'No Rwandan soldiers in DRC'
2003-10-21 10:10
Kinshasa - Rwandan Foreign Minister Charles Murigande declared on Monday that his country no longer had any troops operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Murigande arrived here earlier in the day for a 24-hour visit, less than a week after he accused the DRC's three-month-old transition government of backing extremist groups from Rwanda, notably the Interahamwe and former Rwandan Armed Forces, blamed for Rwanda's 1993 genocide.
A similar accusation was used to justify Rwanda's support for a rebellion launched in DRC in 1998, which developed into a war that drew in Rwanda and five other African nations at its height and claimed around 2.5 million lives, directly in fighting and through famine and disease.
Rwanda officially withdrew its forces from the DRC a year ago in exchange for Kinshasa's pledges to disarm and repatriate the Interahamwe and former soldiers.
But last week, Murigande warned that Kigali could redeploy troops in the DRC if it felt domestic security was threatened.
Civic groups in the DRC's eastern Nord-Kivu Province claim that Rwandan troops have massed in Rutshuru, halfway between Lake Albert and Lake Kivu in the DRC, near the borders with Uganda and Rwanda.
However Murigande told reporters here that "there have been no Rwandan soldiers in the DRC since October 22, 2002," .
"I defy anyone to find a single man from the APR (Rwandan army) on Congo's territory," he added, after meeting his Congolese counterpart Antoine Ghonda.
He stressed that Kigali wished to push the DRC's peace process forward and to normalise relations between the two countries.
He voiced optimism over UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's call for the two nations to re-establish diplomatic relations.
Kinshasa and Kigali signed a pact in July last year under which Rwanda agreed to withdraw troops it sent into the east of the country in August 1998 to back rebels fighting the regime of then president Laurent Kabila, and the DRC agreed to round up, disarm and repatriate Hutu extremists who fled to the DRC after the genocide in Rwanda.
Murigande later met with current DRC President Joseph Kabila.