U.N. Children's Fund Commences Largest Aid Distribution to Eastern Congo

"This intervention is particularly critical," the agency's spokesman, Jaya Murthy, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Supplies reportedly include soap, blankets and water containers, which can help combat diseases such as cholera that has spread across eastern Congo since fighting intensified three months ago and forced more than 250,000 people to flee their homes for crowded, chaotic and unsanitary refugee camps.

"With the frequent movements of people, that's how cholera spreads," Murthy said.

The large distribution comes as the unrelenting fight between the rebel force loyal to rebel leader Laurent Nkunda and the pro-government militia in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has sparked renewed calls for more international aid and U.N. peacekeeping troops.

"Thousands of innocent people have been caught up in the conflict and are living in desperate conditions - they urgently need our help," Peter Grant, international director of the Christian relief and development agency Tearfund, stated in a report Monday.

In a letter to the U.N. Security Council last week, a coalition of 44 organizations in eastern Congo pleaded for more troops to help prevent further fighting.

"Since August 28, fighting has intensified in many areas, causing deaths, rapes, lootings, forced recruitment and further displacements of civilian populations," the coalition wrote.

"We are anxious, afraid and utterly traumatized by the constant insecurity in which we live. We don't know which saint to pray to; we are condemned to death by all this violence and displacement," they stated.

"It is time for the government and the international community to protect the civilians who have fallen victim to the atrocities of the conflict."

Alice Fay of Tearfund, who is in Congo to assess people's needs, recently visited a make-shift camp outside a church, which is now home to ten thousand people.

"We'd been expecting to see people living in the church, but the scale of what we saw was greater than what we'd imagined," she reported Monday. "This was the first we had seen for ourselves anything of the situation on the ground. It was truly shocking."

When Fay and her team later met with a pastor, they were urged to pass along a message to the international community.

"He urged us: 'If you get the chance to talk to people in the outside world, ask them to pray for peace. We need peace above all and the displaced people want to go home,'" Fay recalled him saying.

Congo has a long and bloody history of fighting, but it was in August that the conflict between Nkunda and government forces intensified.

Rebel leader Nkunda and his National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) force claim they are fighting to protect Tutsis from Hutus who escaped to Congo after Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

But critics accuse Nkunda of using that as an excuse to hide his real motive of gaining power. Since the escalation of violence, his troops have taken control of land masses in eastern Congo.