The United Nations is investigating reports that blue helmets from its mission in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) colluded in the killing of civilians and the destruction of a village during joint operations with the Congolese army.

The accusations come as the world body attempts to pacify DRC ahead of the vast African nation's elections, which are due on July 30 and are set to be the first free polls there in over 40 years.

Journalist Aidan Hartley says he personally witnessed the razing of Kazana village in northeastern Ituri district on April 21, while cameraman James Brabazon captured it on film for Britain's Channel 4 (Unreported World series). Here is Hartley's account of what happened.

Officers from the U.N. Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) said Kazana held only recalcitrant militias and a few camp followers, but we saw all the signs of a civilian life brutally interrupted during their joint attack with the Congolese army.

Later, survivors claimed that up to 30 civilians were killed in Kazana during and after the initial U.N. mortar barrage. One of the MONUC officers himself estimated that 25 had been killed mainly by his forces' mortars.

After ground troops entered Kazana, and as blue helmets stood by without intervening, the hamlet was torched.

What happened in Kazana totally violates MONUC's mandate, but the military officers in the field that day were carrying out orders very clearly handed down to them by their commanders.

On April 30, we interviewed both MONUC's local Brigade Commander General Haider Mahboob and Sharou Shariff, the most senior civilian U.N. official in Ituri. They confirmed to us the way MONUC forces operate with the Congolese army, describing exactly the formation we filmed at Kazana.

We then told them what we had observed in Kazana and its aftermath, when we obtained the testimonies of survivors from this and more than a dozen other destroyed villages.

U.N. SURPRISE

Shariff and Mahboob appeared shocked. They promised to investigate our reports. On camera, Shariff said: "This is the first time that I'm hearing of this report ... I'll certainly make it a point to visit myself to corroborate all that, and then ask a lot of questions, both of the FARDC (government army) and to our own troops, but thank you for informing me of that."

If any MONUC investigation took place, it was kept secret until I published a report in Britain's Observer newspaper on June 18. MONUC has provided no proof that any action at all was taken since April 30. Based on this, why should we believe MONUC is serious about a thorough inquiry now?

Shariff claimed the violence being perpetrated on the civilians of Ituri was a "temporary phenomenon" ahead of DRC's first-ever democratic elections scheduled for July 30. He said that MONUC took very seriously its job of bringing to justice Congolese troops accused of human rights violations and agreed that the FARDC were ill-disciplined and ill-trained.

In line with this, he also promised that future operations in the area of Kazana, known as Walendu-Bindi, would be conducted by MONUC forces alone, rather than in combination with the FARDC. Weeks later, MONUC delivered 30 tonnes of ammunition to FARDC units that had received minimal training and 1,000 MONUC troops supported 3,000 Congolese in an attack on the militia stronghold of Tchei, west of Kazana.

COMBINED OPERATIONS

Kazana was not an isolated incident, but part of a pattern arising from the way MONUC operations are designed in combination with the FARDC.

At 17,000, the MONUC force is the biggest UN operation in the world today. But it is so thinly spread and ill-equipped by member states that it has no choice but to fight alongside the Congolese army to subdue militias holding out in parts of eastern DRC.

If a genuine UN investigation into Kazana goes ahead, MONUC commanders and senior UN Peacekeeping officials in New York should be asked:

• Why does MONUC continue to combine its operations with the FARDC, when it knows that the government army is among the main perpetrators of human rights abuses in DRC today? Before conducting joint operations, why was adequate training not given to these Congolese troops?
• Why did intelligence efforts fail to detect the presence of civilians in Kazana and surrounding villages?
• MONUC claims to deliver prior warnings of attack such as aircraft leaflet drops or radio broadcasts, but we observed none. Did any occur? Survivors told us the first they knew of the assault was when the UN mortars began to fall.
• Why did MONUC forces continue to bombard Kazana for seven hours even though people who might possibly have been civilians could be observed fleeing from houses? A UN attack helicopter refused to fire on the village because the pilot radioed to ground forces that the only figures he could see were unarmed.
• Why did MONUC forces fail to intervene while FARDC troops burned Kazana? The razing of Kazana was not an isolated case. A feature of Ituri's landscape south of Bunia was that villages held by militias were still standing, while those recently conquered by the FARDC had been torched by soldiers.
• In the aftermath of the attack on Kazana and neighbouring villages, what action did MONUC civilian staff take to record survivors' testimonies and to provide humanitarian relief to civilians displaced by the violence?

LACK OF AID

On this last point, after the Kazana attack, we set out to determine for sure whether or not there had been there had been civilians in the village. We tracked down refugees along the roads from Lake Albert east of Kazana all the way to the edge of the rainforest in Ituri's west.

We encountered thousands of civilians fleeing violence affecting a swathe of territory. They were sleeping rough beneath trees, in the open or in village churches. They were hungry and sick, and I was particularly struck by how most of them - old and young - were shoeless, with feet bleeding from their gruelling flight. MONUC officials were nowhere to be seen and only one Italian NGO was trying to assess the needs of this traumatised population.

I witnessed the U.N. missions in Somalia in 1993 and Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. I assumed that senior U.N. peacekeeping officials had learned lessons from their past disasters.

One of those lessons is the requirement for the world body to be both transparent and accountable in all its dealings. After Kazana, and the failure to investigate the incident for nearly two months, I believe the United Nations has a long way to go before it can claim to have improved.

"Unreported World - The U.N.'s Dirty War" was broadcast on Channel 4, on June 23 at 7.35pm (BST)

Any opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters.