Voluntary repatriation of Hutu rebels has failed, Kagame says

Rwandan President Paul Kagame called on Sunday for stronger action to disarm and repatriate thousands of Hutu rebels in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), saying efforts at voluntarily disarmament had failed.

"You can't voluntarily disarm these combatants, many of whom are extremists, and I think asking them to voluntarily leave what they have been doing for the last 10 years is unattainable," he told reporters in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, after a meeting with the visiting members of the UN Security Council.

Ambassadors of the 15-member Council are visiting Africa's Great Lakes region, where thousands have been killed and millions displaced by years of conflict.

Kagame and the Council members failed to strike a balance on a UN-proposed method of voluntarily repatriating the Hutu rebels.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with Kagame, the president of the Council, Jean Marc de la Sabliere, told reporters that the Council recognised the urgent need to disarm the Rwandan dissidents, but said such a move would have to be done with the rebels' consent.

"Our understanding is that there's a decision and more willingness to disarm the rebels by the DRC government - assisted by MONUC [UN Mission in the DRC], but this has to be on the basis of voluntary disarmament," Sabliere said.

A move to increase the current number of UN peacekeepers in the DRC to 16,000, as announced by the UN ambassadors, has failed to impress Kagame.

"I think it is not an issue of having MONUC increasing the number of troops; it also has to do with clear definitions as to what they do when they are on ground," Kagame said.

Rwandan authorities have been calling for a stronger Council resolution that would enable UN troops in the Congo to disarm the Hutu rebels by force and repatriate them to Rwanda.

In early November, MONUC troops and thousands of government soldiers started joint patrols in eastern Congo's South Kivu Province to protect civilians and pressure the Rwandan rebels to lay down their arms and return home.

However, the rebels warned that they would resist any attempt to disarm them forcibly.

The presence of thousands of Rwandan rebels in eastern Congo in the last 10 years has fuelled ongoing regional instability and was specifically used by Kigali as justification for invading Congo in 1996 and 1998.