The Congolese government’s military operation in eastern Congo, Kimia II, backed by United Nations peacekeepers and aimed at neutralizing the threat from a Rwandan Hutu militia group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), has resulted in an unacceptable cost for the civilian population, said 84 humanitarian and human rights groups in the Congo Advocacy Coalition today.

The coalition urged diplomats and UN officials, who are due to meet in Washington, DC, this week to discuss the situation in eastern Congo and the wider region, to take immediate steps to increase protection for civilians.

“The human rights and humanitarian consequences of the current military operation are simply disastrous,” said Marcel Stoessel of Oxfam. “UN peacekeepers, who have a mandate to protect civilians, urgently need to work with government forces to make sure civilians get the protection they need or discontinue their support.”

Read more – http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressrelease/2009-10-13/dr-congo-civilian-cost-military-operation-unacceptable

A United Nations assessment team has succeeded in restarting the disarmament and integration of some ethnic fighters into the national army in strife-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after they rejected the process or set preconditions.

The discussions led the Mai Mai Yakutumba to drop some preconditions, ironed out misunderstanding and resulted in the release by both the Yakutumba and another armed group, Forces républicaines fédéralistes (FRF), of more than 450 combatants for integration, according to the UN Mission in the DRC, known as MONUC.

The Mission said the assessment was motivated by the reservations of some armed ethnic groups about disarming at a time of robust military operations by the UN and the national army against Rwandan Hutu rebel Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR) in the Kivu provinces.

Read more – http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32470&Cr=democratic&Cr1=congo

Michael Mann has stated in ‘The Dark Side of Democracy’ (2003) that ethnic and religious conflicts continue to simmer around the world and the death toll in the 20th century for them is somewhere over 70 million. Above 80% of people killed in wars during the 90s were civilians in civil wars, mostly ethnic in nature, which have taken over from interstate or conventional ideology based wars. Displacement, bloodshed and a very convoluted conflict are not new to Congo, which continues to reverberate from the violent aftershocks of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. After Hutu death squads exterminated hundreds of thousands of Tutsi in Rwanda, only to be stopped by the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s take over of the country in July the same year, many killers fled into eastern Congo in what became known as the Great Lakes refugee crisis. The Hutu militias have regrouped, and United Nations officials blame them for terrorizing civilians, especially women, although they claim to have no part in these atrocities (Gettlemen. J, 2007). Read more…