Heavy shelling broke out for an hour on Thursday around Rutshuru in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, provoking panic and flight by local residents while the defence minister was in town.
A man working in a sugar cane plantation in Kisile, just south of Rutshuru, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he heard heavy arms fire at 9am (7am GMT).
”We headed to the centre of Rutshuru to find that the people, who had heard the same detonations, were evacuating the town,” he told Agence France-Presse. Residents of the town in the Nord-Kivu province of DRC fled towards Kiwanja, about five kilometres north.
People who stayed said that local officials took refuge in buildings of Monuc, the United Nations mission to DRC, where the country’s Defence Minister Adolphe Onusumba was also present in the aftermath of high military tension.
In the afternoon, a ministerial cortege of vehicles was stoned by residents when it drove out of the Monuc compound, an Agence France-Presse correspondent saw. Three cars in Onusumba’s convoy were damaged.
Nobody had an official explanation for the artillery fire.
Rutshuru has been tense since rebel soldiers loyal to a renegade army general briefly took control of it on January 20. Skirmishes broke out again overnight on January 28.
Local people are in an anti-government mood because the Kinshasa authorities and army chiefs want to replace the 5th Brigade barracked in Rutshuru with men from the 2nd Brigade, which is one of the new ”integrated” units.
These army corps partly consist of troops who were formerly rebels from the east of the DRC during the last war that wracked the huge country in 1998-2003. They have joined soldiers from other areas, a move meant to unify the military that has sometimes triggered ethnic tensions.
When Rutsuru was briefly seized last month, the 5th Brigade forces fled.
Eastern DRC remains volatile and insecure with several foreign and local militia groups using it as a rear-base to attack and terrorise civilians as well as army installations.
The Central African nation is emerging from years of conflict and economic ruin and is set by June 30 to hold its first democratic elections in more than four decades as part of efforts to restore stability. – Sapa-AFP