Rwanda News Agency/Agence Rwandaise d'Information (Kigali)
31 October 2007
Kigali — Suspected Rwandan rebels have killed a park ranger patrolling in the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) Virunga national park, the latest in a series of such attacks, AFP has reported.
"A park warden was killed and one of his colleagues badly wounded by armed men at the entrance to the central part of the park," the head of the National Institute for Conservation and Nature, Alexandre Wathaut, told AFP.
Other rangers are quoted to have said the patrol was ambushed on Saturday in an attack they blamed on a Hutu group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).
The incident occurred about 80 kilometres north of Nord-Kivu's regional capital Goma, which lies on the Rwandan border.
The attack came as the European Union's (EU's) special envoy for the region said that the violence in eastern DR Congo was on a scale with the carnage in the Darfur region of Sudan.
The Virunga wildlife reserve, in the far east of the country, is famed for its rare mountain gorillas but lies in the heartland of the conflict.
And at the end of a 13-day visit, Roeland Van de Geer, the EU special envoy for the Great Lakes region issued a stark warning about the worsening crisis in Nord-Kivu.
"The humanitarian crisis in Nord-Kivu is comparable to that of Darfur," Van de Geer told AFP in Kinshasa. "We were struck by the gravity of the humanitarian crisis."
Officials running three of the six displaced persons camps at Mungunga, 15 kilometres from Goma, "have complained of the rape of women in the camps or outside when they go to fetch water or wood," he said.
"The displaced accuse the FARDC (regular army), which is around the camps and sometimes goes into them at night," he added. "There is an urgent need to settle the crisis and to tackle its underlying causes," he said.
Nord-Kivu is the focus of conflict between a number of armed groups and operations by the regular army. The region has already been the subject of several recent reports on appalling atrocities and human rights violations.
Rebel fighters from several movements have been reported in the mountain park in recent weeks. According to conservation groups in the park, up to 50 gorillas are without protection due to increasing uncertainty as park rangers flee for dear life.
The violence has led to the displacement of 350,000 people in the province this year alone, of a total of 800,000.
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