World - Rebels advance in Congo threatens UN operations

Jeffrey Gettleman and Neil Macfarquhar

NAIROBI, Kenya: With rebels closing in and artillery shells raining down, the United Nations said it decided on Tuesday to extract its aid workers who were holed up in the eastern Congolese village of Rutshuru.

But the attempt to evacuate roughly 50 aid workers trapped in the battle zone deep in the forest was halted after furious villagers attacked the armed convoy and blocked the road, United Nations officials said. In the melee, even Congolese government forces fired on the convoy, the officials said.

"The situation was very chaotic," said Ivo Brandau, a United Nations spokesman in Kinshasa, Congo's capital. "The convoy had to turn back."

United Nations troops deployed helicopters and established infantry lines to try to prevent the rebels from overrunning Rutshuru and from reaching Goma, the provincial capital, said Alan Doss, the top United Nations official in the country. The rebels were breaking up into small groups to try to get around the United Nations forces, he said, but the peacekeepers were determined to try to repulse any attack on Goma, if it came.

The situation has deteriorated over the past three days in eastern Congo. Doss said the peacekeeping troops were overstretched in trying to protect the civilian population, which is caught in the middle of vicious fighting between a rebel group and the Congolese Army. In many areas, aid operations have ground to a halt. Hundreds of thousands of people are trying to flee, but it seems to be getting harder and harder to reach them.

"We have about 15 trucks loaded with food, and they can't move," said Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program in Nairobi.

Angry mobs of civilians stoned the bases of United Nations forces in both Goma and Rutshuru. One civilian was killed Monday by a stray bullet when United Nations soldiers fired over the heads of the protesters trying to overrun the Goma base, Doss said from Kinshasa.

Doss, the representative of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in Congo, said he understood the civilian frustration, and he urged diplomatic efforts to get all groups together for talks.

"We cannot have a soldier behind every tree, in every field, on every road and in every market; it is impossible," he said, adding that United Nations forces had been trying to explain to the civilians that by besieging the bases they were slowing efforts to attack the hostile forces.

Doss appeared before the Security Council this month, pleading for an increase in the 17,000 troops he has spread out all over the country, with about 6,000 in the area around Goma.

The fighting near Goma had made it too dangerous to distribute food in the rural areas, said Prior, the food program spokesman. In Goma, operations had been suspended because of the level of hostility against the United Nations.

Eastern Congo has been plagued by violence and insecurity for years and is home to the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world. But the blue-helmeted peacekeepers and their attack helicopters have seemed unable to stop one man, Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Congolese general, who is leading the rebel charge on Goma.

For the past several weeks, Nkunda's troops have been gobbling up territory and forcing the Congolese government's forces to retreat. They are now within 10 miles of Goma, and they are employing new hit-and-run tactics that seem to be frustrating the United Nations peacekeepers who are working with the Congolese military to beat back the rebels. Doss said the uneven quality of the government troops complicated those efforts.

The fighting has driven villagers in many directions as they look for a safe place to hide. Doss estimated that 100,000 had been displaced in the past few days, although estimates of new displacements were difficult amid people who have moved two and three times.

Juliette Prodhan, the country director for Oxfam's aid programs in Congo, said the volume of people on the road had increased from a few hundred trudging toward Goma to now more than 20,000. "There is widespread fear and panic," she said.