Tens of thousands of civilians are likely to be forced to flee their homes during a planned offensive by Congolese and UN forces against Rwandan Hutu rebels entrenched in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a UN agency has said.
The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in planning documents seen by reporters that the planned attacks on the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) would affect hundreds of thousands of people.
The remarks came after the UN Security Council approved the offensive against the FDLR — some of whose members were involved in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide — which failed to meet a deadline to disarm and surrender on Jan. 2.
OCHA said the resulting spillover of violence would quickly overwhelm the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s weak local capacity, forcing international donors to step in. About 1 million people were displaced during the last major offensive against the FDLR in 2009.
Having been at the heart of two decades of violence, an estimated 1,400 Hutu fighters remain entrenched along the nation’s eastern edge, where Kinshasa has little control. The rebels were accused of targeting civilians in response to the 2009 operations.
After defeating M23 rebels — who counted more than 5,000 fighters — in 2013, UN and Congolese troops are under pressure to neutralize remaining insurgents in the mineral-rich region.
Last week, UN and government troops attacked Burundian rebels in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in what UN officials described as a preparatory operation ahead of the broader offensive.
OHCA expects at least 368,000 people in North Kivu Province and 118,000 in South Kivu to be affected by fighting, while rebels fleeing west into Oriental Province could affect 90,000 more civilians.
Operations targeting the FDLR are also complicated by disagreements among the African nations spearheading the UN force, with some nations reluctant to target the FDLR due to frosty relations with Rwanda.
African nations are due to discuss the operations on Thursday and Friday in Angola.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema