PWETO, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) – Faced with a dearth of United Nations peacekeepers, lack of funding and competition from other global crises, relief agencies are struggling to contain a growing humanitarian disaster in Democratic Republic of Congo’s mining heartland.
More than a decade after the official end of a 1998-2003 war that killed millions of people in Congo, mostly from hunger and disease, donors are keen to switch from emergency aid to longer-term development projects in the vast central African country.
But the deteriorating situation in the copper and cobalt-rich southeastern province of Katanga, which the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) labelled “catastrophic” last month, throws into sharp relief the gaping humanitarian needs.
The number of displaced people in Katanga has leapt to nearly 600,000, from 55,000 three years ago, mostly due to violence by armed groups, including the secessionist movement Bakata Katanga.
The crisis has taken Congo’s humanitarian community by surprise after a decade spent focusing on the eastern border provinces of North and South Kivu, a volatile patchwork of rebel and militia fiefdoms that never fully emerged from the war.
“Suddenly, we turn to a zone where there is a major crisis in the process of developing but where there are not enough humanitarian actors,” Moustapha Soumaré, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator in Congo, told Reuters.
One major obstacle is the lack of basic security. The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) has urged Congo’s U.N. peacekeeping mission (MONUSCO) to increase its presence in Katanga. Of 21,000 U.N. soldiers in Congo, only around 450 are deployed in Katanga.
After a decade and a half of operations, the U.N. mission aims to start scaling down its force in Congo next year, despite the persistent violence in the country’s east.
“We have been requesting frantically for more troops but so far it has been very difficult,” said Alessandra Trabatoni, MONUSCO’s chief of office in the northern Katangan town of Kalemie. “There is no real appetite for sending more troops.”
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