Roundup on African conflicts

Democratic Republic of Congo

MONUC reports that Congolese soldiers fighting alongside UN troops have protested their conditions of service. A group of soldiers ransacked a UN camp.

Congolese army soldiers fighting alongside U.N. peacekeepers against ethnic militiamen have mutinied and ransacked a U.N. camp in the east of the vast country, the United Nations said on Thursday.

The mutiny began on Wednesday and forced the suspension of a joint U.N. and Congo government army operation to retake the eastern town of Tchei in Ituri district from an ethnic militia, said Lieutenant-Colonel Frederic Medard, U.N. military spokesman in the capital, Kinshasa.

The joint operations had been in the Tchei area, which has seen significant fighting lately.

Fighting between the Congolese national army (FARDC) and militiamen of the Congo Resistance Movement (MRC) continues in the areas around Tchei, some 90 kilometres south of Bunia in Congo’s northeast. More than 8,000 people, mostly women and children, are being held hostage by militiamen, who are using them as human shields.

These people are living in the bush with no shelter or food. Information regarding their condition is scarce and humanitarian workers cannot access the zone at present.

Between 8,000 and 10,000 people were living in the environs of Tchei prior to the launch of military operations by the FARDC supported by the UN mission peacekeepers last February 27th meant to flush out MRC militias. Civilians were forced to stay in their villages by the MRC militia despite calls by the national army to evacuate the premises.

Only 1,081 civilians fled their villages using a secure corridor to seek refuge in Aveba where FARDC and UN peacekeepers are stationed. Some fifty houses were set ablaze by militiamen in the area. The newly displaced persons are swelling the ranks of the previously displaced 4,000 people who had fled a militia attack on Tchei at the end of January 2006. Ongoing fighting will delay access and humanitarian assistance to this population.

Systematic rapes still continue in these troubled areas.

Schiller, who spent six weeks in eastern Congo as a volunteer with Christian Peacemaker Teams, says the distinguishing feature of the conflict is the systematic use of rape to control the population.

At first he thought the claims must be exaggerated but he met victims everywhere he went.

"It is very extensive, it is ongoing, it seems to have become a modus operandi," Schiller said in an interview. "All groups use this to terrorize the populations they want to control.

"Women are often raped in front of their families, in front of their children and husbands. When the woman is raped she is most often rejected by her husband and by her own family.

"Every church seems to have its group of raped women they're dealing with."

Chad/Darfur

The violence in the Darfur region continues, and it is spilling across the border.

The killing and pillaging in Sudan's Darfur region for the past three years "are now bleeding freely across the border" into Chad, on-the-scene investigators warned last week.

The spread of the conflict is destabilising Chad's government and threatening to ignite a civil war in that country as well, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.

The mainly Arab Janjaweed militias that have killed an estimated 300,000 black Africans in Darfur have begun carrying out attacks against members of the same tribes inside Chad, the report says.

Arab groups in Chad are not being attacked by either the Janjaweed or by black African rebels operating in Darfur, Human Rights Watch points out.

Citing eyewitness accounts, Human Rights Watch charges that Sudan's government is directly aiding the Janjaweed forces operating in Chad. In addition to providing material support to the Janjaweed and to rebel groups in Chad, Sudan is "deploying its own armed forces across the border into Chad," the New York-based group says.

Nigeria

The rebels in the river delta have said they want to reduce Nigeria's oil output by another one million barrels a day.

Nigerian militants threatened on Sunday to halve the country's current oil output by cutting another 1 million barrels a day this month in their campaign to gain more autonomy for the southern delta region.

The militants from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta are holding two U.S. hostages and one Briton. Their attacks last month reduced output from the world's eighth largest exporter by 455,000 barrels a day, or one fifth.

This lowered output to 2 million barrels a day before the latest threat by the militants, who want more local control of the delta's oil resources.

"God willing we hope to reduce Nigeria's export by a further one million barrels for the month of March," the militants said in an email.

Royal Dutch Shell has shut down its oilfields on the western side of the Niger Delta, a vast maze of mangrove-lined creeks in southern Nigeria, after a string of bombings and kidnappings on February 18.

The militants are using increasingly lethal weaponry.

People steeped in the bloody history of the Niger Delta recall when militants battling for control of the vast oil reserves here traded their fishing spears and machetes for locally made hunting guns and then, a few years later, upgraded to imported AK-47 assault rifles.

But those days now seem long ago to the delta's beleaguered residents and observers of the decades-old conflict, who say government forces and the militants fighting them are both using profits from record-high oil prices to rearm themselves with unprecedented levels of firepower.

The government, according to Nigerian news reports, is shopping in international markets for new weaponry. And the militants, who support their operations by tapping directly into pipelines and selling the stolen oil in a bustling black market, are using the proceeds to stockpile belt-fed machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

Dozens of militants displayed such weapons, fully loaded, during interviews last month on a stretch of river they appeared to control. With photographers snapping away, the hooded and camouflaged young men waved their guns menacingly at journalists and at one of the nine hostages they seized last month. The hostage, Macon Hawkins, an oil worker from Texas, and five others were later released.

The hundreds and perhaps thousands of unemployed young men who make up the militant forces have stockpiled boxes of ammunition that are as big as tables, said Ledum A. Mitee, head of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, a human rights group that advocates on behalf of the ethnic group in the delta.

Mitee saw weapons caches when he visited a base in January to help negotiate the release of four foreign hostages, he said. "I left thinking the situation was more serious than it has ever been," he said.