15 RCD officers arrested for incitement to mutiny

Fifteen officers of the Rwandan-backed Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie (RCD-Goma) armed opposition movement, accused of incitation to mutiny, were arrested last week in Kisangani and transferred to Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), sources told IRIN on Wednesday.

Widespread dissent has been reported among rank-and-file of RCD soldiers who complain of not receiving salaries, of poor living conditions and inadequate equipment. Sources told IRIN that since the Kinshasa government announced on 2 September that it was willing to pay the salaries of civil servants in occupied DRC territory, RCD soldiers had become more hopeful and increasingly vocal in their criticism of rebel authorities.

On 13 September, a teenager was killed and several people hit by bullets when RCD-Goma security forces shot at demonstrating students in the eastern DRC town of Bukavu. "The students were demonstrating peacefully with banners calling on the RCD to accept a [Kinshasa] government offer to pay salary arrears to civil servants when bodyguards of a security official opened fire, first in the air and then into the crowd, killing a young man 14 years old," AFP quoted one resident as having said.

At a meeting of the RCD-Goma executive committee on 10 September, deputy head of the Department of External Relations and Cooperation Crispin Kabasele Kimanga expressed "surprise" at Kinshasa's proposal to pay the salaries of civil servants working in territory controlled by the RCD. "Civil servants should know that this charming move is part of the economic war between Kinshasa and Goma. In short, Kinshasa - which has not paid a single month's salary to the civil servants in the western part of the country - will never be able to pay 37-month arrears to those in the east," AFP quoted Kabasele as having said.

However, the minister of communications and government spokesman, Kikaya bin Karubi, announced on government-owned RTNC TV on Tuesday that the "government has decided: First, to send funds for the payment of salaries to the civil servants in the occupied territories, particularly in Equateur and Oriental provinces; second, to continue efforts so that the UN Observer Mission can find ways and means of bringing to all the civil servants living in the occupied territories their salaries as paid by the government." He also said that the government "expresses the entire Congolese people's solidarity with the victims who were gunned down only because they supported the decisions made by the government and, particularly, the decision to pay civil servants working in the territories occupied by foreign forces."