Date:14/11/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/11/14/stories/2008111462632100.htm

International

3,000 more U.N. troops for Congo

Chris McGreal

To bolster the world’s largest peacekeeping mission

— PHOTO: AP

Scattered lives: People carry bags of flour away form the aid distribution point in Kibati, north of Goma, on Thursday.

Kigali (Rwanda): The U.N. is poised to send 3,000 more troops to the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, bolstering the world’s largest peacekeeping mission as reports emerged of looting and rape by government troops fleeing a rebel advance.

Meanwhile, Angola on Wednesday said it would respond to a Congolese government request to send its forces to block, and possibly reverse, advances by the Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda in the east. A small number of Angolan troops have already been seen fighting to defend the regional capital, Goma.

Mr. Nkunda earlier this week warned that he would attack any foreign troops that entered the conflict. The arrival of Angolan troops is also likely to aggravate neighbouring Rwanda, which fought them in the years after its 1998 invasion of Congo. The U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asked the Security Council to approve the extra peacekeepers, amid reports of escalating attacks on civilians. Diplomats said the request was likely to be approved.

About half of the 17,000 peacekeepers in Congo are based in the east, but the U.N. says they are too few to protect civilians. The spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo, Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich, said he had received reports of several government troops raping and looting in villages near the town of Kanyabayonga, north of Goma.

Mr. Ban’s call was backed by aid agencies such as Oxfam, which said on Wednesday there had been a rise in rape, forced labour and other brutality in eastern Congo. “In camps across North Kivu, women have been raped while searching for food and firewood, forced into doing humiliating tasks at gunpoint, and children separated from their families are recruited into armed groups,” said Oxfam’s head in Congo, Juliette Prodhan.

Aid workers are still trying to locate people who fled the recent fighting or were forced out of refugee camps by Mr. Nkunda’s rebels. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008