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NAIROBI, Kenya, May 22 - The United Nations, burdened by its inability to stave off the mass killings in Rwanda in 1994 and by failed missions in Bosnia and Somalia, is allowing its peacekeepers to mount some of the most aggressive operations in its history.
The change has been evolving over the last decade, as the Security Council has adopted the notion of "robust peacekeeping" and rejected the idea that the mere presence of blue-helmeted soldiers on the ground helps quell combat.
It is most obvious in Congo, which commands by far the largest deployment of United Nations troops in the world. Peacekeepers in armored personnel carriers, facing enemy sniper attacks as they lumber through rugged dirt paths in the eastern Ituri region, are returning fire. Attack helicopters swoop down over the trees in search of tribal fighters. And peacekeepers are surrounding villages in militia strongholds and searching hut by hut for guns.
"The ghost of Rwanda lies very heavily over how the U.N. and the Security Council have chosen to deal with Ituri," said David Harland, a top official at the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York.
...
Recently a commander in eastern Congo, a Bangladeshi colonel named Hussain Mahmud Choudhury, pointed at a huge map in his office in Bunia, the regional capital, to show a reporter where his troops had been chasing the militias. "Here, here, here," he said, banging on the map.
"If we hear they are somewhere, we move in," he said. "We don't get them all the time, but they have to run. Their morale is shattered, and from a military point of view, that is everything..."
Hey, they even have a human rights group complaint:
But nowhere do war and peace seem as cloudy as in Congo, where peacekeepers received a beefed-up mandate from the Security Council in 2003 - and where at least one human rights group has complained of civilian casualties.
...United Nations peacekeepers in Congo were not always so gung-ho. For years, they were criticized for huddling in their camps as atrocities recurred in the countryside. Now, some critics condemn them for being too aggressive. And critics also denounce the sexual abuse of girls by some peacekeepers...
There's more...
Bans visit came after three days of sometimes deadly fighting between rebels and government forces that ended a precarious calm spell in the mineral-rich east of the country, an area gripped by conflict for more than two decades. The latest bout of fighting near Goma, which was briefly seized by the M23 rebels in an armed uprising last year despite the presence of a large UN peacekeeping force, has sent thousands of people fleeing. The UN said shelling in Goma killed three people and wounded 10 on the eve of Bans visit, but the Congolese army and rebel forces said the situation on the ground was calm on Thursday. Ban had said earlier this week that deployment of a UN intervention force made up of about 3,000 African troops should be accelerated in view of the fresh unrest. On Thursday, the UN chief gave a firmer deadline, saying: It will arrive [in] about one or two months.
The force made up of Tanzanian, Malawian and South African soldiers was approved by the UN Security Council in March as its first ever offensive peacekeeping brigade. It will join the 17,000-strong peacekeeping force the biggest currently deployed in the world by the UN already in place in the DR Congo, but it will have an additional mandate of fighting and disarming the rebels. The latest unrest was unleashed barely a week after the first troops from the UN offensive brigade arrived in the east, an area rich in minerals including gold and coltan, which is used in cell phones and other electronic equipment. Both Kinshasa and the M23 have accused each other of launching hostilities and trying to scupper peace efforts in the restive east. The rebels had earlier announced a cessation of hostilities for Bans visit. The government said on Tuesday that 19 people had been killed on Monday.
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, who is accompanying Ban on the regional tour, on Wednesday pledged US$1 billion in aid as part of a UN-brokered accord aimed at bringing peace and stability to the region. We believe it offers the best hope for peace in a generation, Ban said of the agreement signed by 11 regional countries in February after the M23 uprising. But that agreement must translate into concrete actions, he said after meeting Congolese President Joseph Kabila at the start of his regional tour, that will also take him to Uganda and onto an African Union summit meeting in Ethiopia. Despite its vast mineral wealth, the DR Congo is ranked by the UN as the worlds least developed and has been devastated by some of Africas deadliest wars.
The M23 rebellion in the east last year threatened to drag the region into a fresh fully-fledged war amid claims by the UN and Kinshasa that Rwanda and Uganda are backing the M23. Regional and international diplomatic pressure forced peace talks on the warring parties, but fresh fighting broke out on Monday. The UNs refugee agency said the fighting, had forced about 30,000 displaced civilians to flee temporary shelters. The M23 a largely ethnic Tutsi group of former army defectors has vowed to retaliate if attacked by UN troops, but said it does not intend to retake Goma.
UN troops in DR Congo in ?one or two months:? Ban - Taipei Times
Rwanda, which the U.N. accuses of backing the rebels in the neighboring nation of Congo, blamed the Congolese military for the shelling of its territory, saying it was done with the intention of dragging them into the conflict. But in New York, the United Nations said the U.N. force "can confirm firing incidents into Rwandan territory originated from M23 positions" from Aug. 22-29, and stressed that "it has not witnessed any Congolese Armed Forces firing into Rwandan territory during this period."
Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo said a projectile fired by Congolese forces at 9:45 a.m. killed a woman and seriously injured her 2-month old baby in a market in Rubavu town, located 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the Congolese border. "We have remained restrained for as long as we can but this provocation can no longer be tolerated. We have the capacity to determine who fired at us and will not hesitate to defend our territory. Rwanda has a responsibility to protect its population," Mushikiwabo said. She said a second projectile landed at 11:20 a.m. in Rubavu, injuring one person, and that eight landed at nearby Busasamana village 10 minutes later.
Residents take to the streets in protest over recent violence in Goma, Congo
Goma, a city of 1 million located on the Rwandan border, briefly fell to the M23 rebels last year, whose ranks are swollen with undercover Rwandan soldiers, according to repeated reports by the United Nations Group of Experts. The soldiers from Rwanda join the M23 in small groups, hiking across footpaths into Congo. Rwanda has also supplied them with arms and sophisticated equipment, including night vision goggles, the report said. Meanwhile, combat continued in eastern Congo on Thursday, and Congolese Minister of Information Lambert Mende confirmed that two shells had landed in two separate neighborhoods in the provincial capital of Goma overnight, killing one person and wounding eight. That brings to 13 the number of people killed in Goma by shelling from rebel positions north of the city in just over a week, ever since the Congolese army backed by United Nations troops went on the offensive against the M23 rebels.
Paluku Kavunga, a resident of Goma, said he had seen the latest victim of the shelling: "I saw the body torn into pieces of a boy who was 16 years old and who was killed last night," he said. "This morning I heard another two detonations not far from Goma and I also saw four helicopters from the United Nations who were flying over the city of Goma." The fighting in recent days has been among the most intense in the past year, and comes after the United Nations Security Council in March authorized the creation of a special intervention brigade which, unlike the other 17,000 peacekeepers stationed in this vast nation, have a mandate allowing them to go on the offensive against the M23 rebel group. The brigade, made up of soldiers from Tanzania and South Africa, was created in the wake of the criticism following the fall of Goma to the rebels last year.
More Congo conflict spills over into Rwanda - Africa - Stripes
Bemba, 53, sat impassively as the sentence was read. He was convicted in March of five counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for failing to prevent the rapes, looting and killings that his troops, the Congolese Liberation Movement, employed in a reign of terror as they attempted to suppress a coup in the Central African Republic in 2002 and 2003. He was sentenced to two 18-year terms and two 16-year terms, to run concurrently, and his time spent in a Belgian jail since 2008 will be deducted from his penalty. Bemba's lawyers have stated he will appeal the case.
The Dickens you say!
The conviction and sentence are groundbreaking: Bemba is the first person to be convicted of war crimes by the ICC, an international court established in 2002 as a "court of last resort" to try major crimes. He is also the first to be held directly responsible for his subordinates' actions; his 1,500 troops engaged in a wide-scale rampage in the CAR for a five-month period, and ICC judges said Bemba could have stopped the violence but chose not to. ICC judge Sylvia Steiner said Bemba failed to restrain the troops in his private army, resulting in "sadistic" rapes, killings and pillaging of "particular cruelty."
Bemba's trial was also the first to consider rape as a weapon of war and a war crime. "Today's sentencing marks a critical turning point for the thousands of women, children and men who were victims of Bemba's orchestrated campaign of rape and murder," said Karen Naimer, an observer of the trial and director of the sexual violence in conflict zones program for the non-governmental group Physicians for Human Rights. The case was also significant in that 5,200 witnesses, many of whom were victims, participated in the trial, and may now be eligible for reparations.
War crimes court sentences former Congolese vice president to 18 years in prison
