[Daily Nation (Kenya)] Rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo or
Republic of Congo, which is much smaller and much more (for Africa) stable. DRC gave the world Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu, followed by years of tedious civil war. Its principle industry seems to be the production of corpses. With a population of about 74 million it has lots of raw material...
on Wednesday claimed control of a town outside the captured city of Goma and threatened to continue their push all the way to Kinshasa, as the UN accused them of carrying out summary executions.
"We are not going to stop at Goma, we will go as far as Bukavu, Kisangani and Kinshasa," M23 front man Vianney Kazarama told a crowd massed at a stadium in Goma a day after the rebels overran the eastern city with little or no resistance from UN or government troops.
Rebels said Wednesday they had also seized the town of Sake, about 20 kilometres (more than 10 miles) northwest of Goma. They vowed to press on southward to Bukavu, the other major city on the border with Rwanda.
Kazarama also demanded that President Joseph Kabila leave power, claiming he was not the legitimate winner of last year's disputed presidential election.
But at talks in Kampala, Kabila and the leaders of neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda insisted that the rebels must immediately pull out of Goma, the main city in the mineral-rich but deeply impoverished east.
UN envoy Roger Meece accused the rebels of carrying out "summary executions" of local leaders in their advance.
Meece told the UN Security Council that the ethnic Tutsi rebels who launched their uprising in April were trying to set up "a formal administrative or governing structure" in the region.
"We have received numerous reports of targeted summary executions of those who stand in their way, including government and traditional leaders who resist or fail to cooperate with an M23 administrative structure," he said.
Meece said that since the fall of Goma there had been demonstrations in several cities against the UN presence and the government.
The United Nations
...an organization originally established to war on dictatorships which was promptly infiltrated by dictatorships and is now held in thrall to dictatorships...
and other humanitarian groups have reported killings, abductions, looting and extortion of civilians and fears of a humanitarian catastrophe were growing as electricity and water supplies dried up.