Civilians suffer amid tense stalemate in eastern Congo

Civilians in Congo’s conflict-torn North Kivu province are bearing the brunt of instability there as warring factions step up forced recruitment and a humanitarian crisis deepens.

Mr Jean-Paul Kakuti was attending his village school when he was kidnapped by fighters loyal to renegade Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda, who are battling Democratic Republic of Congo’s army in the lawless eastern province.

“When they took me, I was with about 30 others. They took lots of school children and teachers,” Mr Kakuti said as he waited in a UN refugee agency tent in Bulengo, just west of the provincial capital, Goma. “They wanted us to fight alongside them, to become rebels like them.”

A tense stalemate reigns in North Kivu after an informal UN-brokered ceasefire helped end heavy fighting last month. Intermittent skirmishes continue between Nkunda’s fighters, government forces, local militia, and Rwandan rebels.

With no concrete efforts under way to negotiate a settlement to the current situation, North Kivu’s civilian population is suffering an intensifying humanitarian crisis. More than 90,000 people were displaced by last month’s fighting and there are worrying signs the situation could soon worsen.

The Congolese army, considered by human rights groups as the country’s worst human rights abuser, has poured thousands of extra troops into the province to battle Mr Nkunda.

Congo’s UN peacekeeping mission accuses Nkunda, local militia, and Rwandan Hutu FDLR rebels of forcibly recruiting fighters, in some cases minors. The indications point towards preparations for the next round of fighting.

“It’s really an explosive situation that can change overnight,” said Philippe Havet, a doctor at a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in the isolated town of Masisi. “We don’t know what will happen tomorrow. That much is completely clear.”

Even before the latest round of fighting, more than 270,000 civilians had fled fighting in North Kivu since the beginning of the year. Few dare return home, causing camps to balloon and placing a strain on local communities that have welcomed them.

Uncounted thousands more have been cut off from assistance, as transport routes have been transformed into frontlines.

“Access to people has become a real challenge. North Kivu is divided,” said Aya Shneerson, the UN World Food Programme’s director in North Kivu. “No one is going home, because the situation is unclear. There are places where people urgently need help that we can’t get to.”

At the hospital in Masisi, one of the few operating in the area, a team from the Belgian chapter of MSF carries out an average of 1,000 consultations per week. The 73-bed facility currently houses 130 patients and medical supplies must be flown in by helicopter to avoid ambushes on the road from Goma.

“They come walking sometimes from 20 km away,” Dr Havet told Reuters by phone from Masisi. “There are some who have to wait two days to be treated.”

Congo’s UN peacekeeping mission has been pushing for negotiations to end the crisis and former colonial ruler Belgium is calling for the appointment of a special outside mediator for North Kivu.

“It’s clear that a political solution is needed, and quickly. The humanitarian consequences of drawn-out instability in North Kivu are pretty dire, maybe a million displaced by the end of the year,” said one western diplomat.

“There seems to be a lack of political will from both sides to have meaningful talks.” 

Meanwhile, Congo hopes a new biometric identity card scheme backed by the European Union can help overhaul its undisciplined armed forces, branded by campaigners as the central African state’s worst rights abuser.

After decades as a tool of repression under former leader Mobutu Sese Seko and a devastating 1998-2003 war, Democratic Republic of Congo’s army is bloated, unmanageable and corrupt.

UN officials and activists such as Human Rights Watch accuse the military of rape, looting and extra-judicial killings, particularly in Congo’s violence-torn east where rebels still operate near the border with Rwanda and Uganda.

The identity card scheme, relaunched last week after running into problems earlier this year, should allow President Joseph Kabila’s government to determine the exact size and whereabouts of its armed forces, a first step towards protecting civilians.

“The only sure way of reducing and eventually stopping these abuses of power is to put the soldiers in barracks, to make them lead a normal military life,” Congo’s top military commander General Dieudonne Kayembe told Reuters. 

“With the improvements that will result from this biometric control, we’ll be able to envisage building barracks.” 

Experts say the faltering attempts to reform the army pose the main risk to stability after elections last year, the former Belgian colony’s first democratic polls in more than four decades.

Army morale is poor. Salaries are low and are rarely paid on time, with senior officers often skimming off money or pocketing the wages of phantom soldiers. Estimates put the size of the military at between 100,000 and 160,000 soldiers. 

“We are suffering,” one soldier told Reuters, asking not to be identified from fear of reprisals. “We make 14,500 Congolese francs ($29 a month). You can’t live on that. We have children. And we’re still waiting to get paid this month.” 

Brought in to help turn Congo’s army around, military advisers from the European Union faced a daunting task.

“We were told to come up with a way to pay the soldiers,” said General Pierre-Michel Joana, head of the EU’s security sector assistance programme (EUSEC). “But we quickly realised the entire administration needed to be completely reformed.”

With that in mind, Congo launched an ambitious census of its armed forces this year with EU assistance.

Each soldier will be issued with an identity card with a microchip containing a digital fingerprint and information including rank, age, marital status and number of children.

“We don’t even have this in the French army,” Joana said.

The goals are to establish the size of the army, identify soldiers and locate them so they can be regularly paid.

Not everyone is convinced. Many question whether the army will be able to maintain the identity card readers in working order in far-flung barracks and whether soldiers will lose their cards. Campaigners say deeper reforms are needed to overhaul one of Africa’s most brutal armed forces.

“The tradition of the army as a force of internal repression, as it was under Mobutu, has survived,” said Francois Grignon, Africa director for the think-tank International Crisis Group. “When you put on a uniform, it gives you a right to do whatever you want ... You need to end this impunity.”

For hundreds of soldiers waiting to hand in census forms at an air base in Congo’s sprawling capital, Kinshasa, there were more immediate concerns. “We know that with this census we will be paid better. That’s why we are here,” said one.