GREAT LAKES: Kinshasa vows to resist any foreign invasion

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

KINSHASA, 30 Sep 2005 (IRIN) - The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) said on Friday its army would resist any invasion by foreign forces.

"If Uganda, Rwanda, or any other country launches an attack on the DRC, we will fight," Henri Mova Sakanyi, the government spokesman, told IRIN in Kinshasa, the nation's capital.

Rwanda has not recently threatened to send its army into the DRC. However, On Thursday Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said the DRC government and the UN mission there, known as MONUC, had just two months to disarm 400 Ugandan rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) fighters who in September crossed from Sudan to Congo's northeastern Garamba National Park.

"If the international community does not come in to do it, we shall go there," he said at a news conference in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

Mova reacted, saying Museveni is not serious. "He will not attack, these are only threats."

The DRC government has already set a deadline for all illegal foreign combatants to leave the country by Friday. "If the foreign combatants refuse to disarm voluntarily the army will begin military operations against them," Mova said.

"We can't yet divulge the nature of those operations," he added.

Several Ugandan rebel groups have been based in the DRC near the border with Ugandan for years. Thousands of Rwandan Hutu rebels are also based in the DRC near the border with Rwanda.

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