Congo Tense As U.N. Mandate Set To Expire

World Body Must Decide Whether To Continue, Change Or Cancel Largest Peacekeeping Force In The World

(Christian Science Monitor)  This article was written by Stephanie Hanes.

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Across this war-scarred city of dirt roads, crowded markets, and security checkpoints, people know the importance of April 15.

This is the day the mandate for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is scheduled to expire. So by then, the U.N. Security Council must decide whether to extend, change, or scrap what is now — with almost 20,000 civilian and military personnel — the largest peacekeeping force in the world.

Many people here are nervously waiting for this decision. If the Security Council extends the Congo mission, they say, it will mean a continued march toward stability for the eastern city of Bunia and the rest of this massive, traumatized country.

Yet there is pressure to downsize. The demand for U.N. military assistance has ballooned in recent years, with five times as many peacekeepers spread worldwide in 2005 as in 2000. Donor countries are wary of missions with ever-extending end dates, and the U.N. itself says it must reevaluate the way it conducts peacekeeping and find new ways to spread increasingly strapped resources across complex, volatile regions.

But six months after a landmark presidential election that cost the U.N. half a billion dollars, the country remains tense. At least 150 people died in the capital, Kinshasa, last week in clashes between government troops and forces loyal to opposition leader and former warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba.

Here in Bunia, one of the epicenters of a war that claimed some 4 million lives from violence, disease, and hunger, residents and U.N. personnel on the ground worry that an exodus of "blue helmets" will mean a return to chaos.

"You can download and cut the deployment in Congo," says Henri Boshoff, military analyst for the South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies who has spent much time in the DRC. "And you can throw away billions and billions of dollars. Because it will return to where it was."

The U.N. came into Congo in 1999, soon after warring parties signed an agreement to stop fighting. But the cease-fire did not hold — neighboring countries were drawn into the fighting, and ethnic violence grew. Ituri province, of which Bunia is the capital, was particularly violent, with its own ethnic strife and massacres.

The next year, the U.N. sent almost 6,000 peacekeepers — a force that would become known by its French acronym, MONUC.

The fighting continued, and the peacekeeping mission grew. But with the help of U.N. forces, a transitional government took power in 2003, and much of the country returned to stability. This past December, the U.N. helped monitor the Congo's first free, democratic elections in more than 40 years.

In many ways, the U.N. has fulfilled its mandate: There is a solid cease-fire, and Congo has had democratic elections. But people on the ground here caution that the hard work is just beginning.

The country is still far from stable. Apart from last week's deadly clashes in the capital, which Mr. Bemba says were triggered by the government's attempt to assassinate him, skirmishes between the Army and various militias are common throughout the country's volatile east. In January, Congolese soldiers upset with their low pay rioted in Bunia, shooting, raping, and looting.