UN scrambling for force to stop Congo bloodbath
Canada considers troops: Thousands flee ethnic fighting as bodies litter streets
It's pretty sad when so much of the world reads this, and shrugs it off....and doesn't see that their own willfulness makes them totally impotent as far as stopping the killing. Americans can't be everywhere, nor should we be expected to be everywhere....the rest of the world can do their fair share of peacekeeping
Steven Edwards
National Post
nationalpost.com
Thursday, May 15, 2003
ADVERTISEMENT
UNITED NATIONS - As thousands fled renewed fighting yesterday between ethnic militias in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Canada said it will considerproviding troops for a possible UN intervention force.
UN officials said 2,500 crack peacekeeping troops with a mandate to shoot could stop the violence and prevent a sharp rise in an already high death toll.
France has said it is willing to provide a battalion of about 800 soldiers, but many other Western countries capable of fielding well-trained and well-equipped troops at short notice already have major commitments in other parts of the world.
Canada's biggest overseas deployments are in Afghanistan, Bosnia and the Persian Gulf.
The UN call for new troops to beef up forces already in the Congo raised chilling comparisons with the 1994 plea by Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general in charge of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, to be given just 5,000 more well-trained troops on the eve of that country's genocide. After the UN Security Council failed to respond to Mr. Dallaire, 800,000 people died as extremist Hutus slaughtered Tutsis and anyone who sympathized with them.
Bill Graham, the Foreign Minister, said yesterday it was "certain" Canada would study the feasibility deploying to the Congo, despite Canada's commitments elsewhere.
John McCallum, the Defence Minister, agreed Canada "could potentially" intervene in the Congo, but said there were also many other options available to the government. "We have to balance those various options against both our available resources and the priorities of the government," he said.
Dead bodies yesterday littered the streets of Bunia, focus of the latest fighting in the Congo.
Fighting between armed militias linked with the rival Hema and Lendu tribes has wrought havoc in the town and surrounding region over the past week. The UN, which has only eight humanitarian workers in Bunia after evacuating a larger crew, says there are hundreds dead, but adds it has no idea of the fate of people in the countryside.
Carolyn McAskie, the UN's deputy emergency relief co-ordinator, yesterday described the humanitarian situation as "extremely dangerous, even desperate."
Some 50,000 are fleeing south to Beni, while 3,000 have sought protection at the UN's Bunia headquarters, and 5,000 are crammed into the town's airport grounds. "They're under no roof. They're huddled in the compound," Ms. McAskie said.
The UN has provided them with plastic sheeting to shelter them from seasonal rains, and is feeding them with high protein biscuits. But with water cut off to the town, latrines do not work, raising fears of disease.
"There are indications of dysentery," Ms. McAskie said. There has also been an outbreak of measles.
Fighting erupted after Uganda withdrew some 3,000 troops from the area, leaving a power vacuum.
Although Uganda brought calm to the region, its presence sparked strong protests from its regional rival Rwanda, which threatened to re-invade eastern Congo for the third time in a decade.
Both countries are among five regional powers that have occupied parts of the resource-rich country in recent years on pretexts of either defending their own national security from rebel armies, or supporting the Congo's central government in Kinshasa.
The UN already has a large peacekeeping force in the Congo, including some 800 mainly Uruguayan troops in Bunia. But with a mandate that restricts the amount of force they can use, they were not able to quell the ethnic violence in the town after the Ugandans left.
The call now is for the Security Council to dispatch a force of troops from Western countries with a mandate to use all necessary force.
"We have to use force," said Meg Carey, deputy director of the Africa Division of UN Peacekeeping Department. "The [current] peacekeeping operation is lightly armed and is basically guard units. They're defending themselves and defending [UN] headquarters doing their best in that regard. But what [we need] is the rapid deployment of an enforcement measure."
Among the few Western countries without major overseas commitments is France, which did not participate in the war against Iraq.
But its historical involvement in central Africa has earned it a reputation for favouring certain ethnic groups over others, leading Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, to suggest that an intervention force be more broad.
A request has gone out to Britain which, like France, is a leading former colonial power in Africa. But its forces are heavily committed to Iraq. It also has peacekeeping troops in Sierra Leone.
Germany has heavy peacekeeping commitments around the world while Belgium, the former colonial master in the Congo, is detested by many Congolese.
sedwards@nationalpost.com |
