KINSHASA, TUESDAY

Rwandan troops crossed the border into eastern Congo today under a December agreement between the two countries to hunt down Rwandan Hutu rebels, a Western diplomat in the east Congo city of Goma said.

"They are there. MONUC has seen them," the diplomat said, adding that an estimated 1,500-2,000 Rwandan troops had crossed the border.

After an offensive last year by Congolese Tutsi rebels, who say they need to protect themselves from the Rwandan Hutu fighters, the Rwandan and Congolese governments agreed on December 5 to launch joint operations against the Rwandan Hutu rebels.

Eyebrows raised

Congo government said it invited Rwandan forces in, operations against Rwandan Hutu rebels to last 10-15 days.

"The operations are beginning. We have invited Rwandan officers with their security contingents for their safety. They are observers ... The operations to disarm the FDLR are planned for length of 10 to 15 days," Lambert Mende, Congo’s information minister and government spokesman, told news sources.

The size of the Rwandan deployment appeared to be more than a simple observation mission.

"We are not going to discuss the issues of these operations with the media. There is an operational plan for the whole operation and it is a secret document," Rwandan military spokeswoman Major Jill Rutaremara said in Kigali.

"I can’t confirm whether there are troops in DRC because all those are operational questions," she said.

A Reuters reporter at Kibati, just north of Goma, North Kivu’s provincial capital, saw Congolese army soldiers stopping all vehicles, including UN peacekeepers, from going north.

"This morning between 1,500 and 2,000 RDF (Rwanda Defence Forces) crossed the border in the Munigi-Kibati zone," Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich, military spokesman for the UN force, MONUC, said.

"We saw them deploy, leaving Kibati heading north on the Goma-Rutshuru axis," he said. MONUC, the biggest UN peace force, said it had not been involved in planning the operation.

DECADES OF BLOODSHED

Congolese army forces were on the move with tanks, armoured personnel carriers and mobile rocket launchers, Dietrich said.

The presence in eastern Congo of rebels of the mostly Hutu Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), many of whom participated in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, has been at the heart of more than a decade of bloodshed.

A 1998-2003 war sucked in the armies of half a dozen nearby countries, including Rwanda and neighbouring Uganda, which each backed rival rebel forces. The war and a resulting humanitarian catastrophe have killed an estimated 5.4 million people. Rwanda and Congo have agreed on several occasions to cooperate to tackle the Hutu rebels, but have failed to do so in the past amid widespread accusations that Congolese government forces, who are notoriously ill-disciplined and ineffective, have sided with the FDLR Hutu fighters.

–– Reuters