Rights group says Ituri civilians need UN protection

The US-based organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday called on the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, known by its French acronym MONUC, to immediately send more military and civilian observers to the strife-torn Ituri province in northeastern DRC. In a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, HRW said that the latest flare-up of violent inter-ethnic conflict between the Hemas and Lendus had resulted in hundreds of civilian killings and the displacement of thousands of people. "From the onset of the conflict in 1999 to the current spiral of killings, leadership disputes within the splinter Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie-Mouvement de liberation (RCD-ML) and manipulation by the occupying Ugandan army have combined to stoke the violence," the organisation stated. To dissuade the RCD-ML and Ugandans from causing more harm to unprotected civilians, and thus help in mitigating the conflict, it recommended that, under the terms of its current mandate, MONUC should send more military and civilian observers to the region to monitor the behaviour of militia forces on the ground. Given what it called a rapidly deteriorating situation, Human Rights Watch also called on the office of the Secretary-General and the UN Security Council to increase political pressure on all parties to the Lusaka cease-fire agreement on the DRC. By doing so, it said, governmental actors were more likely to insist that local forces under their sway would adopt the necessary measures to end abuses against civilians.