Washington, D.C. — Despite the optimism of a just-returned United Nations investigating team, worry over continuing armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is mounting. Speaking to allAfrica.com, the DRC's U.S. Ambasador, Dr. Faida Mitifu, said that despite movement by Uganda toward withdrawing its troops, Rwanda is escalating its involvement.
Mitifu's government charged in a statement Thursday, that Rwandan troops, "strongly armed with heavy equipment, crossed the frontier between the DRC and Rwanda throughout May to deploy in northern and southern Kivu provinces.
After promising a unilateral withdrawal from Congo, Rwanda reneged, Mitifu said. "We are not talking about Rebels," she insisted. "Rebels are mainly in urban areas. [Rwanda] redeployed troops."
According to Ambassador Mitifu, Rwandan troops are now in Kassai, Katanga, and Orientale Provinces. "I would like to believe that they are in Congo for their security concerns," she responded, when asked whether Rwanda had legitimate security interests in Congo. "But, unfortunately, when you see the map of the Congo, and especially when you see the kinds of human rights abuses they have perpetrated against the local population, it's very difficult to believe that those who really want peace and security will behave that way against people who never participated in the genocide in Rwanda."
According to Ambassador Mitifu, Congo would also like to see the perpetrators of that genocide captured. But Rwanda "should realize that occupying Congo is not a solution."
Further muddying Congo peace prospects were charges made earlier in the week by the rebel Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie or Rally for Congo Democracy (RCD-Goma) that the the peace deal reached in Lusaka in 1999 was near collapse. Adolphe Onusumba, an RCD leader, charged that the DRC government of Joseph Kabila was backing militia groups fighting the RCD behind the front lines in the provinces of North and South Kivu.
A DRC government spokesperson denied "giving any kind of backing to armed groups." But, warned Onusumba in an interview with the Reuters News Agency, "Enough is enough. We are fed up with Kabila's hypocritical and malicious seduction of the international community pretending the cease-fire is holding, while he is setting the whole of the eastern Congo ablaze."
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
Rwanda and Uganda "have occupied Congo for three years," says Ambassador Mitifu. "What have they accomplished? I think Rwanda is a volcano ready to erupt."
