The increased tempo of United Nation’s peacekeeper operations in the eastern reaches of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) follows only days after a squad of 21 Bangladeshi UN troops was ambushed resulting in the capture, torture, and execution of nine soldiers . The longstanding ethnic conflict between the Lendu and Hema tribes in the Ituri province provides the violent and chaotic setting for the deadly attack, which recently prompted international aid organization such as Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, or Doctors without Borders) and UN humanitarian assistance efforts to suspend operations to the 54,000 civilians at risk. By early March 2005, UN troops had arrested a handful of senior leaders of the ethnic Lendu militia/political party called the Front des Nationalists Integrationistes (FNI, or Nationalist and Integrationist Front). Arrests included FNI leader Floribert Ndjabu as well as Generals Goda Sukpa and Germain Katanga, among others. (Sukpa and Katanga are former militia commanders under Ndjabu in the FNI and who integrated into the DRC armed forces this past January as part of the 2002 peace settlement.) Then, by March 2, 2005, a UN deployment of some 240 Pakistani soldiers supported by at least two Indian helicopter gunships engaged dozens of ethnic Lendu militia, killing nearly 60 people, including perhaps as many as 20 women and children, not far from the provincial capital of Bunia.

The ethnic conflict has resulted in the deaths of nearly 50,000 people across the region since 1999, extending beyond the cease fire and peace agreement of 2002, and has displaced nearly 70,000 refugees. Unrest still occasionally provokes cross-border skirmishes with militias and governmental armed forces in Uganda and Rwanda . The most recent round of violence further jeopardizes the national elections, originally scheduled for June 2005, now pushed back until at least October 2005 and possibly well into 2006. In the meantime, the UN is increasing the number of troops from its current 15,000 to over 16,700 from over 100 countries by the end of March 2005. The United Nations’ engagement in the DRC is its most significant worldwide.

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