The party of a renegade Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) general on Wednesday threatened to withdraw its troops from the DRC’s armed forces, sparking fears of renewed violence.
Laurent Nkunda’s fighters, who clashed with government soldiers in the volatile Nord-Kivu region in the country’s east late last year, had started integrating into the army in January following an accord with Kinshasa.
”The mixing has failed on a logistical and an organisational level,” said Patient Mwendanga, who heads up Nkunda’s National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) party.
”The government is not taking responsibility for our troops. We have been forced to supply them with food and fuel,” Mwendanga added in a telephone interview.
”If the government is unable to live up to its responsibilities, that should be made clear. Otherwise CNDP will take back its troops and use them differently,” he said.
When asked if this meant a new rebellion in the region, he answered: ”When the time comes, we will tell you.”
An adviser to President Joseph Kabila lamented the ”orchestrated failure of the mixing,” telling Agence France-Presse that Nkunda’s men had never intended to integrate into the army and that the former general continued to ”exploit” ethnic issues.
The threat, along with nearly daily violence against civilians in eastern DRC, prompted observers on Wednesday to predict new violence in the region.
Home to rebellions that have twice plunged the country into war, Nord-Kivu is again ”on the edge of the abyss” and the situation is ”explosive”, according to a Western military observer who asked not to be named.
Nkunda, a Tutsi who fought Rwanda’s Hutu-led military during the 1994 genocide, went into dissidence in the DRC in the aftermath of the 1998 to 2003 regional war, claiming that he sought to protect ethnic Tutsis in the east from attacks by other population groups.
A warrant has been issued for his arrest for war crimes allegedly committed by his troops in 2004.
Meanwhile, the Hutu-led Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebel group active in eastern DRC accused Nkunda and Rwandan President Paul Kagame of trying to ”set up a satellite state” in the Kivus.
FDLR spokesperson Anastase Munyandekwe said Nkunda ”has recruited thousands of fighters in Rwanda and he is now ready to proclaim himself master of North Kivu and South Kivu”.
”Kagame cannot openly send his men to occupy the two Kivus,” he said, adding that the aim was to create ”a Rwandan satellite state in the east of Congo”.
Sylvie Van den Wildenberg, spokesperson for the United Nations mission to DRC (Monuc) in Nord-Kivu, said ”all the indicators are flashing red at a security and a humanitarian level and we are seeing a rise in inter-community tensions”.
”Since the beginning of the [integration] we have tallied more than 100 000 new displaced people in the province, extortion of civilians is reported virtually every day and troubling events are multiplying,” she added.
According to a foreign diplomat in the region requesting anonymity, ”the situation appears irresolvable”.
”Nkunda had a maximum of 3 500 men before the [integration]. He has provided 7 000 and says he has 2 000 more. It is clear that he has recruited from the hundreds of demobilised Rwandans,” he explained, referring to military information.
A Western military officer, meanwhile, predicted that ”we are headed towards a conflict. The question is when.” — Sapa-AFP