World Powers Urge Rebels To Withdraw From Goma

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When M23 rebels swept into the Congolese city of Goma this week, world powers urged them to immediately withdraw. Instead, the Rwanda-backed insurgents are intent on showing they can restore order and govern.

On Thursday, power and mobile data services, which had been down for days, were back up. The border with Rwanda, a lifeline for the city, had been re-opened. M23 officials said they had trained up hundreds of administrators who were ready to deploy.

We are asking all Goma residents to go back to normal activities,” said Corneille Nangaa, head of Alliance Fleuve Congo, the political coalition backing the M23, just two days after heavy fighting subsided, leaving bodies in the streets and the city cut off from the outside world.

Nangaa also pledged to get children back in school within 48 hours and open a humanitarian corridor so people displaced by fighting could return home.

How well M23 manage to maintain order and run services in Goma, a city of 2 million people, will be key to determining if they can expand elsewhere in eastern Congo or if their reign will be short-lived as it was in 2012.

Proxy Forces
At stake is a potential return to the situation that arose in the 1990s and 2000s, when Rwanda and Uganda and their proxy forces occupied and ran Congo’s eastern borderlands, managing trade, communications and transport.

One U.N. official said a number of members of the RCD-Goma movement, a Rwanda-backed group dating back to the 1998-2003 war, were involved in the M23.

In the three years since reigniting their rebellion after a dormant decade, M23 has set up “parallel administrations” in areas they conquered, taxing civilians and businesses and rolling out intelligence networks, U.N. experts said last June.

But Goma, with its population size, international airport, and role as a hub for one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises, is a far greater challenge.

 

 

 

Reuters/Shakirat Sadiq

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