by Daniel Ooko
NAIROBI, Nov. 22 (Xinhua) -- Fighting in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) has caused massive disruptions in schooling for hundreds of thousands of children, a UN children's agency said in a statement received here Saturday.
According to UNICEF, about 60 percent of the newly displaced people are children and throughout the province, thousands of schools are closed. Many schools are now occupied by displaced people.
Since late August, over 250,000 people have fled conflict, bringing the total number of displaced in the province to over 1 million. In the last few days, rebel soldiers have pulled back their positions in North Kivu but humanitarian access is still limited.
"Rutshuru territory, in particular, has been a zone of conflict and we know that 85 percent of schools in that territory have been closed for the last three weeks," said UNICEF Communications Specialist in Goma Jaya Murthy.
The statement came as the UN Security Council voted unanimously to send some 3,000 additional U.N. peacekeepers to DR Congo to help prevent a new war in the vast country.
The UN peacekeeping mission in Congo, known as MONUC, is the world's biggest UN peacekeeping operation and will be increased temporarily to just over 20,000 troops and police once the reinforcements are deployed.
"That has halted the education for approximately 150,000 students." Without regular school, children become more vulnerable to violence and abuse, said Murthy.
"Schools actually serve as a protective environment for children," he said. "When schools are closed, children start doing other activities, for example collecting wood, or going to collect water or doing other things out in the open. They are more prone to being exploited, to being abused, to being raped and also being recruited into armed groups.
"We're extremely hopeful that the situation will come down so that schools can resume, so -- of course -- that children can develop intellectually, but also so that children are protected."
UNICEF is providing emergency school supplies in some areas. Itis also working to move displaced people who are currently living in schools into other forms of shelter so that classes can resume.
UNICEF is also working to provide education for displaced children. "We identify displaced students and schools in a region and we try to integrate displaced children into those schools," Murthy says.
"Often schools don't have the capacity to accommodate them, so we'll build emergency classrooms out of plastic sheets, and we can add several emergency classrooms that way."
Aid organizations have criticized UN mission in the country MONUC for allowing a humanitarian disaster to develop in eastern Congo, an area the size of France where around a quarter of a million people have fled the recent fighting between the Congolese army and Tutsi rebels.
The continued risk of displacement has made it difficult for many children in North Kivu to regularly attend school, said Murthy.
"This conflict is not new -- it's been happening over the last 10 to 12 years, so there have been many children who've actually never gone to school," he said.
"We have catch-up centers where we target adolescents and expedite their learning so that they can get basic literacy and numeracy skills that are critical for their development."
