KINSHASA – The United Nations must boost peacekeeping forces in areas of Africa where Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels operate in order to stop massacres such as one in which more than 300 people were killed in December, a rights group has said.
The Ugandan rebel group has killed and abducted people on a regular basis for the last 23 years from Uganda, Sudan, Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Human Rights Watch (HRW) noted in a report.
It said the UN has fewer than 1,000 peacekeepers in this vast and often impenetrable area, in which the rebels mount their attacks. The UN says the LRA killed more than 1,200 people in a 10-month period through 2008 and 2009, while HRW puts at 321 the death toll in a massacre in the remote northeast of the DRC last December that was previously unreported.
‘‘The four-day rampage demonstrates that the LRA remains a serious threat to civilians and is not a spent force, as the Ugandan and Congolese governments claim,” Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher at HRW, said.
HRW also wants the Congolese government to work with mobile phone companies to bring network coverage to the area.
One witness cycled 60km (40 miles) to find a telephone to inform the UN of the massacre, and villages that were subsequently attacked knew nothing of nearby attacks.
Other recommendations in its report charting LRA atrocities, released late on Saturday, include donor funding for a comprehensive strategy, better co-ordination, community radio, helicopter support and deployment of elite military groups.
‘‘High-level attention, bold steps and courageous leadership are necessary to develop and implement a comprehensive regional strategy that resolves the LRA threat,’’ said the report.
The US military’s African Command provides communications, logistical and intelligence support for Uganda’s national army in its pursuit of the LRA, and the US is considering legislation to ensure a strategy to catch the LRA leadership.
‘‘The number of peacekeepers we have on the ground is already not enough to cover Congo, but it’s not only about blue helmets – we need more co-operation among the three countries in the fight against the LRA,’’ a spokesman for the UN mission, known as MONUC, said. – (Reuters)