SAPA-AFP
April 8, 2010
Goma: Young mother and former Hutu rebel fighter Epiphany Mukamana did a little jig when she told of her pleasure at being able to escape her one-time base in the dense forest.
"I am happy to have left the forest, I was tired," said the 26-year-old at a United Nations camp in the city of Goma in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mukamana arrived recently with her 10-year-old son, deserting the ranks of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) for a chance to be repatriated to her homeland across the border under a UN programme.
A handful of former Rwandan combattants have turned up in recent days at the camp in Goma, the main centre in the Nord-Kivu province.
A Congolese army operation against the FDLR, launched in Nord- and Sud-Kivu in March 2009, had pushed the rebels out of the cities and villages they set up years earlier in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
They were forced to abandon their fields, livestock and small businesses to hide out in the remote forests. They were safer there, but life was considerably more difficult.
"We had to loot, to steal to eat. It was tiring. That is why I left," said Mukamana.
John Musabuyimana, 40, served in the mortar division of a batallion at an FDLR headquarters set up in the Ntoto forest about 100 kilometres (60 miles) west of Goma.
Along with his wife and children aged three and six, he made it to a camp of the UN's Disarmament, Demobilisation, Repatriation, Reintegration and Reinstallation programme several days ago.
"For resupplies, we attacked Congolese army positions," he said. "Then we salvaged rations and ammunition.
"The fighters also had the right to go and do business, like in palm oil, for two months and then to return.
"But at the start of 2009, it became harder to live in the forest, and we had less freedom."
To dissuade would-be deserters, FDLR officers - some of whom have been accused of participating in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda - warned their troops that they would be killed or jailed if they returned home to Rwanda.
"If we are stopped in the process of fleeing, we are considered like one of the enemy," said Saidi Dahimana, 26, a former corporal in the same rebel battalion.
"We could be whipped, imprisoned, even killed," he said.
"When you decide to leave, you must not tell anyone, it has to stay secret," added the young man.
He said he had left with his wife because he was "tired of the forest".
All the former fighters denied that the FDLR was exploiting the region's considerable mineral wealth, contradicting several reports from UN agencies and non-government organisations.
Dahimana also said there had been no weakening of the FDLR, which one UN source estimates at fewer than 4 000 fighters in the two Kivu provinces.
"They are continuing to recruit young Rwandan or Congolese Hutus, from the age of 17, who undergo training of three months," he said.
"We are not afraid of the Congolese soldiers, they are not capable of fighting us," he added.
Dahimana went on to give a detailed explanation of the structure of the FDLR units to a UN official.
Under the UN programme, he and other former Hutu fighters and their families will be taken to a reintegration camp in Mutobo in Rwanda, where they will spend at least two months before restarting their lives.
For some of them, that will be 16 years after they fled into the Democratic Republic of Congo following the genocide in which about 800 000 people, mainly minority Tutsis, were killed.
In 2009, 1 564 former rebels were repatriated under the programme: 300 have returned since the beginning of 2010.
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