Militia fighters in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo attacked a UN peacekeeping base triggering clashes that left two fighters dead and two peacekeepers lightly wounded, the UN mission said.
Thirty-four rebels from a Mai-Mai militia were killed in fighting with Congo’s army last week, local army spokesman Jules Ngongo said, a spike in violence attributed to an army crackdown on the militia’s harassment of local residents.
The attack, in which two rebels were wounded, was a frontal assault on UN forces charged with protecting civilians in Congo’s east, where dozens of armed groups exploit mineral resources and prey on local residents.
“Early this morning, about 30 Mai-Mai attacked,” mission spokeswoman Florence Marchal told Reuters, adding UN forces drove off the assailants. It was not immediately clear which Mai-Mai group attacked or what their objective was.
The Mai-Mai comprise a number of armed bands originally formed to resist Rwandan invasions in the 1990s. They have morphed into a variety of ethnic-based militia, smuggling networks and protection rackets.
Congo’s mineral-rich eastern borderlands are a tinderbox of ethnic tensions and for more than two decades have been racked by violence that often spilled across the country’s borders.
President Joseph Kabila’s refusal to step down at the end of his constitutional mandate last December fuelled further unrest in the country’s east, where wars between 1996-2003 killed millions, and centre, where an insurgency against the central government killed thousands since last August.
Last week, UN forces in South Kivu province intervened with helicopters and heavy machine guns to beat back an advance by a separate rebel group on the strategic city of Uvira.
The UN mission in Congo, MONUSCO, is the world’s largest with some 18,000 uniformed personnel and a more than $1 billion annual budget.
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