Andrew Mitchell: DCR's stricken people need more UN aid

Last Sunday, in the Kibati camp in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DCR), I met a girl of 17 – the same age as one of my daughters. Her parents are dead, killed in the previous war in DCR. She has never been to school. She fled her home with no possessions except the clothes on her back. She has moved twice since the fighting broke out.

I reached the camp under armed United Nations escort. We passed through the DCR army lines and saw heavy artillery dug into the hillside. On the other side of the camp, forces belonging to the rebel commander General Nkunda are deployed. The 65,000 people in Kibati – mainly women and children – are at terrifying risk, trapped between the two armies. If the fighting starts again they will stampede into Goma, with horrendous consequences. The camp is truly miserable. There is row upon row of tents made from plastic sheeting, under which people live in fear. One was crammed with three mothers and 12 children. All three had lost their husbands, one to fighting and two to disease. There is no infrastructure: just a few latrines supplied by the United States, and plastic sheeting for shelter from the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. Looming high above the camp is the Nyamuragira volcano, which could erupt at any moment.

What can be done to protect these people? I visited the headquarters of Monuc, the 17,000-strong UN force in eastern DRC, to find out. I was reminded of my experiences as a UN peacekeeper in Cyprus in 1975. The same style of white Portakabins and furniture. Military maps showed the position of up to 22 armed groups throughout the DCR.

Bipin Rawat, the Indian general who commands the UN brigade in North Kivu, described the difficulties he faces. No capability for night flights, and, absurdly, no ammunition replenishment between 5pm on Fridays and 9am on Mondays. The UN, he said, has difficulty moving without being seen – aircraft and vehicles are painted white. If Goma is attacked, the UN will not be able to protect the tens of thousands of refugees there.

Monuc has a Chapter 7 mandate, which means that it should be able to use force to protect civilians. But its limited capabilities rest on a structure that would normally be a Chapter 6 assignment – monitoring and observation of an existing peace – manifestly not the situation here.

The UN force needs strengthening urgently if it is to protect the people and ensure the DCR government disarms the FDLR Hutu-supremacist militia who fled Rwanda after the 1994 genocide and who give the Tutsi General Nkunda a pretext for his violence.

On Thursday the UN Security Council voted to send an extra 3,000 troops to bolster Monuc. But it is unclear where they will come from and when they will arrive. Britain's priority must be to encourage the 18 countries who already send troops to the UN force to despatch more – the quickest and more effective way to strengthen the force, as the command, control and logistic structures are already in place. Britain should also push for the force's intelligence-gathering capabilities to be improved, and for it to have a proper "expeditionary" capability, to give it greater effectiveness as a military force. Nor should the option of sending European troops – as part of the UN force or as the EU force, Eufor – be taken from the table, although with Britain so overstretched in Afghanistan and Iraq, the burden of this must fall on other European countries.

In 2005, world leaders embraced a "Responsibility to Protect". We will now see whether this is anything other than a bumper-sticker slogan from leaders of powerful nations seeking good publicity or whether they meant what they said about protecting vulnerable people in high danger.

>Andrew Mitchell is Shadow Secretary of State for International Development. To help those afflicted visit dec.org.uk or call 0370-606 0900