Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) President Joseph Kabila has announced that foreign rebel groups operating in the vast country are to be forcibly disarmed.
The move was one of a number of measures announced at a session of Parliament late on Tuesday to evaluate the performance of Kabila’s government.
”The government has decided to implement immediately the forcible disarmament of foreign armed groups operating on the nation’s territory, particularly in the east of the country,” he said.
He did not name the groups or say how the operation would take place, but the reference was taken to be to bands of Rwandan Hutus who fled after perpetrating the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in their country.
The presence of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in eastern DRC has poisoned relations between Kinshasa and the Tutsi-led government in Kigali.
At the end of March in Rome the FDLR’s political wing announced that its fighters would disarm and return home peaceably to Rwanda without conditions, but three months later nothing has happened on the ground.
The lack of progress on the Rome declaration obliged the African Union (AU) on Friday to reactivate its project, first mooted in January, of sending AU troops into the DRC to forcibly disarm the FDLR and a handful of other, smaller, foreign rebel groups.
The AU said it would send an evaluation mission to the DRC ”in July” to prepare for the deployment of such a force, even though the origin of the troops to be deployed has not yet been announced.
Many members of the FDLR, including several of the group’s senior military commanders, are accused of having played an active role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which, according to a UN estimate, left 800 000 people, essentially minority Tutsis, dead.
Kabila also said his government would act urgently to facilitate the return home of the some 380 000 Congolese who have fled to neighbouring countries as a result of long years of war that have ravaged the DRC.
He announced a speed-up in reshaping the security forces, the local administration, the diplomatic corps and state-owned companies, mainly to reflect the political composition of the government.
He promised wage rises to civil servants and the armed forces from July, boosting the low level of average army pay which has led to incidents of indiscipline by troops and exactions against civilians.
Kabila urged the continuation of the transitional process in the DRC to enable free, democratic and transparent elections to be held by the end of June next year.
A peace deal signed in 2003 to end a savage five-year war that brought in other countries of the region provided for general elections to be held by June 30 this year.
They would end the mandate of the current transitional administration made up of leaders of the former government and former warring armed groups.
However Parliament extended the deadline until the end of the year after the electoral commission said it was physically incapable of organising voter registration in time.
Under the peace agreement the polls can be put off for a further six months, and with major unrest continuing in the eastern part of the resource-rich nation, which is about the size of Western Europe, this is seen as almost inevitable.
Veteran opposition politician Etienne Tshisekedi, leader of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress, has continued to demand the end of all transition institutions.
He has called on followers to march peacefully on Kinshasha on Thursday, which is also the anniversary of Congolese independence from Belgium in 1960.
The government, the international community and the Roman Catholic Church have all appealed for calm on that day.-Sapa-AFP