The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees is worried about people displaced by the ongoing fighting in eastern Congo:

UNHCR is worried for the security of displaced people and aid workers in camps in eastern Congo after an attack on Saturday at the Mugunga III camp outside Goma. There were no deaths or serious injuries although one person was badly beaten. People’s homes as well as the camp pharmacy were looted. There were six unconfirmed cases of rape.

Witnesses say a small group of men from outside the camp were seen monitoring food distribution earlier in the day. A few hours later, the camp was surrounded by a large number of armed men. They told a woman to take them to the camp leader, and then beat her. The armed men then searched tents, stealing money, mobile phones and food that had been handed out earlier by WFP. Looting was also reported among the population living immediately adjacent to the camp.

The reports of six rape cases are being investigated. It is also reported that around a dozen IDPs were forced to carry looted materials out of the camp, before being freed. The few police were unable to intervene, while MONUSCO troops – also facing capacity constraints – were not in a position to maintain a permanent presence at the site. UNHCR staff who visited the camp yesterday (Monday) said people in the camp were still anxious and upset.

The incident highlights the need for security at sites for internally displaced people to be prioritized, along with improved humanitarian access so that such populations can be better cared for. At least 30,000 people are currently at the Mugunga III camp, while some 75,000 more are staying in sites under the responsibility of the Camp Coordination and Camp Management cluster. The rest are living in spontaneous sites or with host communities.

As well as security difficulties at Mugunga III and elsewhere in North and South Kivu, UNHCR is also contending with shortages of shelters and
non-food items. Some 12,000 highly vulnerable families are in urgent need of non-food help (blankets, kitchen sets, tarpaulins, plastic sheeting, mosquito nets, sleeping mats, jerry cans, soap and sanitary napkins). We also need shelter for 47,000 highly vulnerable households.

According to U.N. figures 130,000 people have been newly displaced by the recent instability in and around Goma. This is on top of the estimated
841,000 people who were already displaced before this latest wave of insecurity.

In South Kivu, according to OCHA figures, some 878,000 people were displaced by the end of October 2012. The overwhelming majority of them (more than 96 per cent) are living in host communities. The fighting around Sake in North Kivu forced an estimated 18,500 people into South Kivu, mostly around Minova. UNHCR emphasizes that these figures are preliminary only, as they do not take into account the fact that some people may have been displaced multiple times (and thus could be counted twice) or the recent returns.

In 1999, the Australian military launched a major peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention into the tiny Southeast Asian country of East Timor, following Timor’s brutal conflict with Indonesia. Australian aircrews began flying emergency relief missions, air-dropping loads of food, water and other supplies to the impoverished Timorese.

But the mission of hope turned tragic when a free-falling box of supplies, weighing probably hundreds or even thousands of pounds and falling at the rate of a speeding car, crushed a Timorese boy, causing him to lose a leg.

It was a humanitarian’s worst nightmare, and the origin of a new tactic for air-delivering vital supplies to disaster zones. Today, the U.S. Air Force’s Air Mobility Command, the world’s biggest airlift force, is putting the finishing touches on a method of veritably carpet-bombing afflicted populations with food and water.

Instead of the heavy, potentially dangerous drops of the past, AMC is planning to scatter thousands of small, leaf-like foam packages, each containing a drink of water or six ounces of emergency rations. Call it: energy bars from heaven.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

Matt Bors art.

One of Matt Bors’ sketches from Haiti, from a “tent camp that is located on Place St. Pierre, just outside our hotel.”

He returns to the U.S. next week.

Type 74 Main Battle Tank with Dozer Attachment. Image via Military-Today.com

According to the Daily Yomiuri, the GSDF is sending two Type 74 main battle tanks to the Fukushima Daiichi reactor to help clean up rubble and debris from the earthquake, tsunami, and explosions at the reactor site. The rubble and debris are hampering emergency efforts to repair the reactors. The GSDF is using tanks instead of bulldozers because the thick steel hull of the Type 74 is effective at blocking some radiation from the crew. The tanks also have NBC air filtration systems.

The article says that the tanks will be sent from Camp Komakado, which according to Wikipedia is the headquarters of the 1st Tank Battalion, as well as the 1st Armored Training Unit. Other sources on the Internet indicate that one Type 74 per tank company is equipped with a dozer blade, in which case the 1st Tank Battalion probably has three such tanks on hand.

Kyodo News Agency has a picture of one of the tanks chained to a tank transporter.

Type 74 with dozer attachment. Kyodo News Agency.

Originally published at Japan Security Watch.

Dungu, Congo — There are just a few hundred fighters from the Lord’s Resistance Army in the vicinity of Dungu, in northeastern Congo just south of Sudan. These few fighters, traveling in bands of six or so men and camped deep in the forest, have killed thousands of people in recent years and displaced some 300,000. Rarely have so few caused so much suffering for so many.

In Dungu and surrounding villages, tens of thousands of displaced people live in a camp and with host families. Many of the displaced fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Many have lost family members, perhaps even all the male breadwinners. Some are aged. Several are blind or otherwise disabled.

Nonprofit groups in Dungu try to identify the most vulnerable displaced people and prioritize them for assistance. Emmanuel Ngolndima and his wife Elisee Animawayi, driven from their homes by the LRA, are perfect examples. He is blind and partially lame; they own no land. They live on a small plot with a Dungu family. The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Refugees, in conjunction with Lutheran World Foundation, paid local men to build a temporary shelter for the couple.

It starts with wooden poles driven vertically into the hard-packed earth. Then workers weave bamboo between the poles and slap mud onto the bamboo. The roof is thatch. Smaller than most Americans’ living rooms, the $300 temp shelter is humble, but it keeps the rain off and provides shade during 100-degree afternoons.

Ngolndima passes his days sitting outside his new home. His wife fetches water from the local well. For food, they await deliveries from the U.N. World Food Program. There are at least 8,000 similarly vulnerable displaced people in and around Dungu. And with LRA attacks continuing in Dungu and other communities in Orientale Province, that number will only grow.

Presented with the prospect of U.S. military intervention in the LRA problem, many Americans — understandably weary of foreign wars — ask why Congo is any of America’s business. The fact is, the U.S. is already intervening in Congo, along with scores of other nations. In Congo as in many other conflict countries, American money funds around half of all humanitarian operations. In Congo, that amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. As it stands, there is no end in sight for the LRA, and the U.S. will continue paying to care for the group’s victims for years to come.

Whether everyday Americans like it or not, Washington has already decided it wants to be involved in Congo. The question now is exactly how we should be involved, how decisively and at what potential cost in cash and lives.

MONUSCO. David Axe photo.

DUNGU, Democratic Republic of Congo — The report must have caused a furor when it reached the Kinshasa headquarters of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo: Last week, residents of Duru, a town of several thousand residents in Congo’s inaccessible northeast, told peacekeepers at a nearby U.N. base that the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group had just attacked and abducted several people.

Indian army Lt. Gen. Chander Prakash, the new commander of the roughly 20,000-strong U.N. force, was apparently so disturbed that he personally led a reconnaissance mission to the affected community, flying a thousand miles across some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world. On Saturday, Prakash and his entourage landed in Duru aboard a pair of Bangladeshi helicopters and linked up with locally based U.N. forces. Among Prakash’s goal’s: to understand how the LRA could kidnap civilians apparently right under the noses of U.N. troops.

The incident highlights the ongoing difficulties the U.N. faces in protecting Congolese civilians from one of the world’s most brutal — and most elusive — armed groups. The peacekeepers’ reactive strategy means it is always a step behind the LRA.

Since the Ugandan army chased the LRA out of its home country five years ago, the rebels under the command of Joseph Kony have terrorized a wide swath of Congo as well as neighboring Sudan and Central African Republic. Having long ago abandoned its original grievances, the LRA now fights only for survival. The group loots villages, murders anyone who resists and abducts children as laborers and sex slaves.

Read the rest at World Politics Review.

Moroccan troops escorted a World Food Program convoy through rough terrain from Dungu to Ngilima in northeastern Congo on September 21. Lord’s Resistance Army rebels were spotted in Ngilima just before and during the movement. The LRA’s presence forces people from their fields to the safety of the town center, rendering them unable to feed themselves and thus reliant on WFP. The roughly 25-mile trip took nearly three hours owing to kiddie-pool-size potholes in the dirt road.

Afghan National Army Mi-17 helicopters. U.S. Department of Defense photo.

Torrential monsoon rains since late July have flooded Pakistan’s Swat Valley and portions of neighboring Afghanistan, killing nearly 2,000 people and displacing around 2 million. Relief efforts have included deployments of troops and helicopters by the Pakistan military, the NATO force in Afghanistan and, perhaps surprisingly, the nascent Afghan air corps. “Right now, the Afghan air force has four Mi-17 helicopters in Pakistan supporting that relief effort,” said U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael Boera, head of Afghan air training.

The Afghan deployment underscores an encouraging trend in the nine-year-old war against the Taliban. On Aug. 11, top NATO commander Gen. David Petraeus announced that the Afghan army had reached its planned peak strength of 134,000 soldiers — two months earlier than anticipated. Reacting to the news, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said NATO might begin handing over security duties to Afghan forces as early as the spring of 2011.

The security handover would see Afghan forces increasingly taking the lead as foreign contingents begin a gradual withdrawal. The Dutch army removed its main ground forces from southern Afghanistan on Aug. 1. The Canadians are slated for a 2011 departure. U.S. and British troops might start leaving in the summer of 2011, though the pace of their drawdown will “depend on the conditions on the ground,” Gates said. British planning currently calls for some U.K. combat troops remaining in Afghanistan as late as 2014.

Still, the Afghan flood response could give NATO commanders some hope for a speedy end to foreign intervention in Afghanistan.

What would become the Afghan air force amounted to a handful of decrepit helicopters when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in late 2001. Today, with NATO funding and training, it boasts scores of airplanes and helicopters, hundreds of pilots and thousands of ground crew. The air corps’ skill level has risen along with its numerical strength. “Afghan aviators know how to fly,” Col. Don Galli, commander of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade, told World Politics Review this spring. “They take to this like fish to water.”

Read the rest at World Politics Review.

The heavy rains in Pakistan’s restive Swat Valley began in late July and didn’t let up for weeks. Flooding and landslides killed at least 1,500 people and displaced 4 million in the worst natural disaster to strike Pakistan in years.

The U.N. called for $500 million in foreign assistance for flood victims. The U.S. pledged $150 million. Great Britain offered $100 million. “It’s not bad for a normal disaster, but this isn’t a normal disaster,” U.N. aid chief John Holmes said of the pace of donations.

Money aside, America’s greatest contribution has been military in nature. The Pentagon has seized on the flood relief efforts as an opportunity to win hearts and minds in a region of Pakistan that has long harbored Islamic extremists and helped fuel the fighting in Afghanistan. “When you’re hungry, it’s hard to be angry at someone bringing you food,” Marine Captain Paul Duncan explained.

Read the rest at Offiziere.ch.

David Axe photo.

by UNA MOORE

Does humanitarian aid prolong wars? Yes, argues Dutch journalist Linda Polman in her new book War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times, which was just reviewed by The Guardian.

War Games is just the latest addition to the booming cottage industry of criticizing aid, aid workers, and international activism related to humanitarian crises. It joins NYU economist Bill Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,  veteran war correspondent Rob Crilly’s Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War,  Zambian economist and former banker Dambisa Moyo’s widely misunderstood, but even more influential for it, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa, and an expanding anti-aid blogosphere.

If Polman’s Guardian interview is any indication, her book will be a huge hit for taking extreme positions and providing a wealth of quotable quotes. At one point, she is asked how she would describe the aid agencies that provided relief to Rwandan Hutus, many of them genocidaires but plenty also ordinary civilians, who fled into the now Democratic Republic of Congo in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. Polman’s response? “Perhaps war criminals.”

International lawyers would probably disagree, but aid critics will no doubt seize statements like that and turn them into rallying cries.

Unfortunately, like many aid critics, Polman doesn’t seem quite sure of what her argument is. She thinks aid neutrality is among the causes of tragedies like the prolonged conflict in Africa’s Great Lakes region. “Without humanitarian aid,” she says, “the Hutus’ war would almost certainly have ground to a halt fairly quickly.”

But she thinks a lack of aid neutrality is also a cause of conflict. In Afghanistan, aid agencies have worked too closely with coalition militaries, and this has tied their access to populations in need to the successes of one side in a complex war and emboldened the Taliban to directly target aid workers, she argues.

When Guardian journalist Andrew Anthony confronts Polman with the glaring contradiction in her arguments, she responds by saying, “Whether you’re being manipulated by the Sudanese regime or coalition forces in Afghanistan, you are always an instrument of war.

“The system as it is now, the humanitarian ground rules say that aid agencies are neutral and therefore not responsible for what other people do to their aid. I think that’s too easy. They should stop claiming neutrality, stop claiming that they’re above the law.”

That argument will be a hard sell to organizations like Medecins San Frontieres and other relief agencies, especially those specializing in medical relief, that insist on serving all those in need, including combatants from all sides in a particular conflict.

Read the rest at U.N. Dispatch.

Freed aid workers. Photo via The Telegraph.

by UNA MOORE

Three Italian aid workers arrested in southern Afghanistan on April 10 for allegedly plotting to kill a provincial governor have been freed, according to the AP.

The case against the Italians, employees of the Milan-based medical relief charity Emergency, looked suspicious from the start, and Emergency’s leadership asserted its staff were innocent from the moment the Italians were arrested along with six Afghan colleagues at a hospital in the city of Lashkar Gah.

Emergency is one of the largest medical relief organizations operating in Afghanistan, and runs three hospitals in different provinces, 28 clinics and an orphanage.

In the rugged northern province of Panjshir, Emergency’s 100 bed facility is the only hospital.

Read the rest at U.N. Dispatch.

Related:
U.N. Dispatch: 5 U.N. Employees Believed Kidnapped in Afghanistan
Unastan: Buzkashi, Rougher than Politics
Unastan: Kabul Nightlife, Not All Bombs and Illegal Booze
Unastan: People Died Here
Unastan: Waking to Bombs in Kabul
Unastan: Afghanistan’s Amnesty Law
Unastan: Taliban Blocks Civilian Flight
Unastan: The Situation (in Afghanistan)
Unastan: The Roads of Kabul