In DR of Congo, UN mission lends means of transport to electoral panel

The United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is making its vehicles, airplanes and helicopters available to the national electoral commission as it distributes materials for what will be the biggest and most expensive elections the world body has ever helped to conduct.

The director of the Electoral Division of the UN Mission in the DRC (MONUC), Ali Diabacté, told journalists at the weekly briefing that everyone in MONUC is committed to helping the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), especially with logistics, as it grapples with the problems of servicing 9,000 voter registration centres nationwide for the elections next year.

Thanks to the assistance from MONUC, the Bas Congo Province had received 100 per cent of the material it needed and Oriental Province, 90 per cent, he said.

Because of the vastness of the DRC and its lack of infrastructure, the operation to identify and register voters in the rural areas was lagging behind that of the capital, Kinshasa, Mr. Diabacté added.

MONUC had withheld the means transport still involved in military activities in the troubled eastern region, he said.

MONUC military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Hubert said all the military operations in the east, whether conducted by MONUC alone or jointly with the Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC), involved controlling the territory and sending out reconnaissance missions, some of the latter by helicopter.

“The North Kivu brigade of ‘blue helmets’ have been deployed at Nyamilima. The presence of MONUC troops is going to allow the provision of security for some 80,000 people living in the localities of Rutsuru Territory,” MONUC deputy spokeswoman Rachel Eklou Assogbavi said.

Meanwhile, through train-the-trainer techniques, MONUC police had helped to train 900 Congolese police in law enforcement and other know-how, State organization, the role of the police during elections and handling the infractions that might occur during voter identification and enrolment.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) representative told the journalists that more than 11,500 DRC refugees, mainly in Tanzania, had decided on their own to return home to South Kivu. Most of a further 152,000 in Tanzania, however, could not be repatriated to South Kivu before the end of voter registration in September.

The only part of the country to which UNHCR is facilitating returns is Equateur Province in north-western DRC. Since October 2004 the agency has helped about 17,000 refugees go there from the Central African Republic and the Republic of the Congo.

Fighting erupted in Côte d'Ivoire in 2002 when rebels seeking to oust President Laurent Gbagbo seized the north, dividing the world's largest cocoa producer in two. Last year the Security Council set up UNOCI, which, along with French Licorne forces, maintains a ceasefire between Government forces, ruling the south of the country, and the major rebel group, Forces Nouvelles, controlling the north.