In a letter to "Comrade" Azarias Ruberwa, the president of their Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), the eight said they were "until further notice suspending participation in the transitional National Assembly".
Copies of the letter were also sent to all United Nations and foreign parties involved in the post-war democratic process in the DRC.
The eight, who included Bizima Karaha, a prominent hardliner from the Rwandan-backed RDC, demanded the withdrawal to their original positions of 10 000 government soldiers deployed in the tense Kivu provinces in the east of the vast country. During the war in the DRC, the rebels controlled much of the east, which borders Rwanda.
President Joseph Kabila's government in Kinshasa sent reinforcements to the region after fighting last month in which dissident army officers and their men, mainly former RCD fighters, seized control of the Sud-Kivu provincial capital Bukavu for a week.
The dissident officer who marched on the town, General Laurent Nkunda, had formerly served in Rwanda, where in 1994 a Tutsi-majority force seized power and ended three months of genocide by Hutu government soldiers and militias.
The parliamentary deputies said they considered that "more than half" of the regular army troops deployed in the eastern DRC, were onetime members of the forces responsible for the Rwandan genocide, in which at least 800 000 people were slaughtered.
The eight sent their letter from Goma, in DRC's Nord-Kivu province, which for a long time served as the RCD's headquarters.
They called for a meeting in Goma "of party leaders devoted to an evaluation of the transition" towards democracy in their country, the former Belgian colony of Zaire.
Five years of war, which drew in the armies of more than half a dozen other African countries on the rival sides, officially ended in the DRC last year after a series of peace pacts and with the deployment of a large United Nations peacekeeping force.
Ruberwa is currently one of the four vice-presidents in Kabila's interim administration, which is due to pave the way for elections in June 2005, two years after the transitional institutions were established.
The eight dissident deputies, part of a group of 94 RCD members in the 500-seat National Assembly, said this "one plus four" arrangement of a president and four vice-presidents "weakens the state and creates institutional instability".
They said it would be preferable to set up an "executive of non-politicians" during the transition.
The deputies also urged Ruberwa to press for the "neutralisation" of armed Hutu elements in the new DRC army and the deployment of a joint force of soldiers from the UN, the DRC and "all the neighbouring countries that complain that our country serves as a rear base for negative forces".
The latter was a reference to Rwanda.
Karaha has been in Goma for more than two months. In June, newspapers in Kinshasa accused him of preparing a front opposed to the transitional authorities.
Interviewed by a radio station yesterday, Karaha said his goal was not to start another rebellion but to "bring salvation to the process underway".
He said the Kinshasa government "isn't taking seriously the problems in the east", which remains by far the most volatile part of the mineral-rich but deeply impoverished DRC. – Sapa-AFP.
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