September 8, 2009
More than 140 MONUC personnel have been killed

KASASA, Congo | On a winter night shortly after dark, a group of armed men burst out of the jungle and attacked a small camp here for displaced families.

By dawn, the rebels had massacred scores of civilians, pillaged crops and other valuables and left tents and huts ablaze.

But U.N. peacekeepers in a base camp less than a mile away did not hear the guns, grenades or screams, nor were they alerted by villagers who had the base's cell phone numbers, the local U.N. commander said.

The most expensive peacekeeping operation in U.N. history, with an annual budget of $1.24 billion, the Democratic Republic of the Congo mission known by its French acronym as MONUC has an authorized strength of 20,575 soldiers and military observers, and hundreds of civilians. Despite its size and resources, the 9-year-old mission has failed to pacify this tumultuous region.

"We have a large mandate, the country is huge, and there is obviously no peace to keep," U.N. Undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping Alain Le Roy told The Washington Times.

Col. Nambir Singh Vashishta, commander of the Indian battalion at the time of the raid in Kasasa, said Congolese expectations are too high.

"There are only so many soldiers here, for an area the size of Western Europe," he said. "We have one soldier for every thousand people."

The active combatants in eastern Congo — a patchwork of Rwandan- and Ugandan-financed militias and the unstable Congolese national army — have pushed MONUC into a more aggressive stance, closer to peace enforcement than peacekeeping.

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