Johannesburg - South African troops in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are preparing to go into battle soon against Hutu rebels amid warnings that this might be a hard fight with many civilian casualties.
This week the government warned the rebels, who call themselves the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), that they had “rendered (the) military option inevitable” by missing a January 2 deadline to surrender.
On Tuesday, Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete, who also has troops in the DRC, said after meeting Minister of Defence Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula in Dar es Salaam, that Tanzania was already ready to take on the rebels.
The South African and Tanzanian troops, plus others from Malawi, form the 3 000-strong Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) that is part of Monusco, the UN peacekeeping force in DRC, but has a more robust mandate to “neutralise” the many rebel groups in eastern DRC.
This week, Monusco said DRC government troops and FIB forces were intensifying deployments towards positions, but the rebels were also mobilising and mixing with civilians, raising the risk of them being used as human shields.
The FDLR, founded by Hutus who fled Rwanda after participating in the genocide against Tutsis there in 1994, announced last year that they would surrender.
Regional leaders gave them until January 2 this year to do so. On January 3, President Jacob Zuma announced the FDLR had only surrendered 337 fighters, representing just 24 percent of its total strength, and so had not kept its promise.
A summit of regional leaders was to have been held this week to decide on the next move but it was cancelled and Zuma and Mapisa-Nqakula instead held one-on-one meetings with regional leaders.
And the UN Security Council instructed the DRC and Monusco to plan military action.
The SANDF has about 1 350 troops in the DRC, mainly a combat group from the 5th SA Infantry Battalion based in Ladysmith. This plus the support staff for the three Rooivalk attack helicopters.
But military analysts warned this week that fighting the FDLR could be difficult.
André Roux, military analyst at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria, said they were a scattered force of small militias, numbering about 1 500 in total, of whom only 300 were hardcore fighters.
“If you attack them, they will scatter into the bush. They’re not going to stand and fight. And what’s to stop them using the same tactics as the LRA?” asked Roux, referring to the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Ugandan rebels operating in several countries, including the DRC.
When pursued by superior military forces in the past, the LRA has massacred hundreds of civilians to discourage further attack.
And, as Monusco warned this week, because the FDLR fighters are more integrated into the local population, more civilians are likely to be caught in the crossfire of any battle.
Although the FDLR’s likely tactics of not standing and fighting should reduce the risk of casualties to the soldiers of the FIB, Roux warned the rebels might concentrate their forces to ambush an initial reconnaissance patrol of the FIB to inflict casualties and damage morale before retreating.
Some official military sources insist regional governments are still discussing an extended deadline for the FDLR to surrender. But all the signs point to imminent action.
Roux thought it had now become politically unavoidable for the FIB to engage the FDLR militarily to repay Rwanda for withdrawing its support from the M23 in 2013 so it could be defeated.
It was also politically necessary for the DRC and FIB to attack the FDLR to keep Rwanda neutral, Roux said, to avoid a repetition of its previous military excursions into the DRC to try to eliminate the FDLR.
Even if the DRC and FIB failed to eliminate the FDLR, they might achieve this political objective by having shown good faith.
He noted the original UN mandate establishing the FIB in 2012 had specified 33 rebel groups it was supposed to “neutralise” and so far it had only neutralised the M23 rebel group. Since then the number of these groups had risen to about 50.
Military analyst Helmoed Heitman agreed with Roux that defeating the FDLR would not be easy.
“Defeating the M23 was luck. It helped that they were caught by surprise by South Africa’s attack helicopters,” he said. They had melted into the bush.
The FDLR, while not as organised as the M23, had been around longer and is battle-hardened. “They will be difficult to fight. They must first be found to be defeated.”
Independent Foreign Service