UN to Send Additional Troops to DRC, EU Urged to Send Even More

UN to Send Additional Troops to DRC, EU Urged to Send Even More

Peter Cassata | November 21, 2008

After a unanimous vote by the Security Council, the UN will send 3,000 additional peacekeepers to the MONUC mission in Democratic Republic of Congo, Reuters reported. Given the UN's belatedness, the decision is a positive response to recent increases in violence in DRC. However, the peacekeepers' rules of engagement have been questioned:

Aid workers have criticized MONUC for lack of action in allowing a humanitarian disaster to develop in Congo's North Kivu province, where a quarter of a million people have fled recent fighting between the Congolese army and Tutsi rebels.

[...]

France's UN ambassador, Jean-Maurice Ripert, who led negotiations on the French-drafted reinforcement resolution, suggested that MONUC needed to be more aggressive in protecting civilians and implementing its mandate. "The rules of engagement, if they are strong enough, they are not being used strongly enough," he said.

Furthermore, human rights groups are urging the EU to send its own rapid response troops as well because the UN deployment could take a couple months:

While Congo's government and aid agencies welcomed the extra UN troops, some groups urged the European Union to immediately send a bridging rapid reaction force, citing likely delays of up to two months before the UN reinforcements arrived.

"The question still remains, what do we do in the interim? The option of EU troops still has to be considered," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, Congo researcher of Human Rights Watch.

The extra peacekeepers will be drawn mainly from Angola, Kenya, and Senegal. The Independent describes the MONUC expansion in greater detail:

The UN agreement, unanimously voted at a meeting of the Security Council in New York means 3,100 more troops will be dispatched. The UN peacekeeping mission, Monuc, is already the largest of its kind in the world with 17,000 soldiers but that covers an area equivalent to much of Europe and amounts to only 6,000 in the warring zone between the lakes of North and South Kivu.