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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Wednesday 9 June 2004

DRC: Loyal army troops re-enter Bukavu

KINSHASA, 9 Jun 2004 (IRIN) - Loyalist troops under the command of Gen Mbuza Mabe re-entered the recently embattled eastern Congolese town of Bukavu on Wednesday without a fight, a UN official said.

Sebastien Lapierre, a spokesman for the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), told IRIN from Bukavu that dissident troops led by Col Jules Mutebutsi withdrew from the town late Tuesday. Some headed towards Uvira, 118 km to the south, and others northeast towards the border with Rwanda.

"According to our information, Mutebutsi's troops went to the south [of the river] Ruzizi, and to Uvira," Lapierre said.

He added some of Bukavu's residents greeted the loyalists warmly. UN troops are now patrolling the streets to prevent further looting of shops and offices of humanitarian agencies. The UN troops are also to prevent acts of retaliation between ethnic groups.

Gen Mabe, the loyalist commander of the 10th Military Region under which Bukavu falls, appealed to residents, over UN Radio Okapi, to remain calm.

The dissidents had invaded Bukavu on 26 May after they received reports that Mabe was killing Congolese Tutsis, known as Banyamulenge.

Humanitarian action hindered

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees warned on Tuesday that security concerns were hindering humanitarian operations in the area. The coordinator of the Congolese Red Cross in Bukavu, Leon Mbalabala, said the crowds in the streets had prevented his personnel from carrying out a needs assessment.

"We hope to be able to resume work in the coming hours," he said.

In the nation's capital, Kinshasa, the spokesman for the UN Mission in the DRC, Hamadoun Toure, said the Bukavu fighting had had a serious effect on aid operations and that the UN World Food Programme's warehouse in Bukavu had been looted.

"As a result, there is no more food to give to the population, which is in urgent need," he said.

Similarly, the country director of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), Werner Vansant, told IRIN on Wednesday that his expatriate staff had been evacuated to the Rwandan capital, Kigali, and would not return to Bukavu immediately. Meantime, he said, local IRC staff were providing water and sanitation services to some 1,200 residents who had been moved from their shelter in the UN mission's compound to Alfajiri College. Lapierre said some civilians had started returning to their homes.

"The [MONUC] camp started to empty automatically this morning, with the arrival of the army," Roy Maheshe, an OCHA official in Bukavu, told IRIN. "The displaced people who are returning home are those who were afraid of Mutebutsi's men. Now other people are coming to the camp, they are those who are afraid of the army.

The fighting, despite the presence of UN troops in Bukavu, had prompted the government of President Joseph Kabila to call for the intervention of French troops. An official in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs had told IRIN that Paris would discuss this with the EU.

However, in Kinshasa, visiting Belgian Foreign Affairs Minister Louis Michel said on Tuesday that the deployment of additional peacekeeping force, under a EU mandate, was highly unlikely.

"I think there still is space for a diplomatic solution to resolve the crisis without necessarily resorting to such a solution. The conditions are not currently favourable to send such a force, but we must strive to strengthen MONUC," he added.

An official of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs told IRIN that after talks with Kabila, Michel, who also met Rwandan President Paul Kagame in Kigali, offered to host a meeting in Brussels next week of the foreign ministers of Burundi, DRC and Rwanda.

Regional leaders meeting in the Ugandan capital of Kampala for a Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa on Tuesday also called on the UN to reinforce its 10,722 troops now in the DRC.

[ENDS]

This material comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. All materials copyright © UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2004