A rebel group has been accused of shooting down a UN helicopter in the Democratic Republic of Congo, amid fears that a proxy war is materialising in the country’s eastern province.
On Tuesday, eight UN peacekeepers were killed when the aircraft crashed while on a reconnaissance mission in the Rutshuru region of DRC’s North Kivu province. Local officials have blamed M23 – a rebel group that caused widespread panic when it took control of the provincial capital of Goma in 2012.
The group had been largely inactive in the years since, but there are now fears that M23 is making a resurgence. Earlier this week, suspected M23 fighters attacked an army base and stormed two villages in an overnight raid around 30 miles north east of Goma. This follows a similar raid in November when two strategic villages were seized by rebel fighters.
There is also an increasing array of armed groups in the region, including the suspected involvement of forces from neighbouring Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.
Jackie Keegan, head of the UNHCR office in Goma, told The Telegraph that 11,000 people have already fled to neighbouring Uganda amid an uptick in violence, while a further 35,000 have been internally displaced.
“Most people fled as soon as the attack started,” she said. “There is a risk of children being separated from their families, a risk of opportunistic rape and sexual abuse and a risk of theft as people are stopped at roadblocks by armed groups”.
Humanitarian groups are currently unable to access the patchwork region of forest, hills and plains where they had been administering aid to counter a cholera outbreak and food and water insecurity.
The UNHCR and its partners met on Thursday to discuss the implementation of a 50-mile long ‘humanitarian corridor’ between Goma and the town of Rutshuru, to allow safe passage for humanitarian aid.
A history of war and claims of broken promises
The corridor, however, will require the participation of M23 leaders who have mostly pushed back on claims it is responsible for attacks in recent months.
“Our organisation, the M23, which has been able to patiently wait nine years for the implementation of the peace process, deplores this dreadful option of violence,” its spokesman Willy Ngoma claimed last week.
The M23 group was formed by members of an ethnic Tutsi militia, who claim that a 2009 peace deal to integrate the former rebels into the Congolese army and create a registered political party was not implemented.
The National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) had been fighting the Congolese army in the aftermath of the Second Congo War, which pitted Rwanda-backed Tutsi forces against the national government.
Taking up arms in 2012, the militants wreaked havoc in the North Kivu region until another peace deal was signed the following year, which set out much the same conditions as before and allowed for the repatriation of M23 fugitives who had fled to Uganda. Reports from Ugandan refugee camps suggest that M23 fighters have started returning to the DRC in recent months, saying that the peace deal has not been met.
‘Vivid memories’ of foreign forces on the ground
The outbreak of attacks comes amid recent incursions into the DRC by Uganda and Burundi and accusations that Rwanda is again backing M23, which it has denied.
In December, Uganda led a force of 1,700 soldiers into eastern DRC to hunt down an al-Qaeda linked terrorist group called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which in November detonated two suicide bombs in its capital city of Kampala.
Uganda has been accused of using the military operation to simultaneously loot large quantities of gold from the DRC. Earlier this month, the US sanctioned a Belgium businessman, Alain Goetz, and a Uganda-based company, African Gold Refinery, for the “illicit movement of gold valued at hundreds of millions of dollars per year from the Congo”.
Local officials allege that Burundian soldiers also entered the DRC in December to combat Red-Tabara, a Tutsi-led group that aims to overthrow the Hutu-led government in Burundi. Rwanda, Uganda and to a lesser extent Burundi have long backed proxy forces in eastern DRC in a complex situation partially caused by the spill-over of the 1994 Rwandan genocide between Hutus and Tutsis into the DRC.
The recent build-up of foreign forces, however, has alarmed the international community and local citizens as Rwanda and Uganda both entered the DRC in the late 1990s in what led to a series of wars and millions of deaths.
“When you talk to Congolese, they still have vivid memories of Rwanda and Ugandan forces on the ground,” said Nelleke van de Walle of the Great Lakes Director at Crisis Group, a conflict-mitigation organisation.
“A lot of things are happening at the same time which may lead to an increase in violence.”
Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security
