23 October 20002

PRESS BRIEFING BY DEPUTY EMERGENCY RELIEF COORDINATOR

The Democratic Republic of the Congo faced a potential massacre of horrific proportions unless the international community forestalled it by addressing the country’s humanitarian crisis, particularly in the east, United Nations Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Carolyn McAskie warned at a Headquarters press briefing today.

Briefing correspondents following her recent mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi, she said her Office was still trying desperately to obtain accurate information of events due to restricted access to the affected areas.  “What we are picking up more and more are the stories coming out that it’s not just one group fighting another; that there is a deliberate campaign of incitement to ethnic hatred.”  She continued:  “The messages are sounding very familiar.  We have heard them before in the region, and what this could lead up to is the potential of a massacre of horrific proportions.  Already there were some reports of violent killings.”

She said reports had been received that a hospital had recently been surrounded and hundreds of people killed.  Estimates of the number of dead ranged from 200 to a thousand.  She added that more and more children were reported to be coming into hospitals with mutilations and machete wounds.

It was becoming increasingly clear, she said, that the withdrawal of foreign troops from the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which it had been hoped would lead to peace, would not bring peace right away.  What the withdrawal had further exposed was ongoing internal conflicts that would continue to fuel humanitarian crises in the region.  “There is no such thing as a humanitarian crisis in the Congo.  There are a series of humanitarian crises”, she emphasized.

The two major crises, she said, were first the ongoing war in North and South Kivu, from Goma, Bukavu to Uvira; along the Rwanda-Burundi border involving Rwanda’s efforts against potential incursions by the Interahamwe militias responsible for the 1994 genocide; and on the Burundi side, the involvement of Burundi rebel movements in the Congolese conflict.

She said it was obvious that the main Congolese group, the RCD-Goma, which had been supported by Rwandan troops, was expected to weaken progressively as the Rwandans pulled out.  Nobody had realized just how quickly the group would collapse and, as a result, other groups in the area, particularly the Mai-Mai, had moved quickly to take over areas previously held by the RCD-Goma.  That had precipitated a return to the field by the official Rwandan armed elements.

“We had information over the weekend, when I was in Bujumbura, that in fact a battalion of the Rwandan army and a battalion of the Burundian army immediately crossed the border in order to bolster the RCD”, Ms. McAskie said.  “What this means is that the fighting will continue and that we can expect an ongoing to-ing and fro-ing in terms of who is in charge of the key strategic centres in the Kivus.  What this means is that we still have no real access to the numbers of people that are still affected.”

She said it had become “very, very difficult” for her office to negotiate with the RCD-Goma, who were determined to prevent any talks with other rebel groups on negotiating access.  “So we have a serious ongoing humanitarian crisis in North and South Kivu”, Ms. McAskie added.

Referring to last week’s report of the panel on the exploitation of mineral resources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she said it indicated that some of the violence was based on the fight for wealth.  It was, therefore, very important that the international community not just try to respond on a humanitarian level, but also try to prevent the outbreak of a potentially disastrous situation in the Great Lakes region.

She said the main purpose of her mission had been to continue the strengthening of humanitarian coordination structures in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while the ongoing crisis in Burundi required regular management attention.  The visit, particularly to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, had been especially timely, coming after the peace agreements that had resulted in the gradual and progressive withdrawal of foreign troops from Congolese territory.

As of August, it had been estimated that 2 million people were internally displaced, with 1.8 million of them located in North and South Kivu, Katanga and Oriental provinces, she said.  More than 80 per cent of the families in rural North and South Kivu had been displaced at least once over the past five years.  In Oriental Province, where International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) staff were killed last year, that organization believed strongly that they had been deliberately targeted as a warning to humanitarians to stay out of the region.  There had been no formal results of investigations by any local authorities, she added.

Referring to Burundi, where one seventh of the population had been displaced or were refugees outside the country, she said the country was now being asked to receive refugees from a neighbouring country, which was like adding insult to injury.  Her mission had met Congolese refugees crossing the border into Burundi, which was itself at a very critical point, having signed a peace accord two years ago, the institutions of which were slowly but surely being put into place.

However, she noted that while Burundi’s transition government was working well, the fighting was still going on.  Even if ceasefire efforts being pursued in Dar-es-Salaam succeeded, the humanitarian community would still have an enormous job to do because, once they had access, they would have to deal with the problems of millions of people, in addition to hundreds of thousands of refugees likely to return home from the United Republic of Tanzania.

Asked by a correspondent whether the situation had resulted in increased refugee flows into neighbouring countries like Zambia, Ms. McAskie replied that although no refugees were flocking southward into Zambia, the crisis in Katanga province, in the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, was continuing.  That crisis, along with the drought that had affected the whole of southern Africa, was likely to send refugees into Zambia.

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