Congo civilians flee as rebels advance

29 Oct 2008, 7:48 am   -   Source: AAP
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Rebels advanced toward Congo's Goma, sending tens of thousands of terrified civilians into a makeshift shelter as Congolese troops and UN tanks retreated.

Rebels advanced toward Congo's eastern provincial capital Goma, sending tens of thousands of terrified civilians into a makeshift shelter as Congolese troops and UN tanks retreated.

The sudden influx of an estimated 30,000 people tripled the size of the camp in Kibati in a matter of hours, said Ron Redmond, spokesman for the UN refugee agency.

"It's chaos up there," Redmond said from Geneva, citing UN staff in Congo. "These crowds of people coming down from the north have already started turning up there."

A hundred refugees a day, mostly women and children, also were fleeing across the border into Uganda, the Red Cross said.

In Kibati, a few kilometres from the front line, young men lobbed rocks at three UN tanks also heading away from the battlefield.

The UN has 17,000 peacekeepers in Congo - the biggest mission in the world.

"What are they doing? They are supposed to protect us," said Jean-Paul Maombi, a 31-year-old nurse from Kibumba.

Some 70 kilometres away, government soldiers fired on civilians and trapped foreign aid workers trying to escape the town of Rutshuru, reported the top UN envoy in Congo, Alan Doss. He said peacekeepers were forced to "respond", apparently meaning they shot at the soldiers who are supposed to be their allies.

Aid agencies said their workers could hear bombs exploding as the rebels closed in and angry and frightened civilians and soldiers blocked their evacuation by UN peacekeepers.

The mob was looting humanitarian centres and the belongings of about 50 trapped aid workers at Rutshuru, a strategic town north of Goma, said Ivo Brandau, a spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA.

Brandau said tens of thousands of civilians are fleeing that town, heading north and east toward the Ugandan border. Rutshuru had a population of about 30,000 residents and the same number of refugees.

Doctors Without Borders said its doctors and nurses trapped at Rutshuru Hospital had treated 70 war wounded since Sunday but most patients had fled the hospital.

UN helicopter gunships fired rockets at rebels on both fronts on Tuesday but are hampered by their using civilians as shields, UN spokeswoman Sylvia van den Wildenberg said.

The rebels also are fighting around Rugari, a town between Goma and Rutshuru, as well as north-west of Goma around Sake - using several fronts to scatter government forces and UN peacekeepers.

Doss, the UN envoy, vowed to keep Rutshuru and other towns out of rebel hands. "We are going to remain there, and we are going to act against any effort to take over a city or major population centre by force," he told reporters in New York in a videoconference.

The tactics of the helicopter gunships appeared to be succeeding in part. By late afternoon, about 200 government soldiers were nearly three kilometres closer to the rebels than the line of the troops that retreated. They were being resupplied from a truck loaded with rocket-propelled grenades.

The chaos in eastern Congo has been fuelled by festering hatreds left over from the Rwandan genocide and the country's unrelenting civil wars. Renegade General Laurent Nkunda has threatened to take Goma despite calls from the UN Security Council for him to respect a ceasefire brokered by the UN in January.

Nkunda charges that the Congolese government has not protected his minority Tutsi tribe from a Rwandan Hutu militia that escaped to Congo after helping perpetrate the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Half a million Tutsis were slaughtered.

Nkunda's ambitions have expanded since he launched a fresh onslaught on August 28 - he now declares he will "liberate" all of Congo, a country the size of Western Europe with vast reserves of diamonds, gold and other resources.

The UN says more than 200,000 people have been forced from their homes in the past two months, joining 1.2 million displaced in previous conflicts in the east. Outbreaks of cholera and diarrhoea have killed dozens in camps, compounding the misery.

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