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More UN troops needed in Congo: envoy
United Nations— The UN special envoy for the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Friday urged the Security
Council to provide extra troops for his peacekeeping mission to cope
with an upsurge in rebel attacks.
“I talked to the Council about reconfiguration of our forces to see
to what extent we can get more mileage out of what we’ve got to
respond to the situation,” Alan Doss, who heads the UN mission in
DRC (MONUC), told reporters.
He said he also requested “a surge capacity ... some additional
troops (and air mobility assets),” although he refused to go into
“operational details,” except to say that an “enhanced capacity to
detect movements of groups in a difficult terrain” such as drones
would be useful.
Doss however said after briefing the council on the situation in the
restive central African country that members made it clear that
“resources available for new commitments are very tight.”
“The situation in North Kivu (province) is above all very, very
preoccupying and we believe we need to go ahead as rapidly as
possible with the disengagement plan to reduce the risk of those
hostilities spreading and spilling over,” he said. “Ethnic tensions
have risen in North Kivu and that is very dangerous, no doubt about
it,” he added. “MONUC itself has been the subject of some
hostilities ... We believe that this has been orchestrated by groups
or individuals with their own ambitions and agendas.”
Doss specifically slammed as “unacceptable” recent comments by
renegade ethnic Tutsi colonel Laurent Nkunda “implying there is an
effort to reverse the results of a democractic election that we
supervised (in 2006).” “That would imply that he is walking out of
any effort to move the peace process forward,” he warned.“We do not
want to see the Congo plunged back into the conflict which spilled
over and involved neighbors,” Doss said.
A five-year conflict pitting government forces, supported by Angola,
Namibia and Zimbabwe, against rebels backed by Uganda and Rwanda,
ended in 2003 after claiming more than three million lives.
In a BBC interview Thursday, Nkunda called on all Congolese people
to “stand up” to the national government and said his rebel group
would “fight until the people are liberated”. Renewed fighting broke
out August 28 in eastern DRC, with government troops and Nkunda’s
National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) violating the
ceasefire reached under the Goma peace accord in January.
Doss also pointed to evidence of activity by Uganda’s rebel Lord’s
Resistance Army (LRA) in the Oriental province where 10 days ago
there were attacks on villages and the abduction of some
civilians.“We have a very small presence in that area. The
government is trying to reinforce its troops and we’re trying to
help them to contain the LRA,” he noted. “Our capacities to do that
are very limited given our preoccupations in the Kivus.”
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the two-decade-old
civil war between the LRA and the Ugandan government.Fighting
officially ended in 2006 when a ceasefire was agreed, however LRA
rebels have in part regrouped across the border in DRC during the
agreement’s much-delayed implementation.
With around 17,000 troops, MONUC is the UN’s largest peacekeeping
mission. —AFP
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