UN envoys get a 'taste of Bunia'

2003-06-13 12:18

Bunia - Three hours on the ground was enough for a delegation of security council ambassadors to learn about the horrors of life in Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) northeastern town of Bunia.

The envoys' brief visit on Thursday to the main town in Ituri region took place as a multinational EU force began to take shape there to secure Bunia and protect its population from inter-ethnic clashes that have killed hundreds of people in recent weeks.

"Life is reduced to waiting for the next attack and something to eat," one woman who lives in Bunia told a visiting ambassador.

The woman said she had been gang-raped by armed and drugged militia fighters.

"It was rape or die. What could I do? I had five children back in the camp depending on me," she said, letting it be known that such ordeals were commonplace here.

The UN emmissaries were driven under heavily armed escort through streets dotted with child soldiers with AK47s slung over their over-sized uniforms.

"They are in training. Non-operational cadets," older fighters insisted, when visitors tried to talk to the children, who included a giggly pretty young girl.

"This is war - a question of survival. We have no choice if we want to avoid being killed by the Lendu," said one fighter from the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), an armed faction drawn from the region's Hema minority.

The Hema and the majority Lendu have for years been engaged in a bitter feud, one that grew all the more deadly when the onset of DRC's wider civil war in 1998 brought with it a flood of weapons into the region and spawned a plethora of politico-military groups hungry for soldiers.

General Jean-Paul Thonier, commander of the emergency force, said not enough troops had yet deployed in Bunia "to carry out our task of guarding the airstrip and protecting refugees, humanitarian workers and UN personnel".

The force, which will be restricted to Bunia town and its dilapidated airport, will number 1 500 troops in all. Some 700 Uruguayan lightly armed soldiers from the exising UN mission in DRC (Monuc) are already in the town.

"We will take between 15 days and three weeks to deploy fully," said the general.

As the ambassadors will have realised on landing and taking off, Bunia's runway is pitifully potholed and becomes more so with every plane that uses it.

The strip can accommodate only five heavy planes a day, before it has to undergo overnight repairs.

"We could have got everything here in days, if we had a proper airstrip," said a Monuc officer.

Among the other challenges facing the EU force is protecting about 20 000 displaced people camped out in barbed wire-enclosed compounds at the airport and Monuc's headquarters.

Their plight has been publicised around the world by their short-stay neighbours: dozens of reporters and television crews.

"Once we got the journalists here, we sort of felt we had already done our job," said a Monuc official.

"The world is now aware of what is happening daily in Bunia. People are no longer dying unknown," he said.

Monuc sources are convinced the EU force will be tested by the militia in and around Bunia.

"They will try something to see if we run away," said one officer.

"We need to hit back hard in such a case," he said.

"We have done it before to good effect. They tried to drive us out of town and to the airport. They stopped when he used enough force to show that we were going nowhere," he said.

"You have to deter them. We are not up against heroes here. - Sapa-AFP

- SAPA