DRC: Eastern Congo Security Deteriorating, Crisis Group Reports

The Democratic Republic of Congo government's two-year military campaign against rebels in the east is failing and has sparked widespread abuses by both insurgents and the army, the International Crisis Group said.

Government forces and rebels are battling over control of land and mines of tin-ore, gold and coltan, with neither side strong enough to win, while conditions for civilians have deteriorated, the Brussels-based group said yesterday.

“Women and girls, particularly, have suffered the consequences of impunity and of a highly militarized environment in which rape is endemic,” it said in a report.

Conflict in eastern Congo exploded when army troops and ethnic Hutu militias from neighboring Rwanda who carried out the genocide against Tutsis in 1994 crossed into the mineral-rich east. Fighting persisted after a 2003 peace agreement, while a rapprochement between Congo and its former enemy Rwanda in December 2008 didn't improve stability, Crisis Group said.

Almost 1.3 million people were displaced in North Kivu and South Kivu provinces as of Sept. 30, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said today.

The integration into the Congolese army of a Tutsi-led rebel group previously backed by Rwanda has increased “the risk of inter-ethnic clashes, disintegration of the national army and destabilization of the region,” the group said.

Rwandan Hutu Militia

Military operations against a mainly Rwandan Hutu rebel group still living in eastern Congo, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR, have sparked retributions against civilians, the report said.

Major Sylvain Ekenge, army spokesman for the military operations against the FDLR, said Congo was making progress in the east and denied the findings of the Crisis Group report.

“If you see the actions of the FDLR now, they're sporadic,” Ekenge said by phone today from Goma, capital of North Kivu province. “We're continuing to hunt them and we are diminishing their capacity to resist.”

Since January 2009, the FDLR's military force has been cut in half to between 3,000 and 3,500, said Matthew Brubacher, a political affairs officer in the UN section responsible for the demobilization of the FDLR rebels.

“Without the military operations, we wouldn't have the numbers of demobilizations that we're having,” Brubacher said by phone today from Goma.

Congo is also making progress in removing the military from mining activities in the east, Ekenge said.

“Anyone caught mining will be arrested,” he said.

Crisis Group criticized the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo for failing to protect civilians, saying its credibility “has been seriously undermined.”

The 10-year-old UN mission in Congo is one of the organization's largest, with almost 20,000 soldiers costing more than $1.3 billion a year. Ninety-four percent of the mission's peacekeepers are deployed in Congo's eastern provinces.