Tens of thousands of terrified civilians flee into a makeshift shelter, heading north and east toward the Ugandan border.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFcongo un rebels 224 ap(photo credit: )
Rebels advanced toward Congo's eastern provincial capital of 600,000 people Tuesday, 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 told The Associated Press 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, that country's Red Cross said.
In Kibati, a few miles from the front line, young men lobbed rocks Tuesday at three UN tanks also heading away from the battlefield. The UN has 17,000 UN 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 45 miles 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 centers 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 Tuesday but are hampered by their using civilians as shields, UN spokeswoman Sylvia van den Wildenberg told The Associated Press.
The rebels also are fighting around Rugari, a town between Goma and Rutshuru, as well as northwest 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 center by force," he told reporters in New York in a video-conference.
The tactics of the helicopter gunships appeared to be succeeding in part. By late afternoon, about 200 government soldiers were nearly 3 kilometers 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 fueled by festering hatreds left over from the Rwandan genocide and the country's unrelenting civil wars. Renegade Gen. Laurent Nkunda has threatened to take Goma despite calls from the UN Security Council for him to respect a cease-fire 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 Aug. 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. Congo's vast mineral wealth helped fuel back-to-back wars from 1997 to 2003.
The UN says more than 200,000 people have been forced from their homes in the last two months, joining 1.2 million displaced in previous conflicts in the east. Outbreaks of cholera and diarrhea have killed dozens in camps, compounding the misery.
On Monday, peacekeepers in attack helicopters fired at the rebels trying to stop them taking Kibumba, a village on the main road 50 kilometers north of Goma. But fleeing civilians say the fighters overran Kibumba anyway.
The rebels retaliated by firing a missile at one UN combat helicopter Monday, but missed, van den Wildenberg said.
Several foreign aid workers have fled fighting from Rutshuru as rebels closed in on the town, 70 kilometers north of Goma, she said. The UN was trying to evacuate the workers from Rutshuru, where the rebels are fighting on the second of four fronts.
Doctors Without Borders said essential medical staff who were not evacuated from Rutshuru Hospital said they could hear heavy artillery combat close by Tuesday. They said they had treated 70 war wounded since Sunday but most patients had fled the hospital.
UN efforts to halt Nkunda's rebellion are complicated by the country's rugged terrain, dense tropical forests that roll over hills and mountains with few roads.
On Tuesday, a UN official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said rebels in civilian clothes made several attempts to infiltrate Goma, but UN peacekeepers spotted them and forced them to return.
The chief UN mandate is to protect the population. But since the peace deal it also is supposed to help the Congolese army disarm and repatriate Hutu militiamen - by force if necessary.
But Bisimwa, the rebel spokesman, claimed Tuesday the Congolese army has abandoned dozens of its positions to Hutu militiamen.
"It's the Hutus who are on the front line and whom we are fighting, not the army," he said. UN peacekeepers "leave us no choice but to fight on."
Nkunda long has charged that Congolese soldiers fight alongside the militia of Hutus, an ethnic majority of about 40 percent in the region.
Some 800 Hutu militiamen have voluntarily returned to Rwanda, the UN says, but the fighters recruit and coerce Congolese Hutu children and young men into their ranks daily - far outnumbering those who have returned home.
Civil leaders led by Jason Luneno said if UN peacekeepers cannot halt the rebel advance, the peacekeepers should leave Congo and "the people will descend into the streets to demand the government resign."
Tensions also are high on the diplomatic front. Congo this week repeated charges that Rwanda's Tutsi-led government is sending troops across the border to reinforce Nkunda. Rwanda denies the charges and the UN says they are unfounded.
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