Another African Nightmare

Thousands of civilians have taken refuge on floating islands in the lakes of Congo's Katanga province to escape rape and murder by government and militia fighters, a top U.N. humanitarian official said on Thursday.

Some 120,000 people have fled their homes in the remote Mitwaba area, where hundreds of women have been raped during fighting between the army and former pro-government militiamen that U.N. peacekeepers are unable to control, he added.

Congo is staggering toward elections, due later this year, but fighting continues in Katanga and elsewhere in the lawless east, where minerals are plentiful and gunmen continue to roam, nearly three years after the war was officially declared over.

Daniel Augstburger, the head of the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Congo, said many people had taken refuge on islands formed by clumps of papyrus plants floating on lakes in Katanga's Upemba National Park.

"In and around Upemba there are thousands of people living on floating islands because it is the only place they feel safe," he said. "There is systematic sexual violence. Hundreds of women have been treated for rape."

Once again, the UN is unable to deal with the situation, the African Union is stretched thin, and the usual calls for the US to provide assistance will be made. The UN peacekeeping delegation in Congo is its largest operation - with 17,000 peacekeepers.

Congo is home to some 17,000 U.N. peacekeepers, making it the world body's largest peacekeeping mission. But they are spread thinly across the vast country and just several hundred have been deployed to Katanga, which is the size of France.

Humanitarian crises elsewhere in the Congo, where aid workers say fighting and war-related hunger and disease kill 1,000 people a day, mean there are also only a handful of organizations looking after Katanga's displaced.

"We are trying to get more humanitarian actors into Katanga," Augstburger said. "Congo provides us with an enormous list of crises. We can't be everywhere as we don't have unlimited resources."

Due to the severity of the crisis, which is compounded by drought in some parts of Katanga and the plundering by gunmen of what little food stocks civilians had, the U.N. has begun transporting food into Mitwaba by helicopter.

UPDATE:
The situation isn't any better in Zambia, where the UN has cut food aid to starving refugees because the UN simply doesn't have the food to provide. They're running out of rations to distribute:

In January, to stretch its thinning supplies, the United Nations cut its already basic food rations to war refugees in Zambia by almost 40 percent — not just for the Nangweshi camp's 15,100 residents, but also for 57,000 refugees from Congo in four other camps.

The cuts were made after the developed world did not respond to United Nations' pleas for help to feed the refugees. Like similar appeals, they went unheeded in a year of many disasters and what aid specialists call a growing malaise among donors about such emergencies.