South Sudan refugees in eastern Congo take 13 UN mission agents hostage

Kinshasa: Unarmed South Sudanese refugees took 13 staff members hostage at a United Nations camp in eastern Congo on Tuesday, demanding that they be moved to another country, the UN mission in Congo said.

Negotiations with the refugees living at the Munigi base in Congo's North Kivu province were continuing into the evening, said Daniel Ruiz, the head of the North Kivu UN bureau.

The South Sudanese refugees want to be sent to other East African countries to avoid their forced return to South Sudan, Ruiz said.

"They refuse to release our agents, 13 in total, of which two are expatriates," he said. "They are all disarmed, but they demand asylum in Uganda, Kenya or Ethiopia."

The refugees are among a group of 530 who had fled South Sudan last year and have been staying at the UN camp in Munigi, north of the provincial capital Goma. Most are part of the opposition movement of South Sudan's former vice president, Riek Machar, and fled fighting with South Sudan forces loyal to President Salva Kiir that erupted in the capital, Juba.

The hostage-taking followed the repatriation to South Sudan on Friday of eight fighters from Machar's Sudanese People's Liberation Movement.

The presence of the South Sudanese rebels worries Congolese civilians in the North Kivu province, who have been plagued for decades by violence as militias vie for control over the mineral-rich region.

South Sudan fell into civil war in December 2013, just two years after it won independence from Sudan. When war broke out, Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, accused Machar, his political rival and an ethnic Nuer, of leading an attempted military coup in the capital that later escalated into a full-blown rebellion.

A peace deal signed in August 2015 amid international pressure has been violated repeatedly by both sides. Machar, who had been reinstated as Kiir's deputy under the agreement, fled into exile after fighting resumed in Juba in July 2016.