23^rd October 1996

PRESS RELEASE NO 98

RPF PLAN TO SUFFOCATE REFUGEES AND ATTEMPTS TO REDRAW THE PRESENT RWANDA BORDERS TO THE PRE-COLONIAL ERA.

Very reliable information from Rwanda indicate that RPF is determined to intensify its war in Eastern Zaire. On advice from its foreign sponsors , RPF has drawn up a plan to suffocate hutu refugee camps before destroying them. According to the plan, RPF would then occupy permanently the Kivu region and thus redraw the rwandan borders to their pre-colonial period.

In the first phase, the External Security Organisation (ESO) sent hit squads made up of nearly 300 agents to NAIROBI, DAR-ES-SALAAM, GOMA and BUKAVU to physically eliminate hutu leaders and to destabilise organisations of refugees. The hit squads have already carried out their plan in NAIROBI and BUKAVU.

In Eastern Zaire, in addition to thousands of Banyamulenge infiltrated into Zaire in Uvira region, RPF has infiltrated 600 soldiers in GOMA and BUKAVU, some of them disguised as refugees.

The mission of the 600 soldiers is to seize and occupy, at an opportune time GOMA and BUKAVU airports in order to prevent any military reinforcements and military supplies from Kinshasa and the countryside. Once they will have occupied the two airports, RPF soldiers are to move massively into the towns of BUKAVU and GOMA. At this very time the Banyamulenge in South Kivu and the Tutsi of MASISI in collaboration with the BANGILIMA MAYI/MAYI rebels are to converge respectively on refugee camps in South and North Kivu.

Attacks against refugee camps are to be carried out from the rear in order to push refugees into Rwanda where they would be massacred by the RPF Army . In the framework the latest attack on Kamanyola was aimed at cornering the refugee fleeing Uvira town into the trap after they had avoided UVIRA-BUKAVU route which is along the Rwanda- Zaire border, where they feared to be intercepted by the RPF.

Fearing popular uprising inside the country of a population which is hostile to the regime and its exportation of war to Eastern Zaire, RPF embarked in the months of July and August 1996 on a military training programme of a tutsi militia and invited the extremist tutsi militia cadres of Burundi "les sans echecs" (those who do not fail their mission) to train this militia in methods of repression of the population.

In Kigali town, all "Nyumbakumi" leaders have just undergone a military training and been armed. Moreover, all night patrols that have become compulsory all over the country, have been put under the supervision of an armed "cadre" of RPA.

RDR hereby calls upon the international community to put pressure on the RPF and Burundi tutsi dominated governments, so as to stop their unhuman acts of persecution against Hutu refugees, who fled from their military and oppressive dictatorships.

RDR requests human rights organisations women and men of good will to do all their utmost and avoid a recurrence of an new humanitarian catastrophe targeting Hutu population.