DR Congo's M23 Rebels, Chief Surrender to Uganda

Democratic Republic of Congo's M23 guerrillas, including rebel chief Sultani Makenga, have surrendered en masse in Uganda, officers said Thursday, signalling the end of an 18-month insurgency.

The rebel surrender follows a crushing defeat at the hands of the U.N.-backed Congolese armed forces.

"He is with our forces, yes, Makenga has crossed into Uganda," a senior Ugandan military officer told Agence France Presse, although he declined to clarify if he had formally surrendered or was under arrest.

Paddy Ankunda, a colonel in the Ugandan army, told AFP that 1,500 men from the M23 -- a number thought to account for more or less the entire force -- had crossed into Uganda and given themselves up.

"About 1,500 fighters surrendered today," said Ankunda, who is spokesman for Defense Minister Crispus Kiyonga, the mediator in stalled peace talks between M23 and Kinshasa. However, Ankunda said he was "not aware" if Makenga was among those to have surrendered.

Uganda has been accused by United Nations experts of backing the M23, claims Kampala has strongly denied.

The rebels' surrender puts paid to fears that they might try to fight on despite having been outweighed by superior firepower, notably helicopter gunships.

Makenga, 39, a former colonel in the DR Congo army, is accused of masterminding killings, abductions, using rape as a weapon of war and recruiting child soldiers, and is on both U.N. and U.S. sanctions lists.

Congolese troops backed by a special U.N. intervention brigade with an offensive mandate launched a major assault late last month against the M23 force of army mutineers in turbulent North Kivu.

The region is rich in natural resources, especially gold, coltan and tin, which have been fought over by a range of armed groups for the past 15 years.

The Movement of March 23 (M23) was founded by ethnic Tutsi former rebels who were incorporated into the Congolese army under a 2009 peace deal but mutinied in April 2012, claiming that the pact had never been fully implemented.

After briefly seizing the regional capital and mining hub of Goma last November, the M23 entered into fresh peace talks which fell apart last month, leading the Congolese army to go on the attack in a bid to end the rebellion.

The United Nations and rights groups have accused the M23 of atrocities including rape and murder in a conflict that caused tens of thousands of refugees to flee.

Makenga was born to parents from the Masisi area north of Goma but grew up in the neighboring Rutshuru district.

Like many of the ethnic Tutsi officers who fought alongside him, he cut his teeth in the ranks of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, now in power in neighboring Rwanda, when it launched its rebellion in the early 1990s.

At the beginning of the second DR Congo war in August 1998, he took part in a daring airlift of Rwandan troops and their allies from Goma to Kitona in the west, which aborted after Angola intervened.

He then served as a battalion commander in the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy before joining Laurent Nkunda's National Congress for the Defense of the People.

Ever since he has been seen as loyal to Nkunda, who has spent the past several years under house arrest in Rwanda after he fell out with his former mentors.