Global Policy Forum

By Evelyn Leopold

Eastern Congo is rapidly turning into one of the world's biggest disasters, with 3.3 million people out of reach of relief groups, including 4,500 malnourished children, a senior U.N. official said. In preparation for a U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday on civilians in war zones, Jan Egeland, the emergency relief coordinator, said 10 million people in the world were in conflict areas with little access to aid, most of them in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

"Access-wise, it is even worse than Darfur in western Sudan, where aid groups recently were permitted to enter," Egeland said in an interview. But he noted relief groups only recently had access to Darfur, where Arab militia have conducted a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, "so there is a tremendous race against the clock there, too."

The main area for the recent flow of Congo refugees, who are the victims of pillaging, killings and rape, was fighting around the town of Bukavu, he said. Rebels ousted government troops, who then retook the town. Some 130 international aid workers have relocated from various areas in the northern and southern Kivu regions of Congo to the city of Goma, leaving hundreds of thousands without food aid, health care, water and sanitation.

The U.N. peacekeeping force in the Congo is too small to stop all the abuses. Thousand are crossing the border into neighboring Burundi, and 5,000 more are at a transit camp in Rwanda, which has now closed its borders. "The civilian population again is the target of massive abuse," Egeland said." There has been a marked deterioration since Bukavu fell and it has been spreading. The world has not understood how deep the crisis has become and what is at stake."

Rebel Violence

Egeland refused to say who was responsible for the atrocities except to say there was enough blame to go around. Militant Hutus, who escaped from Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, were on the rampage as well as rebel groups loyal to Rwanda, other U.N. officials said.

Tensions also are rising along the border with troops from the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi lined up near each other, U.N. officials said. Human Rights Watch contends that government soldiers as well as dissident forces have carried out "war crimes" in Bukavu in their battle to control the city. The New York-based rights group said that in the past few months, rebellious factions of former rebel groups in Ituri and the Kivus have used violence to oppose integration into the new Congolese army and to challenge the authority of the fragile transitional government in the capital Kinshasa. Egeland said none of the political or military leaders believed they would ever be held accountable, but he predicted this would not last.

"The age of impunity has been ending in other parts of the world and one day it will also end in the DRC," he said. "We will record what happened. We will report how we have been forced to leave behind more than 3 million civilians who have disrupted humanitarian service and thousands of children without supplies," Egeland said. "There is a gruesome technique of creating terror to build a power base."

Weapons, he said, were cheap and plentiful, especially the Kalashnikov rifle. "A few men with automatic rifles can displace enormous defenseless civilian populations in no time." "The Kalashnikov is the atomic bomb of our time," he said.

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