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By Joe Bavier

GOMA, Congo, Jan 28 (Reuters) - Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army rebels killed more than 100 people in a village in Congo in an apparent reprisal for army operations against them, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

The massacre in Tora village in northeastern Orientale province on Jan. 16 brought the number of civilians killed by the rebels to 900 since the campaign started last month.

"At least 100 bodies were recovered by local self-defence forces. The attack was reportedly carried out by 13 rebels," said Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich, military spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Democratic Republic of Congo.

Dietrich said 40 rebels had been killed in the operations, launched by Congo, Uganda and Sudan after the LRA failed to sign peace accords to end one of Africa's longest wars.

No LRA commanders -- some of whom are wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court -- have been captured. But the operations have brought a wave of reprisals by rebels.

Congo's President Joseph Kabila won elections in 2006 saying he would pacify his vast, resource-rich country after a decade of war and chaos which killed more than 5 million people and sucked in six neigbouring armies.

Despite support from the U.N. mission, the government has struggled against several local and foreign rebel groups which continue to roam the east, exploiting mines and attacking civilians.

As a result, over the last month Kabila has allowed Uganda and Rwanda to send their armies into Congo to help hunt the LRA and Rwandan Hutu FDLR rebels. But the operations have been controversial and resulted in high civilian casualties.

The U.N. humanitarian agency OCHA said it had reports that 110 people had been killed in the Jan. 16 attack on Tora and some 130,000 people have been displaced since September.

SPASM OF ATTACKS

Uganda, which led the anti-LRA operation into Congo with fighter planes on Dec. 14, initially said it planned to spend a month hunting the rebels led by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed mystic who has waged a 20-year rebellion in northern Uganda.

But they are still pursuing rebels who have dispersed into the bush of Congo, South Sudan and Central Africa Republic.

Kabila last week allowed Rwanda to send its army into Congo to track its rebels, the Rwandan Hutu Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), some of whom took part in the 1994 slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

In return, Rwanda is under pressure to end a rebellion by the Tutsi National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), which was founded by dissident general Laurent Nkunda and, until recently, received support from Rwanda. Nkunda was arrested last week.

The International Crisis Group think-tank said the operations "were likely to achieve few concrete results other than to cause damage to civilians...and to provoke the intended target into a new spasm of attacks on innocent communities."

For FACTBOX on the Lord's Resistance Army, click [ID:nLS761995] (Writing by David Lewis; editing by Alistair Thomson and Angus MacSwan)

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