Zimbabwe has strongly denied the claims of military involvement in the Great Lakes region.
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Southern African Development Community (SADC) executive secretary, Tomaz Salamao, said the bloc would immediately dispatch military experts to the DRC to assess the situation in coming days.
The resolution comes amid accusations by Bertrand Bisimwa, spokesperson of the Laurent Nkunda-led rebels, that Zimbabwe and Angola were mobilising troops to make war against the rebels.
Bisimwa claimed that Zimbabwean and Angolan troops were in Bukavu, south of Goma, with 550 Angolan commandos in Goma itself and other Zimbabwean troops in the central DRC city of Kisangani.
The announcement came as Laurent Nkunda’s rebel forces and Mai Mai militia battled for the second day running in the eastern province of Nord-Kivu, sparking a fresh exodus of displaced people and jeopardising a fragile ceasefire that has held for the past week.
The local Mai Mai said that they would take up the fight against Nkunda after his forces routed government soldiers in an offensive that swept several towns last week. Angolan and Zimbabwean troops were alleged to have been deployed to help Joseph Kabila’s shaky defence lines.
About 1 000 men, women and children were walking out of the Kiwanja area over the weekend amid sporadic weapons fire, carrying what personal belongings they could.
While the Zimbabwe army staunchly rejected charges that it had deployed troops to the DRC, Bisimwa insisted that Zimbabwe was mobilizing forces to fight in the civil war in the Eastern DRC in support of the government of President Kabila. Kabila attanded Sunday’s SADC summit in Sandton.
Zimbabwe’s previous military involvement in the DRC between 1998-2002 was politically and economically controversial and raised constitutional issues.
Military analysts say that if the army has sent troops to DRC as the rebel leaders claim, it would be a breach of legislative regulations that clearly state that additional funds which would inevitably be needed to pay for external troop deployment would have to be voted by Parliament.
Mugabe’s decisions on operational deployment of troops are not for him alone, but require the concurrence of the Cabinet, which does not exist at the moment given the collapse of talks on the formation of a unity government.
MDC secretary general Tendai Biti reiterated that Mugabe had no authority to deploy troops out of the country at the moment. He added that Zimbabwe was currently undergoing a serious financial crisis and that if Mugabe deployed to DRC, it would deepen Zimbabwe’s problems.
“DRC is not a priority to the Zimbabweans, there is more of a need to focus on issues of national development than external issues,” Biti said.