Georgianne Nienaber: Author. Journalist.

Congo soldiers arrested for Radio Okapi journalist's murder

MONUC today posted a report from Reuters that police in the Democratic Republic of Congo have arrested two soldiers suspected of killing a journalist working for United Nations-sponsored Radio Okapi in the violent eastern Congo. MONUC is the UN sponsored peace-keeping mission in DRC. The report originated from Kinshahsa.

Serge Maheshe, a broadcaster for Radio Okapi since 2002, a nationwide radio network set up to aid the peace process in Congo after the 1998-2003 war, was shot on Wednesday in the South Kivu provincial capital of Bukavu. He has a wife and two children.

Maheshe, a respected journalist, had received death threats before, but U.N. officials said on Friday they still did not know if he was killed because of his work as a journalist.

"We have no evidence one way or the other. We know, at one time, he had a brush with the military but that seems to have been a personal dispute that escalated. We cannot yet say if it was politically motivated," Kemal Saiki, spokesman for the U.N. mission in Congo, said. He was the third journalist murdered in the former Belgian colony since 2005. Maheshe had in the past been involved in a dispute with members of the military, it was rumored.

"The police tracked down the group of assassins and seized the weapons used in the killing," General Gaston Luzembo, the police chief inspector for South Kivu, told Reuters. 

Dangers Increase for Displaced in Eastern DR Congo

25 May 2007 – Murder, torture, arbitrary detention and looting are devastating civilians in growing numbers in the northeast region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the United Nations humanitarian branch said today.

The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that in the last six months continuing clashes between militias and Government forces have displaced 260,000 people, with the humanitarian situation in the North Kivu province, in particular, deteriorating badly.

The northeast has long been the most unstable region in the vast DRC, and about 85 per cent of the more than 17,000 peacekeepers and military observers in the UN Organization Mission in the DRC (MONUC) are deployed in that part of the country.

UN agencies and their partners are preparing contingency plans to cover the needs of the displaced, OCHA said, but the UN has received only about a fifth of the funds it is seeking for the relief effort.