UN staff and their families were evacuating to Rwanda on Monday morning, where 10 buses were waiting to pick them up. Unverified videos shared on social media showed local residents looting merchandise outside the airport customs warehouse and columns of heavily armed men, believed to be M23 fighters, walking through the northern suburbs of the city.
Corneille Nangaa, leader of the Congo River Alliance that includes the M23, has told Reuters that his forces were in control of Goma and that army soldiers were laying down arms. “They have started to surrender, but it takes time,” he said. “It’s normal that they [residents] still see soldiers.” However, Tryphon Kin-Kiey Mulumba, chair of the Air Transport Authority, said the army still held the airport.
Troops from Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda have been firing at each other across their shared border in the eastern Congolese city of Goma, where Rwandan-backed rebels launched an offensive, two United Nations sources said on Monday.
The UN security council on Sunday demanded that M23 rebel forces stop an ongoing offensive and advance towards Goma, the largest city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and that “external forces” in the region immediately withdraw. The council demands came just hours after Rwandan-backed M23 said they had taken Goma following a lightning advance that has forced thousands of people to flee and fuelled concerns of a regional war.
Thousands of inmates broke free from the main prison in Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern city of Goma early on Monday in the midst of a rebel offensive in the city, a prison agent and a resident said.
France expressed its solidarity regarding the Democratic Republic of Congo and condemned actions by Rwanda in the country, French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot said on Monday. Barrot was speaking as he arrived at the Council of European Foreign Ministers in Brussels.
UN peacekeepers have begun to process members of the military who had begun to surrender on the outskirts of the city, AP reported. Congolese government spokesperson Patrick Muyaya made a statement in a video posted on X calling for the protection of civilians and saying that the country is “in a war situation where the news is changing.”
The Uruguayan army, who are in Goma serving with the UN peacekeeping mission, said in a statement on X late on Sunday that some Congolese soldiers have laid down their weapons. “More than a hundred FARDC soldiers are sheltered in the facilities of the “Siempre Presente” base awaiting the (Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration) process,” the statement said.
a post on X, spokesperson Patrick Muyaya said the DRC forces were working to prevent “carnage and loss of human life”, and he also called on Goma residents to stay at home and not engage in acts of vandalism.said on X.
It was not clear on Monday morning how much of Goma, the capital of North Kivu state in eastern DRC, was controlled by the rebels, but witnesses in the city said rebel fighters could be seen in the centre. Residents said gunfire could be heard near the airport, city centre and near the border with Rwanda.
The rebels had ordered government soldiers to surrender by 3am on Monday (0100 GMT) and 100 Congolese soldiers had handed their weapons over to Uruguayan troops in the UN peacekeeping mission in DRC (Monusco), Uruguay’s military said. Monusco staff and their families were evacuating across the border to Rwanda on Monday morning, where 10 buses were waiting to pick them up.
The eastern borderlands of DRC are a tinderbox of rebel and militia fiefdoms stemming from two regional wars after Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, when Hutu extremists murdered close to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. M23 is the latest in a long line of Tutsi-led rebel movements.
Source: theguardian.com
