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Congo peacekeepers stuck in middle
Real estate news By Karen Allen
Friday, 26 October 2007
Checkpoint culture is deeply entrenched in North Kivu. To move anywhere out of the provincial capital, Goma, requires tolerance, tenacity and time. If you are lucky the troops manning the checkpoints will be sober. If you are not, then you had better hope that your paperwork is in order, and the weapon slung over the shoulder of the soldier trying to squeeze another dollar out of you, is pointing away from your vehicle - especially as the gunman in question is probably just 15.
You would think that the peacekeepers of the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Monuc) would escape such challenges. But that is not always so. It was a move clearly designed to humiliate the UN, as much as ourselves.
Though it all came right in the end, it demonstrates the precarious relationship between the peacekeepers and government forces - troops, many of them once militiamen, rounded up like cats and fashioned into a regular army. For the UN peacekeepers, the biggest success has undoubtedly been last year's elections. But in the turbulent region of North Kivu, politics has delivered a terrible irony. Democracy has helped fan the flames of violence.
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