Bunia "stabilising but still precarious", says MONUC

The security and humanitarian situation in Bunia, northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was "stabilising but still precarious" on Wednesday, the UN peacekeeping mission there, known as MONUC, reported.

In a news conference in the capital, Kinshasa, MONUC's director of public information, Patricia Tome, said the local Red Cross had recovered 429 bodies and that 74,000 people had been displaced from Bunia, the principal city of Ituri District, since the latest round of fighting erupted in early May. Tome added that 128 children had been separated from their families.

She said that MONUC continued to receive reports of rape, kidnapping and extortion in and around Bunia.

"Villages situated along the Kilo-Mongbwalu axis were abandoned by their residents who fled exactions by armed militias," she said.

However, in a positive development, Tome reported that several hundreds of people who had found refuge in MONUC sites had now returned to their homes.

Tome also reported that MONUC was still unable to confirm the alleged killing of between 250 to 350 civilians in Tshomia on Saturday [see earlier report, "Lendu militias accused of massacre of more than 250"].

While nearly 10,000 people had received 21-day food rations from NGOs operating in Bunia, Tome warned that the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs had reported a massive shortfall in funding for humanitarian efforts in the DRC, with only 18.5 percent of the needed US $232 million for 2003 having been received to date.

On the military front, Tome reported that the Union des patriotes congolais (UPC), an Hema militia which claims to have 15,000 troops and currently controls central Bunia, informed MONUC of the beginning of the cantonment of its troops in a perimeter of six to 20 km from the city.

"MONUC visited a camp where it noticed the presence of 600 UPC troops,” Tome said. “For the Mission, the announcement of this cantonment is unilateral and was not discussed with MONUC and the multinational force."

She said that the cantonment of armed militias outside of Bunia was required by a mid-March agreement reached among Ituri belligerents.

Sources in Bunia reported that UPC leader Thomas Lubanga had named the outlying locations of Similiabo (along the Bunia - Mandro route), Dele (along the Bogoro - Kasenyi route), Rwampara (along the southwest approach to Bunia) and Kambaokabo (along the Songolo - Komanda route) as the areas to which his forces would withdraw ahead of the arrival of a French-led multinational peace enforcement mission.

However, a humanitarian observer in Bunia warned that should the UPC follow this plan, all access routes into Bunia would be under the control of UPC forces, in which case the humanitarian community would "most certainly" have very limited access to areas beyond UPC force concentrations. This, the observer stated, would "constitute an unbearable security risk for any logistics activities and therefore be totally unusable for relocating humanitarian assistance commodities".

The observer said: "It should be noted that [the multinational peace enforcement] mission would be insufficiently mandated to prevent the asphyxiation of Bunia by UPC armed elements."