Congo vows to stamp out new armed movement

Nov 2, 2009 7:52 PM | By Joe Bavier, Reuters

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Congo is deploying police and soldiers to stamp out a new armed uprising blamed for killing dozens of police in an attack in the country’s isolated northern border region last week, a government spokesman said on Monday

Armed men killed 47 policemen sent to quell ethnic clashes between two villages in Democratic Republic of Congo’s Equateur province last week, United Nations-supported Radio Okapi reported.

Information Minister Lambert Mende said security forces were being sent to the area.

“They will suppress anyone found with a weapon. They will arrest those who murdered our policemen. The operations have started,” he said.

Residents from the neighbouring villages of Enyele and Monzaya, representing two different ethnic groups, have been involved in feuding over fishing rights.

The clashes are not linked to simmering fighting in Congo’s eastern borderlands, where the army, backed by thousands of U.N.

peacekeepers, is attempting to stamp out local, Rwandan and Ugandan rebels who roam the mineral-rich regions.

“Today, this group, which was composed in all of around 50 young people with knives and machetes, has grown to several hundred armed with machine guns, AK-47s, and automatic weapons,” Mende said.

The government of Congo is struggling to reestablish state control over the vast central African nation following a 1998-2003 war and humanitarian disaster which have killed an estimated 5,4 million