Zimbabwe denies troops killed in northern DRC

The military authorities in Zimbabwe on Thursday denied a news report that rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) last week killed 124 Zimbabwean soldiers fighting alongside government forces.

Colonel Chancellor Diye, an army spokesman, said an AFP report quoting an alleged Zimbabwean survivor of an attack on a river boat near Gbadolite in northern Congo was “totally false”.

AFP quoted a captured Zimbabwean soldier identified only as Corporal Tsamba as saying he had been taken prisoner by rebels from the Mouvement pour la liberation du Congo (MLC) after they attacked a ferry carrying Zimbabwean and government soldiers. He said he was the only of 125 Zimbabwean soldiers aboard to have survived the attack last Thursday.

“Firstly, I can tell you that no large number of Zimbabwean soldiers were killed,” the army spokesman in Harare told IRIN. “Secondly, there are no Southern African Development Community (SADC) forces deployed in that part of the country. Only the Congolese army themselves are out there. This information is totally false.”

Zimbabwe has deployed an estimated 12,000 troops, or about one-third of its army in the DRC to assist the government of President Laurent-Desire Kabila against Ugandan and Rwandan-backed rebels.

Colonel Martin Rupia, a specialist on the conflict at the Institute of Defence Studies in Harare, told IRIN that SADC forces from Zimbabwe and Namibia assisting Kabila were based hundreds of kilometres from Gbadolite in central DRC near the town of Mbujimayi and in the southwest of the vast nation near Lubumbashi.

“I believe it is unlikely that any Zimbabwean troops were up there,” he said. “It is open information of the Joint Military Commission (JMC) that Zimbabwean troops are confined to the central and western parts of DRC. The area where this happened is simply not their theatre of operations.”