UN officials have vehemently rejected suggestions that UN peacekeepers have failed to protect civilians in eastern DR Congo, where recent fighting is causing a humanitarian catastrophe.
Aid agencies say tens of thousands of civilians are roaming the countryside unprotected, in need of shelter, food, water and medical care.
Some of the displaced have accused UN peacekeepers of failing to fulfil a mandate to protect them from violence and looting, not just by armed rebel groups but also by government forces.
The head of UN peacekeeping in the region, Alain Le Roy, dismissed suggestions that UN peacekeepers in DR Congo, known by their French acronym MONUC, had failed to carry out their duty.
'We are doing our utmost,' he told reporters
He said MONUC, which has some 17,000 troops across Congo, was doing everything possible to fulfill its mandate with limited manpower over eastern DR Congo, a region one and a half times the size of France.
Last week's rebel offensive displaced 100,000 civilians, including 60,000 children, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said.
'Around 250,000 people are now believed to have been displaced in the last two months, bringing the total number of internally displaced to around 1m, 20% of the entire Nord-Kivu population.
Since the mid-1990s, the east of the huge central African nation, rich in natural resources and bordering nine countries, has been plagued with conflicts, some involving neighbouring nations.
In a fresh diplomatic move aimed at ending the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said he is prepared to travel to the region.
The first UN-protected relief supplies for a week arrived in the area yesterday.
Mr Ban said he was trying to arrange meetings with both the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, and his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kigame.
