United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres called on the international community on Monday to provide more financial help to bolster reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Reuters reported. Speaking after a visit to the DRC and neighbouring countries, he said he sensed a growing feeling of hope among ordinary people that the country, at war for much of the past decade, was on the path to a democratic and peaceful future. "There is reason for that hope, and I appeal to the international community to make that hope turn into reality.... We will need a much greater engagement by the rest of the world (in the DRC) in the months and years to come," he said. The former Portuguese prime minister said the situation in Congo, emerging from decades of dictatorship as well as civil war, remained fragile, especially in the east of the country where "massive human rights violations" were rife. The current U.N. force of some 17,000 peacekeepers is not sufficient to maintain law and order at a time when the new Congolese army is only slowly coming together, is poorly fed and under paid, Guterres told a news conference. Financial help to ensure that soldiers' conditions were improved would go some way to alleviating the high incidence of rape of women in conflict areas for which troops were often responsible, he added. The DRC authorities under President Joseph Kabila, who is facing elections in June, were working to rectify the situation but had few resources. The presidential elections in the vast country the size of Western Europe are the final stage in a peace process aimed at drawing a line under a five-year war which sucked in six neighbours and left an estimated four million people dead. Most of these died from hunger and disease resulting from disruption of food supplies, medical attention and an overall breakdown in governance as rival armies and militias fought for domination across the mineral-rich eastern provinces.
