NAIROBI, Kenya — Rebel leaders in Congo said Tuesday that they had “no problem” withdrawing from the strategic eastern city of Goma, which they captured last week, but they then went on to present such a long set of demands that an immediate pullout seemed unlikely.
The rebels said they would leave Goma only if the Congolese government released political prisoners, investigated the murder of opposition supporters, dissolved the national election commission and convened a conference of opposition leaders and members of the Congolese diaspora.
“We are ready to defend ourselves if the Congolese army attacks Goma because we are not leaving unless there are talks with the president,” said Jean-Marie Runiga, head of the rebels’ political wing.
A Congolese government spokesman, Lambert Mende, called the rebel demands a “farce.”
“If each day they’re going to come back with new demands, it becomes ridiculous,” he told the Reuters news agency.
Regional leaders, especially President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, are putting enormous pressure on both sides to break the impasse, which many analysts fear could drag Congo, a vast nation in Africa’s strategic center, back into chaos.
Goma is one of the biggest and most commercially vital cities in Congo, and its fall into rebel hands set off protests across the country, some of them quite destructive and violent. And the rebels have said their capture of Goma is just the beginning and that they plan to “liberate” the entire country.
On Tuesday morning, the Ugandan government declared that the rebels had agreed to leave Goma. That announcement was then essentially canceled out by a rebel news conference a few hours later.
The rebels, who call themselves the M23, continued to clash Tuesday with government-allied militias around Goma, witnesses said.
“This ain’t over yet,” said Jason Stearns, a Congo analyst who runs a blog called Congo Siasa, or Congo politics.
“It will be difficult to find a compromise — the M23 deeply mistrust Kabila,” Stearns said in reference to Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila, “while the Congolese government is wary of reintegrating their enemies yet again into the army.”
The M23 rebels began as a different rebel force — the National Congress for the Defense of the People — before being integrated into Congo’s national army as part of a March 23, 2009, peace deal. Earlier this year, they reinvented themselves again into rebels, taking their name from the date of the unfulfilled peace accord. Their commander remains Gen. Bosco Ntaganda, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In the past week, Congo has slid into one of its more worrisome phases of recent years as the M23 rebels steamrolled through several important towns in the east, eviscerating a demoralized Congolese army and raising serious questions about Kabila’s grip on power. Scores of people have been killed in the fighting and tens of thousands have been sent on the run, fleeing for their lives.
Goma itself was relatively quiet Tuesday, although groups of rebels were seen strolling the streets, with grenade launchers, witnesses said.
The M23 rebels have a reputation for being ruthless warriors and adept administrators. They started out this spring as a relatively small rebel group believed to be a proxy for Rwandan interests but more recently have morphed into a well-disciplined fighting force of several thousand soldiers, with national ambitions and — possibly — more independence from Rwanda.
Few analysts ever believed the 2009 peace deal would stick. Rwanda has a long history of fomenting rebellions in eastern Congo as a way to carve out a sphere of influence in one of the most mineral-rich areas of the world. Many of the M23’s top officers are Tutsi, the ethnic group that dominates Rwanda’s military and government, and the suspicion was that the Tutsi officers in the Congolese army were actually taking their orders from Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, instead of Kinshasa, Congo’s capital.
But in recent months the M23 have made a major effort to promote non-Tutsis to leadership positions, broadening their base of support and making them an even more pernicious threat to Kabila, who was already despised by many across Congo, suspected of stealing from public coffers while so many roads, bridges, hospitals and schools sink into rot.
This spring, under pressure from Western governments, Kabila indicated he was going to arrest Ntaganda, a Congolese Tutsi and former rebel commander nicknamed the Terminator. The Congolese government also planned to shake up the power structure of the troops in eastern Congo, which the M23 rebels said was a violation of the original 2009 deal.
The troops then mutinied and took over town after town, culminating in Goma’s capture last week.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 11/28/2012