OFFICIALS FROM the United Nations Security Council will fly to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) this weekend, as doubts grow over the future of the organisation’s 20,000-strong peacekeeping mission in the country.
President Joseph Kabila has called for the UN to leave because of its inability to protect civilians, but the top UN official in Congo, Alan Doss, cautioned against such a move.
Although the situation was stable enough in the west of the country to pull out 2,000 peacekeepers, he said violence in some eastern provinces was so bad that it necessitated an increased police presence to maintain public order.
“The humanitarian situation in the Kivus and parts of Orientale province remain of deep concern with a large number of internally displaced persons, high levels of sexual violence against women and attacks on humanitarian workers,” he said.
Eight members of the International Committee of the Red Cross were kidnapped on Friday in eastern Congo, where peacekeepers are still supporting the national army in its efforts to eradicate Rwandan Hutu fighters and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army.
Mr Doss’s comments come ahead of a new study of rape victims in eastern Congo, which reveals the extent to which sexual violence has become endemic in the region since the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda spilled across the border.
The research, which was commissioned by Oxfam and conducted by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, shows that although the number of rapes by armed combatants has fallen, it has risen dramatically among civilians.
Looking at more than 4,000 cases reported at the Panzi hospital in South Kivu, eastern Congo, the research found that there was a shocking 17-fold increase in rapes carried out by civilians between 2004 and 2008.
Fewer than 1 per cent of rapes were perpetrated by civilians in 2004, but by 2008 that proportion had gone up to 38 per cent, suggesting “a normalisation” of rape among the civilian population. Rape by soldiers and militiamen decreased by 77 per cent.
“Rape of this scale and brutality is scandalous” said Krista Riddley, director of humanitarian policy at Oxfam America. “This is a wake-up call at a time when plans are being discussed for UN peacekeepers to leave the country.”
Mr Kabila came to power in 2006, in an election hailed as a democratic milestone for the country, which was ruled for almost 32 years by the authoritarian Mobutu Sese Seko.
However, the Domocratic Republic of Congo risks anarchy without democracy and institutional reform, according to a report from the International Crisis Group, which calls Mr Kabila’s four years in power a failure.
“Nearly four years after Joseph Kabila won the presidency in elections hailed as a milestone in the peace process, power is centralised at the presidential office, checks and balances barely exist, and civil liberties are regularly undermined . . .” the report said.