UN troops in uphill struggle

2008-11-04 10:35

Geneva - The lopsided numbers tell the story of the UN's uphill struggle to protect civilians caught up in the latest rebel assault in conflict-wracked eastern Congo.

For months, 6 000 UN peacekeepers in North Kivu - a province 1½ times the size of France - have been trying to help ensure security for one million displaced people threatened by an offensive started August 28 by rebel leader Laurent Nkunda.

"For two months, we prevented anything out of hand happening," the top UN envoy in Congo, Alan Doss, said on Monday in a videoconference from Goma. "There were attacks, counter-attacks, but we kept both sides more or less from deteriorating into a major conflict throughout the region."

Last week, however, Nkunda's forces took control of Rutshuru, a village 88km north of Goma, and swept toward Goma itself as government troops retreated, looting and raping as they fled. Nkunda then declared a unilateral cease-fire.

Tens of thousands of civilians have fled the fighting, and an unknown number were injured and killed. The UN has come under attack by critics who claim it hasn't done enough to protect civilians.

Doss said the UN force, known by its French acronym MONUC, "held positions everywhere (and) didn't pull back." But this time its soldiers couldn't protect all the civilians caught up in the fighting.

Troops overstretched

"We had counted on national forces," Doss said. "We have not had the support there that we had hoped for."

UN peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy echoed Doss saying the United Nations is in eastern Congo to assist the Congolese army and the UN's troops are overstretched and needs to be reinforced.

The total UN force in Congo is 17 000 strong - currently the largest UN peacekeeping mission in the world - but it is operating in a country the size of Western Europe.

The 6 000 peacekeepers in North Kivu are deployed in 34 different places, where their main job is protecting displaced civilians who now number about one million of the province's four million population, said Ross Mountain, the UN's humanitarian chief in Congo.

The rest of the UN force is deployed in three other provinces in eastern Congo where many armed groups are also operating, South Kivu, Ituri, and Orientale.

"So we're operating on four fronts," Mountain said. "We certainly cannot provide a soldier behind every banana bush."

Critics say the UN force was unprepared for its main task - protecting civilians from the war, and growing numbers of civilians are furious at the UN's failure to keep them safe. Last week, angry Congolese pelted rocks at all four UN compounds in Goma.

Unfair criticism

Erin Weir, the peacekeeping advocate in Goma for Washington-based organisation Refugees International, said recently that "the UN Security Council handed MONUC an exceptionally complex set of tasks to accomplish, but never came through with the resources or the political support to get the job done".

Asked about the criticism, Le Roy replied that during his meetings with Congolese leaders and North Kivu's governor nobody was critical of the UN force.

"Authorities on the ground recognise that without MONUC, many other areas will have been taken. ... Criticism of MONUC is in many cases, I must say, unfair," he said from Goma.

Doss said UN personnel faced gunfire from government and rebel troops and were "often caught between the two" sides. In one case, he said, a Uruguyan unit was caught in crossfire.

"That we need to reconfigure, reinforce - we agree," Doss said. "In the light of what has happened - that the peace process has once again fallen apart in many ways - that's true."

But he said the UN is still trying to keep the situation from deteriorating into a major regional conflict and it needs political and diplomatic support, and additional reinforcements.

Mountain said the UN is also appealing for $55m for food, shelter and clean water for the thousands of Congolese displaced by the fighting.

Same old problem

Both Doss and Le Roy called the cease-fire fragile and said Goma remains under threat.

"As we've seen over recent months, it only takes one incident to trigger other incidents, and then you're back into the same old problem," Doss said.

He said a cease-fire is not a long-term plan. Instead, he said: "The ultimate answer lies ... in the dismantling and disarming of all armed groups."

In North Kivu, he added, that means not just Nkunda but between 10 and 15 other armed groups.

- AP