KINSHASA (Reuters) –
Dozens of unidentified fighters attacked a provincial capital in northern Democratic Republic of Congo Sunday in a battle that has so far left one U.N. peacekeeper dead, U.N. officials said.

At least 30 fighters believed to be part of a mushrooming ethnic conflict in the region crossed the Congo River by boat to Mbandaka, capital of Congo‘s northern Equateur province, attacking the governor’s residence and taking control of the city’s airport in a surprise assault on Congolese and U.N. forces, a U.N. official said.

“There is heavy fighting going on right now, especially around the airport,” Madnodje Mounoubai, spokesman for the U.N. mission MONUC, told Reuters by telephone. “There is one (peacekeeper) dead, Ghanaian.”

He added that a U.N. contractor has also died of a heart attack during the fighting.

The Mbandaka assault is thought to be separate from an ongoing conflict between U.N.-backed forces and rebels in Congo’s east and marks an escalation in the northern region, where violence erupted last year between ethnic groups over fishing access.

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KINSHASA (Reuters) –
The United Nations must boost peacekeeping forces in areas of Africa where Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels operate to stop massacres such as one that killed more than 300 people in December, a rights group 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, Human Rights Watch noted in a report.

It said the United Nations has fewer than 1,000 peacekeepers in this vast and often impenetrable areas where the rebels mount their attacks.

The U.N. says the LRA killed more than 1,200 people in a 10-month period throughout 2008 and 2009, while the rights group puts the death toll in a massacre previously unreported in the remote northeast last December at 321.

“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.

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