News
Mystery deepens as Nkunda chapter is ‘closed’
Congolese soldiers patrol the town of Rutshuru in eastern Congo on January 28. Plans to integrate Tutsi rebels into Congo’s army faltered before they could begin, underlining the challenges facing efforts to pacify the east despite renewed Congo-Rwanda co-operation. Photo/REUTERS
Posted Saturday, February 7 2009 at 09:13
But this has not been independently confirmed.
What has been independently confirmed is that the Rwandan government has fallen into a game of political “hot potato,” passing responsibility for the arrest from ministry to ministry, with the military, under whose authority Nkunda supposedly remains, deferring virtually all questions to either the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of Justice.
But senior officials in those ministries have hung up telephones in the middle of conversations, calling upon journalists “to stop harassing” them.
All signs now point to a small and highly concentrated nexus of the country’s elite, most likely between the executive and military, deciding Nkunda’s fate, going beyond normal legal protocol and verging into the realm of the highly political.
Nkunda resides in a legal limbo — in protective — if not disciplinary custody — of a country that spoke volumes to disassociate itself from the Tutsi rebel, only to see silence over his arrest all but confirm a relationship.
The Rwandan army, although arresting a resistant and armed Nkunda after “illegally crossing borders,” has refused to give him a legal classification and says that “he is not being punished.”
“He is a human being,” Maj Rutaremara says. “Why punish him?”
Other human beings, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, derivative forces of Hutu extremists that committed genocide in Rwanda against a million Tutsi and other moderates, are being rounded up by the Rwandan military in the Congo every day.
Thousands upon thousands are disarming and returning. Thursday’s edition of Rwandan daily The New Times declared victory against the FDLR in its editorial. “The hey day of the insurgents is over.”
Photographs of former Hutu rebels are paraded across the newspapers, accompanying headlines such as “region steadily stabilises.”
And Nkunda, the enemy of Rwanda’s enemy, is silently swept under the rug, and officials are forbidden to speak on the subject, in the hope that all will be forgotten.
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