A commander of the United Nations force in the Democratic Republic of Congo dismissed reports that his troops had killed civilians in an operation which left at least 50 militia dead in the troubled northeastern region of Ituri.
”We don’t think there were any civilian casualties,” the deputy commander of the UN mission in DRC (Monuc), General Patrick Cammaert, said late on Wednesday.
He was responding to accusations by a spokeperson for the ethnic Lendu community that peacekeepers had killed at least 25 villagers, including women and children, during Tuesday’s operation.
But Cammaert insisted: ”We only engage people who have weapons and who are firing at us.”
”The local population immediately fled the village when they saw our vehicles coming over the edge of the hills and the unit was extremely careful during the house-to-house search,” he said.
”They rescued a number of civilians, elderly people who could not move and even a woman who had just given birth to a baby was pulled out of her burning house,” he added.
Almost 250 Pakistani and South African troops were involved in Tuesday’s operation, which was in response to the killing of nine Bangladeshi peacekeepers on Friday. At least 50 militiamen were killed and two of their camps destroyed.
A Monuc spokesperson had said earlier on Wednesday that he could ”not rule out that civilians” were among the casualties, particularly as he said that that the militias had ”used civilians as human shields”.
A South African battalion of 850 soldiers has been flown in to join around 3 000 UN troops in one of the most dangerous parts of the country, where Cammaert has taken command on the ground to disarm six militias who have been terrorising civilians.
Monuc — which has grown since its mid-war presence in 1999 to about 16 700 soldiers, police and civilians deployed across the DRC — has accused militia chiefs of war crimes and also crimes against humanity because they use civilians as human shields. – Sapa-AFP