Rwandan rebels suspected in Congo massacre
The killings of 29 villagers in the volatile region have been called the worst outbreak of violence there in nearly two years.
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According to AFP, the weekend's bloodshed was the worst outbreak of violence in the area in almost two years, when 59 people were killed by suspected Rwandan rebels in separate 2005 incidents.
Rwandan Hutu rebels - numbered by the United Nations at more than 10,000 - have been operating in the forests and mountains of eastern DRC ever since the genocide of at least 800,000 mostly minority Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.
Some of the FDLR [Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda] members are accused by the Rwandan government of taking part in the genocide.
According to Reuters, the UN, which voted this month to extend its peacekeeping mission in Congo until at least the end of the year, is currently assisting the nation's military in tracking down the assailants.
A spokesman for the 17,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, known as MONUC, confirmed that its troops were providing support for the Congolese army operations.
Attacks by rebels and renegade militias in eastern Congo have persisted despite historic U.N.-supervised elections last year which crowned a peace process ending a 1998-2003 war in the vast, mineral-rich former Belgian colony.
The first free vote in more than four decades was won by incumbent President Joseph Kabila.
The UN mission itself has come under fire amid allegations that in 2005 some of its Pakistani peacekeepers stationed in the area traded weapons for gold with the very same militia they were tasked with disarming, the BBC reports. When the UN sent an internal oversight team to investigate the matter, it resulted in a standoff between the investigators and the peacekeepers.
At first the Pakistani battalion there cooperated with [investigators]. But when they attempted to seize a computer with apparently incriminating documents on it a stand-off ensued.
The Pakistanis surrounded the UN police accompanying the investigators with barbed wire and put two armoured personnel carriers outside their living quarters at a nearby Christian mission.
Thoroughly intimidated, the investigators were airlifted out of Mongbwalu.
The BBC adds that new deployments of Pakistani UN troops are cycled in and out at six-month intervals, and current forces are not implicated in the ongoing investigation.
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