Violence flares in Brazzaville
2005-03-04 17:50
Brazzaville - Automatic weapons fire broke out early on Friday in two working-class parts of Congo's capital after security forces arrested a member of an insurgent militia group still active in the area.
Witnesses said that government troops were trading shots with militiamen of the Ninjas led by an eccentric priest, Frederic Bitsangou, the remnants of whose forces are holed up in a forested region stretching southeast of Brazzaville.
The gunfire caused panic in the Bacongo and Makelekele districts, which have seen sporadic militia incursions when violence in the forests of the Pool region spread into the capital itself, and local authorities swiftly shut markets, shops and schools.
"Yesterday, Thursday, the forces of law and order arrested some of our youths near the Total market in Bacongo while they were searching for an individual suspected of selling hemp," a Ninja spokesman, Philippe Ane, said.
"They freed everybody except for one man who's still in custody," Ane told AFP. The detained youth was not the drug-seller suspect, he said, adding that Friday's trouble broke out when security forces returned to the district "to arrest other youths".
The government troops "started firing in the air after the youths resisted arrest because they've done nothing to reproach themselves for," Ane added.
Ninjas vs security forces
The authorities gave no explanation of the clashes, but witnesses saw large numbers of troops being deployed in the troubled districts, especially around the national television headquarters, where a journalist reached by AFP said a decision was taken to suspend broadcasting at the end of the morning.
Local residents said the security forces had gone in as part of an ongoing government drive called Operation Hope, aimed at cracking down on banditry and at recovering weapons circulating illegally in the central African country after a series of civil wars in the 1990s.
"There's shooting in Bacongo and Makelekele between the Ninjas and the security forces of Operation Hope, but I don't know exactly why," one resident of the working-class south of town told AFP.
The legacy of the decade of political and ethnic conflict for the government of President Denis Sassou Nguesso, a onetime military ruler, was a major Ninja insurgency in the Pool region between 1998 and 2003.
Father Bitsangou, more widely known as Ntumi, has been guaranteed safety under a general peace accord signed in March 2003, but remains based in the Pool, where he has stuck to a demand that the government grant him a "special status" as well as a house which has been readied for him in Makelekele.
"We're at the base which houses the residence prepared for Father Ntumi," Ane said. "We're encircled by security forces."
Local residents said they thought the Ninjas were in there to fight off a possible attack if one was launched under Operation Hope.