"triggered a conflict-driven humanitarian catastrophe that killed an estimated 5.4 million people."

From Reuters:

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By John Kanyunyu

KIBATI, Congo (Reuters) - Rwandan troops crossed into eastern Congo on Tuesday in a joint military operation by the Great Lakes neighbours to disarm Rwandan Hutu rebels seen as a root cause of more than a decade of conflict.( WOW )

While both countries presented the operation as part of internationally-backed efforts to end conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo, analysts said allowing the Rwandan army in posed political risks for Congolese President Joseph Kabila.( TRUE )

The presence of the Rwandan Hutu FDLR fighters, who finance themselves by exploiting illegal mines( NB ) in the mineral-rich east, triggered two previous Rwandan invasions of Congo that led to a wider 1998-2003 conflict. It also helped cause a 2004 rebellion by Congo Tutsi rebels who went on the offensive late last year.

Diplomats and U.N. peacekeepers said that up to 2,000 Rwandan troops entered Congo's eastern North Kivu province on Tuesday under a December joint accord to act against the mostly Hutu Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).

The FDLR's strength is estimated at around 6,000 fighters, spread across North and South Kivu.

"The operations are beginning. We have invited Rwandan officers with their security contingents for their safety. They are observers ... The operations to disarm the FDLR are planned for a length of 10 to 15 days," Lambert Mende, Congo's information minister and government spokesman, told Reuters.

But the size of the Rwandan deployment appeared to be more than a simple observation mission.

A Reuters reporter saw hundreds of Rwandan troops, wearing Rwandan flag patches on their uniforms and carrying mortars, rocket launchers and AK-47s, moving into Congo in the Kibati area north of the North Kivu provincial capital Goma.

Rwandan military spokeswoman Major Jill Rutaremara told Reuters in Kigali the details of the operation were "secret".

Rwanda's Information Minister, Louise Mushikiwabo, said the Rwandan forces would operate under Congolese command.

"This is a result of recent intense and sincere efforts -- diplomatic, military and other ... to bring peace and stability to the region." he told Reuters by text message.

U.N. peacekeepers also confirmed the Rwandan deployment.

"This morning between 1,500 and 2,000 RDF (Rwanda Defence Forces) crossed the border in the Munigi-Kibati zone," Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich, military spokesman for the U.N. force, MONUC, said. MONUC, the biggest U.N. peace force, said it had not been involved in planning the operation.

Congolese army forces were on the move with tanks, armoured personnel carriers and mobile rocket launchers, Dietrich said.

FEARS OF ESCALATION

Analysts said the latest entry of Rwandan troops into Congo, at the same time as a Ugandan-led offensive against Ugandan LRA rebels further north in Orientale, were an acknowledgement by Kabila that he had failed to pacify his country( VERY TRUE ). He had promised to do this after winning 2006 elections.

"Look where we are, two years after elections, the Rwandan army back in Congo and the Ugandans are back in Congo ... and the Congolese get screwed again( SAD BUT TRUE )," one veteran foreign Congo analyst, who asked not be named, said.

The analyst recalled Congo's 1998-2003 war, when Rwanda and Uganda backed rival rebel groups.

"It's a confirmation of what everybody knows -- the DRC army has no control over its own territory( TRUE )," said a foreign diplomat.

The presence in eastern Congo of Rwandan Hutu FDLR rebels, many of whom participated in Rwanda's 1994 genocide, has been at the heart of more than a decade of bloodshed.

The 1998-2003 war sucked in the armies of half a dozen nearby countries, and triggered a conflict-driven humanitarian catastrophe that killed an estimated 5.4 million( 5.4 MILLION ) people.

Rwanda and Congo have agreed on several past occasions to cooperate to tackle the Hutu rebels, but have failed to carry this out amid accusations that ill-disciplined Congolese government forces have sided with the FDLR Hutu fighters.

Fighting flared again in North Kivu last October, when the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), a Congolese Tutsi rebel group led by renegade General Laurent Nkunda ended a ceasefire and launched an offensive against Goma.

The fighting, which killed hundreds and displaced around 250,000 people, prompted fears of a fresh regional war.

U.N. experts told the Security Council last month that the governments of both Rwanda and Congo had been backing rebel groups in the conflict, and recommended targeted sanctions such as travel bans and freezing of assets against some individuals( ANYTHING ).

Since then diplomatic efforts to achieve a peaceful solution have picked up pace with frequent high-level contacts between Kigali and Kinshasa, in the absence of formal diplomatic ties."

If they actually cooperate, this might be the right course of action to end this nightmare.

"If this lasts another six months or a year, they'll start looking for better equipment, and we risk a Mai Mai phenomenon,"

From Stop The War In North Kivu:

"OCHA humanitarian info on North Kivu In From the field on January 16, 2009 at 1:22 pm

I have just received a report from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on the information meeting they hold this morning in Goma.

For anyone interested, all their information can be found here."

Let's check in on the Congo. From Reuters:

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By Joe Bavier

DUNGU, Congo (Reuters) - Congolese villagers are forming self-defence groups to protect homes and families from Ugandan LRA rebels.( CAN YOU IMAGINE HAVING TO WORRY ABOUT THE LRA SHOWING UP IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD? )

LRA rebels have killed 567 people( 567 ) and displaced 115,000 in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo's Oriental province since September, U.N. refugee agency UNHCR says. Attacks surged after Ugandan forces spearheaded an anti-LRA offensive in December.

In silence broken only by the buzz of insects and the crunch of earth under their plastic sandals, eight men file through the cool night, hunting rifles in hand, scanning the darkness for those who killed their neighbours and burned their homes.

Elsewhere in the areas surrounding the town of Dungu, dozens more like them stalk the forest, mostly farmers and internal refugees armed with locally made guns or bows and arrows.

"This is very necessary for me, first and foremost, for the town, and for the people who are suffering in the bush, who have done nothing and who are dying," said Pascal Kalemba, the bottom half of his boyish face hidden by an airline sleeping mask.

Lord's Resistance Army rebel fighters attacked Dungu in September, as efforts to negotiate a peace deal to end their two-decade bush war against the Ugandan government broke down.

"They just walked straight into town. They started to burn houses and kill people," Kalemba said.

At the time, not a single Congolese soldier was deployed in the town of 57,000 inhabitants, located near Garamba National Park, the LRA's stronghold since it fled to Congo in 2005.

On December 14, a Ugandan-led multinational force, including Congolese and South Sudanese soldiers, launched an offensive aiming to capture the rebels' reclusive leader Joseph Kony.

Instead, the operation splintered the rebels into smaller groups that are now attacking villages, slaughtering civilians, raping women and kidnapping children for use as sex slaves and child soldiers. The U.N. death toll may be conservative.( UNREAL )

New York-based Human Rights Watch says three days of raids alone, starting on Christmas Day, killed at least 600 people. Most were beaten to death with clubs or hacked with machetes.

ARMY "RUNS AWAY"

The head of Dungu's self-defence force, former chief Etienne Dalafata, said despite the deployment of over 3,500 government troops to the area, villages must defend themselves.

"We've already gone on operations with the army, but when we go into the bush they get scared and run away. They are city soldiers," he said.

Dalafata said his force enjoys the town's support and that militias have sprung up across Congo's northern borderlands.

All of this worries Felicien Balani, president of Dungu's local civil society association.

"Our army must make them unnecessary. They find their justification in its ineffectiveness. If this lasts another six months or a year, they'll start looking for better equipment, and we risk a Mai Mai phenomenon," he said.

Mai Mai ethnic militias sprang up across eastern Congo in the 1990s during invasions by Rwanda and proxy rebel groups.

Like Dalafata's men, the Mai Mai initially said they took up arms to protect their communities. But they became notorious for bloody massacres of civilians, rape, and ritual cannibalism.( PLEASE NOT AGAIN )

Since September, the Dungu militia has taken just three LRA prisoners from a number of clashes with the Ugandan rebels.

All, they said, were turned over to the army.

But this week a self-defence patrol in Nzope village on the eastern edge of Garamba caught two LRA suspects. It mutilated and killed one before handing the other over to the authorities.

In Dungu, Kalemba said he feels no hatred for these latest invaders. He simply wants them to go home.

"Why are they persecuting us? Why?" he said.

"If it comes to a battle, we will die together."

I truly believe that indifference allows this to happen. Shame on us! Including me.

"Another 408 people have been kidnapped by the LRA since the outbreak of violence in September last year"

From the UNHCR:

"UNHCR concerned about displaced Congolese and continuing LRA attacks

DUNGU, Democratic Republic of the Congo, January 13 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency on Tuesday expressed mounting concern about the plight of more than 100,000 Congolese civilians force to flee their homes to escape attacks by a rebel Ugandan force in the northern province of Orientale.

"We are increasingly concerned about the humanitarian situation and continuing attacks by ... the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA)," said UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond, adding that the death toll in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) province bordering Uganda and South Sudan is now estimated at 537 people.

"Another 408 people have been kidnapped by the LRA since the outbreak of violence in September last year, including victims abducted in attacks over the past four days," said the spokesman, citing figures gathered by UNHCR staff in the town of Dungu.

Rough estimates of the number of forcibly displaced in this part of the DRC have now surpassed 104,000. Many of these internally displaced people (IDP) are still hiding in the bush, particularly in areas around the town of Faradje, which was heavily hit during the Christmas period. Out of an estimated 37,000 people who escaped from Faradje, some 16,000 have been registered so far in Tadu and surrounding villages south of Faradje. More than 10,000 of them are children.

In the Dungu area, which was attacked by the LRA last September, the local Red Cross has just completed the registration of displaced in the town and 27 nearby villages. Out of 54,777 IDPs registered, more than 27,000 are women and nearly 15,000 are children under the age of five.

The Congolese, Sudanese and Ugandan armed forces began a joint military operation against the LRA in mid-December.

The latest series of LRA attacks targeted villages and settlements south-west of Faradje. The village of Tomati, 57 kilometres south-west of Faradje, was reduced to ashes on Saturday. LRA attacks Friday and Sunday on Sambia, a mining village some 75 km from Faradje, left at least seven people dead.

"Throughout the region, sightings of LRA rebels are causing panic and new displacement. Our staff in Dungu reported this morning that there are considerable, ongoing population movements in the direction of Faradje and areas south of Dungu. In addition, 2,000 people have reportedly arrived in Ezo in neighbouring South Sudan," the spokesman said.

The UN refugee agency is extremely concerned about civilians who are caught in a conflict zone near the borders of the DRC, the Central African Republic and Sudan. According to local health authorities, the population in the Doruma area is about 56,000 people. In the Faradje district, also the scene of frequent clashes over the past few weeks, there are some 350,000 residents.

The displaced population is in dire need of food, shelter, medicine, clothes and other aid items. The area, which by itself poses immense logistical challenges due to the lack of decent roads, remains highly volatile. Safe humanitarian access remains a key challenge for UNHCR and other agencies as they strive to bring assistance.

By Margarida Fawke
In Dungu, Democratic Republic of the Congo"

Add this to the previous post, and you have some idea how bad things are getting in an already dismal situation.

"The number of dead just keeps going up. Since the beginning of these operations, it is the civilians who are dying,"

From the Congo. It just never seems to end for it. Now the pestilence of the War Criminals of the LRA. From Reuters:

"By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Twenty people were killed in a raid by Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army rebels on a park ranger station in northern Democratic Republic of Congo, local officials said on Monday.

Dozens of LRA fighters attacked the headquarters of the Garamba National Park in the town of Negero, in Congo's Orientale province, late on Friday.

"Ten people were killed, including two women, two park rangers, an electrician and five other civilians who have not yet been identified," Orientale's Deputy Governor Joseph Bangakya told Reuters.

Ten rebels were also killed in the four-hour gunbattle with armed park rangers and Congolese soldiers based at Negero's airstrip as part of a three-week-old multinational assault on LRA strongholds in northeastern Congo, Bangakya said.

In two separate attacks on Sunday, LRA gunmen raided a protestant mission in the Congolese village of Napopo and attacked Laso, a village in Sudan, local officials said. It was not immediately clear whether anyone died in the incidents.

Forces led by Uganda and including Congolese and South Sudanese soldiers began bombing LRA bases in the park on Dec. 14 after the rebels' leader Joseph Kony again failed to sign a deal to end his rebellion against Uganda's government.

The operations received the unanimous blessing of United Nations Security Council member states. Ugandan and Congolese officials have said the offensive succeeded in destroying most of the LRA's bases in Congo.

However, coalition forces have so far failed to locate Kony, who along with two deputies is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and his rebellion is now waging a brutal campaign against local villagers.

"CIVILIANS DYING"

Fleeing LRA fighters killed at least 271 people in a series of Christmas week massacres that forced tens of thousands to flee their homes.

Catholic humanitarian charity Caritas said it believed more than 400 people died in the attacks on the towns of Doruma and Faradje, which had been left undefended by coalition forces.

"The number of dead just keeps going up. Since the beginning of these operations, it is the civilians who are dying," said Felicien Balani, who heads a coalition of civil society groups.

Estimated to number between 800 and 1,000 fighters, Ugandan and Congolese officials say the LRA has now splintered into smaller groups. Some are believed to be heading towards neighbouring Central African Republic, where the rebels have carried out raids in the past.

"We are facing criminal behaviour by fleeing forces. A deployment is underway. But we are there in a vast territory, and it's being done at the rhythm of our air capabilities," Congo's Information Minister Lambert Mende said.

Uganda has said it is sending more troops to the area to prevent more LRA raids.

The LRA was driven out of northern Uganda, where its two-decade bush war killed thousands of people and displaced 2 million, but the group has continued to carry out raids in Congo, Sudan and Central African Republic. (Editing by Daniel Magnowski) (daniel.magnowski@reuters.com; Dakar Newsroom +221 33 864 5076)) (For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/)"