Africa

IRIN 23 June 2003 African stability threatened by mass migration Hassen Abdella ADDIS ABABA, 23 Jun 2003 (IRIN) - Mass migration in Africa will threaten the region’s stability if it continues unchecked or unabated, a conference in Addis Ababa heard on Monday. Millions who flee conflict or economic crises pose enormous burdens on their new host nations, the four-day meeting on migration and trafficking was told. The meeting - organised by the International Migration Policy Programme (IMP) - brings together top officials from dozens of African countries who will draw up an action plan aimed at curbing migration and introduce a continent-wide policy to tackle the crisis. In Africa, there are an estimated 16 million migrants and 13 million internally displaced persons (IDPs). Hassen Abdella, who heads Ethiopia’s Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (MOLSA), said many migrants were “maltreated” and deprived of basic rights. He also warned that trafficking, which he described as the “demeaning side of migration” was a particular menace to children who were used as cheap labour or in prostitution. He called for strengthening law enforcement in order to combat criminal gangs who prey on children and urged greater help from the international community. “This will not be an easy task as human smuggling has become a lucrative business and the capacity of African states is not strong enough to meet the challenge,” he said. Among the fears surrounding mass migration is the further spread of the AIDS pandemic which is crippling the continent. African officials are backing plans for boosting border controls such as greater data collection on would-be travellers and strengthening checks on travel documents. They are also looking at targeting known trafficking routes and international criminal gangs through strengthening legislation.

IPS 30 June 2003 AFRICA: Still Producing the Largest Number of Refugees Joyce Mulama Joseph Ndarangazi, 24, is still hounded by memories of the 1994 genocide that saw all his family members wiped out in Rwanda. ”People ambushed our house and hacked to death my father, raped my mother then chopped off her head. During the commotion, my two brothers and I managed to slip from the house. The soldiers ran after us. I was ahead of my brothers and just heard gunshots from behind. I suspect they shot at my brothers, but I never looked back. I just ran for dear life,” he says, sobbing. NAIROBI, Jun 28 (IPS) - Joseph Ndarangazi, 24, is still hounded by memories of the 1994 genocide that saw all his family members wiped out in Rwanda. ”People ambushed our house and hacked to death my father, raped my mother then chopped off her head. During the commotion, my two brothers and I managed to slip from the house. The soldiers ran after us. I was ahead of my brothers and just heard gunshots from behind. I suspect they shot at my brothers, but I never looked back. I just ran for dear life,” he says, sobbing. His story is chilling; so is Fatuma Ishmael's, a 30-year-old refugee from Somalia. She fled to Kenya 15 years ago following the war in her country. Thinking that she was now out of harm's way, one evening she was raped just near a refugee camp in Kenya. ”Three men grabbed me, while I was strolling and taking time off from the hassles of the camp. One held my mouth, the other my hands, while the third raped me. It went on like that until each of them had his turn,” she says, tears rolling down her cheeks. Ishmael has a six-year-old son whose future she terms unpredictable. ”I cannot wait to go back home. I want a sense of belonging, a place I can call home and forget about all the bad things I have experienced in the refugee camp,” she says. This year's World Refugee Day, commemorated under the theme ”Refugee Youth, Building the Future”, was dedicated to millions of young people whose futures have been jeopardised by war, persecution and self-exile. But young girls in refugee camps claim their rights have been ignored. They cite lack of access to education at the refugee camps, accusing donors of misplaced priorities. Anne Itto, a community leader who helps refugees in Kakuma camp, last year commented: ”Donors are either not convinced of the necessity of a girls' school in camps, or there is lack of goodwill towards the feminine needs in refugee stations.” Kakuma Refugee Camp is situated in northern Kenya, at the border with Sudan. In his speech to commemorate the refugee day on Jun.20, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, observed: ”If young refugees are not properly protected and denied opportunities to learn the skills they need to live productive, independent lives, they are likely to contribute to the next round of conflicts.” Africa has produced the largest number of refugees, also referred to as uprooted people, in the world. Statistics show that out of the more than five million refugees, 3.5 million are from Africa. The number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Africa stands at 13.5 million, out of the 25 million worldwide. Mugambi Kiai, a human rights activist in Nairobi, says Africa has for a long time had a problem of governance. ”It is, therefore, not by accident that thousands of people are fleeing and seeking refuge in other regions,” he says. Most of the refugees, he says, have fled from oppressive systems of government and human rights abuses. To stem out the abuses, Kiai says it is ”a duty” of every citizen to demand better governance. ”We must ask for responsibility and accountability within the leadership,” he asserts. Controlling the influx of refugees in Africa lies in finding lasting peaceful resolutions in areas of conflicts, ”stripping off garments of selfishness and wearing virtues of accountability and transparency,” says a human rights lawyer in Nairobi. Rev. Telewa Johnson of the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) says: ”The situation of the uprooted people in Africa is both serious and urgent. We appeal to the International Community to take steps in the mobilisation of the desperately needed resources to raise the standards of living of millions of people whose lives continue to hang pitifully on the balance”. Telewa is the chairperson of the AACC Continental Committee on Uprooted Persons. Sudan is the largest producer of refugees in Africa, with about 500,000 of its citizens forced to flee to neighbouring countries due to civil unrest. The country, which has been held captive by a 20-year civil war, also records the largest number of IDPs (4 million) on the continent. Congo stands second with 1.8 million IDPs, followed by Angola with an estimated 1.1 million, Burundi with 600,000 and Sierra Leone with 500,000.

Botswana

Survival International 20 June 2003 Bushmen served with court orders for entering ancestral land At least nine Bushmen have been served with court orders for 'illegally' entering the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, their ancestral land. Their whole village was forcibly evicted from their land in February 2002, but some returned late last year. If found guilty, they could face jail. President Mogae of Botswana faced many demonstrations over his government's treatment of the Bushmen when he visited Britain in early June.

Burundi

IRIN 24 Jun 2003 Rebels killed as thousands of civilians flee fighting BUJUMBURA, 24 June () - An unknown number of rebels have been killed in fighting against government troops in northern Burundi, forcing up to 65,000 civilians to flee their homes, army and local authority officials told on Tuesday. The fighting between the army and the Conseil national pour la defense de la démocratie-Force pour la défense de la démocratie (CNDD-FDD) rebel faction led by Pierre Nkurunziza intensified on Monday at Butaganzwa and Matongo communes in Kayanza Province in the north, the commander of the Third Military Region, Brig-Gen Sylvestre Nimubona, said. Fighting continued on Tuesday in Mufunya, Nyarurama and Buramiro in Butaganzwa areas, he said. There had also been fighting in the past week in the communes of Gahombo and Muhanga in Kayanza. "Many of them [the rebels] were killed and others driven back to the neighbouring commune of Butaganzwa," Nimubona said. "I am not able to tell the exact toll as fighting continues in that area." He did not say whether there had been casualties in the army side. Administration authorities were reported to have contacted humanitarian agencies seeking aid for the tens of thousands displaced. "The [UN] World Food Program responded positively to our request, aid distribution can start at any time," Edouard Nkurunziza, the governor of Kayanza, told . CNDD-FDD spokesman Gelase Ndabirabe accused the army of launching attacks on CNDD-FDD positions in Butaganzwa. "What we're doing now is to defend ourselves against army shelling," he said.

IRIN 27 Jun 2003 Burundi: Rebel group objects to cantonment site BUJUMBURA, 27 June () - The larger faction of the Conseil national pour la defense de la democratie-Force pour la defense de la democratie (CNDD-FDD) rebel group is opposed to the cantonment of fighters loyal to leaders of two smaller rebel groups at a site it considers its stronghold, the group's spokesman told on Friday. The spokesman, "Major" Gelase Daniel Ndabirabe, said the cantonment that began on Thursday was a violation of a ceasefire agreement signed between the CNDD-FDD faction led by Pierre Nkurunziza and the government in December 2002. A unit of the African Union peacekeeping force in Burundi cantoned the first group of 22 fighters loyal to the Forces Nationales de Liberation (FNL) rebel faction led by Alain Mugabarabona on Thursday at Muyange, 30 km northwest of the capital, Bujumbura. More fighters are expected at the cantonment site on Monday, an FNL spokesman said. The CNDD-FDD faction led by Jean Bosco Ndayikengurukiye has indicated that its fighters would soon be cantoned. However, Ndabirabe said that according to the ceasefire agreement his faction signed with the government, Muyange, in Bubanza Province, is one of sites that was to be used for the cantonment of fighters loyal to Nkurunziza. "We urge the African peace Mission in Burundi [AMIB] to canton combatants of Ndayikengurukiye and Mugabarabona elsewhere, in areas totally controlled by the government as the two rebel groups are represented in the transitional government," he said. Asked if his movement planned to attack the Muyange site, he responded, "The South African soldiers protecting the site should quit the place, and if there is no reaction, appropriate decisions would be taken." The AMIB commander, Maj-Gen Sipho Binda, said the force was in the country to strengthen peace and security, not to engage in offensive military activities. "AMIB has the necessary means to accomplish its task and protect its troops," he said. The spokesman of the FNL faction led by Mugabarabona, Charles Kabagambe, said they would ignore the CNDD-FDD threat because they believed that the Muyange cantonment site was well secured by AMIB. The larger FNL faction led by Agathon Rwasa, which has refused to enter into negotiations with the government, has said it would not interfere with the cantonment process. "We agreed with Ambassador Mahmadou Bah, representing AU in Burundi and who is coordinating the cantonment process, that our men can move in different areas under our control without any problem; we will not attack the combatants of Mugabarabona, but if they attack us we will respond," Pasteur Habimana, the faction's spokesman, said.

IRIN 30 Jun 2003 Rebels kidnap four MPs BUJUMBURA, Conseil national pour la defense de la democratie-Force pour la defense de la democratie (CNDD-FDD) rebels kidnapped on Saturday four Members of Parliament and seven others, as a warning to the Burundian government to end what is says is a propaganda campaign against the group. "It is true our fighters arrested four senior members of FRODEBU at Gisuru. They were in an area controlled by FDD, they are safe," Hussein Radjabu, the CNDD-FDD secretary-general, said. He added that FRODEBU, the Front pour la democratie au Burundi, had tried to discredit the group's image before the international community by "saying that our movement is against peace". FRODEBU leaders told on Sunday that the 11 people were kidnapped in Ruyigi Province, eastern Burundi. "We learnt that four members of our party were abducted by the rebels led by Pierre Nkururnziza at Gisuru commune in Ruyigi," Jean de Dieu Mutabazi, the FRODEBU spokesman, said. Mutabazi said Pierre Barusasiyeko, the vice secretary-general of the Parliament; Leonidas Ntibayazi, the head of the human rights commission at the Parliament; Véronique Nizigiyimana and Fabien Barutwanayo were among the abducted. They were, Mutabazi said, in Ruyigi to prepare for the 10th anniversary of the party's 1993 election victory, scheduled for Monday (30 June). "We demand their immediate and unconditional release," Mutabazi said. "The mediation and the regional initiative for peace in Burundi have already been informed of this kidnapping." Rebels have in the recent past kidnapped or killed several administration authorities who were members of FRODEBU. "The FDD must know that electoral legitimacy will always triumph over military legitimacy, so it's time for them to lay down their guns and accept democratic principles," Mutabazi said.

Côte d'Ivoire - Also read News Monitors for Côte d'Ivoire from 2002 and 2001

PANA 23 Jun 2003 Checkpoints, roadblocks dismantled in central Ivorian city Bouake, Cote d'Ivoire (PANA) - Scores of roadblocks and checkpoints, which dotted the streets of Bouake, stronghold of the former key Ivorian rebel faction, have been dismantled to facilitate free trade and easier movement of the people. Erected since the outbreak of the armed insurrection in the country 19 September 2002, the roadblocks and checkpoints were major hindrances to resumption of socio-economic life. "We have always proclaimed freedom in the zones we occupy. By dismantling these roadblocks, we would like to make life easier for our people, especially for businessmen who continue to denounce their abundance. Henceforth, there will be no more roadblocks in Bouake," the newly appointed military head of Bouake, sergeant Cherif Ousmane told PANA Monday. The rebel factions and national army agreed to enhance free movement of people and goods by reducing checkpoints along the various roads at a recent meeting in Bouake, led by the French Unicorn operation and the West African peacekeeping force. Ousmane said prior to dismantling the Bouake checkpoints, he led a mission aimed at sensitising the troops stationed along the Bouake-Yamoussoukro road, where official checkpoints are now erected and manned by soldiers duly assigned by state authorities. At another meeting in Korhogo, about 650 km north of Abidjan, the political and military leaders of the rebel factions set up an Economic Recovery Council, a civil-military structure, to examine issues impeding the upswing of economic life in the erstwhile war zones.

Reuters 23 Jun 2003 Government must curb Ivory Coast's xenophobia By Sayre Nyce Refugees International advocate Sayre Nyce leads the organisation's field work in West Africa, undertaking missions to Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia and Ivory Coast. She returned from Ivory Coast in March after completing her ninth humanitarian assessment in the region in three years. She urges the government to take a lead in soothing the rampant anti-foreigner sentiment gripping the country. Since the start of the war in Ivory Coast, approximately 400,000 foreigners have fled the country, including about 200,000 Burkinabes, 70,000 Guineans, 48,000 Malians, and 44,000 Liberians. These people were not simply fleeing the conflict. Instead, many have run from the hostile xenophobia that has grown rampant in the past year in Ivory Coast. Thousands have been harassed, threatened and evicted from their homes or their lands. When I visited Ivory Coast in March I was stunned by what I found. I travelled there expecting to investigate the needs of people fleeing the fighting between the rebels and the government, which had been well documented by NGOs and the media. Instead I discovered a serious problem that was hardly being reported: many people were fleeing persecution because they, or their parents, were foreign-born. Ivoirian civilians and military have harassed, threatened, and in a few instances, killed those considered foreigners. Let's parse the term "foreigner". By the government definition, anyone whose parents were not born in Ivory Coast -- both parents, mind you -- is regarded as foreign. This working definition renders about 30 percent of Ivory Coast's 16 million inhabitants foreign, and, thereby, subject to hostility, even though many of these foreigners have never set foot outside Ivory Coast. The concept of foreigner stands in negative relief against that of ivoirité, or "ivorianness." One's ivoirité is established simply by lacking foreign-born parents, and yet this has become the credential du jour throughout Ivory Coast. LICENCE TO PILLAGE For some Ivorians, it has also become a licence to pillage, intimidate and kill. Military and armed local youth have organised outfits of terror in western Ivory Coast. The 35,000 Liberian refugees that remain in Ivory Coast are in imminent danger of being caught up in the conflict in the west and being targeted by these bands of thugs. In effect, the Liberian refugees who have sought refuge in Ivory Coast in the past decade are again in need of a safe haven. This campaign of xenophobia comes at a high cost, literally. Ivory Coast, the world's biggest cocoa producer, relied on thousands of foreigners to work in the plantations. The violence inspired by the government has had the effect of dispersing this labour force from the cacao and coffee plantations. The hostile and intimidating environment may leave the plantation workers reluctant to return even if Ivory Coast is stabilised. Such disruption of planting and harvesting - even for a short time - would be a severe blow to a major pillar of West Africa's economy. Neighbouring countries have already suffered economic losses. For example, Carolyn McAskie, U.N. humanitarian envoy for the crisis in Ivory Coast, reported: "Mali relied on Ivory Coast for over 70 percent of its imports and exports, and along with Burkina Faso, and to a certain extent Niger, is suffering serious economic setbacks at a time when it is also affected by the drought in the Sahel." The violence and xenophobia in Ivory Coast have had severe economic consequences: the loss of remittances, a poor agricultural season, and the strain for communities in Burkina Faso and Mali of accepting thousands of returnees. Together, these consequences present a major challenge to the region. The origins of ivoirité-based ethnic tension are varied and complex. The notion itself began as a political tactic of former President Henri Konan-Bédié to prohibit some politicians, including prominent northerner Alassane Ouattara, from standing as president. It has increased tensions among ethnic groups and created a division between the mainly Muslim north, which is where most of those considered "foreigners" are living, and the mainly Christian south. CHASED FROM THEIR HOMES In November 1999, the anti-foreigner sentiment resulted in the displacement of 15,000 Burkinabes who were chased from their homes in the southwestern town of Tabou. In the past eight months of conflict, Burkinabes, along with other foreigners such as Malians and Liberians, have been the targets of hostility. An ethnic massacre at Yopougon, outside Abidjan, in October 2000 and the massacre of gendarmes by northern rebels in the town of Bouaké in October 2002 exemplified ethnic hostility. The roadblocks to peace in Ivory Coast are legion. Human rights abuses, including forced recruitment, must be stopped immediately. Liberian refugees need to be moved from western Ivory Coast to a safer area. The government must ensure the protection of immigrants and refugees. It should also establish a new legal framework that liberalises citizenship requirements and protects the rights of foreign nationals living and working in the country. These measures alone will not suffice. The government must also root out its own hypocrisy on the matter. For a government that has occasionally encouraged anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiments by publicly reviling foreigners, taking an active and public role in soothing xenophobic tension is imperative. National reconciliation in any meaningful sense cannot happen until the government defuses ivoirité, and welcomes its citizens - all of them - to a persecution-free Ivory Coast. Until the people of Ivory Coast scrap the identity politics, there is little hope for a lasting peace.

PANA 23 Jun 2003 Ivorian militia group calls for armed resistance Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire (PANA) - A private militia group with strong ties to the Ivorian government on Sunday in Yopougon, an Abidjan suburb, called for armed resistance against the Marcoussis peace agreement reached near Paris on 24 January. At a gathering near here, the leader of the Grouping of Patriots for Peace (GPP), Groguhet Charles, a former student leader, urged Ivorians to enter into the arena in order to militarily combat the Marcoussis accord, the sons of immigrants within the opposition Rally of Republicans (RDR) and the New Forces composed of former rebel movements. The meeting was attended by several hundred clean-shaven youths who wore T-shits with the grouping's acronym -- GPP. "This is a war of Ivorians against the sons of immigrants. Côte d'Ivoire cannot accept that the sons of immigrants we welcomed, housed and gave work, try today to snatch our dearest possession, our motherland," said Groguhet, amid a wild applause. The former leader of Côte d'Ivoire Student and School Federation (FESCI), one of the pillars of President Laurent Gbagbo's government, appealed to Ivorians to avoid "xenophobia complex," to get mobilised for "the decisive battle against imperialists and their local stooges." Groguhet violently criticised France, Burkina Faso, former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara's RDR and the Patriotic Movement of Côte d'Ivoire (MPCI), the ex-rebel group that currently controls the northern part of the country, whom he accused of "killing Ivorians every minute." Two MPs from Gbagbo's ruling Ivorian Popular Front and police officers particularly the well-known riot brigade commander on whose car was installed the public address system, attended the meeting, which later degenerated into violence. Several residents, including a policeman and a local businessman were beaten up and robbed of everything they had. Overzealous militia groups are still mushrooming in Abidjan and upcountry-urban centres in spite of recent government ban. Most Ivorian political parties, civil societies and the Catholic Church have condemned the militia groups because of their unbecoming activities. However, the FPI appears to show tolerance towards them. Receiving their leaders at State House recently, President Gbagbo wondered why certain people were against these "simple runners," in an apparent reference to the jogging GPP members have adopted.

Amnesty International 24 Jun 2003 - Côte d'Ivoire: Liberian refugees caught between two conflicts: a solution is urgently needed On the eve of a visit by United Nations Security Council delegation to West Africa, and as fighting intensifies around Liberia's capital, Monrovia, Amnesty International urges the countries of the subregion and the international community to do everything possible to protect Liberian refugees and all others caught in the middle of these two conflicts. In a document published today, Côte d'Ivoire: No escape. Liberian refugees in Côte d'Ivoire, Amnesty International appeals to the international community to implement a humanitarian evacuation programme that includes resettlement in other countries for these refugees, who do not know which way to turn to. At the beginning of April 2003 thousands of people who, a few weeks earlier, had sought refuge from the Côte d'Ivoire crisis by fleeing to Liberia, crossed the border in the opposite direction after increasingly violent clashes in the region where they had sought asylum. These hasty and panic-stricken displacements illustrate the situation of tens of thousands of people -- Liberian refugees, Côte d'Ivoire nationals and people from elsewhere in the subregion -- caught in the middle of two conflicts, one in West Côte d'Ivoire and one in East Liberia, and who do not know where to go to for effective protection. The lives of some 70,000 Liberian refugees, who had successfully sought asylum in Côte d'Ivoire after the war broke out in Liberia in 1989, have been shattered by the crisis that has shaken the country since September 2002. "The Liberian refugees are the victims of atrocities committed by various parties to the conflict, who loot their possessions and ill-treat them, and sometimes forcibly recruit them into their ranks, while at the same time accusing them of supporting their opponents; they cannot return to Liberia, where the situation gets worse every day; and no other neighbouring country seems disposed to welcome them, because they are often perceived as trouble-makers," Amnesty International said. The document published today includes accounts made by many Liberian refugees an Amnesty International delegation met in Abidjan in March 2003. These accounts show why they feel they cannot escape from the situation they find themselves in. One Liberian refugee told the Amnesty International delegation: "Many Liberians now feel that they would even prefer to be put out to sea on a boat than to remain in Côte d'Ivoire". The situation of Liberian refugees is of particular concern in the west of Côte d'Ivoire, where most of these refugees live, and where they have for months been the victims often of forced recruitment by armed opposition groups and government forces alike. "Refugees, especially those living in Abidjan, have been victims of harassment, humiliation and sometimes arrest. Members of the security forces and certain segments of the Côte d'Ivoire population, encouraged by some xenophobic media, consider them to be accomplices of the armed opposition groups that appeared in the west of the country at the end of November 2002," Amnesty International asserted. Unable to remain safely in Côte d'Ivoire, tens of thousands of desperate Liberian refugees have returned to their own country despite the war that is raging there. In addition to these Liberians, tens of thousands of Côte d'Ivoire nationals and people from other countries of the subregion have also fled to Liberia. Figures published by the UNHCR in March 2003 showed that about 100,000 people had fled to Liberia since the beginning of the Côte d'Ivoire conflict, although many of them have been forced to return to Côte d'Ivoire. In these circumstances, Amnesty International believes that these population movements represent de facto 'refoulement'. Even if the Côte d'Ivoire and Liberian authorities do not directly expel these refugees and the civilian population fleeing the war zones, it is nevertheless obvious that the conflict is forcing these people to go to regions where their security is under serious threat. Amnesty International therefore reminds the international community of its duty to assume responsibility for finding a solution to this problem. A major concerted effort by the international community is indispensable, especially in relation to fundraising for humanitarian action in the field, if this crisis, in which hundreds of thousands of people have lost everything, is to be resolved. Unfortunately, the international community has been slow to react, despite the efforts of the UNHCR, the World Food Programme and UNICEF. The United Nations has launched several appeals for funds, but the sums collected have, so far piled against the enormous needs created by one of the most serious current humanitarian crises. Amnesty International appeals to the Côte d'Ivoire government and armed opposition groups operating in Côte d'Ivoire to immediately cease attacks on Liberian refugees. The organization also urges the international community to urgently find a comprehensive and long term solution to the crisis that ensures the effective protection of Liberian refugees and others who cannot stay in the subregion and who should therefore be resettled elsewhere. Background The Liberian refugee problem is only one aspect of the serious humanitarian crisis that has shaken Côte d'Ivoire since the armed uprising of September 2002. The conflict has caused the massive displacement of civilians, who have fled from areas where fighting is taking place. Hundreds of thousands of people -- Côte d'Ivoire nationals as well as other people from the subregion, especially Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea -- have had to leave their homes to escape the atrocities committed by all parties to the conflict. The number of people displaced within Côte d'Ivoire itself is more than one and a half million according to the Côte d'Ivoire authorities. Since the September 2002 uprising, about 50,000 Mali citizens and 150,000 Burkina Faso citizens have fled to Mali and Burkina Faso where they face serious reintegration problems, despite the efforts made by the governments and civil society in these countries. It is, therefore, the entire subregion that faces a very serious humanitarian crisis. For the full text of the report, please see: http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engafr310122003

AFP 25 Jun 2003 Ivory Coast's "wild west" normal after being secured by peacekeepers BANGOLO, Ivory Coast, June 25 (AFP) - Ivory Coast's lawless western border with war-ravaged Liberia has returned to normal a month after French and west African peacekeepers entered the troubled area and secured it. Brutal excesses occurred in the region, a stronghold of two western-based Ivorian rebel groups which joined the main insurgent movement after it launched a rebellion on September 19, cutting the world's top cocoa grower in half. Liberian combatants were also active in the area and accused of fighting alongside both government forces and rebels. The Liberians and both the belligerents were accused of widespread rights abuses including murder, rape and looting. French military officials told an AFP journalist visiting the region on Tuesday that the "confidence zone" stretching across 200 kilometres (125 miles) and about 50 kilometres (83 miles) wide was back to normal and "respected 95 percent." In late May, peacekeepers launched an operation to secure the west. The "zone of confidence" refers to a plan to secure the border area near Liberia. Peacekeepers and rebels are tasked with ensuring safety along the northern part of the border, while government troops are responsible for the south. In the beginning of March, some 60 civilians were butchered in cold blood in Bangolo, a key town in the west. Both the rebels and the government forces denied responsibility. Following the killings, civilians fled their homes. But people have slowly started coming back. On Tuesday, Ivorian chief of staff General Mathias Doue, visited the area to reassure the population that their safety was assured "thanks to our brothers" in the French and west African peacekeeping forces. Former rebel leader Gaspard Deli from the Movement for Justice and Peace (MJP) insurgent group added: "It's the time now to work in the fields. Everyone should return soon." The securing of the west follows a French-brokered peace plan for Ivory Coast which was signed in January. Rebels fighting President Laurent Gbagbo have since joined a unity government to end the war. The accord calls for the regrouping of troops in military camps. France has nearly 4,000 troops deployed in Ivory Coast, its former colony, and the west African regional grouping ECOWAS has around 1,300 but has pledged to triple that number.

DR Congo

Campaign to End Genocide July 2003 Update *Urgent Action: Crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo* The current conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRCongo), has been raging for over four years and has taken more lives than any other war since World War II. This conflict in the DRCongo is severe enough to likely be classified as crimes against humanity. There are documented cases of cannibalism, rape, torture and murder. Since the DRCongo is a party to the International Criminal Court, the Court has jurisdiction to investigate the perpetrators of these atrocities. On May 30, 2003 the UN Security Council authorized Resolution 1484 which called for the deployment of the Interim Emergency Multinational Force (IEMF) to the DRCongo. However, the restrictions of the mandate of the IEMF make it very difficult for the soldiers to achieve their objectives. Specifically, the IEMF cannot operate outside of Bunia or use appropriate force against combatants in the area. The situation in the DRCongo requires a UN response, and this UN intervention must be supported by the international community. Learn more: http://www.endgenocide.org/warnings/congo.htm

AFP 1 Jun 2003 At least 100 people massacred in northeast DR Congo: Uganda army by Vincent Mayanja KAMPALA, June 1 (AFP) - At least 100 people were massacred at the weekend in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), near the southern tip of Lake Albert, a Ugandan army officer said Sunday. A DRC rebel official put the number of dead at more than 250, including about 20 babies. The killings come in the wake of a spate of massacres in DRC's Ituri region and amid preparations for a major French-led international force to deploy over the next week in Bunia, Ituri's capital, to protect civilians. Ugandan army Brigadier Kale Kaihura told AFP that fighters from Ituri's majority Lendu ethnic group attacked the rival Hemas "in Kyomya, about 30 kilometres (18 miles) from the Ugandan border, when they realised that withdrawing Ugandan forces, stuck there due to heavy rains, had finally withdrawn." Thousands of Ugandan troops deployed in northeastern DRC have withdrawn over recent weeks under international pressure. "What annoys me and frustrate some of us is that all this is happening after we forewarned the United Nations through MONUC (the UN military mission in DRC) that this situation was volatile and needed careful handling," Kaihura said. "But they thought that we were just manipulating the situation and they kept their mindset and pressurized us to leave without adequate arrangement for security of these people," he added. Bawunde Kisangani, the secretary general of the Party For the Unity and Safeguard of Integrity of Congo (PUSIC), a Hema group, told AFP he had just visited the site of the killings and that the toll was much higher. "We counted 253 dead bodies at Kyomya who had been killed by Lendu combatants and they included about 20 babies," he told AFP by phone. He said the attackers used machetes and rifles to kill their victims, who included people they found in a local hospital. "They stormed a hospital and killed people they found there," he added, saying the attackers included fighters of another rebel group, the Congolese Rally for Democracy-Liberation Movement, as well as Kinshasa government troops. Later Sunday Kisangani gave AFP some photographs he said were taken the previous day in Kyomya, although it was not possible to verify exactly when or where they were taken. They show the bodies of about 25 people, some in a hospital ward, others in a collective grave, others still in a street. One of them is young baby, several of them women. They all bear multiple machete wounds. One depicts a headless body. Some pictures show people carrying bodies for burial. Ituri's Hema groups, including the Union of Congolese Patriots, which controls the region's largest town, Bunia, and has close ties with PUSIC, repeatedly accuse Kinshasa of siding with the Lendu. Kisangani said 18 of the attackers -- 12 Lendu fighters and six Kinshasa soldiers -- were killed during the counter fighting that ensued. "They took our forces unawares but we fought them from around 5:00 am (0300 GMT) Saturday until slightly after mid-day when we managed to chase them, but we could not chase them any further than the hills they climbed because they were heavily armed," Bawundu added. On Friday, the UN Security Council gave the green light for a heavily armed French-led international force to protect refugees from interethnic massacres in Bunia. The force will not be a UN mission, but the 15-member council voted unanimously to authorise it to use deadly force if necessary. Britain has said it would contribute troops to the force, expected to number some 1,400 soldiers. There are already some 700 MONUC troops in Bunia, but they lack the resources and mandate to tackle the situation in Ituri. More than 50,000 people have been killed in Ituri and some half a million displaced since 1999. A long-running feud between the Lendu and Hema groups has become even more deadly since the onset of DRC's wider war in 1998 led to an influx of weapons and numerous politico-military groups eager to recruit fighters and more than willing to exploit deep-seated animosities. DRC's war officially ended early last month, when rebel groups, the government, civil society and the political opposition signed the final act of a peace agreement that provided for the creation of a transitional government.

BBC 1 Jun 2003 Fresh massacre in DR Congo Ethnic Hemas and Lendus have a long-standing land dispute Fresh reports have emerged about mass killings in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo where bitter ethnic conflict broke out after Ugandan troops withdrew last month. A Ugandan military commander Brigadier Kale Kaihura has told the BBC that fighters from the majority Lendu community have slaughtered at least 100 people in a village of Kyomna populated by Hema people. Hema leader Bawunde Kisangani told the French news agency AFP that he visited the village and counted 253 dead bodies, including about 20 babies. He said the attackers used machetes and rifles to kill their victims. "They stormed a hospital and killed people they found there." The attackers included fighters of another rebel group, the Congolese Rally for Democracy-Liberation Movement, as well as Kinshasa government troops, he said. Peacekeepers agreed "What annoys me and frustrates some of us is that all this is happening after we forewarned the United Nations through Monuc (the UN military mission in DRC) that this situation was volatile and needed careful handling," Brigadier Kaihura told AFP. BUNIA CONFLICT More than 400 dead in May 50,000 killed in recent years Ethnic rivalries made worse by foreign armies Q&A: Ethnic flashpoint Eyewitness: Mother's heartbreak "But they thought that we were just manipulating the situation and they kept their mindset and pressurised us to leave without adequate arrangement for security of these people." The United Nations Security Council has given the go-ahead for a French-led international force to restore order in the area. More than 1,000 peacekeepers will be deployed to the Ituri province in order to halt the ethnic fighting that has left more than 400 dead in recent weeks. In the regional capital Bunia local radio stations have begun broadcasting hate messages that threaten civilians. Force sanctioned A small lightly-armed UN force already in the province has been unable to stop the widespread atrocities that have caused thousands of civilians to flee. The UN has been unable to end the violence Under the UN charter, the new troops - who will be in place until September - are authorised to use force to keep control. France has said it will provide half of the international force, with other soldiers expected to come from both western and African countries. The UK has pledged to send troops, and the United States said it may provide logistical and financial support for the troops but ruled out contributing soldiers. The French ambassador to the UN has already said troops could be deployed as soon as next week.

Independent UK 1 Jun 2003 'We will meet UN troops with violence,' Congo militias warn Multinational force dispatched to try to prevent repetition of last month's massacre By Declan Walsh in Bunia, Congo 01 June 2003 Any attempted disarmament of warring factions in the north-eastern Congo town of Bunia - where 1,400 French, British and other UN troops are due to deploy this week - will be violently resisted, the main militia leader warned yesterday. The emergency international force is being sent to the region to prevent a repetition of a massacre last month that left over 400 dead and raised fears of slaughter to rival the genocide in nearby Rwanda nine years ago. Bodies littered the streets of Bunia and some remains were cannibalised. An uneasy calm prevails as volatile gunmen, many of them children, patrol the streets. If the UN tries to disarm them it could lead to "an explosive situation" said Thomas Lubanga, the leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) militia. "It is impossible to disarm my forces. They would have to send an entire army to do that," he said, speaking at an abandoned Catholic retreat near Bunia. Both the UPC, from the Hema tribe, and a rival Lendu militia have a reputation for brutal slayings using guns, machetes, knives and spears. Some of the recent victims had their stomachs slashed open or were decapitated. Although disarmament is not explicitly authorised in the mandate issued in New York on Friday, many believe it is essential to prevent further bloodletting. "As long as they are only observing, it will change nothing," said Benoit Kasereka, who narrowly avoided being shot by a drunken UPC soldier three days ago. Aid worker Nigel Pearson, standing outside the razor-wire-surrounded UN base, said: "They can't just concentrate on this place. They have to demilitarise the town, otherwise we can't do our job." During the recent killing spree the 700 mostly Uruguayan troops stationed in Bunia remained at base, provoking a storm of criticism. Under the fresh mandate, French and British troops are allowed to use military force in response to any act of aggression. But they will be heading into a situation fraught with danger and muddled with ethnic and political complexities. Most of the 300,000 townspeople have fled; those remaining live in fear of looting or rape. Hema militia as young as 10 patrol Bunia, on foot or in battlewagons. Some of the remaining Lendu have been quietly assassinated. Neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda, which have extensive military and economic interests in Congo, have recklessly fanned the generations-old rivalry between the two tribes. Now Lendu forces, armed by the Kinshasa government, are only a few miles outside town. "If the UN troops cannot come very soon the town could descend into chaos, even this weekend," said Marcus Sack, an aid worker with German Agro Action. France is expected to contribute about half of the emergency force. While the MoD has not confirmed British numbers, one source said it was "likely to be less than 200". British troops would "not have a frontline role", but could instead take charge of communications. French involvement was initially opposed by Rwanda, which supports the UPC, because of France's tarnished record during the 1994 genocide. "We had some fears that the French would take sides. But we can accept a multinational force," said Mr Lubanga of the UPC.

AFP 1 Jun 2003 Rebels deny charge of blocking peacekeepers in DR Congo KIGALI, June 1 (AFP) - The biggest rebel group in the strife-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Sunday denied allegations that it and Rwandan backers had launched an offensive to thwart deployment of an international peacekeeping force. "Why should we put a spoke in the wheel of the French soldiers?" a spokesman for Rebels of the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) in the Rwandan capital told AFP. "We were against deployment of a monolithic French force, not to a multinational force with a United Nations mandate," spokesman Jean-Pierre Lola-Kisanga said. Under UN Security Council resolution 1484 adopted last Friday, a multilateral interim emergency force under French command was set to start deploying this week at Bunia in the restless region of Ituri, in northeast of the vast African state. Another rebel group, rivals of the DRC, had earlier claimed the RCD and Rwandan troops had Sunday launched an offensive in the northern Kivu area in the east of the country. Mbusa Nyamwisi, leader of the Congolese Rally for Democracy Liberation Movement (RCD-ML), said the joint RCD-Rwandan forces had attacked RCD-ML positions near Lubero on the Ugandan border. "Their tactics are clear: to seize control of all sites with aerodromes, in order to ensure a continuous supply of arms and ammunition, and deprive the neutral force of the landing bases necessary for its deployment," he said. South African peacekeeping troops involved in a UN operation to disarm and repatriate foreign armed groups began deploying in central and eastern DRC last month, and some 200 are due to be stationed at Lubero in north Kivu. "The aggressors are armed with mortars, heavy artillery and grenade-launchers and their aim is clearly to cut the road between Lubero and Kanya-Bayonga," Nyamwisi said. The RCD was backed by Rwanda in a 1998 coup bid which boiled over into all-out war, drawing in more than half a dozen African countries and claiming some 2.5 million lives directly or indirectly through disease or starvation. The RCD, the country's main rebel group, controls much of the east and centre of the country. Nyamwisi has repeatedly accused the RCD and Rwanda of seeking to block the deployment of international peacekeepers. Rwanda and its RCD allies had initially opposed the idea of French troops arriving in DRC. The United Nations deputy head of peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guehenno, voiced concern on Saturday about the situation in the Kivu provinces, following an escalation of fighting between the RCD and local militias. DRC's war officially ended early last month, when rebel groups, the government, civil society and the political opposition signed the final act of a peace agreement that provided for the creation of a transitional government.

BBC 2 June 2003 DR Congo militia 'will not disarm' Ishbel Matheson BBC correspondent in Bunia, Democratic Republic of Congo The head of the Hema militia says his soldiers are well-disciplined The head of the militia controlling the town of Bunia in the Democratic Republic of Congo has warned he will not allow his troops to be disarmed when a French-led intervention force arrives. Thomas Lubanga of the Hema Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) says he is willing to withdraw his forces from Bunia but there can be no question of giving up weapons. Bitter ethnic clashes have enveloped Bunia since 9,000 Ugandan troops withdrew last month as part of a peace deal in the DR Congo. The UN has approved the deployment of a strengthened peacekeeping mission with the power to intervene to protect civilians. But many inhabitants fear that without widespread disarmament of the militias, there will be no solution to the ethnic killing between the Hema and Lendu groups. Gun-toting children Mr Lubanga says he is happy to cooperate with the French led force. After all, he says, his troops control security in the town so the foreign troops need them. But he flatly denies his men will be disarmed, describing his soldiers as disciplined. The residents of Bunia may see that differently. Pick-up trucks full of gun-toting children career around town, despite Mr Lubanga's insistence there are no child soldiers in his army. Many Congolese believe the top priority of the international force has to be disarming the militia, not just in Bunia, as specified in the UN mandate, but in all of the Ituri region of which it is the capital. It is not clear whether the French-led mission will take on this difficult and dangerous job. But as one local priest made plain, if they do not then this peacekeeping force, like the ones before it, will fail. It is the ready availability of weapons that has fuelled this ethnic conflict. The presence of foreign troops may deter killing in Bunia, but elsewhere in the surrounding countryside the massacres are likely to continue.

The New Yorker Issue of 2 June 2003 THE CONGO TEST by Philip Gourevitch "There is but one solution—to restore the unity of the international community,” Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, announced last week on French radio just hours before the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1483, rescinding economic sanctions against Iraq. Given France’s steadfast opposition to the invasion of Iraq, de Villepin insisted that the U.N. vote should not be understood as bestowing retroactive legitimacy on the American-led war. But, by granting the Anglo-American occupying forces a virtually unfettered dispensation over Iraq—and its oil wells—for the foreseeable future, that is exactly what the resolution does. For the Bush Administration, then, the resolution was a diplomatic triumph, and de Villepin was at pains to argue that his government’s accession to it was not, by the same token, an admission of defeat. “What’s really at stake here is to see to it that the U.N. is restored,” he said. To be sure, he added, “There are two visions of the world”—the multilateralist, U.N.-centered vision of collective security under international law touted by France, and the unilateralist, imperial vision represented by the United States—“but we need to work together.” So one hand washes the other, and, de Villepin said, “The U.N. is back.” Not so fast, Monsieur. Certainly the cessation of hostilities at the Security Council and the patching up of the ruptured transatlantic alliance merits a brief international sigh of relief. But the measure of the U.N.’s vitality will not be taken in Iraq. The true test lies in those vexed areas of the world that hold no compelling strategic or economic interest for the United States or for any of the other veto-wielding members of the Security Council. Most immediately, the U.N. is facing that test in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where seven hundred poorly armed U.N. peacekeepers in the northeastern Ituri region have watched helplessly over the past few weeks as massacres by tribal militias have filled graves with fresh corpses at about the same clip that the dead of Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror have been exhumed in Iraq. Accounts of the horror in Ituri have the quality of Hieronymus Bosch’s grotesque tableaux of apocalypse: torched villages; macheted babies in the streets; stoned child warriors indulging in cannibalism and draping themselves with the entrails of their victims; peacekeepers—mostly Uruguayans—using their guns only to drive off waves of frantic civilians seeking refuge in their already overflowing compound; a quarter of a million people in frenzied flight from their homes. For nearly five years, such suffering has plagued much of the eastern Congo along the tangled battle lines of warring political and tribal factions, stirred up and spurred on by the occupying armies of neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. Hundreds of thousands of Congolese have been killed in the fighting, and many more have died as a consequence of the displacement, disease, and hunger that attend it. By any measure, Congo is one of the most hellish places on earth, and of all the hells within that hell Ituri province has come to be known as the most infernal. The trouble in Ituri was fostered during five years of occupation by the Ugandan Army, which sought to assert control over the mineral-rich region by recklessly arming proxy militias of rival tribal groups. When massacres began in and around the provincial capital of Bunia, in the summer of 1999, Uganda restored a semblance of order. As this pattern repeated itself, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, and Human Rights Watch described the Ugandans as arsonists masquerading as firemen. Last December, when Congo’s latest peace deal set a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces, everyone in Ituri predicted a bloodbath. Toward the end of April, the U.N. sent in the Uruguayans, but without the capacity to protect civilians, or even themselves. (Uganda’s President, Yoweri Museveni, mocked the peacekeepers as “dangerous tourists.”) The pullout came on May 6th, and, sure enough, the killing began at once, with one tribal militia overrunning Bunia, only to be driven out by another, before a tentative ceasefire was established, allowing the U.N. blue-helmets to begin counting the dead. By the end of last week, that ceasefire was breaking down. “We’ve been sending messages every day to New York that this was going to happen, that we need more troops,” the French commander of the U.N. peacekeepers told a reporter. “Nothing was done.” This has become a routine scenario: massacres foretold, warnings ignored, slaughter erupting under the noses of U.N. forces with useless mandates. The mutilated remains of two peacekeepers were found in Bunia last week, and the commander, who has given shelter to some thirteen thousand civilians, was slashed with a machete at the gates of his compound. As Bunia burned, the U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan—haunted by his failure to heed warnings of the impending genocide in Rwanda in 1994—sent a letter to the Security Council asking its members for a “rapid reaction force” to pacify the region. France, which is also tainted by complicity in the Rwandan slaughter, has said it can muster troops to maintain order until the U.N. can field a plausible force, but only on the condition that other nations join in. At least five governments have said they would consider contributing to a French-led operation. The Bush Administration has expressed support for the project but has refused to commit any troops to it. During one of the 2000 Presidential debates, the moderator, Jim Lehrer, raised the issue of Rwanda. “There was no U.S. intervention,” he said. Then he asked George W. Bush, “Was that a mistake?” In a rare show of solidarity with the Clinton White House, Bush answered, “I think the Administration did the right thing in that case. I do. It was a horrible situation. No one liked to see it on our—you know, on our TV screens. But . . . they made the right decision not to send U.S. troops into Rwanda.” In the run-up to the Iraq war, it appeared that Bush had changed his mind. Speaking on Al Jazeera television, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice dismissed the U.N.’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq by reminding her interviewer, “The U.N. Security Council could not act when in Rwanda there was a genocide that cost almost a million lives. There was a very poignant statement by the President of Rwanda recently when he said sometimes the Security Council is not right when it does not act. President Bush believes that, too.” And, lest the mantle of the memory of Rwanda’s dead be wasted on only Arab audiences, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, struck the same note: “From a moral point of view, as the world witnessed in Rwanda . . . the U.N. Security Council will have failed to act once again.” The disingenuousness of these remarks lies, of course, in the fact that it was the United States that prevented the Security Council from acting during the Rwandan genocide, even though no American troops were ever involved or required for the U.N. force there. As Dominique de Villepin observed, the international order hangs suspended these days between two competing visions, each of which justifies itself by pointing to the limitations, failures, and abuses of the other. The people of Ituri couldn’t care less about those debates, as they plead for salvation. It is for such people and such places—places that nobody in what Kofi Annan likes to call “governments with capacity” can find any political grounds to care about—that the U.N.’s system of international humanitarian law matters most. The idea behind that system is that common humanity ought to be reason enough to take an interest in preventing such terrors as extermination campaigns. And the premise behind that idea is that, while action may be costly, the price of inaction must finally be greater. But is that really how the world works? What if the ultimate horror of the Congo nightmare is that there is no price for ignoring it? .

AFP 2 Jun 2003 Heavy fighting reported in northern DR Congo KINDU, DR Congo, June 2 (AFP) - Heavy fighting broke out Monday in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo between the country's main rebel group and a splinter faction, military sources said. The reports of heavy fighting follow accusations Sunday by the RCD-ML splinter group that the main rebel group Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) had launched with its Rwandan backers an offensive aimed at thwarting deployment of an international peacekeeping force. "This morning, the RCD-ML retook control of the small town of Bingi, near Lubero, after heavy fighting was reported in the area," a military source told AFP. For the past few days, the town had been held by the RCD after it launched a north-bound offensive one week ago, the source said. The source said it was uncertain how many people had been killed in the fighting at Bingi, where some of the latest clashes are taking place in the complex war in the eastern DRC, being fought by rebel groups with foreign backing and government and militia forces. "The greatest implication of this fighting, is that like in Bunia, the humanitarian problem continues, with both the RCD and pro-government militia (Mai-Mai) fighters harassing the local population," he said. There were also isolated reports of rape and looting, the source said. South African peacekeeping troops involved in a UN operation to disarm and repatriate foreign armed groups began deploying in central and eastern DRC last month, and some 200 are due to be stationed at Lubero in north Kivu. Under UN Security Council resolution 1484 adopted last Friday, a multilateral interim emergency force under French command was set to start deploying this week at Bunia. The RCD was backed by Rwanda in a 1998 coup bid which boiled over into all-out war, drawing in more than half a dozen African countries and claiming some 2.5 million lives directly or indirectly through disease or starvation. The RCD, the country's main rebel group, controls much of the east and centre of the country. The RCD on Sunday denied it had launched a offensive to thwart the deployment of an international peacekeeping force to the strife-torn Ituri province, which lies to the north.

AFP 2 Jun 2003 Rebel group says almost 350 killed in northeast DR Congo massacre NAIROBI, June 2 (AFP) - A Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) armed faction said Monday that nearly 350 people, mostly civilians, were killed in a weekend massacre in the northeast of the country. On Sunday, the Ugandan army said "at least 100" people had been killed Saturday in Tchomia, near the Ugandan border, while the same armed faction, the Party For the Unity and Safeguard of Integrity of Congo (PUSIC), put the toll at around 250. PUSIC spokesman Kisembo Bitamara, whose movement is drawn from the Hema minority of northeast DRC's volatile Ituri region, said Monday the killers were fighters of the majority Lendu tribe "accompanied by government troops from Kinshasa." This new toll could not be immediately confirmed by independent sources. Bitamara spoke to AFP's Nairobi office, saying he was in Tchomia.

IRIN 2 June 2003 French-led UN force for Bunia seeks to use Ugandan airport A delegation of French officials was due to arrive in Uganda on Monday for discussions with President Yoweri Museveni over the possible use of Uganda's Entebbe airport as a rear base for a French-led international peacekeeping force to patrol Bunia, northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to French diplomatic sources. "The first question we had to ask is will the Ugandan government accept to allow us to use Entebbe?" Jean-Bernard Thiant, the French Ambassador to Uganda, told IRIN on Sunday. "To this the answer is yes." The move follows the unanimous decision by the UN Security Council to authorise the deployment of an international emergency force to help stabilise the situation in the embattled Ituri District of northeastern DRC. The multinational force, expected to consist of 1,400 men, of whom 700 would be French, would ensure the protection of the Bunia airport, internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the camps in Bunia and, if the situation requires it, to participate in the protection of the population, UN personnel and the humanitarian presence in the town, UN News reported. Thiant told IRIN that Entebbe was chosen because Bunia airport was too small to land the large aircraft needed to ferry supplies from France. "That leaves Kisangani as far as Congolese sites are concerned," he said, "but this has the problem that Kisangani's international and domestic airports are miles apart. Equipment would have to be transported between them on poor roads." "After studying various solutions we realised that Entebbe is the only solution," he said. "Since then we have been cooperating closely with the Ugandan government. But we still have to negotiate the conditions." The French-led multinational force has been constituted under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, which authorises it to use military force in response to "any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression". The Council said that the force is to be deployed on a strictly temporary basis - until 1 September 2003 - to reinforce the UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC, known as MONUC. In that regard, Resolution 1484 authorised UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to deploy a reinforced UN presence in Bunia by mid-August. Resolution 1484 also called on UN member states to contribute personnel, equipment, financial and logistical resources to the multinational force, and called specifically on countries in the Great Lakes region to provide all necessary support to facilitate its swift deployment in Bunia. Bunia has been the scene of periodic eruptions of economically motivated ethnic violence for several years, most recently with the withdrawal of the Ugandan army at the end of April. The number of corpses collected by Friday the local Red Cross and MONUC reached 415, according to UN News. On Monday, Bunia was reported to be calm but tense. Speaking on Friday after the international emergency force was approved, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, said: "This is the Security Council at its best, and a demonstration that the Secretary-General and the Security Council can act swiftly, hand-in-hand, to protect the lives of the civilian population in conflict areas, a paramount human rights and humanitarian concern." However, certain humanitarian observers expressed reservations about Security Council Resolution 1484, as it does not make any reference to the disarmament of militia elements or a demilitarisation of the region. "It should be noted that an interim force which is not equipped with a clear mandate to prevent violence against the civilian population by means of force will most likely only be able to maintain the current status quo in Bunia and Ituri, thus implying an unimpeded UPC [Union des patriotes congolais, the ethnic Hema militia that controls central Bunia] reign of terror in Bunia and areas under their control," a humanitarian observer told IRIN. "The interim force as well as MONUC and the IPC [Ituri Pacification Commission] initiating and supporting entities will have no impact whatsoever on activities of all warring factions in areas other than Bunia," the observer said. "Thus insecurity will prevail and access to beneficiaries outside Bunia will most likely not be able to be extended beyond the present limitations." Meanwhile, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported on Friday that the refugee influx from DRC into western Uganda had subsided, with no new arrivals reported in the last week in Bundibugyo or Nebbi districts. UNHCR reported that the last significant group of refugees - about 1,500 - arrived in Uganda on 20 May in the border town of Nebbi, behind the last of Uganda's withdrawing armed forces. The majority of the Congolese refugees have opted to stay with friends and relatives in Uganda, and have not been willing to be moved to government-designated refugee settlements, UNHCR stated. However, Ugandan government officials have continued to register new arrivals for possible relocation to two designated camps: Kyaka II in Kabarole District and Imvepi in Arua District. A joint government/UNHCR assessment mission was planned for Monday to Bundibugyo District to assess the numbers of refugees willing to relocate to settlements and to make logistical arrangements for their transfer. Also on Monday, news agencies reported the killing on Saturday of between 100 and 250 Hema militia fighters and civilians in the Congolese town of Tchomia, allegedly by Lendu militias. "The Lendus attacked the Hemas in Kyomya, located about 30 km from the Ugandan border, once they determined that the Ugandan forces, who had been stuck due to heavy rains, had withdrawn from the zone," Brig Kale Kayihura, the commander of the Ugandan troops that left Bunia, was quoted as telling AFP. However, no confirmation was available from MONUC, as access to the area was not yet possible.

IRIN 5 June 2003 Bunia "stabilising but still precarious", says MONUC KINSHASA, 5 Jun 2003 (IRIN) - The security and humanitarian situation in Bunia, northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was "stabilising but still precarious" on Wednesday, the UN peacekeeping mission there, known as MONUC, reported. In a news conference in the capital, Kinshasa, MONUC's director of public information, Patricia Tome, said the local Red Cross had recovered 429 bodies and that 74,000 people had been displaced from Bunia, the principal city of Ituri District, since the latest round of fighting erupted in early May. Tome added that 128 children had been separated from their families. She said that MONUC continued to receive reports of rape, kidnapping and extortion in and around Bunia. "Villages situated along the Kilo-Mongbwalu axis were abandoned by their residents who fled exactions by armed militias," she said. However, in a positive development, Tome reported that several hundreds of people who had found refuge in MONUC sites had now returned to their homes. Tome also reported that MONUC was still unable to confirm the alleged killing of between 250 to 350 civilians in Tshomia on Saturday [see earlier report, "Lendu militias accused of massacre of more than 250"]. While nearly 10,000 people had received 21-day food rations from NGOs operating in Bunia, Tome warned that the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs had reported a massive shortfall in funding for humanitarian efforts in the DRC, with only 18.5 percent of the needed US $232 million for 2003 having been received to date. On the military front, Tome reported that the Union des patriotes congolais (UPC), an Hema militia which claims to have 15,000 troops and currently controls central Bunia, informed MONUC of the beginning of the cantonment of its troops in a perimeter of six to 20 km from the city. "MONUC visited a camp where it noticed the presence of 600 UPC troops,” Tome said. “For the Mission, the announcement of this cantonment is unilateral and was not discussed with MONUC and the multinational force." She said that the cantonment of armed militias outside of Bunia was required by a mid-March agreement reached among Ituri belligerents. Sources in Bunia reported that UPC leader Thomas Lubanga had named the outlying locations of Similiabo (along the Bunia - Mandro route), Dele (along the Bogoro - Kasenyi route), Rwampara (along the southwest approach to Bunia) and Kambaokabo (along the Songolo - Komanda route) as the areas to which his forces would withdraw ahead of the arrival of a French-led multinational peace enforcement mission. However, a humanitarian observer in Bunia warned that should the UPC follow this plan, all access routes into Bunia would be under the control of UPC forces, in which case the humanitarian community would "most certainly" have very limited access to areas beyond UPC force concentrations. This, the observer stated, would "constitute an unbearable security risk for any logistics activities and therefore be totally unusable for relocating humanitarian assistance commodities". The observer said: "It should be noted that [the multinational peace enforcement] mission would be insufficiently mandated to prevent the asphyxiation of Bunia by UPC armed elements."

IRIN 13 June 2003 US sends emergency aid for Ituri IDPs KINSHASA, 13 Jun 2003 (IRIN) - The US government has sent a consignment of emergency supplies to help 55,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) from Bunia and surrounding areas, officials at the US embassy in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), said on Thursday. The consignment, organised by USAID, represents the first part of a 165-mt emergency aid delivery. It included plastic sheeting, blankets, jerry cans, water purification equipment and medical kits, the officials said. The supplies, which arrived in Goma on Sunday, would be distributed through the UN Children's Fund and its partner NGOs, they said. The estimated 55,000 IDPs fled south when fighting between Hema and Lendu militias erupted at the beginning of May in and around Bunia, the capital of Ituri District. The IDPs are now camped in a zone around the town of Beni, in North Kivu Province. Meanwhile, fighting continued Thursday around the town of Lubero, 70 km south of Beni. The UN Mission in the DRC, MONUC, appealed to the belligerents - the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie-Goma and the RCD-Kisangani-Mouvement de Liberation to disengage and withdraw their forces from the area. The appeal came as the government and the two movements were due to meet Thursday in Bujumbura, Burundi, under the mediation of the UN Secretary-General's special representative, Amos Namanga Ngongi, to try to end the fighting. "We would like to withdraw our soldiers but those who have helped people to attack us, government troops and the Interahamwe must first draw back," Adolphe Onusumba, the RCD-Goma president, told IRIN. The Interahamwe are Rwandan Hutu militiamen who fled to the DRC after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. DRC Defence Minister Irung Awan told IRIN there were no government troops around Lubero. "There is no reason for us to have troops there," he said. "It is the RCD-K/ML that has forces there to try to end a difficult situation brought about by RCD-Goma and Rwanda which are looking to occupy this portion of Congolese territory." Rwandan army spokesman Maj Jill Rutaremara has denied involvement in the fighting saying, "Rwanda has not had any troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo since last year."

IRIN 16 June 2003 UN confirms 70 killed in Ituri village KAMPALA, 16 Jun 2003 (IRIN) - The UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) confirmed on Monday that Lendu militiamen had killed 70 people in the eastern Congolese village of Nkora, near Mahagi town, Ituri District, close to the Ugandan border. "I have reliable reports of the massacre from an independent source," Col Pieter Harmse, MONUC's spokesperson in Uganda, told IRIN in Kampala. "Basically, the Lendu fighters attacked the village itself, chopping up and killing pretty much all civilians - I don't know if they were all Hema or what ethnic group they were." He said the information had come from a Congolese farmer in the village, not from any member of armed belligerents in Ituri's war. The attack was the second by Lendu militiamen reported in less than three weeks. At the end of May, the Hema-dominated Parti pour l'unite et la sauvegarde de l'integrite du Congo (PUSIC), led by chief Kawa Panga Mandro, distributed photographs of some 250-300 dead unarmed civilians in the predominantly Hema town of Tchomia, on the shores of Lake Albert, which divides southern Ituri from neighbouring Uganda. Meanwhile, Bunia town was reported to be calm after an armed Lendu gang attacked French troops of a multinational force who were moving in convoy about six kilometres from the town centre on Saturday. "The situation is now under control again," Capt Frederick Solano, the French army spokesperson, told IRIN. "There was a fight between our troops and the Lendus. We opened fire, as we are mandated to do, to protect ourselves and repel the gunmen." He said no injuries occurred on the French side and that he did not know of casualties among the attackers. Solano said that the deployment of the multinational peace enforcement troops in Bunia was progressing as planned, despite of the skirmish. He said about 1,200 troops were mobilised between Entebbe and Bunia and that 600 of them were already in Bunia by early Monday. "We also have two more French 'Gazelle' attack helicopters coming in today, to increase our firepower," he said. At a news conference at Entebbe airport on Sunday, a UN Security Council team that had just ended its six-nation tour of Africa implored the countries in the Great Lakes region - particularly Uganda and Rwanda - to help restrain the various warring parties in eastern Congo's conflicts. The delegation's leader, French Permanent Representative to the UN Secretary Council Jean-Marc de la Sabliere, told Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni that states in Africa's Great Lakes region needed to play their part in preventing further fighting in Ituri. [For related report, go to www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=34764] Uganda and Rwanda armed and trained both Lendu and Hema fighters in 1999 when they needed them to fight in their opposing proxy rebel factions, splintered from the rebel Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie, which had tried to unseat Congo's late President Laurent-Desire Kabila.

IRIN 18 June 2003 Children suffer torture, rape and cruelty, NGOs report NAIROBI, 18 Jun 2003 (IRIN) - Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have suffered systematic torture and cruelty during the country's five-year war, according to a new report by a consortium of NGOs. Foreign and domestic governments as well as armed groups have committed gross violations against children, including assault, rape, abduction, sexual torture, forced displacement, underage recruitment into armed forces and forced participation in the illegal exploitation of natural resources. "The Impact of Conflict on Children in the Democratic Republic of Congo", a 36-page report released on Monday by the Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict to coincide with the end of a UN Security Council mission to the country and the Day of the African Child, documents the grim reality of the DRC. Among the most striking statistics: over 12 percent of children do not reach their first birthday; three million children are without access to education; malnutrition rates exceed 40 percent in some areas; 400,000 children have been displaced from their homes; tens of thousands of children have been recruited as child soldiers; and gender-based violence, including rape of girls, is widespread. The ongoing conflict in the country has claimed an estimated 3.3 million lives since 1998, mostly women, children and elderly, according to a report by the International Rescue Committee, titled "Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Results from a Nationwide Survey, Conducted September to November 2002, reported April 2003". In Ituri District in the northeast, according to the Watchlist report, children had been forced to witness parents and grandparents being hacked to death; young girls raped in front of their families; children forced to kill their close relatives; children and other hospital patients dragged from their beds and killed; children, including infants, dying after being locked up without food or water; and children killed, some shot in the back, in massacres along with hundreds of other civilians. Speaking to the media for the launch of the report, Anne Edgerton of Refugees International said that the situation in the DRC was "the largest humanitarian crisis on the planet right now with the smallest amount of response". She added: "If somehow the response can be much more appropriate to the actual crisis, it could be ended. It's not so large that it could not be done." The report recommends that all parties to the conflict, the UN Security Council, and to the UN Mission in the DRC take "urgent action" to address the situation in eastern DRC. The Watchlist is a network of local, regional and international NGOs working to protect the security and rights of children in armed conflicts. [For the complete report, go to: www.watchlist.org ]

WP 18 June 2003 At a University in Congo, Lessons Are Hard-Learned Some Students, Professors Remain Despite Chaos of War By Emily Wax Washington Post Foreign Service BUNIA, Congo -- More than anything else, Charles Cwinyaay was determined to remain a university student. So during this town's most recent gun battles, he sat in his room and by the glow of a naked light bulb continued to read his fraying copy of James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time," the impassioned plea for an end to racial discrimination in 1960s America. On a tiny cot in a musty dormitory where the paint is chipped down to the bumpy concrete and bathrooms are mud-floored, Cwinyaay made a promise to himself as bullets crisscrossed the campus on a Saturday afternoon earlier this month. No matter how bad the fighting became, he would stick with his studying. He would not flee. He did not, but then the militiamen who roam this town came and looted the university. They stole Cwinyaay's radio, his clothes, his bedsheets and, worst of all, his books. "They took my Langston Hughes, my Shakespeare, my Emily Dickinson," said the English major, as a group of fellow students in this French- and Swahili-speaking region of northeast Congo listened to his story and nodded. "So now all I have left is the one notebook I had with me. I will just sit here and read. I won't give in." Shot at in their classrooms, robbed in their dorms, students and teachers at the Institut Superieur Pedagogique somehow keep to their studies in a school built by the U.S. government in 1970 as a gift to Africa. Since the war began five years ago, classes have been canceled more than 30 times. The school's two computers have been stolen and the cafeteria and health center closed down, their windows and furniture riddled with bullet holes. In fighting last month, four professors were killed, more than half of the student body fled and the radio station was taken over by an ever-changing cast of rebel groups, people here say. "Does the world care about Congo?" said the school's senior administrator, Raymond Mandro Kalongo, who came here as a history teacher 27 years ago. "We really want to believe they do. We need so much help, but we can't wait. We have to carry on." There is cautious hope that the recent arrival of French-led multinational peacekeepers will restore order to Bunia and the outlying Ituri region, where the central government has ceded control to a variety of ethnic militia and rebel groups backed by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. But until then, the school is left with little more than its pride in the midst of a five-year war in which about 3.3 million people have probably died from fighting and disease, according to the International Rescue Committee, a refugee aid group. The university is a series of low-lying and connected buildings in the hills above Bunia. The dorms are four stories high. There are chemistry labs and wings for math, languages and literature. In peaceful times, it could look like a community college in small-town America, with its long fields of rolling grass and basketball court. The Belgian colonial rulers who went home in 1960, people here say, discouraged Congolese from attending college, though most valued education highly. So when the U.S. Agency for International Development completed the school in 1970 as part of a program to train a national corps of African teachers, people celebrated. "We had a beautiful opening day ceremony, with Congolese music and food," recalled Kalongo, who sat at a desk with only his patched-together datebook, in which he tries to record every gunshot. "This place was an example of what a strong, well-educated country ordinary Congolese wanted to become." But the school soon fell on hard times. During the 1980s, under dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, a U.S. ally, school funds often disappeared into the pockets of Mobutu and his allies, people here say. Students were left without new books, chemicals for chemistry class, paper or even food. The university closed the cafeteria, where three meals a day of beans, potatoes, rice and fish used to be served. After the war began, the capital stopped funding the school altogether. Today only about 100 students remain in a facility intended for 700. They are taught by about a dozen professors. The school limps along with the $180 in annual fees charged to each student. Students help out their teachers by paying small fees, about 60 cents, for each session in the classroom. Officially, classes have been canceled since March because of the fighting, but students don't accept that, and they continue to show up. Teachers ask for things like pencils and notebooks the way Western educators ask for tenure. Yet at times, the scene on the campus here is reassuringly normal. Edward Dhelo-Dhena, an English professor, glides by on his bicycle. He wears a straw hat and plaid shirt. He looks as if he could teach at any college in the United States. But he was educated in the capital, Kinshasa, and had never spoken with a native speaker of English. "Hi, John," he says, addressing a student who is practicing English from a textbook and pronouncing every letter. "Hello, sir," answers the student, John Kabaseke, one of Dhelo-Dhena's favorites, bowing in respect. The 52-year-old professor takes off his thick glasses and asks how Kabaseke is doing. He has heard that bullets whizzed through Kabaseke's room recently, shredding his only suit jacket, which he wore to look like a professional. "It's still okay," Kabaseke says with a shrug. Kabaseke and his professor sit and talk about the war and about how peace will come. Then they talk about Kabaseke's career goals. "My appetite is to be a writer," the student says. Then he lists his favorites: Emily Dickinson. "Her ideas, oh, they are wonderful," he tells his smiling professor. William Faulkner. "He understood sadness," Kabaseke says. To that his professor nods. But it is William Shakespeare whom he finds the most outstanding. He jokes with his teacher about favorite lines, sonnets and plots, and then states that his favorite quote is from "The Taming of the Shrew." He poses theatrically, looking out over the landscape, then utters one of the play's most famous lines: "I will be free, even to the uttermost, as I please, in words."

Reuters 19 Jun 2003 - French troops mingle with Congo's child soldiers By Matthew Green CHARI, Congo, 19 June (Reuters) - The French special forces stopped at the bridge, fearing their armoured vehicles would crash through its rickety planks. Across the river, a small group of Congolese children cradling battered rifles watched the strangers arrive. Both sides wondered what would happen next. "These militiamen aren't real guerrillas, they don't really know how to fight," said one of the French soldiers, wearing mirrored sunglasses and manning a machinegun. "We have to watch out, but I don't think they'll attack us." French troops are taking wary steps outside the town of Bunia in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where child soldiers, drunken militiamen and landmines could all prove potentially fatal. The French form the bulk of 1,500-strong international force that began deploying this month under a U.N. mandate to protect Bunia from ethnic slaughter, before pulling out at the end of their mission on September 1. The European Union is leading the force in its first military deployment outside Europe, hoping to prove it can handle a peacekeeping mission without resorting to NATO, an alliance strained by the war in Iraq. The troops on the ground are treading into a world where people living in mud huts worry about being hacked to death with machetes and children wander around with hand grenades. Massacre survivors speak of ritual cannibalism. For the soldiers of France's Special Operations Command, whose names are kept secret, the recces beyond Bunia are more about staying vigilant than trying to win hearts and minds. "It only takes one person with one weapon," said one of the men, who unlike normal soldiers wear no badges of rank or country. "Someone could be hiding behind a tree and shoot at a convoy, killing or wounding one of us." The French troops shot two militiamen dead on Monday, saying the gunmen had drunkenly aimed their rifles at them. Gaggles of locals peered at the French, an unprecedented sight in their village of Chari, about two miles (three km) west of Bunia. One recommended the local brew. "If they stay here in Congo, they'll have to start drinking it," said Ndio Bitamazire, 29, waiting for a sip of the maize beer in a thatched hut. "It will make them feel good." A French radio operator, asked if he might venture a taste of the sour-smelling, porridge-like drink, was categorical. "No," he said. "I'm working." AFRICA VETERANS While some French forces at a logistics base in Uganda might sport shorts, these men are on a war footing in fatigues and floppy jungle hats. Some speak in deliberately vague terms of missions elsewhere in French-speaking Africa -- Gabon, Ivory Coast, Senegal. And they have no shortage of firepower. The 90mm cannon of a six-wheeled "Sagaie" light tank swivelled across the horizon, while Mirage warplanes roared overhead, new sights for militia with bows and arrows. "They're impressed by all this stuff," said one of the French troops. "They're scared of the armoured vehicles." But no amount of hardware makes the idea of being forced to gun down one of Congo's child soldiers any easier. "That's what would be the worst thing that could happen here, that would really traumatise me," said another special forces member as a small boy trudged past with a rifle slung across his back. "That's what makes this mission hard."

Sapa-AP 21 June 2003 Hesistation on peacekeeping mandate United Nations - France and many African nations are backing Secretary-General Kofi Annan's call for a larger UN peacekeeping force with a more robust mandate to help stem tribal violence in eastern Congo, but the United States appears reluctant to agree. At present, UN troops in Congo are deployed under a mandate that only allows them to fire in self-defence. They have not attempted to stem the violence between rival factions of the Hema and Lendu tribes that has killed more than 500 people in and around the eastern town of Bunia since the beginning of May. On May 30, the council authorised the deployment of a French-led emergency force of 1 400 to Bunia. Their three-month mandate is to secure the airport and protect displaced people and aid workers and they are authorised to shoot to kill, but they can't disarm the fighters or demilitarise the town. With the mandate for UN peacekeepers in Congo expiring on June 30, Annan asked the Security Council earlier this month to increase the UN force from 8 700 to 10,800, to focus mainly on ending unrest in Bunia and surrounding Ituri province. He also asked for a stronger mandate. At the first council meeting on Thursday to discuss Annan's report, US Ambassador John Negroponte said the United States asked for an extension of the current mandate without specifying for how long. France's UN Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere proposed a 15-day extension, stressing that the council has to act quickly to give a clear signal that there will not be a weaker military presence once the French-led force departs at the end of August, council diplomats said. France's Deputy Ambassador Michel Duclos said on Friday that Paris would like an extension of "even less" than 15 days. Negroponte said the United States didn't respond to the French request and council members agreed that the length of the extension was still to be determined. Council experts scheduled a meeting Monday to discuss the issue. The United States is open to a UN peacekeeping contingent led by Bangladesh replacing the French-led force but "we would want to look ... very, very carefully" at increasing the size or mandate of the UN force, Negroponte told reporters on Wednesday. "Our view is that fundamentally no amount of peacekeeping forces are going to be able to help resolve this situation if there isn't the political will among the parties in the Congo and in the neighbouring countries to achieve a satisfactory political outcome," he said. "The Congo is just too large a country to be able to hope or think that a large foreign intervention can make that much of a difference over the long-term," Negroponte said. The US ambassador said the French-led force "is playing an extremely useful role in terms of stabilising the situation in Ituri and in Bunia in particular," but now "other elements need to fall into place," including a cease-fire and establishment of a transitional government in Congo. Angola's UN Ambassador Ismael Gaspar Martens expressed hope on Friday that Washington would eventually support a larger force with a more robust mandate. "Especially after the multinational force, we cannot have a response which is less effective, less robust than what it is now," he said, adding that this view has strong support in the council. "I know they are reluctant," Gaspar Martens said of the United States. "But from what we have seen, it's clear that there is a need for a response from the international community. And I think if we are able to come together to respond to crises which exist in other places ... I think we should also speak with one voice" on Congo. The war in Congo erupted in August 1998 after Rwanda and Uganda sent troops to back rebels attempting to oust Laurent Kabila, then president of Congo. Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia sent troops to support Kabila. While it began over regional security issues in the wake of Rwanda's 1994 genocide, the war is now largely about the control of the gold, coltan, a mineral used in the electronic industry, and timber in the eastern part of the country.

AFP 21 Jun 2003 UN officers kidnapped in DRCongo handed over to MONUC KAMPALA, June 21 (AFP) - Two military observers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) kidnapped in the northeast of the country and released on Saturday have been handed over to the UN, officials said in Kampala. "The two have been handed over to us. They are in good health, but look tired," UN Mission in DRC, MONUC, Liaison Officer Colonel Pieter Harmse told AFP by telephone. He said the two -- a Tunisian and a Russian -- were unharmed when they were handed over to MONUC officers in Beni by officials of the local Congolese Rally for Democracy-Liberation Movement (RCD-ML) rebel group. They were kidnapped in the town of Beni, in Kivu region, on Thursday. RCD-ML spokesman in Kampala, Frank Lusambo, told AFP on Friday that the two were being held for their safety by officials he did not name, but on Saturday said that the "RCD-ML was just negotiating their release." "The situation was tense and some people thought that these people would be harmed, so they took them aside for their safety, because if they got any trouble while on our territory, everybody would be on us," Lusambo said. RCD-ML leader Mbusa Nyamwisi admitted earlier on Saturday, while announcing the safety of the two, that some elements in his rebel group might have been behind the kidnapping of the officers. The DRC was plunged into war four and a half years ago when an uprising boiled over into a conflict that drew in half a dozen African countries. The war officially ended in April, with the conclusion of a peace accord, but fighting has continued in parts of the vast central African country, mainly in the northeastern Ituri region and in Nord-Kivu. MONUC was mandated in November 1999 by the UN Security Council to deploy in DRC military personnel, including observers, backed by specialists in human rights, child welfare, humanitarian, public information, political affairs, and medical and administrative support.

AFP 23 Jun 2003 Women in war-torn DR Congo region deplore UN's "guilty silence" KINSHASA, June 23 (AFP) - Women's organisations in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Monday accused the United Nations mission there of turning a blind eye to ongoing fighting which has ravaged this part of the vast African country. In a letter addressed to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, a copy of which was sent to AFP, four women's groups slammed the UN mission in DRC, called MONUC, for maintaining a "guilty silence" during the "war of aggression and occupation" in their Nord-Kivu province. MONUC seemed to be "out for a stroll in the countryside" in the Nord-Kivu towns of Lubero and Beni, where UN military observers are stationed, as well as in other DRC flashpoints including strife-torn town of Bunia, in Ituri province, they said. The groups singled out the main rebel group, the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), which receives backing from neighbouring Rwanda, as the aggressors in Kivu's ongoing violence. The women also said the world body should urge the Kinshasa government to send troops and aid to Nord-Kivu. The DRC government already backs one of the rebel groups fighting in the area -- the RCD's rivals Congolese-Rally for Democracy - Liberation Movement (RCD-ML). Both the Kinshasa-backed RCD-ML and the Rwanda-backed RCD have accused the other of breaking a brand-new ceasefire agreed last week. The UN mission on Saturday sent military observers to the Kivu area around Beni, Butembo and Lubero to assess claims made by both rebel groups that the other is mobilising its troops -- a violation of the truce -- in preparation for a military offensive. Despite the signing of a final peace pact for DRC last April which formally ended a four-and-a-half year war in the country, fighting rages on between the rebel groups aided by their government backers in the mineral-rich east.

AFP 24 Jun 2003 Most gunmen quit Bunia, although ultimatum extended by Anthony Morland BUNIA, DR Congo, June 24 (AFP) - The vast majority of the factional gunmen that used to roam Bunia had left the volatile northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo town on Tuesday, when an ultimatum for their departure was extended by a day to finalise technicalities. "The ultimatum was put back by 24 hours so that everything could be properly understood," Colonel Gerard Dubois, spokesman for the French-led EU force that imposed the deadline told reporters. "It is better to clarify things before declaring Bunia a town without arms than to to sort matters out after the start of the operation," he said. The extension was granted during a meeting earlier in the day between Thomas Lubanga, the leader of the faction controlling the town, and senior officers from the EU force. Dubois did not clarify exactly what would be discussed at another meeting scheduled for Wednesday morning, but said the issue of the exact size of Lubanga's security contingent, which is exempt from the no-guns rule, had not been settled. The deadline extension did not greatly effect the force's activities, which are focussed on ensuring the free movement of Bunia's residents, hundreds of whom died in fierce inter-ethnic clashes last month. Reports of an attempted incursion by armed groups opposed to Lubanga's Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) prompted both his men and those of the EU force to go into action. According to Dubois, the incident prompted French troops to fire a single warning shot and led the force to formally remind the UPC to move their gunmen outside of the town. In recent days, Lubanga had repeatedly stressed he had already withdrawn most of his fighters from Bunia on his own initiative. The demilitarisation of Bunia is a key provision of various formal engagements made by most of the armed groups active in the area. The process is not a full-scale disarmament operation and the only weapons the EU force says it will confiscate are those found on the streets. Dubois has repeatedly stressed the force has no plans and lacks the manpower to conduct exhaustive house to house searches. On Monday evening, Lubanga complained that the force had failed to take control of several key access points to the town previously held by his men, "which could be used by outside forces to spread devastation." In some outlying areas of town, the departure of UPC fighters, many of whom have not yet reached adulthood, prompted many residents to leave their homes, either following the withdrawing gunmen or moving towards the city centre. The rebel leader added that despite this complaint, "we will not go back on our undertakings." According to Dubois, French patrols were later deployed to secure the areas vacated by the UPC. The force has not disclosed exactly how weapons would be confiscated from any recalcitrant gunmen, insisting only that its soldiers would be vigorous in enforcing the rule. The precise geophrapical limits of the ban were conveyed to Lubanga on Tuesday, but were not released to the press. Force patrols have on several occasions dealt sternly with armed men who dared defy French troops, on one occasion shooting dead two youths when the pair pointed their weapons in the direction of the troops. The force had two minor encounters Monday, one in the morning when a shot was fired at its airport base and a second that led to the disarmament of three men whom Dubois said had acted in a "hostile manner."

AP 25 June 2003 Congo Fighters Withdraw BUNIA, Congo, June 25 (AP) — Dozens of tribal fighters withdrew from this unstable northeastern Congolese town today, complying with a deadline set by a French-led international peacekeeping force in the area. Most of the fighters appeared to have pulled out by Tuesday, the original deadline. The deadline was extended by a day when it became apparent some of the fighters from the Hema tribe were still in town. Officers of the peacekeeping force said that soldiers would disarm any of the fighters who remained in Bunia after the deadline. Bunia is the main city in the resource-rich Ituri region. The province has been the scene of some of the worst atrocities in the five-year-old civil war in Congo.

NYT 25 June 2003 Doing It Right in Congo For more than four years, the deadliest fighting since World War II has raged in the vast Central African nation of Congo. More than 3 million people are dead. In some parts of the country, organized society has collapsed, with tribal vengeance giving way to genocide. For those in the war's path, childhood ends abruptly. Parents are butchered in front of their children and militias turn the orphans into killers by their early teens. Neighboring countries are inflaming the conflict, arming rival militias and looting resources. Sadly, the United Nations has seemed powerless to reverse Congo's deadly disintegration. Before the arrival of a small French-led military force this month, international action has been timid. The new contingent, better equipped and with a stronger U.N. mandate to use force, may now contain the anarchy in one particularly violent area, the northeastern regional capital of Bunia. But the new force has only about 1,400 soldiers and is scheduled to begin pulling out in September. The rest of Congo remains at the mercy of marauding militias. To expand the Bunia operation nationwide could require a U.N. army as large as 100,000. There is no chance of the Security Council's sending or paying for a force that large. Peace will come to Congo, if it comes at all, only by strengthening diplomatic efforts to bring together the country's main factions in a transitional government. Even that won't have a chance unless the neighboring governments of Rwanda and Uganda order their local proxies to stop fighting. But while peacekeeping is not the long-term answer for Congo, it is needed in the short term. One immediate issue, to be decided by the Security Council in the next few weeks, is what will replace the French-led contingent after September. A new version of the weak U.N. force that proved unable to protect Bunia before is not an acceptable answer. The next U.N. peacekeeping mission must have legal authority to use sufficient force to protect civilians. It must be strong enough to prevent anarchy from returning to Bunia. And it must be available to move around the country to enforce compromises negotiated between the rival Congolese factions. The U.N. should also consider sending peacekeepers to the Lake Kivu area near the Rwandan and Ugandan borders. That is where some of the ethnic conflicts that touched off the long Congo conflict still fester. Fears of cross-border raids by militias based in this area continue to drive Rwandan and Ugandan involvement. An effective U.N. force of 10,000 to 20,000 troops, used this way, could encourage an eventual political settlement and ease the plight of civilians. No American troops are expected to go to Congo, but Washington will pay more than a fourth of the U.N.'s costs. Through its veto power, America will shape the Security Council's ultimate decision. The Bush administration should push for a peacekeeping mission that is militarily adequate and legally empowered to use appropriate force. Washington also needs to lean harder on its Ugandan and Rwandan allies to stop stoking the Congo conflict. No quick or easy solutions are available. The damage to Congo has simply been too extensive, the killing too vast, the many decades of past misgovernment too destructive. But the world must not abandon the Congolese people. Their agony challenges our humanity.

WP 29 June 2003 Whispers of Genocide, and Again, Africa Suffers Alone By Lynne Duke Sunday, June 29, 2003; Page B01 How bad does it have to get this time? How many Africans must die before the world is moved to action? Once again, there is bloodletting in Africa, this time in a place called Ituri, in the dense equatorial forests in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). Machetes and Kalashnikovs are the preferred weapons. Ethnic rivals are the preferred victims, especially in batches and whole families. At the United Nations this spring, whispered fears of "genocide" were in the air again. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who has been down this road before, warned that the pattern of killing in Ituri could presage a far more disastrous conflict. He called for a more robust U.N. peacekeeping force than the 8,700-strong contingent already in Congo, and France is now leading a supplemental emergency force of 1,400 to try to quell the Ituri violence. President Bush will travel to the continent next month. Among his stops will be Uganda, across the border from Ituri, where Ugandan troops once patrolled and supplied arms to combatants. Bush's trip will look nice. Last Thursday, in a speech to the Corporate Council on Africa, Bush outlined a broad-brush agenda on Africa, including an end to Congo's war. "To encourage progress across all of Africa, we must build peace at the heart of Africa," he said. But don't count on the White House to support a beefing up of the U.N.'s role in Congo. And don't expect Washington to do anything aggressive to stop the killing. That is not Washington's way -- at least when it comes to Africa. This has happened many times before. It happened under President Clinton, when the world failed to deter genocide in Rwanda. With indignation and rhetorical flourishes, the Bush administration recently cited that episode as a cautionary tale to shame members of the U.N. Security Council reluctant to throw in their support for the war against Iraq. "From a moral point of view, as the world witnessed in Rwanda . . . , the United Nations Security Council will have failed to act once again," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. But with violence once again threatening Africa's Great Lakes region, the United States is doing just what it did in 1994 -- sitting on the sidelines. So I wonder: Just how many dead Africans would it take for the United States to intervene? The answer may come soon if Ituri and other ethnically riven Congolese regions continue to smolder. But historically, Washington's and the rest of the world's tolerance for mass African death has been quite high. Perhaps I sound cynical, even a bit macabre. I admit it. I am bitter. That's because I've been there. I've seen these policy failures up close. It all goes back to a place called Nyabibwe, a Zairian town caught at the fluid front lines of war, where I came to understand -- with a sting I still feel sharply today -- that the West was willing again and again to let Africans die in mass slaughters. I was covering Africa for The Washington Post, and for several days in November 1996, armies of journalists, aid workers and U.N. personnel were vexed by the question: Where were the Rwandan war refugees? Their location and number would determine whether a U.N. peace mission would deploy to help them or would fold. The area around Nyabibwe was a logical place to look. Roughly 1.1 million people had fled to eastern Zaire after the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 and were housed in a string of 30 U.N. refugee camps along the border. Then, when war broke out in Zaire and engulfed the camps in November 1996, about 600,000 of them fled back to Rwanda. That should have left half a million, scattered by the fighting. That's what the U.N. said and what U.S. reconnaissance imagery, seen by aid groups, showed. The aid groups were outraged, then, to hear U.S. diplomats say there were no more than 200,000 refugees left in Zaire, dispersed in relatively small groupings. Moreover, the diplomats said, those refugees who remained in Zaire had probably taken part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and were thus unworthy of being saved. This last point was hotly debated, for the refugees included huge numbers of children and elderly and throngs of people being herded through the region like human shields. In search of the "missing" Rwandan refugees, I happened upon a blasted-to-smithereens refugee convoy at Nyabibwe, where the steady report of automatic weapons fire told us that fighting was still raging in the nearby hills. The Clinton administration's reasoning was clearly a crock, I realized. I counted 30 charred and twisted cars, trucks, buses and gas tankers choking the main road along Lake Kivu's western shore. In a region where few vehicles are ever spotted, of course reconnaissance flights would have seen all these vehicles plodding up the Kivu road. That road was lined for miles with the remnants of cooking fires and tents used by the refugees. Eyewitnesses I met on the road told me that hordes of people had moved with the convoy until forced to march off into the hills near Nyabibwe -- the same hills where I had heard the shooting. But there would be no rescue. The peace mission was aborted. Washington won the day, leaving 500,000 Africans to their fate. Months later, hundreds of thousands of refugees started emerging from the rain forest in search of aid only to be greeted by massacres that left untold numbers dead. The United States obviously cannot police the entire world. It cannot be expected or obligated to jump in and save the day in each and every conflict. Liberia, for example, also cries out for help. But it's the way Washington decides where to intervene, and for whom, that stirs indignation. It has become a chronic feature of U.S. policy -- dating back to the 1993 debacle that left 18 U.S. Rangers dead in Somalia -- to send no troops into harm's way in Africa. Over and over, U.S. diplomats will say that Africa, unlike the Balkans or Iraq, is not of strategic interest to the United States. But the U.S. aversion to intervention in Africa is deeper than that; Washington has prevented other nations' troops from intervening, as well. Rwanda, where 800,000 people died, is one case. Ituri, where the peacekeeping mandate comes up for Security Council reconsideration in the coming month, could become another. It is not a matter of asking why can't the Africans solve their own problems. It is, instead, a matter of asking: If the United States can help Kosovo Albanians, Iraqis, Bosnians, Israelis and Palestinians trying to settle their conflicts, why can't it help Africans? Many may be forgiven for believing it is about race and the lesser value that the United States places on African lives. Even by the standards of Africa's many catastrophes, the five-year-old Congo conflict rates high in terms of the sheer numbers of casualties. The conflict -- of which Ituri is one theater of battle -- is part of a domino effect caused by Rwanda's genocide. This war started in 1998, when a rebel faction supported by Rwandan and Ugandan troops mounted a failed military push on the Congolese capital, Kinshasa. Since then, the Congolese war has claimed more than 3 million lives, not just in battle, but also as a consequence of the sustained degradation in the region's quality of life. People are dying from malnutrition and from disease. In Ituri, aid groups estimate the death toll to be 50,000. The Western powers, we must surmise, find these deaths tolerable, for they have evoked no more than the usual tut-tutting and shaking of heads that accompany bad news about Africa. So Bush, like Clinton before him, will now travel to Africa. And, like Clinton before him, Bush will break bread with President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. Museveni is one of Washington's favored African leaders, in no small measure because of his leadership in bringing Uganda's stunningly high HIV-AIDS infection rate of a decade ago under control. But Uganda has played a destructive role in the Congo crisis. The United Nations has accused the Ugandan military and business elite of plundering Congo's natural resources. Aid groups have accused Uganda, along with Rwanda, of training and arming some of the fighters now ripping the Ituri region apart. Both Uganda and Rwanda have maintained military forces in Congo-Zaire since the 1997 ouster of Mobutu Sese Seko. The withdrawal of their forces earlier this year under a Congo peace accord has bequeathed the fighting to their respective militia proxies. That is what is fueling Ituri's violence. It is not some inevitable spasm of innate African violence, not some stereotype of darkest Africa as summoned up during Rwanda's nightmare. It is mere cause and effect, and thus highly predictable -- and preventable. Let hundreds of thousands of people die, and you can expect enmities to fester, leading to still more bouts of extreme violence. It is a cycle that can be slowed, even broken. The combatants in the broader Congolese war already have begun negotiating a transitional government, as called for in their peace accord. But that peace process could easily be sabotaged if the Ituri conflict goes unchecked. With a firm and consistent international commitment, plus a muscular military mandate and sufficient troop strengths, it can be done. It won't be easy, to be sure. Congo is a vast nation -- the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River. It is a dysfunctional state, with little electrical infrastructure, a collapsed road system and a dearth of telephones in most places outside the capital. The country was picked clean under Mobutu, the infamously corrupt dictator of 32 years, and plunged into more confusion by his power-hungry successor, the late Laurent Desire Kabila. Spreading peacekeepers around such a large and problematic place would admittedly be a logistical nightmare. Yet it must be done, and more than the 8,700 troops in the international force are required. And they need more muscle; they need to be authorized to shoot to kill, as is the emergency French-led force in Ituri. If the goal is to stabilize Co