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Gunfire
Grounds UN Council's Plane in Goma after IDP Camp
Visit, Busses to Rwanda
Byline:
Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press in Africa: News Analysis
GOMA AIRPORT, June 8 -- The UN
Security Council got stranded
in Eastern Congo Sunday night, when a bullet tore through the fuselage
of the
jet they took from Kinshasa. While for a few chaotic moments some
Ambassadors
thought they'd been targeted by the FDLR militia, about whom they had
been
hearing all afternoon at the Mugunga I camp for internally displaced
people.
But it soon emerged that local Congolese security had demanded that a
security
officer traveling with the Ambassador prove that his gun was empty. The
bullet
in the chamber disabled the plane, and the Ambassadors huddles around
the three
computers in the UN terminal at the Goma Airport.
Outside dusk
fell over the volcano that towers above Goma, and spewed down the lava
that
still covers one-third of the airport's runway. There was talk of
traveling
across the lake to Rwanda
for a flight, or of spending the night at the lakefront Stella Lodge,
where the
Ambassadors earlier on Sunday met with the Mixed Commission on
disarmament of
militia, of which the FDLR is not a part.
In
the Mugunga
camp, huts were covered with UN logo emblazened sheet plastic,
stretching out
to the horizon. The ground alternated between black mud and black lava.
A
displaced man from Bufmamu in Masisi territory, Misheku Ernest,
recounted how
war drove him and his four children from his village. They have too
many guns
there, he said. Until the guns are gone we can't go home.
French
Ambassador
Jean-Maurice Ripert waded into the crowd and said he and the Council
are doing
everything possible to allow the displaced to go home. There was
applause,
relatively spontaneous. Then a bus ride past innumerable small shops
and street
vendors, propane tanks being wheeled on the wooden bicycles invented,
it seems,
in the Great Lakes region.
As
darkness fully
fell over the Goma Airport, bus transport was being arranged to
Kigali,
to be picked up
there by plane. While the UN's Alan Doss earlier on the plane,
pre-shooting,
said he could neither confirm nor deny that Rwanda has supplied
renegade
general Laurent Nkunda through this very area, or even through Uganda,
the bus
would head through this same route, without plan, without visa, the
Council
flying blind through areas it constantly discusses and votes on. The DRC Ambassador told Inner City Press it
is good the Ambassadors were in the Congo, to see and mostly
listen.
How it will inform their voting in New York remains to be seen, as do
the new travel
arrangements. Watch this site.
* * *
These reports are
usually also available through Google
News and on Lexis-Nexis.
Click
here for a Reuters
AlertNet piece by this correspondent
about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Click
here
for an earlier Reuters AlertNet piece about the Somali National
Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's $200,000 contribution from an
undefined trust fund. Video
Analysis here
Feedback: Editorial
[at] innercitypress.com
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Other,
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