GOMA, DRCongo (AFP) — One of the principal rebel chiefs in Democratic Republic of Congo, Laurent Nkunda, on Thursday snubbed an army demand that his fighters surrender, saying negotiations were a pre-requisite.
"The government still has not accepted contacting us for dialogue, so we can establish the conditions for the post-deployment," he told AFP by telephone from his mountain hideout in North Kivu.
On Tuesday, the defence forces chief-of-staff, General Dieudonne Kayembe, called on Nkunda's men -- a mix of militia men and army troops who defected -- to report to "deployment" centres where they would be disarmed then integrated them into the army.
Nkunda, a former army general stripped of his post, asserted that, in any case, the centres were only for "military deserters and not CNDP (his rebel National Congress for the People's Defence) troops."
The governor of North Kivu, Julien Paluku, has given a deadline of mid-October for rebel forces to lay down their arms.
Nkunda's fighters and government troops clashed Tuesday in North Kivu, ending a ceasefire imposed 18 days earlier by UN peacekeepers responding to battles that had displaced an estimated 90,000 civilians in the region.
On Thursday morning, 79 former Njunda loyalists who defected in this week's fighting were flown out of Goma airport for a military base in Katanga province in the southeast.
With them went 56 members of the Mai-Mai, a powerful tribal militia who had also laid down their arms, an AFP correspondent at Goma airport saw.
A former captain in the 83rd Brigade who had fought with Nkunda said that on being ordered to advance during the clashes, "I did as far as I could and then raised my rifle in the air to throw myself into the arms of the FARDC (regular army)."
"Two others who tried to stop me were killed by the soldiers just behind us," apparently meaning fellow deserters. For the Mai-Mai, one young militiaman said his chief was trying to stop fighters from leaving while Nkunda's men, "the enemies of peace, are still in the region."
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