GOMA, Congo — Ibrahim Nsanzimana says he can no longer return to his
home in Rwanda for fear of death. The 28-year-old recounted the tortured
history of his Rwandan family’s entanglement with neighboring Congo,
and his latest recruitment by Rwanda to fight in eastern Congo.
When the bitter memories and bleak prospects for his future confronted him, his eyes glazed and a tear ran down his cheek.
“They’ll kill me,” he said bluntly, referring to Rwandan officials and
their vigorous denials that he is among many men trained in Rwanda and
brought to Congo to fight alongside the M23 rebel movement. Out of work
and desperate to make a living, he said he agreed to join the Rwandan
army in early July.
“Our area chief called a youth meeting, I
think it was July 1, and there were about 300 of us young men at
Amahoro Stadium in Kigali (Rwanda’s capital). Military police in red
berets told us we were all going to become soldiers, and they promised
us a salary” equivalent to $60 a month, he said.
They were
crowded into five Rwandan
Defense Forces trucks and driven at night to Gaviro military camp, home
to Rwanda’s School of Infantry near the border with Uganda, where they
spent a week learning how to shoot with AK-47 assault rifles.
“Only then did they tell us that we had come here to fight to take
North Kivu province (of eastern Congo) and to make it part of Rwanda,”
Nsanzimana said. He said the announcement came from Rwandan army Capt.
Francois Mugabo.
“When I woke up the next morning, we were in
the volcano area in Congo,” he said, brought to fight a war led by the
Tutsi tribe that he considers a mortal enemy of his Hutu people.
Terrified
that he was going to be killed, Nsanzimana fled into the forest and
wandered for days before he was captured three weeks ago by Congolese
soldiers. He is being held in an overcrowded holding cell of the
military intelligence agency in Goma, Congo’s eastern provincial
capital. There, he gave The
Associated Press details of Rwanda’s alleged complicity in the latest
rebellion in eastern Congo.
Similar stories have been told to
officials in the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo by fighters who have
been captured or turned themselves in to Congolese troops. Some said
they were trained at Kanombe military barracks just outside Kigali;
others said they received training only once in Congo, near its borders
with Uganda and Rwanda.
Eleven Rwandans who surrendered in May
said they were recruited as early as February — three months before the
rebellion started, according to Patrick Garba, head of the U.N.
demobilization office in Goma.
That testimony helped form the
backbone of a controversial July report by a U.N. Group of Experts that
accuses high-ranking Rwandan officials, including the minister of
defense, of helping to create, arm and support the M23 rebellion and
some Congolese militias. Their fighting over the
past three months has brought some of the worst violence in years to
eastern Congo, forcing some 280,000 people to abandon their homes as the
rebels have seized a huge swathe of eastern Congo.
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