By Louis Charbonneau
GOMA, Congo (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. mission in Congo said on Sunday he would take the fight to rebels in the country's east and appealed to a Security Council delegation to approve new military equipment like unmanned drones.
Alan Doss said the 17,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force in Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) would establish a forward command in Goma, the capital of restive border province of North Kivu, to pin down the rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).
The presence of the FDLR, founded by Hutu militia and former soldiers who fled Rwanda after its 1994 genocide, has prompted two wars in Congo and an ongoing revolt by Tutsi tribesmen loyal to rebel General Laurent Nkunda.
The violence has killed an estimated 5.4 million people since the start of the 1998-2003 second Congolese war, mostly through hunger and disease, making it the biggest humanitarian disaster since World War II.
"The FDLR have to disarm and go back to Rwanda, without that there will be no peace in the Congo," Doss told journalists accompanying the visit by U.N. Security Council ambassadors.
MONUC would press ahead with efforts to negotiate the disarmament of the FDLR while at the same time maintaining a military campaign to bring security to the region, he said.
Even with 15,000 troops in eastern Congo, the U.N. mission remained underequipped and required more advanced intelligence equipment to track down and engage an estimated 6,000 FDLR fighters and 14,000 other combatants, including Nkunda's troops and Mai Mai militia, Doss said.
"It's the equivalent of one cop for all of Manhattan," he said. "One of the things we have to break through is the garrison mentality ... You have to move around, you have to be out there."
HOTBED OF ETHNIC VIOLENCE
Since their deployment in 2000, more than 100 U.N. peacekeepers have been killed in an effort to bring peace to the vast central African country, but ethnic fighters and Congo's ill-disciplined army still loot, rape and kill civilians daily.
The United Nations, European Union and United States on Thursday condemned the FDLR for a "terrorist" attack on a refugee camp in eastern Congo in which at least nine people were killed as the rebels fled an army offensive.
"One of the structural difficulties in an operation like this is in fact getting reliable technical, tactical information," said Doss, who was named head of MONUC in October.
He cited the successful use of unmanned drones to detect Taliban fighters by U.N.-mandated NATO forces in Afghanistan and appealed to the Security Council delegation to back the use of similar equipment in Congo.
French U.N. Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, leading the delegation on an annual tour of Africa's trouble spots, said the proposal would be discussed later this year in New York.
"We wanted first of all to see at first hand what is happening, to talk locally to the U.N.," he told reporters.
Aid workers estimate more than half a million people have fled violence in the past 18 months in North Kivu. Despite a peace deal in January between the government and more than a dozen small rebel groups, fighting has increased as Congo's army has tried to dislodge the FDLR from its strongholds.
In the Mugunga 1 camp outside Goma, housing more than 10,000 displaced Congolese, 58-year-old Misheku Ernest said he was too scared to return home with his wife and four children.
"We came here to get away from the wars," he said. "In my village there is still fighting."
