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Rwanda: Govt Urges Congo to Disarm FDR Rebels
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The Monitor (Kampala)
12 May 2008
Posted to the web 12 May 2008
Kezio Musoke David
Rwanda has expressed doubts about the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) commitment to disarming rebels of the Forces Démocratiques de la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), in line with last year's Nairobi Accord.
The agreement further stated that the DRC repatriate those who were willing to return by the beginning of this year.
Speaking to the local press last week, President Paul Kagame's special envoy to the Great Lakes region, Mr Richard Sezibera, said Rwanda was only aware that the DRC's had created awareness about disarming the rebels.
Mr Sezibera said: "That's all we know. They [the Congolese] said they would carry out military operations against the FDLR. Disarmament of the FDLR forces is 14 years behind schedule. They should have been disarmed in 1994."
Mr Sezibira's remarks came just weeks after representatives of Rwanda and the DRC held a series of meetings at the UN headquarters in New York to assess progress in disarming the FDLR rebels in eastern DRC.
The FDLR rebels, mainly Hutu extremists who fled Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, are now based in the DRC.
They have been accused of human rights abuses, and their activities have forced humanitarian agencies in the troubled region to suspend their relief programmes.
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Formed in 2000 following the merger of the Kinshasa-based command and the Kivu-based Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALIR), the FDRL counts among its numbers the original members of the ex-FAR groups and the Interahamwe militia who carried out the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Late last year, Rwanda and the DRC signed a communiqué in Nairobi, in which the DRC pledged to "prepare, by December 1, 2007, a detailed plan to disarm and address the threat posed by the ex-FAR/Interahamwe" and launch military operations to dismantle these groups.
The disarmament was supposed to begin in March this year, there is now a feeling in Kigali that the DRC is reluctant to carry go on with the programme.
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