Rwandan forces fired tank shells or other heavy artillery across the border at Congolese troops during fighting last week, the UN said yesterday.
The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has accused Rwanda of actively supporting Congolese warlord Laurent Nkunda, but the accusation marks the first time the UN has publicly said Rwanda was overtly involved in the latest fighting. Rwanda has repeatedly denied its military is involved in the conflict.
UN spokeswoman Sylvie van den Wildenberg said that Uruguayan peacekeepers saw Rwandan tanks and other heavy artillery fire into the DRC last Wednesday as Nkunda’s forces advanced toward the regional capital, Goma.
Van Wildenberg said UN officials had asked the Rwandans about the firing.
Rwanda denied it, she said, “but we saw it. We observed it.”
Alan Doss, the top UN envoy in the DRC, said in a video conference on Monday that the “fire had come across the border from Rwanda near the Kibumba [displaced] camp where hostilities were under way.”
Kibumba is located on a main road about 28km north of Goma. The Rwandan border is visible to the east, amid several volcanoes that straddle the frontier.
Meanwhile, rebels accused the DRC government of declaring “war on its people” by refusing to negotiate.
As the city of Goma went under a night curfew yesterday, calls were growing to add muscle to the UN peacekeeping mission to protect civilians trapped in the fighting.
Rebel spokesman Bertrand Bisimwa said the Kinshasa government “confirmed its militarist position” by refusing the parliament’s recommendation of direct dialogue with the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), which has held a unilateral ceasefire since last Wednesday.
“It is an act of sabotage,” Bisimwa said. “The government has just launched the war on its people.”
Nkunda has threatened to oust the government in Kinshasa unless it holds “direct” talks on his demands.
The government has refused to hold direct talks with the rebels, saying it wanted dialogue with all the armed groups in the Kivu region and not just the CNDP.
“There are no small and large armed groups,” government spokesman Lambert Mende said. “The act of creating a humanitarian disaster does not give special rights.”
Last week’s rebel offensive displaced 100,000 civilians, including 60,000 children, UN children’s agency UNICEF said.
“Around 250,000 people are now believed to have been displaced in the last two months, bringing the total number of internally displaced to around one million, 20 percent of the entire North Kivu population,” UNICEF said in a statement.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS