UN’s Congo operation under scrutiny

By Harvey Morris at the United Nations

Published: October 18 2009 23:15 | Last updated: October 18 2009 23:15

The strategy of the United Nations’ biggest peacekeeping force is under scrutiny following reports that government forces it is supporting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have used wide-scale rape and murder as weapons of war.

Abuses committed in a campaign against rebels in the east of the country have been extensively catalogued by human rights organisations. They have now come to the fore with a claim by one of the UN’s own experts that the results of an 8-month UN-backed offensive have been “catastrophic”.

“Hundreds of thousands have been displaced, thousands raped, hundreds of villages burnt to the ground, and at least 1,000 civilians killed,” Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said in a statement last week after a 10-day visit to the DRC.

What Mr Alston termed the “nightmare situation” in the eastern Kivu region underlined the dilemma of peacekeepers required to conduct increasingly robust and proactive mandates handed to them by the UN Security Council with what their commanders often complain are inadequate resources.

In the case of Monuc , the 19,000-strong UN force in the DRC, that has meant cooperating with the frequently badly-trained and undersupplied forces of the government’s army, the FARDC. Many of them are former members of a plethora of rebel movements in the country.

Current operations are aimed at combating the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, a Hutu force formed among those who fled to Congo after perpetrating the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

In a Security Council debate on Friday, Ileka Atoki, DRC envoy to the UN, acknowledged that government elements had been among those implicated.

He said he had been warning the Security Council for a decade about the phenomenon of armed groups in the east using systematic rape, infecting women and child victims with the HIV/Aids virus.

Mr Alston said in his statement that in a recent assault FARDC troops surrounded a camp and shot and beat to death at least 50 refugees. “It also appears that some 40 women were abducted from the camp. A small group of 10 who escaped described being gang raped, and had severe injuries; some had chunks of their breasts hacked off.”

Alan Doss, the British official who is the UN’s special representative in the DRC, reported progress in the so-called Kimia II offensive in a statement to the Security Council. “There is now a real prospect that the conflicts that have long blighted the eastern Congo can be ended,” he said.

But he also noted the challenges facing a UN force, responsible for civilian protection as well as for preventing abuses in an area the size of California and with insufficient air support. “It is oibviously not possible to protect everyone, everywhere, all of the time . . . so, inevitably, the question arises: should Kimia II be halted?”

He said a suspension now would only strengthen rebels “who might well draw the conclusion that attacks against civilians will force the government to give in to their demands”.

The Security Council last November mandated 3,000 reinforcements for the Monuc force to help protect the lives of more than a quarter of a million civilians displaced by war after rebels led by Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Tutsi commander, seized territory in the east of the country.

Security Council members, rethinking peacekeeping strategy in the context of controlling an annual budget that has risen to $8bn a year, have acknowledged the pressure on resources.

Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, said earlier this year Washington would examine ways of increasing its assistance to UN missions, including Monuc, “to better protect civilians under imminent threat of physical, including sexual, violence”.

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