<i>Lack of troops, 'schizophrenic' mandate hamper UN in DR Congo </i>
Congolese Army soldiers light cigarettes as they man a frontline position near a road leading into the North Kivu provincial capital city of Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) yesterday. Photo: AFP
With a "schizophrenic" mandate and a lack of troops and logistics, UN peacekeepers in Democratic Republic of Congo are being accused of powerlessness in the face of conflict, diplomats and analysts say.
Despite the presence of 5,800 peacekeepers in Nord-Kivu province, rebels led by Laurent Nkunda have come as close as 15 kilometres to the provincial capital Goma.
Last week, what the head of the UN mission in Congo (MONUC), Alan Doss, called war crimes took place virtually under the eyes of about 140 peacekeepers based in Kiwanja, north of Goma.
MONUC has a clear mandate to open fire to protect civilians, but in Kiwanja -- where Human Rights Watch says at least 50 were slain last week -- the head of UN peacekeeping, Alain Le Roy, acknowledged it should have done just that.
MONUC, which has opened fire several times on the rebels, has been reinforcing its personnel in Goma to avoid a repeat of 2004 when Nkunda's fighters briefly captured Bukavu, in Sud-Kivu province, from 600 peacekeepers.
"UN troops are crossing guards," a diplomatic source in Congo told AFP on condition of anonymity. "When things are no longer going right, they save themselves. Zero fatalities is their policy."
Deployed since 2001, MONUC is the biggest UN peacekeeping mission anywhere, with 17,000 soldiers in country as big as Europe is "from Portugal up to Russia," said Pierre-Antoine Braud, a former UN political adviser.
In early October, Doss called for 3,000 extra troops for Nord-Kivu -- a plea that remains unanswered by the UN Security Council, which Tuesday took no decision on reinforcing the mission.
The council is to take up the issue again on November 26 following a report from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
Apart from more boots on the ground, MONUC needs "better means" of intelligence -- such as drones and satellite imagery -- to decipher rebel intentions, said Xavier Zeebroek of the Peace and Security Research and Information Group (GRIP) in Brussels.
In fact, MONUC only has 1.14 million dollars a year to spend, equal to "a week of the US presence in Iraq," said Braud, a co-founder of Bridging International, a network of conflict and post-conflict consultants.
That is a meagre budget, and "a major source of its lack of popularity," given its "schizophrenic" mandate, Zeebroek said.
"The rebels accuse MONUC of fighting against them, the Congolese army accuses it of not fighting enough with it, and the people accuse it of no longer protecting them."
"The result is that no one trusts it anymore."
Risky operations by the Congolese army have also helped to discredit MONUC, a diplomatic source said, with government forces "starting action without consultation with MONUC and then asking it to take over when it becomes a rout".
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