Hutu rebels in DR Congo: Weak but a threat

Source: Agence France-Presse (AFP)

Date: 17 Nov 2009

KINSHASA, Nov 17, 2009 (AFP) - Rwandan Hutu rebels in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, whose chief and deputy were arrested Tuesday in Germany, are weakened by military operations against them but remain a threat.

Ignace Murwanashyaka, 46, the leader of the rebels, was seized in the western city of Karlsruhe on suspicion of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in eastern DR Congo between January 2008 and July this year.

His deputy Straton Musoni, 48, was arrested in Stuttgart on the same charges. Within the DR Congo, the rebels are accused of atrocities on an almost daily basis.

Some of these rebels, whose total number is estimated at between 4,000 and 6,000 in the DR Congo, are held responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda of some 800,000 people, mostly from the Tutsi minority.

Former members of the Rwandan army and the Interahamwe extremist militia, they fled into what was then neighbouring Zaire while a regime dominated by the Tutsis took power in Kigali in July 1994.

They fled among thousands of Hutu refugees.

The ranks of the rebels today include young Hutus who have left Rwanda in recent years, claiming that they are oppressed and that they have no future in their small homeland.

When in 1996 the new Rwandan army dismantled the refugee camps dominated by the genocidal killers and located in the DR Congo's eastern Kivu provinces, the rebels spread out all over eastern DR Congo.

In Nord-Kivu, they created the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (Alir) and launched murderous attacks in 1997-98 into northwest Rwanda, to which Kigali responded violently.

In 1998, at the beginning of a second war that engulfed the Congo, then president Laurent-Desire Kabila mobilised the Alir against his former allies in Kigali, who invaded.

Alir changed its name in May 2000 into the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a political-military movement whose bid to topple the Kigali regime in 2001 was a resounding failure.

Steadily, and notably after Joseph Kabila became head of state after his father was assassinated in 2001, Kinshasa began to distance itself from its former allies, including the FDLR.

Nevertheless, at the end of 2008, the FDLR battled alongside the DR Congo army to defeat the Congolese rebellion of former general Laurent Nkunda, the Tutsi leader of the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP).

But on January 20, 2009, Kigali and Kinshasa launched a joint military operation against the FDLR, and they were joined by Nkunda's fighters while he was arrested in Rwanda.

Since the retreat of the Rwandans in February, the Congolese army has been pursuing the FDLR on its own, with logistic support from the UN Mission in DR Congo (MONUC), which has repatriated 1,300 of the rebels to Rwanda since the beginning of the year.

The FDLR, driven back into the forest far from their former bases, and who were "at least 25 percent" neutralised in nine months, according to MONUC, are accused of multiple atrocities against civilians (killings, rape, burnings and looting).

According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, the FDLR committed at least 630 murders of civilians between January and September 2009.

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