The United Nations Security Council has ordered Congolese armed forces (FARDC) to halt collaboration with the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a blacklisted terrorist outfit with bases in that country’s eastern region.

This is contained in Security Council Resolution no. 2014/55 that was passed yesterday, which also demands FDLR, whose members are largely blamed for the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, to disarm and disband.

The Council noted with "deep concern reports indicating FARDC collaboration with the FDLR at a local level, recalling that the FDLR is a group under UN sanctions whose leaders and members include perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.”

The Security Council said FDLR continues to "promote and commit ethnically based and other killings in Rwanda and in the DRC”.

Kigali has repeatedly blamed FDLR and a network run by renegade former military officers for a spate of grenade attacks inside Rwanda over the last couple of years.

Former FDLR combatants and other sources have previously revealed how the Congolese army maintained close ties with the militia group, with some FDLR elements fighting alongside FARDC on different fronts in the country’s troubled east.

Last year, FDLR units made brief incursions on Rwanda on several occasions, causing some deaths in areas near the Congo border.

All armed groups to cease

The UN Resolution demands that all DR Congo-based armed groups, including FDLR, and Uganda’s Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels as well as various Mayi Mayi groups to "cease immediately all forms of violence and other destabilising activities and that their members immediately and permanently disband, lay down their arms and demobiliSe children from their ranks.”

The world body warned that the situation in eastern DR Congo, where a 20,000-plus UN peacekeeping mission is authorised to use force to disarm armed groups, "continues to constitute a threat to peace and security in the region”.

After the adoption of the UN Resolution, Rwanda’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Eugène-Richard Gasana, said his government shared the same concerns with the Security Council’s over reports of the FARDC–FDLR collaboration, but that Rwanda remained committed to finding a lasting solution to recurring crises in eastern DR Congo, bilaterally or through regional efforts.

The FARDC–FDLR alliance is of particular concern because the militia is among those targeted by a 3,000-strong special intervention brigade, deployed last year to bolster the UN peacekeeping force, Monusco.

After the brigade helped defeat the M23 rebels in November last year, its leaders promised to go after the FDLR and other armed forces, but as of to date, nothing has been done.

Instead, reports from eastern DR Congo indicate that FDLR expanded its territory after moving into some of the areas previously occupied by the M23 rebels, and launched a fresh wave of deadly attacks against civilians.  

"The Security Council strongly condemns all armed groups operating in the region and their violations of international humanitarian law as well as other applicable international law, and abuses of human rights including attacks on the civilian population, Monusco peacekeepers and humanitarian actors, summary executions, sexual and gender based violence and large scale recruitment and use of children, and reiterates that those responsible will be held accountable,” the Resolution reads in part. 

It Council called on "all States, especially those in the region, to take effective steps to ensure that there is no support, in and from their territories, for the armed groups in the eastern part of the DR Congo”.

It also urged States to "take steps, where appropriate, against leaders of the FDLR and other armed groups residing in their countries.”

For some time now, top FDLR political and military leaders have been under travel and financial sanctions, and there is a US$5 million bounty for anyone with information that would lead to the capture of the group’s supreme commander, Sylvester Mudacumura.  

Meanwhile, 20 years after the Genocide, the UN for the first time yesterday used the phrase "genocide against the Tutsi” in reference to the 1994 killings that claimed the lives of one million people, instead of the "Rwandan genocide”.

The label "Rwandan genocide” is mainly associated with groups and individuals who attempt to distort the history of the Genocide, including those who deny that Tutsis were the principal targets during the 100-day killing spree.

Rwanda is currently serving its second year as a non-permanent member of the 15-nation UN Security Council.