Fighting between the regular army and renegade troops resumed on Monday after a weekend lull in an escalating battle for control of territory in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), United Nations observers said.
”We’re extremely alarmed by renewed clashes reported from the Ngungu zone, south of Sake,” about 30km from Nord-Kivu province capital Goma, said Sylvie van den Wildenberg, local spokesperson for the UN mission in DRC (Monuc).
The main force, which took on the DRC army again in several places last week, in battles that claimed more than 100 lives, according to regular army commanders, is led by cashiered general Laurent Nkunda, a powerful local leader.
Regular army chiefs could not be reached on Monday for their assessment and no details of casualties in the Sake region were available, but the UN estimated that more than 650 000 civilians were now displaced in Nord-Kivu for fear of conflict.
The army last year sought to deal with the threat Nkunda poses in a volatile part of a vast, war-ravaged nation by forming mixed brigades incorporating his men and their officers, which were deployed in January.
But mass defections ensued once the army high command entrusted them the task of tracking down armed Rwandan Hutus from a politico-military movement established in the Kivu provinces for 13 years.
The situation in the north and south Kivu provinces and in Ituri further to the north seriously concerns both the Kinshasa government and the Monuc mission that has stayed on since the end of the 1998 to 2003 DRC war to oversee and help in last year’s elections and in the restoration of stability.
The military command last Thursday also announced the deployment of brigades to replace the mixed ones and hunt down the exiled Hutu rebels, amid warnings from both Nkunda’s side and the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda that any escalation would lead to conflict. — AFP
