Global perspective Human stories

UN supports exploratory home return of Rwandan ex-fighters from DR Congo

UN supports exploratory home return of Rwandan ex-fighters from DR Congo

MONUSCO peacekeepers on patrol in the DRC
A programme to allow Rwandans who have been fighting with militias in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to visit their home country and see whether conditions are conducive to returning is a positive way to reduce recurrent violence, the top United Nations envoy in the DRC said today.

The initiative “underlines the will of the two Governments to continue to offer a peaceful option to Rwandais combatants who want it,” Alan Doss, Special Representative of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in the vast African country said.

The two Governments have recently been engaged in an ongoing joint military operation in eastern DRC against the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), an armed Hutu group which has been in eastern DRC since the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

According to the UN Mission in the DRC, known as MONUC, six members of an associated armed group called the Rally for Unity and Democracy (RUD) who arrived yesterday in the city of Goma accompanied by five dependants embarked today on a one-week visit in their country of origin.

The visit was planned the week before, when the MONUC team responsible for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) of ex-combatants spoke to a group of some 150 combatants and dependents of the RUD who had voluntarily given up their arms last July, the mission said.

The ex-combatants accepted the offer of the Rwandan Government to send representatives on a visit to investigate conditions for their voluntary return.

The UN mission said that the group crossed the border accompanied by the MONUC DDR team, members of the working group on the follow-up to recent talks in Nairobi on the continuing violence in the eastern DRC, representatives of the international facilitators of those talks and Congolese and Rwandan officials.

The delegation was welcomed at the town of Rubavu, near the Congolese/Rwandan border, by the President of the Rwandan Commission on DDR.