Where is the US?...French soldiers begin patrols in wartorn Congo

Under the local authority's murderous glare, a contingent of 100 French special forces landed in the north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's capital of Bunia yesterday to begin their intervention in the conflict that has claimed more lives than any other since the second world war.

Within minutes of their dawn arrival, the troops began securing Bunia's airstrip for an anticipated force of 1,400 European peacekeepers which may contain British soldiers.

Five British military planners also arrived in Bunia yesterday to consider the feasibility of deploying a small British team likely to comprise non-combat personnel.

The intervention follows the bitter failure of a small band of UN peacekeepers in Bunia to prevent a battle between ethnic groups for the town last month that claimed at least 500 lives and displaced about 250,000 people.

The helplessness of the blue-bereted, mostly Uruguayan force caused the first serious international attention to the civil war in Congo's north-eastern Ituri province.

"I have not given orders for battle ... and we have not encountered any enemy," the French colonel in charge said yesterday. "But if someone engages us, we have the capacity to respond."

The battle for Bunia involved the militias of the local Hema and Lendu peoples, who were armed and chaotically commanded by Uganda and Rwanda, the principal invaders who are also hostile to each other.

Many of the victorious Hema fighters - of the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) - had left Bunia yesterday. Of those who remained, most were unarmed. "Our orders are not to carry many guns," said Michel Ilunga, a UPC fighter toying with a water-pistol on Bunia's main street. "We won't fight the French."

The US will not fund the non-UN force; yet Uganda and Rwanda are thought to have approved the intervention only at its bidding, loosening their grasp on Congo's fabulously mineral-rich north-east.

"This is the first window of opportunity for peace in eastern Congo," said François Grignon, of the International Crisis Group, one of the few analysts focused on a war that has claimed an estimated 4.7 million lives. "This intervention is a very promising start, but much more must still be done."

France agreed to lead the force after the UN admitted its inability to stop the war which has been described by some, even in the UN, as a genocide.

The European force has a more belligerent mandate to protect Congo's brutalised civilians than the Uruguayans had. Yet, crucially, according to Mr Grignon, it still has no plans to patrol Bunia's outlying hills, or to remain in Congo after the arrival of more UN peacekeepers in September.

"These soldiers are to do a specific task in Bunia," said Col Daniel Vollot, the commander of UN forces in Ituri. "They have no orders to leave the town."

That will provide little reassurance to the majority of Ituri's people, who have witnessed their friends and family being murdered by the hundred in the tit-for-tat massacres raging outside the town.

But Bunia was already recovering yesterday. In its makeshift clinic, Kapo Adiu, a nurse, reported no new cases of wounded in over two weeks.

In its main market - formerly littered with corpses - a few vendors did a roaring trade in cigarettes, medicine and soap.



Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003.