A UN special envoy was in eastern Congo on Saturday in a renewed effort to broker peace with Tutsi rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda as peacekeepers said his fighters continued to break a shaky cease-fire there.
Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo was due to meet Nkunda in the rebel commander's native village, Jomba, the UN said, the day after meeting Congolese President Joseph Kabila.
Obasanjo is on his second mission in two weeks aimed at ending fighting in Congo's war-ravaged North Kivu province. A cease-fire declared by Nkunda has halted battles with government troops and brought nearly two weeks of relative calm, but his men have continued attacking Congolese and Rwandan militia allies of the government, sending thousands of refugees fleeing east into Uganda. The rebels seized the border town of Ishasha on Thursday, and Congo's UN peacekeeping mission, MONUC, said fresh clashes between Nkunda's National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) and armed groups erupted near the town of Masisi on Saturday. "We're hoping for some real consolidation of the cease-fire on the part of the CNDP, and a stop to the fighting and the progression of CNDP troops," MONUC's spokeswoman in North Kivu, Sylvie van den Wildenberg, told Reuters.
Some 250,000 civilians have fled fighting in eastern Congo since Nkunda launched an offensive in late August that brought his troops to within 10 km (6 miles) of the provincial capital, Goma, routing the army and throwing MONUC into disarray.
Obasanjo, who met both Nkunda and Kabila almost two weeks ago, recently pressed for direct talks between the two to end the violence, a move viewed by many observers as ceding to one of the rebels' key demands. Government ministers this week again rejected the possibility of direct negotiations with Nkunda, and the warring sides seemed far apart on how to end their festering conflict.
Comments
Comments are closed.