Fighting rife in eastern DRC
2007-08-30 21:36
Kinshasa - Renegade troops killed several regular army troops and wounded 30 others in five hours of heavy fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo's eastern Nord-Kivu province on Thursday morning, military and UN officials said.
Soldiers serving cashiered General Laurent Nkunda attacked an army post, killed an undisclosed number and wounded 30 at Katale, about 9km south of Masisi, the main regional town, army Colonel Delphine Kahimbi said.
The renegades, whom the DRC army earlier tried to incorporate into its ranks before a wave of desertions, "were very numerous" and attacked at 04:00 in a bid to win control of the local headquarters of his Charlie Brigade, said Kahimbi.
Nord-Kivu's spokesperson for the UN Observer Mission in DRC (Monuc) said the fighting was "extremely heavy" until it ended at about 09:00.
'Monuc has reinforced its troops'
UN monitors and the DRC army command put the number of assailants at between 1 500 and 2 000, who tried to seize the headquarters held by 1 000 men.
"During the night, Monuc ceaselessly called on both sides for an immediate end to hostilities and a situation where the civilian population was trapped hostage," said spokesperson Sylvie van den Wildenberg.
"Monuc has reinforced its troops in the Masisi," a rugged forested terrain where the forces of Nkunda, a Congolese ethnic Tutsi, have roamed for several years and occasionally attacked major towns, she added.
The offensive was in "flagrant violation of a truce" mediated on Tuesday afternoon by Monuc staff, Van den Wildenberg said. "There's clear and marked intent by Nkunda's men to eliminate all representatives of state authority in the Masisi."
Kahimbi, the second-in-command of troops in the eastern Nord-Kivu province, warned that regular army "reinforcements are on their way: there will be a riposte. This situation is unacceptable."
After previous bouts of fierce fighting last year between the regular army and Nkunda's forces, the two sides agreed to integrate the mainly Tutsi forces into special "mixed" brigades in Nord-Kivu.
Five such brigades have been deployed since January.
But waves of desertions began after the army's chief of staff gave regular army brigades - and not these "mixed" forces - the mission of tracking down Rwandan Hutu rebels that have been based in the region for the last 13 years.
Nkunda has in the past presented the ethnic Tutsis in DRC as an embattled minority he must defend and his men particularly have it in for the Hutus held responsible for the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda.
Since then, more than 150 000 people have fled either fighting between Hutu rebels in exile from Rwanda and the army, or the mixed brigades as they came under the command of officers loyal to Nkunda.