DR Congo: group of Rwandan ex-militia still missing but repatriation continues

A group of ethnic Hutu fighters who disappeared over the weekend from a camp in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), from which they were supposed to be repatriated to Rwanda, are still missing, but many others have returned home, the UN mission in the country (MONUC) said today.

One of MONUC’s disarmament and reintegration teams is searching the area some 200 kilometres north of Goma, the capital of strife-torn North Kivu province, where the 150 Rwandan ethnic Hutu fighters and their dependents suddenly vanished from their cantonment, the Mission added.

“For now, the reasons that moved these candidates for voluntary return to abandon their camp without a trace remain unknown,” Mounoubai Madnodje, MONUC spokesperson said at the mission’s weekly press conference in Kinshasa.

Despite this incident, the Mission says that close to 800 former Rwandan fighters and dependents have now left for Rwanda from North Kivu province, where some 250,000 civilians, on top of the 800,000 already displaced, have been uprooted by fighting between Hutu groups, a mainly Tutsi militia known as the CNDP, the Government army and others.

In South Kivu province, meanwhile, some 330 Rwandan refugees, including 63 former fighters, were sent back home on Monday, with another 55 former fighters making the trip yesterday.

Twelve of those ex-combatants came from the ranks of the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR), which has been the target of a joint military operation conducted by Rwanda and the DRC.

This brings to more than 500 the total of former Rwandan Hutu fighters and dependents who have been sent back home since the start of this month, MONUC said, adding that its doors remain open to those willing to join its voluntary disarmament, demobilization, repatriation, reintegration and rehabilitation (DDRRR) programme.

MONUC also welcomed today the increasing number of children leaving the ranks of armed groups, with an additional group of 98 children have been extracted from the ranks of the CNDP and other groups in the past week.

That makes more than 350 children who have been turned in by armed groups to the UN Mission and transferred to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) or its partners in the past two weeks, according to MONUC.

Yesterday, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes said he was “fairly optimistic” about the overall situation in North Kivu province, in an interview with MONUC’s Radio Okapi.

At the end of his tour to assess the humanitarian situation in the eastern DRC, he said there was a new momentum following renegade general Laurent Nkunda’s arrest and the ongoing joint Rwanda-DRC operation against the FDLR militia.

He expressed the hope to see “MONUC present in sensitive areas after the joint operation to enable the populations to resume their activities peacefully and on a long-term basis.”