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Hutu rebels escape UN forces
28/04/2006 13:41 - (SA)
Helen Vesperini
DRC - Rwandan Hutu rebels in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are proving elusive for UN peacekeepers sent to flush them out and secure the restive region.
As efforts to kill or capture members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and other armed groups increase ahead of elections later this year, locals say the rebels seem a step ahead of their pursuers.
Operations against FDLR hideouts scattered throughout the dense jungle in this vast, volatile and largely unpoliced area appear largely ineffective as the occupants vacate the bases ahead of raids only to return later or set up shop nearby, they say.
Earlier this week some 300 UN peacekeepers and 600 DRC troops attacked an FDLR camp at Rive, about 90km north of Goma, capital of North Kivu province, believed to house a battalion of guerrillas.
The result: the destruction of straw huts that made up the camp and nine prisoners - six men, one woman and two children, according to the UN mission in the DRC known as MONUC, which released no information about any casualties.
A similar raid on another FDLR camp in the region on April 12 netted just three prisoners, according to MONUC.
Informers
"The FDLR always know when there's going to be an attack," said Bahati Sebango, a young resident of Katweguru, a village where MONUC has a mobile base and a helicopter-landing pad about eight kilometres from the FDLR camp at Rive.
"They have informers who hide amongst the population," he told AFP. "The soldiers arrive and they don't find one single FDLR."
"When we bump into them, they ask us what MONUC is doing here," said another young man, pushing his way through curious onlookers who braved a dust storm to see the arrival of local military chief General Gabriel Amisi by helicopter.
Upcoming elections
Spurred by the need to secure the east ahead of the upcoming but as-yet unscheduled polls and pressure from the DRC's neighbours in Africa's Great Lakes region, UN and Congolese forces have stepped up patrols.
They have targeted numerous armed factions in the eastern DRC including Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) members and various indigenous Congolese militia.
Yet it is the FDLR, estimated to number between 8 000 and 15 000 fighters, that is the primary target.
Made up of members of the former Rwandan army, some of whom are accused of participation in the country's 1994 genocide, and of young fighters recruited as children, the group is vehemently opposed to Rwanda's Tutsi-led government.
Despite agreeing on paper to disarm and return to Rwanda last year, few FDLR rebels have actually done so, demanding security guarantees that Rwandan authorities have refused to offer.
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