The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) army on Wednesday exchanged artillery fire with renegade troops led by dissident sacked general Laurent Nkunda, the military and the United Nations observer mission said.
“There was fighting this morning near Rugari but the situation has calmed down,” the commander in Nord-Kivu province, General Vainqueur Mayala, said.
The artillery battle about 30km north of the provincial capital, Goma, was the first in Nord-Kivu in 10 days and since President Joseph Kabila gave the regular army (FARDC) a green light to forcibly disarm Nkunda’s men if they failed to demobilise by the end of the year.
Neither the army nor Monuc, the UN mission, had any details of casualties in the latest outbreak of violence that has displaced sabout 350 000 villagers this year alone in a province wracked by violence among rival armed movements.
General Mayala said that Nkunda, a Congolese ethnic Tutsi who claims to be protecting that minority population in eastern DRC, now leads “about 3 000 men”.
“There are desertions every day,” he said.
“The Congolese are coming to be integrated into the army and there are also defections among the Rwandans, who are going home,” he added, referring to the rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu movement that includes people blamed for the neighbouring country’s 1994 genocide.
Relief agencies are very alarmed at the scale of the humanitarian crisis in the eastern DRC because their workers cannot access conflict-ridden highlands.
A series of recent reports has blamed all parties, including the regular army, for widespread atrocities against civilians.
Both Kabila and his foes are under strong international pressure to stop the clashes, but European Union and other Central African Great Lakes region envoys and analysts have said a lasting settlement in Nord-Kivu can only be achieved at regional level.
Nkunda regards the Hutu FDLR, numbered at 6 000 by Monuc, as a threat, while the regular army and UN observers accuse him of recruiting demobilised Rwandan soldiers and civilians.
The FDLR, for its part, accuses the Rwandan military of moving in, a charge denied by the Kigali government.
A fourth element in a powder-keg mix consists of tribal Mai Mai militias with volatile political alignments. At the weekend, one Mai Mai chief turned himself in to Monuc peacekeeping troops and more than 80 of his men had followed suit by Wednesday.
Kabila’s army has been reinforced to about 20 000 soldiers in Nord-Kivu and the president has declared that nobody else in the province can present themselves as defenders of its population.
Nkunda has said he wants to negotiate, but in Kinshasa’s eyes he is a wanted war criminal. — AFP