India is to send about 3 000 troops for United Nations peacekeeping operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), making it one of the largest contingents in the strife-torn African nation, a senior official said on Monday.
”India, which keeps a brigade strength of troops on standby for deployment in UN peacekeeping operations, has accepted a UN request for sending more troops there,” Defence Secretary Ajai Vikram Singh said, according to the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency.
”This ably demonstrates our commitment to peacekeeping,” Singh said at the inauguration of a seminar in New Delhi on the ”Future of Peace Operations: Implications for India”.
Singh told the seminar Indian troops had been involved in peacekeeping in the Congo region since the 1960s and had lost 39 men there in operations.
”Now again we are engaged in the Congo. Our air force contingent and a company of the army is already there,” he said.
India’s present deployment consists of a 300-strong air force contingent armed with Mi-35 utility and attack helicopters and a 100-member army team, PTI said.
The UN Security Council voted late in September to send almost 6 000 more peacekeeping troops to the DRC, raising the ceiling of the force, known as Monuc, to 16 700.
The DRC is struggling to rebuild infrastructure from five years of civil war that left nearly three million dead, most from disease.
Most of the new deployment is expected to be in the DRC’s volatile eastern region near the borders with Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.
The restive region, awash in the natural resources that have given rise to hopes of a successful national rebuilding, continues to be wracked by factional violence despite the end of the civil war. – Sapa-AFP