Laurent Nkunda, a renegade general whose troops are blamed for rampant insecurity in the volatile east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has threatened to forcibly prevent national army troops being deployed in his fiefdom.
”No hostile military force will deploy … Any attempt to do so will be blocked, if necessary by force. This has the merit of being clear,” Nkunda said in a statement obtained by Agence France-Presse on Wednesday.
Nkunda created the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), which he calls a ”political-military movement”, shortly before the DRC’s historic presidential and parliamentary elections on July 30.
The rebel leader, the object of an international arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, has been living in the jungles of the eastern DRC for the past two years.
He has his headquarters in the Masisi area, north-west of the Nord Kivu provincial capital, Goma.
The army’s restructured 14th infantry brigade has just completed five months of training near Goma and is due to be deployed in the eastern province.
Like the army’s other brigades, the 14th is composed of government forces and former rebels who fought each other during the country’s 1998 to 2003 civil war.
Since July several clashes have been reported in Nord Kivu between Nkunda’s forces and army soldiers.
In his statement Nkunda, a Tutsi, accused President Laurent Kabila of seeking to whip up ethnic tensions by placing the 14th brigade under the command of a Hutu and ”seeking to deploy it as soon as possible in Masisi”.
A significant proportion of the population in the eastern DRC come from the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups. That part of the country has suffered from the repercussions of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when Hutu extremists murdered about 800 000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
”Since it [the 14th brigade] would be dominated by Congolese citizens of Rwandan Hutu origin — and that the population of the area in question is majority Hutu — the sorcerer’s apprentices [Kabila’s advisers] have convinced their boss that this unit will have no trouble pulling the CNDP thorn out of their side,” Nkunda said.
Ironically, the head of the 14th brigade, Colonel Rugayi, was for a long time considered to be a supporter of Nkunda. He only joined the 14th brigade at its camp near Goma two months ago.
Nkunda is believed in recent months to have taken sides with Jean-Pierre Bemba, who will challenge Kabila in the second round of the presidential election, due to be held in October.
Currently one of the four vice-presidents in the DRC’s outgoing government, Bemba was a rebel leader during the civil war, when he was supported by Rwanda’s neighbour Uganda. — Sapa-AFP