The United Nations is committed to ensuring peaceful elections this year in Democratic Republic of Congo, UN chief Kofi Annan said on Thursday as he visited peacekeeping troops in the violence-prone east.
On a morale-boosting trip to the local UN headquarters in the eastern town of Kisangani, Annan said the world body's biggest peacekeeping force was ready to help the Congolese people leave behind years of war, dictatorship and chaos.
The former Belgian colony plans to hold its first democratic elections in 40 years in June, drawing a line under a 1998-2003 war that dragged in half a dozen foreign armies.
"We are going to work with the Congolese people and the government to make sure we make progress and consolidate peace and stability," Annan said as he met UN and Congolese officials and visited a local electoral commission. "They want peace. They are fed up with war. They have suffered enough and don't want to go back to the destruction and misery of the past," the UN Secretary-General said.
The UN's 17,000-strong Congo peacekeeping mission, known by its French acronym MONUC, is thinly stretched across the vast central African country, which is the size of western Europe.
Operating alongside an often unreliable Congolese army, UN troops have been battling marauding rebels and renegade militias - remnants of the five-year war - who still terrorise civilians in the mineral-rich east.
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