Nairobi/Goma - A Tutsi rebel group that has been battling
government forces in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo is
sticking to its promise to withdraw soldiers from two fronts, the UN
said Wednesday.
'Since late yesterday evening we have seen them begin to withdraw,'
Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich, military spokesman for the UN
peacekeeping mission in DR Congo (MONUC) told Deutsche Presse-Agentur
dpa. 'We have been patrolling and monitoring since this morning.'
Rebel Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda's National Congress for the
Defence of the People (CNDP) has routed the Congolese army and seized
control of territory in the eastern North Kivu province in recent
weeks.
However, on Tuesday the CNDP said it had decided to 'immediately
and unilaterally' withdraw its troops a distance of 40 kilometres on
the Kanyabayonga-Nyanzale and Kabasha-Kiwanja fronts in North Kivu to
show its commitment to peace.
'It is a question of creating zones of separation which will be
occupied only by (UN peacekeeping force in DR Congo) MONUC to the
exclusion of other forces,' the group said in a statement on its
website.
However, MONUC is overstretched and the head of the mission Alan
Doss has called for more troops. France on Monday presented a draft
resolution to the UN Security Council calling for 3,000 more soldiers.
The motion is expected to go the vote next week.
Dietrich said that MONUC had not yet officially responded to the
request to patrol the separation zones and that the details of how
they would work needed to be hammered out.
'Maybe we won't have enough troops immediately (to patrol the
zone)...our helicopters will overfly the zone, but we probably won't
be in a position to stop other armed groups from coming in,' Dietrich
said.
Aid agencies say that renewed fighting between the CNDP and
government forces has displaced at least 250,000 people since late
August, creating a humanitarian emergency.
It has been difficult to deliver food to civilians caught behind
rebel lines due to the security situation, but the buffer zone should
ease the movement of aid convoys.
The CNDP withdrawal comes after Nkunda Sunday told UN peace envoy
Olusegun Obasanjo, the former president of Nigeria, that he would
stick to a ceasefire and support a UN-backed peace process.
Nkunda called a ceasefire almost three weeks ago as his troops were
on the verge of taking Goma, the capital of North Kivu, but fighting
has continued. Some of the worst clashes in a week took place as
Nkunda and Obasanjo met.
The rebel general has warned that unless the government talks to
him, his forces - believed to number between 4,000 and 6,000 - will
brush aside the Congolese army and march on the capital Kinshasa.
He repeated the claim in an interview with German weekly newspaper
Die Zeit, published Wednesday, and said the government had failed the
nation and was 'selling out the country to the Chinese' and
cooperating with criminals.
Both Nkunda's troops and government forces have been accused of
looting, murdering and raping as chaos grips the east of the country,
but Nkunda rebuffed criticism of atrocities committed by his forces.
'I cannot rule out that civilians sometimes get killed. Perhaps
they get caught in the crossfire,' he said.
The DR Congo government has to date refused to talk with Nkunda,
calling him a war criminal.
The general was left out of talks in Nairobi on November 7, which
were attended by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Congolese President
Joseph Kabila and Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
However, Obasanjo said he hopes to broker talks between Kabila and
Nkunda in the coming weeks.
There are fears that the fighting could reignite the 1998-2003 war,
which sucked in many other nations, including Angola, Rwanda and
Zimbabwe.
More than 5 million people are estimated to have died as a result
of the five-year conflict in the resource-rich nation, most of them
from hunger and disease.
The DR Congo accuses Rwanda of backing Nkunda, who says he is
fighting to protect Tutsis from Hutu militia.
The armed Hutu groups were implicated in the 1994 massacres in
Rwanda, when 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed. The Hutus
fled to DR Congo after Tutsis forces led by Kagame seized power.
However, many observers say that the ethnic dimension is merely a
pretext for various militia to seize control of land rich in gold, tin
and coltan, which is widely used in electronic devices.
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