Attacks by local militia groups have killed about 100 people and driven 70 000 from their homes in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s northeast Ituri region in the past two months, United Nations officials said on Tuesday.
Three villagers were killed on Friday at Baliba, about 35km northeast of Ituri’s main town of Bunia, the regional spokesperson for the UN mission in DRC (Monuc) said, as the latest toll from the violence was released.
”Three residents were killed and many huts burned in this village,” said Rachel Eklou from Bunia. ”Witnesses say that the attack was carried out by the Nationalist and Integrist Front (FNI).”
The FNI is one of six militia groups causing havoc in Ituri, a mineral-rich region that remains among the most volatile parts of the vast central African country since the DRC began to emerge from its last devastating war of 1998-2003. Some of the Ituri strife is also ethnic.
Since the end of December, a resurgence of violence in the Djugu territory north of Bunia has forced thousands of people to flee their looted and burned villages. UN workers in the area have collected reports of almost 100 murders, about half of them in an area called Tche, with hundreds more cases of rape and kidnapping.
”We have established that there’s a total of some 70 000 people displaced in the Djugu territory in Ituri since the renewal of violence. These are the ones to whom we have access and are getting aid,” said Rachel Scott Leflaive, spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Kinshasa.
”There has not of late been any major rise in the number of displaced people,” Scott Leflaive added, attributing a spike in overall figures from 56 000 last week to 70 000 in the latest count to ”a more accurate census of families who have gathered at Kafe, in the north of Djugu territory”.
More than 4 000 people have crossed Lake Albert to the region’s eastern neighbour Uganda, where they have been taken to a camp run by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, a UNHCR official said here.
The majority, however, have sought protection from Monuc troops deployed in eastern DRC, particularly Tchomia and Kasenyi on the shores of Lake Albert, Tche, Kafe and Gina to the north of Bunia, and Muhito, a nearby village.
The UN World Food Programme and the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) are able to help people at these sites, according to the OCHA.
”Current needs are covered,” Scott Leflaive said. ”What’s far more worrying is the risk that these people will not be able to go home anytime soon. This is going to cause problems for harvests and for keeping the children in school.”
Since late last year, the DRC army and Monuc troops deployed in the country to keep the peace and monitor a post-war political transition to democracy have been undertaking a joint mission to disarm militias and other armed groups in the tense eastern border provinces of the country. – Sapa-AFP