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Congo-Kinshasa: Pacifying Ituri - Achievements And Challenges Ahead
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UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
8 July 2008
Posted to the web 8 July 2008
Bunia
The pacification of Ituri, a region in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) badly affected by conflict, has been a long and arduous process. Much has been achieved over recent years but, as analysts and officials involved point out, the region is not yet out of the woods.
Since the first of three disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes started in 2004 some 25,000 combatants and 10,000 children have been demobilised. Thousands of weapons have been collected. Programmes have been set up to help former fighters revert to civilian life. Hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians have returned to their homes.
But some small armed groups, splinters of the Front des nationalistes integrationistes (FNI) and of the Forces de résistance patriotique en Ituri (FRPI), did not take part in the latest programme. Since the completion of the third DDR programme in October 2007 several FNI leaders have surrendered, leaving only a few commanders and around 100 men, now considered criminal rather than military threats.
The FRPI, on the other hand, is "reportedly recruiting new combatants and being resupplied with weapons," according to the latest report on DRC, sent in April 2008, by the UN secretary-general to the Security Council.
The group "maintains an operational capacity that allows it to launch hit-and-run operations against FARDC [The DRC army]. Clashes have halted returns of internally displaced persons in parts of Ituri... The fragile security situation poses a serious threat to the strengthening of community reintegration and recovery processes in some areas of Ituri.," the report said.
FRPI groups are estimated to comprise some 500 men.
Reintegration problematic
Many of the former fighters who have disarmed, especially children, have not been properly reintegrated into civilian society - and with the authority of the state, in the view of some analysts, yet to be fully restored in Ituri, many civilians still feel a need to keep weapons.
Between 1999 and 2003, Ituri was the theatre of a particularly bloody sideshow of DRC's wider civil war. Fighting between different communities mobilised into numerous armed groups killed some 50,000 civilians and prompted a large proportion of the region's population to flee their homes. Access to many areas of Ituri was impossible for humanitarian workers and civilians alike.
The first DDR campaigns may have succeeded in disarming large numbers of these fighters but, as Jonas Mfouatie, who heads the UN's Development Programme in Ituri, told IRIN, the reintegration component fell short.
"The third phase of the DDR [which UNDP coordinated] has been largely successful but we have about 12,000 ex-combatants from the first and second phases who did not receive anything at all by the time the programme was suspended," he said in Ituri's main town, Bunia.
"We know that the government has signed on to resume the programme but this will take time. What happens to these people in the meantime?"
Over recent years many fighters have returned to armed groups because they were not all given the necessary help to resume civilian life.
Improved access
Mfouatie pointed out that thanks to DDR, most parts of Ituri were now accessible and that many civilians were safely able to work their farms, providing a boost to food security.
"The district now has more schools, more shopping centres and health centres, and economic activities have resumed across much of Ituri" he told IRIN.
The UNDP official also explained that the third DDR phase differed from its predecessors in that it included efforts to disarm civilian communities.
"We have adopted a community security approach whereby we conduct a diagnosis to help us identify what the population considers to be the factors of risk for them," he said. "We call it 'freedom from fear'."
According to David Mugnier, the Central Africa project director of the International Crisis Group, which in May 2008 published an extensive report http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=5425&l=2 (in French) on Ituri, the third DDR programme (ending in October 2007) was "better conceived in trying to associate communities on the ground, to make them benefit from reinsertion and therefore more inclined to take fighters back."
"Our assessment is that there is still a lot to be done to disarm local communities," he added.
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Government mistrusted
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