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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

DRC: Ituri still plagued by small arms - MONUC

KAMPALA, 13 November 2003 (IRIN) - Officials overseeing the UN peace mission in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (known as MONUC), warned on Thursday that the country’s troubled Ituri District was unlikely to see calm unless more was done to stem the supply of arms to the region’s still active militia groups.

"If Ituri is going to eventually cool down that requires, as a condition, effective monitoring of the flow of arms in the region and of the arms embargo. But this is proving difficult," Philippe De Bard, MONUC’s political affairs officer for Ituri, told IRIN in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

MONUC officials are concerned that recent clashes between its forces and Ituri’s armed groups, such as the shoot-out on 8 November between the Parti pour l'Unite, la Solidarite et l'Integrite du Congo (PUSIC) and MONUC forces, which ended in the death of a PUSIC commander and the arrest of nine fighters, would continue so long as the groups have easy access to cheap weapons.

"A Kalashnikov [semi-automatic rifle] is still easily obtained for a mere fifty dollars in Ituri," Usman Dabo, chief administrator of MONUC’s Ituri operation, told IRIN.

He said that cutting supplies to the armed groups was proving difficult for a number of reasons.

"There are a lot of airfields, so it’s hard to monitor all the planes coming in and what they are carrying," he said. "But part of the problem is the huge supplies of arms that have been shipped into Ituri in the past years during the war. Even if we effectively monitor arms going into Ituri, it is difficult to cut the supplies to the armed groups because a lot of arms are buried around the place".

MONUC is also concerned at claims made by aid agencies that arms may be getting into Ituri from neighbouring Uganda. On 21 October, Amnesty International released a report in which it said armed groups in eastern Congo were still enjoying support, including weapons supplies, from individuals in Uganda and Rwanda.

"We are now working closely with neighbouring administrations – Rwanda, Uganda and the transitional government in Kinshasa – to see how to tackle this problem," Dabo said. "Ituri is the size of this country [Uganda] and has porous borders. It was never going to be cleared of weapons in a day. We will have to be patient".

Theme(s): (IRIN) Conflict

[ENDS]

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