Army kills 39 Rwandan Hutu rebels in east

Congolese government troops killed 39 Rwandan Hutu rebels recently in three to four days of fighting in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Maj Abou Thiam, spokesman for the UN Mission in the DRC said on Tuesday in the nation's capital, Kinshasa.

He said the commanders of Congo's 8th and 10th Military regions had on Monday informed MONUC of the operation against armed men described as members of the so-called Democratic Front for the Liberation of Rwanda (Front democratique pour la liberation au Rwanda) or the Interahamwe or the former Rwandan armed forces.

The Rwandan Hutu rebels were blamed for the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which, according to government statistics, at least 937,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus died.

The army reported three of its soldiers killed and eight rebels captured, Thiam said.

Government troops attacked the rebels near two towns simultaneously. Soldiers of the 8th Military Region attacked rebels near the town of Rutshuru, 120 km northeast of Goma in North Kivu Province; and those of the 10th Military Region attacked near Bukavu, South Kivu Province.

The army said it had dislodged two rebel battalions. Witnesses said the rebels killed 15 villagers as they retreated.

The fighting came as Rwanda announced that the rebels had attacked its territory and that, as a result, it had deployed troops along the Congolese and Burundian borders. In Kigali, Rwandan military spokesman Col Patrick Karegeya told IRIN on Monday that the rebels had attacked the northwestern Rwandan province of Gisenyi on 8 April.

Kinshasa, on the other hand, charged that Rwandan troops had crossed into Congo. Foreign Minister Antoine Ghonda told reporters on Monday that the government considered the presence of Rwandan troops in the Congo as a threat to the trust and bilateral relations between the two countries. However, Kigali denied its troops had crossed the border.

Rwanda officially withdrew its troops from Congo in 2002, under a regional peace deal brokered by South Africa to end a five-year conflict that has led to the deaths of up to three million Congolese and displaced millions of others.