According to a report by the United Nations group of experts that “Le Monde” has obtained, the territory today controlled by the rebellion in the east of the DRC is “almost three times greater” than ‘In March.
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Kinshasa authorities have been waiting for him for months and its content has been explosive. The Confidential Report of the United Nations Experts Group on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), transmitted to member states of the UN Security Council and that Le Monde obtained Thursday August 4, accuses the Rwandan army to have participated in attacks against Congolese soldiers and to have equipped and provided reinforcements to the insurgents of the Movement of 23-March (M23). This rebellion, born in 2012, took up arms against the State at the end of 2021 in the east of the DRC, along the border with Rwanda.
UN experts, who led “on -site inspections” and analyzed the “available images”, ensure “solid evidence” demonstrating the participation of Rwandan soldiers in several attacks perpetrated against Congolese soldiers in the Province of North Kivu, fief of M23, between November 2021 and July 2022. “The FDR [Rwandan Defense Forces], either unilaterally, or jointly with M23 fighters, have engaged in military operations against Congolese armed groups and positions of the FARDC [Armed Forces of the DRC] “, we read in the 29-page document.
Thus, in the Kibumba region, on May 24, “a large number of FDR troops walking in columns […] entered the DRC” and “attacked and dislodged the FARDC of their positions”. Fourteen eyewitnesses interviewed by the UN panel estimated their number between 900 and 1,000. The next day, the attacks carried out jointly by the Rwandan soldiers and the M23 continued “against the FARDC camps” on the hill near Kibumba. Assessment of these assaults: 20 Congolese soldiers killed.
In Bunagana, on June 13, a drone also spotted “around 200 men, all equipped with uniforms, weapons and similar backpacks”. The legend of air clichés attached to the annexes of the UN report presents them as FDR soldiers, insisting on the presence of a Rwandan flag on one of their uniforms. The same day, the rebels of the M23 took over this strategic city, a commercial crossroads of North Kivu, on the border with Uganda and a few kilometers from Rwanda.
two Rwandan soldiers arrested
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