The Government has started screening and giving support to the 1,100 children and 371 women recently repatriated from DR Congo after being separated from an anti-Rwanda militia based in the neighbouring country, Prof. Anastase Shyaka, the Minister for Local Government, told The New Times on Monday.
Most importantly, Shyaka explained, they will be taken through a comprehensive rehabilitation programme that includes citizen awareness on processes of reconciliation, social cohesion and the course of modern Rwanda, as well as their role and responsibilities as citizens.
The returnees arrived on December 20, and are being accommodated at Nyarushishi Transit Centre in Rusizi District, Grace Mugabe, a communications specialist at the Rwanda Demobilisation and Reintegration Commission (RDRC) said.
Shyaka disclosed that the returnees will be at the centre for a full month, instead of the customary 21 days, before their integration into society.
This is part of the precaution to check for things such as the Ebola virus disease and allow the Government to thoroughly prepare them for settlement into society.
DR Congo declared an Ebola epidemic outbreak in August 2018. More than 2,000 lives have been lost while 3,000 infections have been confirmed, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
"We’ll integrate the component of preparing them; creating awareness of the processes we have been going through as a nation. These people have been subject to different forms of ideological intoxication or disorientation,” Shyaka said.
The development comes after hundreds of combatants and their dependants from one of the anti-Kigali terror groups known as the Conseil National pour la Renaissance et la Démocratie (CNRD), were captured by the Congolese army and sent home in the past few days.
Background
When the genocidal regime collapsed in 1994, the then government engineered a mass departure of the perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi into neighbouring Zaïre, now DR Congo.
The genocidal army and its militia network then regrouped and formed what was then called the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALiR), intent on waging a war to return to power and complete their genocidal mission.
In 2000, ALiR merged with another extremist group and formed the FDLR, with Forces Combattantes Abacunguzi (FOCA), as its armed wing.
With time, internal friction resulted in various other splinter groups – including the CNRD/FLN splinter group founded in 2016 – but all of them upheld something in common – a Genocide ideology, which experts believe is what Kigali should worry about.
Besides nursing a dangerous political dream to forcefully return and cause ethnic mayhem, the FDLR militia and its splinters continue to deny and revise the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
Shyaka added: "So, we want to take them through a comprehensive programme of rehabilitation that includes citizen awareness on processes of reconciliation about Ndi Umunyarwanda; the imperative of social cohesion; the direction of the country [today] and their role and responsibilities as citizens.”
The minister stressed that this is not the first such group the country, or the Ministry, has received and as such, "the readiness is there” to handle such situations.
Children to be taken to school
After the full month period elapses, he explained, people will be taken back to their districts origin – like it has always been done with others before them – and they will be reintegrated.
"Some of them will have their families; others might even be having some plots of land, so they will enter into society as any other citizen. Those with challenges will be assisted as we normally do with people with little or no ability.
"We are not worried about that [their welfare]. Children will be facilitated to go to school as usual. Those who have to get health insurance will go through the normal processes to ensure they get it. There is a full path of re-integration process and we will follow it.”
The country’s demobilisation and reintegration process, Shyaka emphasised, is well-packaged and it makes people feel at home.
More importantly, he added, it makes people get assistance when they need the assistance.
Earlier, Mugabe who was speaking on phone from the transit centre said the children and women, some of whom arrived when weak, were getting ample assistance.
Mugabe said that after rehabilitation, the Commission will hand them over to District and local leaders across the country who will help hand them over to their respective communities.
At Nyarushishi Transit Centre, Mugabe said, they are given requisite medical attention and care, and so far, "there has not been any case of Ebola detected.”
"Some are suffering from severe flu which they got from the jungles of DR Congo. Some arrived here weak and are getting treatment. But we are giving them help.”
"They are being sensitized about government programmes and given information on many other things they need to know. Yesterday [Sunday], we gave all of them all the basic needs they need, things such as decent clothes, shoes, washing buckets, and others.”
Many anti-Kigali militia fighters continue to be killed on the front line as they engage the Congolese army (FARDC) especially in the South Kivu Province.
The captured militia fighters are not at Nyarushishi Transit Centre.
"We don’t have them [militia fighters] here. We only have women and children,” Mugabe said.
The RDRC chairperson Séraphine Mukantabana who visited the centre tweeted: "The women and children who were repatriated from DR Congo have been told to love their country for the sake of holistic development.”
DR Congo’s President Félix Tshisekedi has vowed to deal with the problem of insecurity in his country, especially in the east where a myriad of militia are wreaking havoc.
In September, the Congolese army killed the former supreme commander of the genocidal militia FDLR Sylvestre Mudacumura, who had evaded capture for over a decade. Last month, ‘Gen’ Juvénal Musabyimana, alias Jean-Michel Africa, the commander of RUD-Urunana, another splinter group, was killed.
In December last year, Congolese security organs arrested FDLR spokesperson Ignace Nkaka, alias LaForge Fils Bazeye, and ‘Lt Col’ Jean-Pierre Nsekanabo, its head of intelligence. That same month, a UN report of experts indicated that several anti-Kigali groups, including renegade Kayumba Nyamwasa’s RNC joined hands and set up a training base in eastern DR Congo.