Congo fighting flares, summit calls for ceasefire

Fighting between rebels and Congo fighting flares, summit calls for ceasefire government troops flared in east Congo on Friday, and African leaders called for an immediate ceasefire to end a conflict the UN said could engulf the Great Lakes region.
The renewed combat near Kibati in Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province sent thousands of civilians fleeing in panic from a nearby refugee camp, adding urgency to a regional peace summit held in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.
"There should be an immediate ceasefire by all the armed men and militia in North Kivu," said Kenyan Foreign Minister Moses Wetangula, reading a communique agreed by seven African leaders who met UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Nairobi. The leaders from the Great Lakes region, including the presidents of Congo and Rwanda, said they would be willing to send peacekeeping troops to east Congo if required. Addressing the summit earlier, Ban said they must use their influence to make Congolese rebel chief Laurent Nkunda end his attacks and curb any support allowing him to carry on fighting.
Fighting between Nkunda's Tutsi rebels and Congo's army has spread along the hilly border with Rwanda, uprooting hundreds of thousands of people and creating a humanitarian crisis. The African leaders called for a humanitarian corridor to be set up to channel aid to help refugees.
"This crisis could engulf the broader sub-region," Ban told the Nairobi summit, adding that only a lasting political settlement, rather than military moves alone, could solve it. As the UN and African leaders were meeting, Nkunda's battle-hardened fighters and government troops exchanged machine-gun, mortar and rocket-propelled grenade fire from green hills in sight of North Kivu's Nyiragongo volcano.
As the sound of combat echoed around the slopes, civilians carrying infants, bundles, pots and even domestic animals streamed south away from the camp at Kibati on the road towards North Kivu provincial capital Goma, 7 km (4 miles) to the south.
The UN has its largest peacekeeping force in the world, 17,000-strong, deployed in the vast, mineral-rich but racially divided Congo, whose eastern conflict is fuelled by ethnic tensions stemming from the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda.
But UN troops are thinly stretched across a state the size of Western Europe where marauding armed groups have roamed for years, killing, looting and raping and recruiting child soldiers in some of the worst levels of violence seen in the world.
Humanitarian agencies in east Congo are clamouring for more protection for civilians and a group of them appealed to the UN, Africa and Europe to reinforce the UN Congo mission.
"The world cannot look away again as thousands suffer in eastern Congo," said Juliette Prodhan, head of Oxfam in Congo. "We have had fine words and important meetings but these must now be put into action by providing additional troops to safeguard the people". "We need more urgency, action and commitment," she said.
The recent upsurge in fighting between Nkunda's rebels and army troops backed by militia allies has raised fears of a rerun of a wider 1998-2003 war in the former Belgian colony. A key issue African leaders need to resolve for a lasting solution is the presence in east Congo of Rwandan Hutu rebels, known as the FDLR, who took part in the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Previous agreements to halt the fighting have failed to produce results on the ground.
Nkunda justifies his revolt as a legitimate one to protect ethnic Tutsis in Congo from the Hutu rebels. He told Reuters on Friday the summit would have no influence on him unless the leaders convinced Congo's President Joseph Kabila to have talks.
"It's only a regional summit. It doesn't have any impact on our demands," Nkunda said by telephone from east Congo. The region is rich in minerals, such as coltan, which is used in mobile phones, making control of the remote terrain, far from Congo's capital Kinshasa, lucrative. United Nations relief agencies, which run the Kibati refugee camp, said the fighting had interrupted the distribution of aid and caused panic among the camp population.
"All our programmes in Kibati have been suspended as a result of the shooting, the whole camp is emptying," Jaya Murthy of UN childrens' agency UNICEF in Goma told Reuters. Ban held bilateral meetings in Nairobi with Kabila and Rwandan President Paul Kagame to encourage them "to find a path to peace". Ban said later he was encouraged by the in-depth, frank exchange of views and engagement of the leaders.
Rwanda denies supporting Nkunda and accuses Congo's army of backing the Hutu rebels in the east. US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Nkunda's rebels and government-backed Mai-Mai militias of deliberately killing civilians in fighting this week at Kiwanja, north of Goma.
The number of people displaced by fighting in North Kivu since September is now estimated at 250,000, the UN said. This was in addition to 800,000 who had fled previous hostilities. "The humanitarian situation is deteriorating," Elisabeth Byrs of UN humanitarian agency OCHA said.