Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) renegade general Laurent Nkunda on Monday abandoned a month-old ceasefire and blamed government army attacks for fresh fighting in an eastern border province.
His announcement heralded more conflict and humanitarian suffering in DRC’s North Kivu province, which has long been a tinderbox of ethnic tensions and clashes between the army and rival rebel and militia groups.
After fighting in the east in August and early September, the United Nations Mission in DRC (Monuc) announced on September 6 a limited truce between the rebel Tutsi general and the army.
But fresh clashes between the two sides broke out on Thursday and over the weekend, and UN military sources said fighting continued on Monday in several parts of North Kivu.
Some of the recent violence took place in Virunga National Park, Africa’s oldest nature park, forcing rangers to flee and putting a community of endangered mountain gorillas at risk.
”There is no ceasefire. … The government continues to attack us. … We have told ourselves we will no longer stand with our arms crossed while people are dying. We must react. We are soldiers,” Nkunda told Reuters by telephone.
”Monuc thinks there is a ceasefire, but we’ve abandoned it,” he added.
The UN mission in DRC, which has a 17 000-strong peacekeeping force in the vast, war-scarred former Belgian colony in the heart of Africa, said it was closely monitoring the renewed fighting in several places in North Kivu province.
Threat to regional stability
”There’s some fighting going on now in Masisi [district]. It’s taking place in three locations, including Karuba and Ngungu, where they had already been fighting,” a UN military spokesperson, Major PK Tiwari, told Reuters.
Nkunda, who led a 2004 rebellion in defence of his Tutsi people in North Kivu, accuses DRC President Joseph Kabila’s government and armed forces of supporting Rwandan Hutu rebels — traditional ethnic enemies of the Tutsi.
The largely Hutu Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebels are accused of involvement in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide that saw the slaughter of 800 000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus by a Hutu-led government and ethnic militias.
Kabila’s government denies supporting the FDLR and has met several times recently with its Great Lakes neighbours Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, to discuss ways of ending the conflict in North Kivu, which is seen as a threat to the volatile region.
Kabila has pledged to pacify the mineral-rich east after winning DRC’s elections late last year.
The North Kivu fighting has displaced tens of thousands of civilians and foreign relief agencies have warned of a fresh humanitarian catastrophe in DRC, which is still recovering from a 1998 to 2003 war that killed about four million people, mostly from hunger and disease generated by conflict.
UN forces have in the past used helicopter gunships to support army operations against Nkunda’s fighters.
A January accord raised hopes for peace by integrating his rebel soldiers into mixed national army brigades, but Nkunda’s men abandoned the mixed brigades in August, amid mutual accusations of violence and discrimination. — Reuters