UN and Congolese forces have killed about 80 rebels in a week of joint operations and vowed to sustain the drive to bring peace to the violent east before next year's elections, the UN said on Monday.
A UN military spokesman said UN peacekeepers and Congolese government troops were pursuing Ugandan rebel fighters through the jungle after driving them from five camps south of Beni in the Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu district.
"It's an ongoing operation, the Ugandan rebels are in full flight," UN military spokesman Major Hans-Jakob Reichen told Reuters.
Over the last week, joint Congolese/UN units had also staged two separate operations to flush out local Congolese militias that have refused to disarm and carried out attacks in Ituri district, which lies to the north of North Kivu.
"Some 80 armed members of these ex-militia and rebel groups, both Congolese and Ugandan, have been killed in the last week," Reichen said.
The three operations had involved in all 1,000 UN troops supporting 6,000 Congolese government soldiers.
They were launched following a ground-breaking December 18 national referendum in which Congolese overwhelmingly voted to adopt a new constitution aimed at paving the way for national elections by end-June next year.
The internal security drive is key to guaranteeing peaceful parliamentary and presidential polls in Africa's third biggest country, which has seen decades of dictatorship, war and chaos.
"This is a momentum we will sustain right up to the elections," Reichen told Reuters.
He said UN casualties reported in the week's operations so far were an Indian peacekeeper killed and four more wounded.
A number of Congolese government troops had also been killed and injured in the fighting.
The UN's 17,000-strong Congo peacekeeping force - its biggest in the world - is trying to establish order across the country in the wake of a five-year war estimated to have killed nearly 4 million people, mainly through hunger and disease.
The war officially ended in 2003, but bands of gunmen still intimidate civilians in large areas, particularly in the east whose mineral riches are believed to have fuelled the conflict that at one point drew in six foreign armies.
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