THE UN’s troubled mission to Congo suffered its deadliest attack yesterday when at least nine peacekeeping troops were killed in an ambush in the northeastern province of Ituri.

The soldiers, all from Bangladesh, were patrolling a refugee camp for civilians displaced by persistent fighting in the province, one of the country’s worst trouble spots.

The attack in the village of Kafe is the most serious challenge yet to the UN mission which arrived in the country two years ago to implement a peace agreement. Under the accord, elections scheduled for later this year have already been postponed.

The UN has deployed 4,800 peacekeepers in Ituri — a third of its total force in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The vast area is home to several ethnically based militia groups, which human rights groups say have massacred some 50,000 Hema and Lendu tribespeople in the past few years and made another 500,000 homeless.

The UN force in Ituri is made up of four contingents of 850 soldiers each from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco and Nepal.

“These blue helmets were out there protecting people, and they got ambushed while doing it,” Mamadou Bah, a spokesman for MONUC, the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said.

Kafe is near the small town of Tsha, where Front Nationaliste Integrationiste (FNI) militiamen have been attacking and burning down rural villages in the past two months.

Some 70,000 people have since fled the area amid increasing signs that fighting between rival militia groups was about to resume.

The UN-supported Radio Okapi reported that William Swing, the head of MONUC and special representative of the UN Secretary-General in the country, had dispatched extra peacekeepers to Ituri.

Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, is struggling to recover from a 1998-2002 war, dubbed “Africa’s World War”, which at one stage drew in six neighbouring states and killed at least three million people. Last December, one aid agency said 1,000 people a day were still dying.

The UN mission, which was sent to the country in 2003 to support a transitional government arising from a peace agreement brokered in South Africa, has been plagued by accusations of incompetence and mismanagement and allegations of sexual misconduct.

In its defence, UN sources say that the mission, which costs more than £500,000 a day, is hopelessly inadequate for policing an area the size of Western Europe with virtually no infrastructure and point out that not one big Western country has committed troops.

In June, crowds stoned UN offices across the country after peacekeepers failed to prevent the eastern town of Bukavu falling to a renegade general even though they have a mandate allowing them to use any necessary force.

In addition, several peacekeepers have been arrested for sexually abusing women and children. Two weeks ago, the UN announced “non-fraternisation” rules banning all peacekeepers from having sex with local people. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, asked the Security Council for 100 extra police and French- speaking investigators to root out the abuse. The UN is investigating 150 cases of alleged abuse, ranging from rape and paedophilia to using prostitutes and bribing desperate under-age girls with eggs, milk and biscuits in return for sex.

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