/ 19 January 2006

Thousands flee clashes between DRC troops, militia

An offensive by troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) against militia armies in the volatile east has driven 122 000 people from their homes, the United Nations mission in the DRC (Monuc) said on Wednesday.

”A new wave of 46 000 people has been displaced since November 2005 in districts of Nord-Katanga which are still the theatre of military operations against armed groups roaming the region, bringing the total number of displaced persons to 122 000,” Monuc deputy spokesperson Eliana Naaba said.

Much further north, an armed gang loyal to a renegade general on Wednesday attacked an army position at Runyonyi in Nord-Kivu province, according to the local military commander, Colonel Jean-Marie She Kasikila, who accused Rwandan troops of backing the rebels.

The DRC armed forces last year began, sometimes in direct cooperation with Monuc troops deployed across the vast Central African country, major offensives to crush more than a dozen local and foreign militias and rebel forces in the east, which has a long border with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

In Katanga, the country’s south-eastern province that has many mineral resources, the main target is a tribal Mai-Mai militia led by one chief Gedeon, who is accused of numerous war crimes against local people in Bukama, Kabalo, Mitwaba and Pweto, areas between 400km and 600km north of the main town, Lubumbashi.

Aid agencies have difficulty getting food, clothes and medicines to displaced people, mainly at Dubie and Nyonga in the Pweto and Bukama regions, according to the UN.

In Nord-Kivu, Kasikila said his men were attacked by ”soldiers in the pay of General Laurent Nkunda, with support from troops of the 63rd Battalion of the APR [Rwandan Patriotic Army]”.

He gave few details of the raid, more than 85km north of the provincial capital, Goma, on the Rwandan border, but had on January 11 denounced ”Rwandan infiltration” into the territory under his command.

Rwanda denies military operations on the DRC side of the border, but puts constant pressure on the Kinshasa government to wipe out or repatriate Rwandan Hutu rebels based in the area and seen as a permanent threat.

Nkunda is a Congolese Tutsi of the same ethnic origin as the minority people of Rwanda, who defected from the DRC army and briefly seized control in June 2004 of the Sud-Kivu province capital, Goma. He did so on the unsubstantiated pretext that Tutsis there were being massacred by Hutus.

He has been cashiered from the army and is now the object of an international arrest warrant issued by Kinshasa. — Sapa-AFP