UN says troop reinforcements due in Congo soon

By Patrick Worsnip

GOMA, Congo (Reuters) - Around 3,000 extra peacekeepers meant to shore up the United Nations' struggling mission in Democratic Republic of Congo could begin arriving next month, the U.N.'s top official there said on Monday.

Rights groups and aid agencies have urged the United Nations to do more to protect civilians in the country's eastern borderlands after a wave of massacres blamed on Rwandan Hutu rebels and alleged abuses by Congo's own army.

"(The reinforcements) have been identified but now we have to get them here. I think probably June, July we'll see the first of them," Allan Doss, head of Congo's U.N. mission, MONUC, said in Goma, the capital of troubled North Kivu province.

However, he said the mission was still waiting for U.N. member states to come forward with offers of essential military hardware, including attack helicopters.

Envoys from the U.N.'s 15 Security Council member states flew into Goma on Monday to bolster a U.N. drive to help resolve years of conflict and ultimately allow the 17,000-strong U.N. force there to leave.

The Security Council approved the reinforcement late last year as clashes between government soldiers and Congolese Tutsi fighters threatened to spark yet another Great Lakes regional war, but few countries have been willing to pledge troops.

Despite the official end of Congo's 1998-2003 war, the vast central African nation's eastern provinces remain plagued by lingering fighting between the army, foreign rebels, and homegrown insurgents and militias.

MONUC is backing Congolese operations against the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Rwandan Hutu rebel group seen as a root cause of the violence in eastern Congo.