Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/96932.html
FEARS OF A MASSACRE MOUNTING IN CONGO
Barry James/IHT
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
PARIS Officials in Paris, at UN headquarters in New York and in Africa sought Tuesday to head off another massacre in the heart of Africa as violence between two tribes, the Hema and the Lendu, increased in the northeast Democratic Republic of Congo.
An outgunned contingent of a few hundred UN soldiers deployed to observe a peace agreement in Congo appeared powerless to check the violence between tribes battling for control of the Ituri Province bordering Uganda. The UN forces were keeping a low profile after two of them, a Jordanian and a Nigerian, were found "savagely killed" on Sunday, according to a UN spokesman. It was not known who was responsible for the killings.
Aid workers say the situation in Bunia, in Orientale Province, threatens to turn into another genocidal massacre like Srebrenica in Bosnia or Rwanda, and are urging the United Nations to send more military help.
On Monday, Uganda completed an evacuation of its army as part of a peace agreement with the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, that has done little to stem the violence in the remote eastern province, where at least 50,000 people are believed to have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in more than four years of low-level warfare.
The Ugandan troops entered Congo in 1998 to enforce regional security and oppose Rwanda, their main rival in the region, which also sent in troops. The last contingent of Ugandans, accompanied by thousands of terrified Hema refugees, reached the frontier on Monday.
Because of the intervention of rival Ugandan and Rwandan forces in Congo, the tribal militias in the eastern part of the country are well equipped with grenade launchers and assault rifles, and aid workers and diplomatic observers were concerned that fighting between opposing militias could erupt in the current power vacuum. Aid workers say they fear that the dominant Lendu may massacre the richer Hema in a genocide like that in Rwanda, a few hundred kilometers to the south, when hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in a four-month period in 1994. Further fueling the conflict are the province's natural riches, which include farms and forests, as well as the chance to control lucrative cross-border trade.
The Associated Press quoted aid workers as saying they had found the bodies of 231 people killed since May 4 on the streets of Bunia, including women and children, some decapitated. Some reports said Lendu fighters had killed civilians and mutilated their bodies.
The UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, has called for volunteers to end the terror, and France responded on Tuesday by sending a dozen officers to reconnoiter Bunia, leading to speculation that they were preparing the way for the deployment of a larger UN force. The French presence is supported by Uganda but bitterly opposed by the government in Rwanda, which accuses the French of allowing genocidal murderers to escape into Congo when Paris sent troops to enforce the peace in Rwanda in 1994.
France is considering a request from Annan to lead an international peacekeeping force and provide a battalion with up to 1,000 troops. Diplomats at UN headquarters said Annan had appealed to about 20 countries to contribute troops. The UN Security Council endorsed the appeal last week.
The European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said this week that the EU also was considering providing soldiers, in what could be the first test of the Union's rapid reaction force.
Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune
Aggo Akyea
608-274-7409
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, visit:
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/aam.html
AAM Website: http://www.danenet.wicip.org/aam
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
