KINSHASA, 23 October (IRIN) - Mbusa
Nyamwisi, the minister for regional cooperation in the two-year transitional
government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), has confirmed
reports of the presence of Ugandan rebel training camps in his country's
northeastern North Kivu Province, in the region between Beni and Kasindi.
"These camps exist and it is possible
that there are other such camps that have not been identified, because
these armed groups are located in the forest, sometimes in very small camps",
Nyamwisi told IRIN on Thursday.
Nyamwisi is also the leader of the Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie-Kisangani/Mouvement de liberation (RCD-K/ML), a former rebel movement now party to the DRC national unity government. Prior to this, RCD-K/ML controlled the region in question.
Ugandan rebel groups such as the National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU) the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) have been active in this region in the past.
Nyamwisi said he was concerned by recent reports that Uganda had been mobilising its forces along the joint DRC/Ugandan border.
"For more than a week, Ugandan government troops have been deploying [in Uganda] along the border with Congo, and authorities in Kampala [the Ugandan capital] have even threatened to cross over, as has been previously declared by Kigali [capital of neighbouring Rwanda] under the same pretext that they were unable to repatriate these groups while their national armies were there", Nyamwisi said.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has denied having any intention of sending his forces back into the DRC.
Nyamwisi added that he would be travelling to Kampala on Thursday to discuss the matter with the Ugandan government, as part of a wider effort to normalise relations between the two former enemy states.
On 6 September 2002, DRC President Joseph Kabila and Ugandan President Museveni signed a peace accord in Luanda, Angola, under which Uganda agreed to withdraw some 10,000 of its soldiers who had remained in the DRC.
The accord also called for joint patrols along the slopes of the Rwenzori Mountains on the DRC side of the border.
"We are going to discuss the matter, but it is critical that the current formation of a new and restructured Congolese army be completed", Nyamwisi said.
For its part, the UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC, known as MONUC, said it could not confirm the presence of the Ugandan rebel camps. "We received this information, and our observers are conducting inquiries, but we cannot confirm at present the existence of such camps", the MONUC military spokesman, Col Antoine Wardini, said on Wednesday during a news conference at MONUC headquarters in Kinshasa.
Also on Wednesday, MONUC announced the discovery by a group of farmers of an arms cache on 18 October in the village of Lume, 16 km from Mutwanga, North Kivu Province. The weapons, whose origin MONUC said was unknown, were taken on 19 October to Mutwanga, then to Beni.
"Local authorities of the RCD-K/ML confirmed their intention to hand them over to MONUC Task Force I for their destruction", the MONUC interim spokesman, Madnodje Mounoubai, told the same news conference.
"We are in the process of verifying this, and we are pursuing our investigations, because, at present, we cannot say whether this is a genuine cache of arms or simply some weapons left behind by someone", Wardini added.
The region in question used to be under the control of RCD-K/ML, which had been backed by neighbouring Uganda before it formed an alliance with the Kinshasa government in April 2002.
[ENDS]
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