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.
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