Feb 12 (Reuters) – Congolese public officials have trickled back to work in recent weeks in the contested town of Uvira on the Burundi border, where a skeleton staff has found ransacked offices and damaged buildings.
AFC/M23 fighters seized Uvira, a trading hub on Lake Tanganyika and a gateway to neighbouring Burundi, in December and pulled out a week later under U.S. pressure.
Their withdrawal allowed Congolese forces to move back into the town in mid‑January and to begin re‑establishing state control.
Mayor Kifara Kapenda Kik’y said the town hall had been looted in his absence, with windows smashed, furniture broken and files strewn across the floors.
“We are back, but unfortunately we found everything ransacked,” he told Reuters as he walked through his destroyed office. “Everything needs to be redone.”
Kik’y said only a minimal administration would operate for now until civil servants, many of whom fled to neighbouring Burundi, are able to return.
Addressing staff in a damaged hall, he said authorities aimed to restore order through law rather than reprisals.
AFC/M23’s capture of Uvira followed a wider lightning advance across eastern Congo last year, during which the group captured two major cities further north, Goma and Bukavu. The fighting displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
Congo and AFC/M23 have been engaged in Qatar‑mediated talks and agreed to a ceasefire in October. Last week, both sides finalised terms for monitoring the truce, clearing the way for the U.N. peacekeeping mission MONUSCO to deploy to Uvira.
U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean‑Pierre Lacroix told reporters in Kinshasa on Tuesday that MONUSCO would begin with aerial reconnaissance flights but needed security guarantees from all sides before sending helicopters and personnel into the city.
(Reporting by Congo newsroom, Writing by Clement Bonnerot, Editing by Jessica Donati and Timothy Heritage)
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