Nearly three dozen people have been arrested during the last 10 days in the southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) province of Katanga, officials said on Monday.
They include Andre Tshombe, son of Moise Tshombe, who led a breakaway rebellion in Katanga in the early 1960s.
”In all 35 people have been detained,” Diemu Tshikez, deputy governor of Katanga, told French news agency AFP by telephone from Lumumbashi, the DRC’s second city and capital of the resource-rich province.
”Military personnel and politicians are among those arrested.”
He confirmed that army officers are among those being held, as well as Tshombe, whose father declared in July 1960 that he was ”president of independent Katanga”.
The uprising lasted until January 1963 when United Nations forces quelled it.
Andre Tshombe is president of a Lumumbashi-based political party, the Congo National Confederation (Conaco).
At the start of the 1960 secession a corps of ”Katanga gendarmes” was created. After the rebellion ended some were integrated into the armed forces while others went into exile in neighbouring countries, especially Zambia and Angola.
Some of those detained in recent days were former gendarmes who are now part of the special presidential security group.
Tshikez gave no reason for the arrests saying he could give no more information while ”investigations are under way”.
DRC President Joseph Kabila rushed to Lubumbashi on Sunday following what press reports called an ”aborted insurrection attempt” by military elements, officials said on Monday. He was accompanied by Defence Minister Adolphe Onusumba.
Tshikez said the visit aimed to ”assess the situation” and ”get things out in the open”.
Newspapers in the captal Kinshasa have spoken of an attempt to destabilise Katanga by inhabitants in the south of the province.
The local authorities have described those detained as being ”nostalgic” and seeking to harm the political transition process in the DRC.
”Nobody today believes in the secession of Katanga,” Tshikez said. ”By whom? What for?”
He said Lumumbashi was calm, a claim confirmed by local residents.
Human rights groups have spoken of ”about 100 arrests” in the city but Tshikez would only give a total of 35, while suggesting there could be more.
Intelligence agents have been questioning civilians as well as soldiers for the past 10 days, said provincial authorities, without elaborating.
The arrests are part of an investigation opened after a major theft of arms in March from a military camp in Lubumbashi, according to sources close to the army chief of staff.
Rivalries dating from the secession movement four decades ago pit the Balubakat tribe dominating the north of Katanga against a variety of tribes in the south, where copper has been mined for centuries.
The Balubakats are accused of confiscating power, and it was the southerners who launched the secession bid.
The DRC is still struggling to recover from its second massive war of the 1990s, which ended in 2003 after drawing in the armies of half a dozen other countries. – Sapa-AFP