The lopsided numbers tell the story of the U.N.'s uphill struggle to protect civilians caught up in the latest rebel assault in conflict-wracked eastern Congo.

For months, 6,000 United Nations peacekeepers in North Kivu - a province 1 1/2 times the size of France in a country the size of Western Europe - have been trying to help ensure security for 1 million displaced people threatened by a rebel offensive.

Rebel leader Laurent Nkunda went on the offensive Aug. 28 in the eastern Congo province of North Kivu and brought his fighters to the edge of Goma, its largest city, last week before declaring a unilateral cease-fire. Tens of thousands of civilians fled the fighting and an unknown number were injured and killed.

"For two months, we prevented anything out of hand happening," the top U.N. envoy in Congo, Alan Doss, said Monday in a videoconference from Goma. "There were attacks, counterattacks, but we kept both sides more or less deteriorating into a major conflict throughout the region."

Last week, however, Nkunda's forces took control of Rutshuru, a village 55 miles north of Goma, and swept toward Goma itself as government troops retreated, looting and raping as they fled.

Doss said the U.N. force known as MONUC held positions "everywhere" and "didn't pull back."

But this time its soldiers could not protect all the civilians caught up in the fighting.

"We had counted on national forces," Doss said. "We have not had the support there that we had hoped for."

U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy echoed Doss, saying the U.N. is in eastern Congo to assist the Congolese army but its troops are overstretched and need to be reinforced. The 17,000-strong U.N. force in Congo is currently the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission but is operating in a vast area.

About 6,000 peacekeepers are deployed in 34 different places in North Kivu, where their main job is protecting displaced civilians numbering about 1 million of the province's 4 million population, said Ross Mountain, the U.N.'s humanitarian chief in Congo.

The rest of the U.N. force is deployed in three other provinces in eastern Congo where many armed groups are also operating, South Kivu, Ituri, and Orientale.

"So we're operating on four fronts," Mountain said. "It's a zero sum game. ... We certainly cannot provide a soldier behind every banana bush."

Critics say the U.N. force was unprepared for its main task of protecting civilians from the war. A growing number of civilians are furious at the U.N.'s failure to keep them safe. Last week, angry Congolese pelted rocks at all four U.N. compounds in Goma.

Erin Weir, peacekeeping advocate in Goma for Washington-based Refugees International, said recently "the U.N. Security Council handed MONUC an exceptionally complex set of tasks to accomplish but never came through with the resources or the political support to get the job done."

Asked about the criticism, Le Roy said that during his meetings with Congolese leaders and North Kivu's governor no one was critical of the U.N. force.

"Authorities on the ground recognize that without MONUC many other areas will have been taken. ... Criticism of MONUC is in many cases, I must say, unfair," he said from Goma. "It's clearly not what I've seen today. ... We are doing our utmost."

Doss said U.N. personnel faced gunfire from government and rebel troops and were often caught between the two sides. In one case, he said, a Uruguyan unit was literally caught in crossfire.

He called criticism of the U.N.'s performance "a disservice" to the men on the front lines.

"That we need to reconfigure, reinforce - we agree," Doss said. "In the light of what has happened, that the peace process has once again fallen apart in many ways, that's true."

But he said the U.N. is still trying to keep the situation from deteriorating into a major regional conflict and it needs political and diplomatic support as well as reinforcements.