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DRC to expel foreign fighters
13/02/2008 08:17 - (SA)
Kinshasa - The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has announced its plan to get rid of foreign fighters still in the country in coming months, with the help of the United Nations mission deployed in DRC.
President Joseph Kabila by decree on Monday created a steering committee under his authority on the "eradication of the presence of combatants", to be led by Foreign Minister Antipas Mbusa Nyamwisi, said a text given to AFP.
It primarily concerned armed Rwandan Hutus who had been grouped in the east of the country near the border for almost 14 years and whose presence was widely regarded as the main threat to security in the Great Lakes region of Africa.
The government of neighbouring Rwanda accused some of these Hutus of having taken part of that small country's genocide in April-July 1994, when the United Nations estimated that about 800 000 people, mainly minority Tutsis, were killed.
Few Burundian rebels 'also in DRC'
The new committee had been tasked with an awareness campaign, disarmament, demobilisation and repatriation to their homelands of "armed foreign groups, including the ex-Rwandan Armed Forces/Interahamwe (Hutu extremist militias)", the decree said.
The UN's peacekeeping force - which had seen the DRC out of a major civil war in 1998-2003 that drew in more than half a dozen other African armies to a post-war democratic government - still maintained more than 17 000 personnel in the country.
This mission, Monuc, estimated that the number of armed Rwandans, who politically called themselves the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), at about 6 000 men, living in the Nord-Kivu and Sud-Kivu eastern border provinces.
A few hundred Ugandan and Burundian rebels were also in the DRC, but rarely active on its soil, in contrast to the FDLR, which had been embroiled in Kivu conflicts.
Military operations
In November, representatives of the DRC and Rwanda met in Nairobi and signed a joint statement under which the Congolese government committed itself to draw up a plan to disarm and repatriate Rwandan rebels either voluntarily or by force.
This plan was submitted to the Rwandan government in December and provided for an interim period of preparing the fighters to go home before a resumption of military operations against them.
Monuc for its part agreed to train several dozen DRC army battalions, then back the military with logistical and intelligence support for an operation due to start in March.
The DRC army is currently in no shape for major offensives, but the plan was hailed by the international community, particularly the United States, which called for a rapid reinforcement of the Congolese army.
Washington also played a major diplomatic part in a conference early this year that led to the signing of peace pacts on January 23 among government troops, a renegade ex-general and a host of armed militias for each of the Kivu provinces.
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