RCD calls for independent inquiry into Kisangani events

The president of the rebel Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie (RCD-Goma), Adolphe Onusumba, has reiterated his movement’s call for an international independent commission of inquiry into the recent mutiny and killings in Kisangani, northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

He said on Radio Rwanda on Friday that the RCD had nothing to hide and that he was making an urgent appeal for the commission to be set up, so "these tragic events may be entirely brought to light". RCD-Goma had already sent a team from Rwanda, he added, and investigations had been opened. "We will announce its conclusions when the time comes," he said.
Initial indications from the investigation were that soldiers from RCD-Goma who were unhappy with the impasse in the peace process had taken control of a local radio station and made appeals for ethnic hatred, he said. "Violence ensued and people, mainly of Tutsi origin, were killed."

"In the face of the absence of progress, some people could thoughtlessly launch into acts of desperation and look for scapegoats. We nevertheless cannot tolerate the existence or development of a campaign of ethnic hatred, whose consequences in our subregion everyone knows in our country," he said.

AP quoted him as saying that the UN should not be involved in the inquiry "in the interest of a fair investigation".

In a preliminary report on the mutiny within RCD-Goma and subsequent events from 14 to 21 May, the UN mission in the DRC (known by its French acronym MONUC) stated that there had been "grave violations of human rights and humanitarian law" in a place where RCD-Goma was the de facto administrative authority.

"In light of overwhelming evidence, and even though a mutiny appears to be at the origin of the reprisals committed by the RCD, MONUC considers the exactions to have been unjustifiable and unacceptable," the UN mission report stated.

Onusumba reportedly returned to Goma on Thursday from South Africa, where he was on Friday due to meet the Special Representative of UN Secretary-General in the DRC, Amos Namanga Ngongi, RTNC Radio reported.

Hundreds of people demonstrated in the DRC capital, Kinshasa, to protest against the killings, AP reported. Wearing white scarves on their heads as a sign of mourning, the protesters demanded that the UN strengthen MONUC's mandate to enable it to take action to enforce peace. But Ngongi said on 21 May that the Security Council had "almost unanimously" resisted proposals to change MONUC's mandate from peacekeeping to peace enforcement.

Meanwhile, reasons given for the mutiny in Kisangani are varied. RCD-Goma had accused civic leaders in Kisangani of organising the rising, with the backing of the DRC government, AP reported. Rebel-controlled Radio Candip in Bunia quoted RCD-Goma delegates in Kisangani as saying that the violence "was the work of external elements". The London-based Guardian newspaper reported that many local people in Kisangani believed the mutiny had been orchestrated by the RCD-Goma rebels themselves to provide a pretext to crack down on local dissent.

"I am in the process of posing many questions to myself about the version of events put out by the media, simply because I can't see how a group of 15 officers could begin an insurrection against a command of a force of 6,000 men in the city and its vicinity," Agence Presse Associee quoted the archbishop of Kisangani, Laurent Monsengwo, as saying. "There's something that hasn't emerged yet," he added.

In a separate development, the French Foreign Ministry said it was "extremely concerned" over the situation in Kisangani. "If, as information suggests, Rwandan forces have indeed been deployed in Kisangani to support the RCD, we expect from Rwanda that it withdraws its troops and no longer intervenes militarily in Congolese affairs," Francois Rivasseau, the ministry’s spokesman, was reported as saying on Friday. Paris took the view that the violence in Kisangani "must not be used as a pretext for repressing civil society, the clergy and the media," AFP quoted him as saying.

While still compiling a definitive list of victims, MONUC has recorded the deaths of at least 23 people, including civilians, in Kisangani. MONUC personnel reported seeing corpses floating in the Congo River, some of which had been mutilated and stuffed into plastic bags. Twenty other corpses were found in a mass grave east of the city's airport.