Peace still words on paper for east Congo civilians

Three months after a peace accord in east Congo, armed groups are still killing and raping civilians, and fighting between the army and Rwandan rebels who did not sign the ceasefire has displaced thousands more refugees.

Humanitarian organisations are calling on the international community which backed the Jan. 23 Goma peace agreement to take urgent action to ensure it is translated into real security for civilians in Democratic Republic of Congo's turbulent east.

They say that since President Joseph Kabila's government and rebel and militia factions signed the accord, which introduced a ceasefire in North and South Kivu provinces, civilians there are still enduring horrific suffering. Scores have been killed, hundreds of women and girls raped and children recruited as fighters. Malnutrition, cholera and malaria are rife.

"Nothing has changed ... We're seeing that, three months on, there has been no progress on human rights and the humanitarian situation. This needs to be more than words on paper," Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), told Reuters.

North and South Kivu remain a violence-racked remnant of Congo's 1998-2003 war and its ongoing humanitarian disaster that have killed about 5.4 million people, mostly from hunger and disease in the deadliest conflict since World War Two.

Congo's eastern borderlands are an ethnic and political tinderbox in the Great Lakes region, still charged with racial tensions rooted in Rwanda's 1994 genocide which helped trigger the 1998-2003 Congolese war, sucking in neighbouring states.

The main aim of the Jan. 23 Goma accord was to guarantee peace for the long-suffering populations of the Kivus, to allow more than 1 million people displaced by violence in the two provinces to return home and rebuild their shattered lives.

But over the last week fighting has flared between the Congolese army and Hutu rebels of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), who did not sign the January peace agreement and retain a powerful guerrilla army in eastern Congo.

Recent clashes drove at least 16,000 people from their homes and forced two United Nations agencies to suspend some relief operations and food distribution.

Far from seeing a reduction in refugees since Jan. 23, the United Nations estimates a total of 75,000 more people have been displaced by violence in the Kivus.



ETHNIC ENEMIES

"It's true. There has been a lot of violence lately, but we will finish with that soon," the Congolese army's top commander in North Kivu, General Vainqueur Mayala, said.

Mayala told Reuters the clashes were the result of the army deploying near FDLR strongholds ahead of an eventual offensive.

But humanitarian agencies fear large-scale government operations against the FDLR could lead to reprisal attacks against civilians, triggering a massive new wave of refugees.

Congo last year pledged to disarm the FDLR, by force if necessary, under an agreement aimed at alleviating tensions with neighbour Rwanda. Analysts say solving the problem of the FDLR is key to achieving long-term stability in eastern Congo.

One signatory of the Jan. 23 Goma accord was rebel General Laurent Nkunda, who led a four-year insurgency to defend Congo's Tutsi minority against what he says is the threat to their existence posed by the Rwanda Hutu FDLR, their sworn enemies.

The FDLR are composed in part of Rwandan Hutu ex-military and Interahamwe militia responsible for the killings of some 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. Thousands of Tutsis fled the genocide to eastern Congo.

A month before the January peace pact was signed, Nkunda's 4,000 fighters were able to push back an offensive by more than 20,000 government troops who had U.N. logistical backing.

Analysts say the FDLR are a much larger guerrilla force that is deeply entrenched among the local population of the Kivus.

Diplomats point out that pacifying another northeast Congo hotspot, Ituri province, where inter-ethnic conflict killed more than 70,000 people, took three years.

"This process (in the Kivus) is going to be long and complex ... It involves even more players (than Ituri), so we should expect there to be challenges," a Western diplomat said.