GOMA, CONGO—In a weary country where the war is allegedly over, the fighting and dying never actually stop.
A brazen pre-dawn attack Wednesday on a forward military position 40 kilometres from Goma has resulted in at least 19 people killed, including five Congolese soldiers.
Eight civilians were killed during the assault on the town of Burungu, which is in an area of chronic raids by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). Maj. Vianney Kazarama, spokesman for the Congolese army, said 150 FDLR rebels had participated in the attack.
“We killed six (rebels),” claimed Kazarama.
The FDLR is composed of ethnic Hutu militants who’ve been on Congolese soil since inflicting mass genocide on their Tutsi countrymen in 1994. The FDLR remnants, believed to number about 7,000, have ignored all peace agreements signed between the two nations. They’re also extensively involved — as are Tutsi Rwandan militia — in the illegal trade of the Congo’s immense mineral wealth: gold, copper, cobalt, tin, zinc and the prized coltan, used in consumer electronics.
UN troops — MONUC peacekeepers operating under a Chapter Seven mandate, which gives them the right to use “all necessary means,” including lethal force, to protect civilians — are extensively deployed in North and South Kivu provinces, the main battleground between rival militias.
MONUC was initially deployed in 2001 when the Democratic Republic of Congo was still in the grips of the 1998-2003 war that drew in armies from more than a half-dozen neighbouring countries, either pro- or anti-Kinshasa.
The attack came on same day as the suspicious death of a leading human rights activist.
Floribert Chebeya, head of the national network of human rights NGOs and of local NGO Voice of the Voiceless, was found dead in his car in a Kinshasa suburb.
Chebeya, who campaigned to improve prison conditions, had been harassed by authorities in the past and was named in an Amnesty International report this year saying he was at risk.
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