Fighting flared in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s powder keg east on Wednesday, as the army battled insurgent troops after killing 20 rebel soldiers who staged a pre-dawn attack.
Men loyal to cashiered general Laurent Nkunda launched a raid on an army position near Rutshuru, the headquarters of an eponymous district in the troubled Nord-Kivu province, said army Colonel Antoine Mushima.
”The insurgents attacked us at around four in the morning in Rukoro,” near Rutshuru, said Mushima, the local commander of the Congolese army.
”We returned fire and pushed them back,” he said. ”We found the bodies of some 20 insurgents. Two of our men were injured.”
Fierce fighting then broke out in the centre of Rutshuru with combatants using heavy-arms fire and forcing thousands to flee their homes in panic, the area’s top administrator and witnesses said.
”The insurgents overran the army positions and they are currently battling them at Rutshuru, about 700m from my office,” said chief administrator Dominique Bofondo.
But the UN peacekeeping mission in DRC (Monuc) said the clashes abated in the afternoon after an hour when UN troops intervened and the insurgents withdrew.
”The fighting ended around 1.30pm (11.30am GMT). The renegade troops who had attacked the army headquarters in Rutshuru then pulled out of the town,” said Monuc spokesperson Sylvie van den Wildenberg, speaking from Nord-Kivu.
”Monuc troops are patrolling Rutshuru,” she said, adding that the ”heavy-arms fire sparked panic among the people”.
”Monuc severely condemns the second attack by dissident soldiers in a week on an army post near a town,” Van den Wildenberg said, referring to a November 13 attack by Nkunda’s men near camps housing displaced people.
”All attacks carried out on urban centres, aimed at blocking the free movement of people and supplies, is a war crime,” she added.
Nord-Kivu has been the site of confrontations between the Congolese army and insurgents backing Nkunda in recent months.
In October, President Laurent Kabila gave the go-ahead for the army to disarm rebel fighters by year’s end, by force if necessary. But Nkunda’s men appear to have hardened their stance.
Since the end of August, the regular army has deployed about 20 000 troops in the area to fight Nkunda’s estimated 4 000-strong force in the region or persuade them to surrender and join a revamped armed force.
Villagers have been displaced by fighting not only between the army and Nkunda, who claims to be protecting the minority Congolese Tutsi population, but also between the Mai-Mai militia and Hutu rebels from neighbouring Rwanda, who are hostile to Nkunda.
About 375 000 civilians have been displaced by fighting in Nord-Kivu since the end of last year, according to the UN, in addition to some 800 000 who fled their homes following previous clashes.
Separately, Monuc said on Wednesday that 11 militants had turned themselves in to UN officials last weekend in Ituri in north-eastern DRC.
The militants were part of the Patriotic Forces of Resistance of Ituri (FRPI), among the last active militias in the area, said Monuc spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Chareyron.
Their surrender followed a recent Monuc and DRC military operation as well as a decision by the FRPI’s ex-chief and two other former Ituri militia leaders three weeks ago to reintegrate into the regular army.
Several families from the village of Lalo in the region had also begun to return home following a separate military operation, Chareyron said.
Clashes between militias and inter-ethnic violence in the gold-rich district of Ituri between 1999 and 2006 resulted in more than 60 000 deaths, according to humanitarian agencies. ‒ Sapa-AFP