More than 100 DR Congo soldiers desert: mutineers

GOMA, DR Congo (AFP) - More than 100 soldiers including two senior officers have quit the army in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo to join a mutinous armed force known as M23, the mutineers said Saturday.

The deserters were all members of a former rebel movement, the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), who were integrated into the army in 2009, following a peace pact.

They joined the mutineers Friday night, Lieutenant-Colonel Vianney Kazarama, spokesman for the M23, told AFP.

He said 83 soldiers, including six captains, had left the Beni territory in northern Nord-Kivu for Rutshuru in the south of the province, where government forces are battling dissident forces in the Virunga National Park on the border with Rwanda and Uganda.

"We have information that the soldiers defected," a loyalist colonel who took part in the fighting told AFP, without giving a figure. "They are mostly supporters of Colonel Yusuf Mboneza", a former CNDP commander.

The senior officers are "a lieutenant-colonel and a major", the spokesman said, adding that the former arrived from the Nord-Kivu capital of Goma and the latter from Masisi, which borders Rutshuru.

The major was an intelligence expert and the lieutenant-colonel "coordinated health operations for Nord and Sud-Kivu in the Amani Leo" (Peace Now) military operation, which was suspended by President Joseph Kabila in April after the first defections of former CNDP rebels in the two provinces.

The new defection follows that of seven senior officers who quit the government forces with nearly 170 men on Wednesday.

The M23 mutineers are demanding that the March 2009 peace accord that integrated them into the regular army be fully implemented.

Troops who were once in the CNDP have been deserting for weeks, blaming their poor conditions in the army.

In spite of frequent shelling by the army in the Virunga National Park, the mutineers have held their positions on several key hills in the park.

In recent days, a relative calm has prevailed in the conflict, which has displaced 200,000 local villagers and sent more than 20,000 refugees across the border into neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda, according to the United Nations.