Nkunda Responds to Possible ICC Indictment

The renegade general Laurent Nkunda, who commands a band of rebel Congolese Tutsis in the eastern Congo, said he doesn’t care whether he’s arrested by the International Criminal Court, ICC, if his fight has resulted in justice for his people.



In an exclusive interview with IWPR, Nkunda also denied that he has recruited child soldiers – an accusation made by the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, MONUC, and various international aid groups working in the North Kivu province.



Nkunda insisted that his mission has been to defend his fellow ethnic Tutsis from Rwandan Hutu fighters who were responsible for that country’s genocide of 1994.



Many of these same Hutus, known as the Interahamwe, fled Rwanda into the Congo. Some formed the Front Démocratique de Libération du Rwanda, FDLR – Nkunda’s enemies.



“My fight is well known,” Nkunda told IWPR, saying that if the ICC arrests him today it won’t matter to him, so long as his fight has resulted in justice for the Congolese Tutsis.



Nkunda, who in the past is widely believed to have been backed by Rwanda, has refused to join the Congolese army despite being offered the rank of general.



Instead, he has maintained his force in the eastern Congo and has successfully fought the FDLR, other militias and the Congolese army.



His goal, he said, was to help his fellow Congolese Tutsis. But although Nkunda claimed to be protecting his ethnic group, he has also been accused of abducting children and forcing them to become child soldiers and sex slaves for his forces, as recently as late last year.



According to a UN report last December, hundreds of child soldiers were used in the front lines of clashes between Nkunda’s forces and the Congolese army.



The UN said Nkunda’s Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple, CNDP, and the FDLR were the two main groups who routinely grabbed children from schools and internal refugee camps.



The UN also said that many of the estimated 8,500 former child soldiers who have been rescued since 2004 have since been re-recruited.



An estimated 800,000 Congolese have been displaced in North Kivu. This includes 170,000 who last year were forced to flee the fighting, which has since quieted in the wake of an agreement signed earlier this year by more than 20 warring militias, including that of Nkunda.



Nkunda, however, has denied collecting new child soldiers. He said, "I have no children in the army under my control. You can go around if you want, and you will not find any."



Nkunda claimed, however, that he had inherited child soldiers from the Rally for Congolese Democracy, RCD, a former rebel faction reportedly backed by Rwanda and which operated in eastern Congo from 1998 to 2003. Nkunda was a senior officer in the RCD, which was one of the major rebel groups fighting there.



In June 2004, he led a force of several thousand soldiers into Bukavu, the capital city of the South Kivu province which sits on the far southern shores of Lake Kivu. Although Nkunda withdrew after only occupying the town for a week, it was a bloody episode, with widespread reports of killing and rape.



Nkunda later justified his occupation on humanitarian grounds, saying he thwarted a planned genocide against Congolese Tutsis. He pointed out that later that year, 160 Congolese Tutsis were killed in neighbouring Burundi.



Nkunda also later said he refused integration into the Congolese forces because it would have meant working with former enemies whom he did not trust.



In September 2005, the Congolese issued an arrest warrant for Nkunda, accusing him of numerous war crimes and human rights abuses.



Many of these have been documented by such groups as Human Rights Watch, and include summary executions, torture, and rape committed by soldiers under Nkunda’s command in Bukavu in 2004 and in Kisangani in 2002.



While the arrest warrant was never carried out, some speculate that the government’s evidence against Nkunda could become the basis for indictments against him by the ICC.



“Some organisations do not want to present anything positive on my side,” Nkunda told IWPR. “Since 2004, I have already demobilised 2,600 child soldiers that I handed to Caritas [the Catholic church’s humanitarian agency].”



Oswald Musoni, director of Caritas in Goma, acknowledged that Nkunda had turned over many child soldiers.



“From the 2,226 children we demobilised from 2004 to 2006, 2,003 came from Nkunda’s armed forces, as he was controlling almost the entire region,” said Musoni.



Of all the charges that have been levelled against Nkunda, the forced recruitment of child soldiers could cause the most trouble for him.



Thomas Lubanga, a warlord from the Ituri region adjacent to North Kivu, was arrested and transferred to the ICC for having recruited child soldiers in 2006. Although his trial was due to start at the end of March, it now looks likely to be delayed until later this summer.



Nkunda, however, doubted that the recruitment of children was the reason for Lubanga’s arrest, and suspected that it was because of his alleged killing of the ethnic Lendu in the Ituri region.



“I heard that Thomas Lubanga was first accused of having killed Lendu in Ituri. Then, it was noticed that even Lendu killed so many Hema in that district,” said Nkunda. He noted that recruiting child soldiers was common practice in the region and that Lubanga certainly was not “the first to recruit child soldiers in this country”.



In an interview with journalists in Goma earlier this year, Alan Doss, the UN’s representative to the region, said most countries, including the DRC, support the rights of children. Armed groups are aware that they should not recruit child soldiers because they are brutalised and traumatised. He urged the practice to stop.



In addition to Lubanga, two other Ituri militia leaders have been arrested and transferred to the ICC. Germain Katanga is accused of murder, sexual slavery and using child soldiers.



And on February 7, Mathieu Ngudjolo, the head of the Front of Nationalists and Integrationists, FPI, was taken to the ICC. He faces war crimes charges, including murder, sexual slavery and using child soldiers.



The ICC said it had “strong evidence” that Ngudjolo “committed crimes of shocking violence against men, women and children”, mostly associated with a February 2003 attack on the village of Bogoro, which he commanded along with Katanga. Some 200 people were killed and countless others were wounded. The village was then pillaged, said the ICC.



Following the arrest and pending prosecution of the three war lords, the ICC has signalled that it is preparing a further probe into war crimes and crimes against humanity in the North and South Kivu provinces.



“The office of the prosecutor is now moving on to a third investigation in the DRC, with other applications for arrest warrants to follow in the coming months and years,” the ICC said in a statement last week.



“The actions of armed groups still operating and reportedly still committing crimes in the east of the DRC, and in particular in the Kivu provinces, and the situation of those individuals who may have played a role in supporting and backing DRC armed groups, are among the principal options upon which the [office of the prosecutor] is focusing for this third investigation.”



Nkunda and his soldiers are among those referred to.



Jacques Kahorha is a Goma-based journalist and contributor to IWPR.