Three months after a peace accord in east Congo, armed groups are still killing and raping civilians, and fighting between the army and Rwandan rebels who did not sign the ceasefire has displaced thousands more refugees.
Humanitarian organisations are calling on the international community which backed the Jan. 23 Goma peace agreement to take urgent action to ensure it is translated into real security for civilians in Democratic Republic of Congo's turbulent east.
They say that since President Joseph Kabila's government and rebel and militia factions signed the accord, which introduced a ceasefire in North and South Kivu provinces, civilians there are still enduring horrific suffering. Scores have been killed, hundreds of women and girls raped and children recruited as fighters. Malnutrition, cholera and malaria are rife.
"Nothing has changed ... We're seeing that, three months on, there has been no progress on human rights and the humanitarian situation. This needs to be more than words on paper," Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), told Reuters.
North and South Kivu remain a violence-racked remnant of Congo's 1998-2003 war and its ongoing humanitarian disaster that have killed about 5.4 million people, mostly from hunger and disease in the deadliest conflict since World War Two.
Congo's eastern borderlands are an ethnic and political tinderbox in the Great Lakes region, still charged with racial tensions rooted in Rwanda's 1994 genocide which helped trigger the 1998-2003 Congolese war, sucking in neighbouring states.
The main aim of the Jan. 23 Goma accord was to guarantee peace for the long-suffering populations of the Kivus, to allow more than 1 million people displaced by violence in the two provinces to return home and rebuild their shattered lives.
But over the last week fighting has flared between the Congolese army and Hutu rebels of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), who did not sign the January peace agreement and retain a powerful guerrilla army in eastern Congo.
Recent clashes drove at least 16,000 people from their homes and forced two United Nations agencies to suspend some relief operations and food distribution.
Far from seeing a reduction in refugees since Jan. 23, the United Nations estimates a total of 75,000 more people have been displaced by violence in the Kivus.
