Envoy seeks UN 'surge' in DRC

2008-10-04 10:35

New York - The UN special envoy for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Friday urged the Security Council to provide extra troops for his peacekeeping mission to cope with an upsurge in rebel attacks.

"I talked to the Council about reconfiguration of our forces to see to what extent we can get more mileage out of what we've got to respond to the situation," Alan Doss, who heads the UN mission in DRC (MONUC), told reporters.

He said he also requested "a surge capacity ... some additional troops (and air mobility assets)," although he refused to go into "operational details," except to say that an "enhanced capacity to detect movements of groups in a difficult terrain" such as drones would be useful.

Doss however said after briefing the council on the situation in the restive central African country that members made it clear that "resources available for new commitments are very tight."

Hostilities spreading

"The situation in North Kivu (province) is above all very, very preoccupying and we believe we need to go ahead as rapidly as possible with the disengagement plan to reduce the risk of those hostilities spreading and spilling over," he said.

"Ethnic tensions have risen in North Kivu and that is very dangerous, no doubt about it," he added. "MONUC itself has been the subject of some hostilities ... We believe that this has been orchestrated by groups or individuals with their own ambitions and agendas."

Doss specifically slammed as "unacceptable" recent comments by renegade ethnic Tutsi colonel Laurent Nkunda "implying there is an effort to reverse the results of a democratic election that we supervised (in 2006)."

"That would imply that he is walking out of any effort to move the peace process forward," he warned.

"We do not want to see the Congo plunged back into the conflict which spilled over and involved neighbours," Doss said.

A five-year conflict pitting government forces, supported by Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe, against rebels backed by Uganda and Rwanda, ended in 2003 after claiming more than three million lives.

- AFP