9 U.N. Peacekeepers Slain in Congo After Crackdown on Militias

Militia members ambushed peacekeepers in eastern Congo on Friday and killed nine of them, in the deadliest attack to date on U.N. forces trying to enforce a cease-fire in the African country and protect civilians from renegade troops.

About 70,000 civilians have fled their homes in the region since an upsurge in violence between rival militias late last year. In recent weeks, peacekeepers and humanitarian agencies have reported massacres, rapes and increasing violence against civilians in the Ituri region in the northeast, where 4,800 of the U.N.’s nearly 14,000 troops are deployed.

The ambush, in which nine Bangladeshi troops were killed, sparked fear of more violence against peacekeepers. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked Congo’s government to “find and hold accountable” those responsible for the deaths.

“I appeal to all the parties in the Congo to refrain from all these sort of brutal acts,” Annan said Friday.

“Peacekeepers are there to do serious work and to help the Congolese people.”

More than 1,300 Bangladeshi soldiers and observers are in the U.N.’s Congo mission.

Friday’s ambush followed a crackdown on militias by peacekeepers trying to protect fleeing civilians in the area around Kafe, 19 miles northwest of the provincial capital, Bunia.

The spokesman for the U.N. force in Congo, Kemal Saifi, said in a telephone interview from Kinshasa that 27 members of a militia had been forcibly disarmed and arrested Thursday.

“We started a number of very proactive measures against those groups, and yesterday we encircled those groups and 27 people were disarmed and arrested. So it might very well be that that had a connection with what happened today,” Saifi said.

On Friday, an unidentified band of militiamen refused an order to disarm, then attacked the U.N. patrol. The U.N.’s Ituri Brigade responded with a helicopter assault to support troops sweeping the area. Saifi said that peacekeepers were searching for those responsible for the killings and that they would continue to safeguard Ituri’s vulnerable residents.

“This is not going to deter us from protecting very rigorously the civilian population in the area,” he said.

One of the area’s most active militias is the FNI, the French acronym for the Nationalist and Integrationist Front, a Lendu tribal group that the U.N. has accused of mounting violent attacks on civilians of the Hema tribe. The militiamen arrested Thursday by the peacekeepers were from the FNI.

On Feb. 10, the U.N. confirmed that the FNI had killed 52 civilians in Ituri and that the attackers included many child soldiers under 16.

“They pretend to be political groups, but actually they are your run-of-the-mill thugs preying on the population,” Saifi said. “We count these groups as criminal groups above anything else.”

Ituri has been torn by ethnic conflict for years in the wake of Congo’s civil war, which dragged in the armies of five other nations and left an estimated 4 million civilians dead from violence, disease and starvation.

Critics have accused the U.N. mission of failing to disarm eastern Congo’s militias, which have been jostling for power and control of resources. Humanitarian agencies fear that access to the area will be cut off.

Farley reported from the United Nations and Dixon from Johannesburg, South Africa.