DRC military claims victory in South Kivu

THE army of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) says it has seized the “last strongholds” of a rebel force after several days of fighting in the province of South Kivu. The clashes erupted in the province’s highlands on August 12, when the military said it had responded to attacks by a coalition of the Makanika, Twigwaneho and Ngumino armed groups.

The groups consist of members of the Banyamulenge community – Congolese Tutsi with distant origins in neighbouring Rwanda. In Fizi territory, “the army has recovered all the villages formerly occupied by the rebels, including the last strongholds of these armed groups led by the deserter Colonel Michel Rukundo, alias Makanika,” army spokesperson Captain Dieudonne Kasereka said.

He claimed a “victory of the FARDC”, the armed forces of the DRC, and said calm had been restored.

Rubibi Saint-Cadet, representing civil society groups in Minembwe, said the clashes had “caused massive population displacement” into the bush and the forest. The highlands region is the focus of conflicts between armed groups formed along community lines, notably the Banyamulenge people and the Bafuliro, Babembe and Banyiundu.

A state of emergency in the DRC’s Ituri and North Kivu provinces is to be extended after 334 out of 335 MPs voted in favour of the extension.

The country’s eastern North-Kivu and Ituri provinces were declared under siege in May by President Félix Tshisekedi, after violence by dozens of armed groups in which thousands of civilians were killed and thousands more were forced to flee their homes. The violence has included kidnappings, rape and the burning of homes.

The eastern provinces have also seen violence between ethnic groups.

The violence has been on the increase despite the presence of thousands of UN peacekeepers and commitments by the new government to improve civilian protection.

An estimated 122 armed groups roam the eastern border provinces of the DRC, many of them a legacy of regional wars in the 1990s. The bloodiest is the Allied Democratic Forces, a historically Ugandan Islamist group that has carried out massacres in the last 18 months.