Rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo yesterday claimed control of a town outside the captured city of Goma and threatened to continue their push all the way to Kinshasa, as the UN accused them of carrying out summary executions in their sweep across the east, stoking fears of a humanitarian disaster.
“We are not going to stop at Goma, we will go as far as Bukavu, Kisangani and Kinshasa,” M23 spokesman Vianney Kazarama told a crowd massed at a stadium in Goma a day after the rebels overran the eastern city with little or no resistance from UN or Government troops.
Rebels said yesterday they had seized the town of Sake, about 20 kilometres northwest of Goma. They vowed to press on southward to Bukavu, the other major city on the border with Rwanda.
Kazarama also demanded that President Joseph Kabila leave power, claiming he was not the legitimate winner of a hotly disputed presidential election in the war-weary country last year.
But at talks in Kampala, Kabila and the leaders of neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda insisted that the rebels must immediately pull out of Goma, the main city in the mineral-rich but deeply impoverished east.
UN envoy Roger Meece accused the rebels of carrying out “summary executions” of local leaders in their advance and said they were making “offensive moves” towards a new army base.
Meece told the UN Security Council that the ethnic Tutsi rebels who launched their uprising in April are trying to set up “a formal adminis-trative or governing struc-ture” in the region they now control.
“We have received numerous reports of targeted summary executions of those who stand in their way, including government and traditional leaders who resist or fail to cooperate with an M23 administrative structure,” he said.
Meece said that since the fall of Goma there had been demonstrations in several cities against the UN presence and the Government in the troubled central African giant and he feared that these could spread.
The UN and other human-itarian groups have reported killings, abductions, looting and extortion of civilians and fears of a humanitarian catastrophe are growing as electricity and water supplies dry up.
Violent demonstrations erup-ted in several DR Congo towns, including Kisangani where protesters targeted the UN base, as well as a church whose pastor was accused having M23 ties, a resident said.
Six people were also killed in protests in the town of Bunia, a Western aid worker said. The information could not be immediately confirmed.