Residents burn town hall after latest rebel attack
ANGRY RESIDENTS of the eastern Congo city of Beni burned the town hall and stormed the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission Monday after rebels killed eight people and kidnapped nine overnight in their latest assault.
Gunfire could be heard as police and peacekeepers tried to disperse crowds that attacked the UN base and burned UN vehicles. Residents have protested outside the UN for several days over repeated attacks by Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels, and two civilians and two policemen have died in the unrest.
Civil-society leader Kizito Bin Hangi said that they warned the Congolese army when they saw suspicious activity in the centre of town Sunday but soldiers came too late.
One protester, Kasereka Fundi, suggested that the UN mission known as MONUSCO should leave if it won’t protect the population.
“What did we do to deserve that, do we not have the same rights as other citizens of Congo?” Fundi asked. “We are killed while MONUSCO is here to protect us. Let them go home. We do not need tourists in our country.”
The UN peacekeeping mission said it could not carry out operations unilaterally in a region where Congo’s military is already active and that it cannot participate in Congolese military operations without being invited. Hours later, Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi, after an emergency meeting, decided to allow joint operations between Congolese and UN forces in Beni and install a headquarters for Congolese troops there, his office said.
The ADF rebels, who formed in Uganda in 1995, have been blamed for killing more than 1,500 people in the area in the past five years. Numerous rebel groups are active in mineral-rich eastern Congo.
Beni was an early epicentre in the ongoing Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo and the World Health Organization has said that rebel attacks hamper the crucial work of containing the virus that has killed more than 2,100 people since August 2018.
The World Vision aid group said its operations in Beni had halted and that it could be days before health workers’Ebola prevention efforts could resume.
“This outbreak of violence could not have come at a worse time. We were just about getting on top of the Ebola epidemic,” its regional director Helen Barclay-Hollands, said in a statement.