Congolese army raids spread terror as ex-rebel issues warning

NYONGERA, Congo, Thursday

Jeannette Nyirarukundo says she buried her child in the forest when she fled her village in eastern Congo after it was attacked by the government army meant to protect it. 

Six

-year-old Moise starved to death before the family reached the safety of a camp at Nyongera, 70 kilometres from North Kivu’s provincial capital Goma. 

Some 113,000 civilians have fled fighting in Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu since February, and the province now has 600,000 displaced people, according to the UN humanitarian coordination agency OCHA. 

“We slept in the forest for two weeks, and then they came after us there too. It wasn’t safe anymore, and we came here,” said Nyirarukundo, 28, who was accompanied by her husband and three surviving children. 

Eastern Congo is no stranger to violence, but ironically the latest surge in killing started with a deal designed to bring peace to this corner of the vast country nearly four years after a nationwide accord officially ended a 1998-2003 war. 

Laurent Nkunda, a dissident Congolese army general, led his two brigades into the bush in 2004, vowing to protect his fellow ethnic Tutsis. He is under an international arrest warrant for alleged war crimes after his men occupied Bukavu, South Kivu. 

Historic polls

After last year’s historic polls saw President Joseph Kabila become Congo’s first democratically elected leader in more than four decades, the army and Rwandan mediators began negotiations to bring Nkunda and his soldiers into existing army brigades stationed in North Kivu. That process began in January. 

But instead of ending the violence, the five new mixed brigades began hunting down Nkunda’s enemies in the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu-dominated Rwandan rebel movement based in eastern Congo. 

“There’s more and more movement every day ... If this military strategy continues, we could be looking at another 280,000 more (displaced),” said Luciano Calestini, emergency specialist for eastern Congo for UN Children’s Fund UNICEF. 

“The next six months is going to be a disaster. It’s going to be catastrophic,” he said. 

Human rights observers accuse the mixed brigades of killing, raping and forcing civilians from their homes. 

Soldiers from the mixed Bravo Brigade arbitrarily executed at least 15 mostly Hutu civilians in Buramba village about 100 km north of Goma, the human rights division of Congo’s UN peacekeeping mission said in a report. Bravo Brigade commander Colonel Sultani Makenga blamed the massacre on the FDLR. 

“What we did was separate the population from the FDLR. That’s why the villages are uninhabited,” Colonel Makenga told Reuters in an interview. “We evacuated the civilians in order to fight the FDLR alone ... It was to protect them.” 

Col Makenga said operations would continue until the FDLR were chased out of Congo or destroyed. 

Dominique Bofondo, territorial administrator of Rutshuru, where Bravo Brigade is based, said civilians now lived in fear of the mixed brigades. 

“These are the same soldiers who killed people, who raped women. And now they are here to take care of us? ... We are in the hands of a killer,” Mr Bofondo said. 

In Nyongera camp, Nyirarukundo said she is still afraid to return home but says her surviving children are hungry and sick. 

“For now, we have nothing. There’s no food. Nothing. We just want security, so we can go home,” she said.

Meanwhile, Gen Nkunda’s party has threatened to quit the pact, sparking fears of renewed violence.

“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,” Mr 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 Kabila lamented the “orchestrated failure of the mixing,” saying that Gen 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.

Meanwhile, the FDLR has 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.”