Fresh fighting broke out yesterday in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), wreaking panic among civilians even as regional leaders gathered in Nairobi to try to rekindle dialogue and hammer out a road map to peace.
Clashes erupted between DR Congo troops and renegade general Laurent Nkunda’s rebels around 15km from the regional capital Goma, several sources said.
An AFP reporter said thousands of displaced people fled the nearby camp of Kibati, as gunshots were heard and helicopters flew overhead.
“The FARDC [government forces] have used heavy weapons from Kibati, mortars and machine guns. The fighting is continuing,” UN military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich said.
DR Congo President Joseph Kabila’s spokesman accused UN peacekeepers of doing nothing to stop killings by rebels, following reports by Human Rights Watch that at least 20 civilians had been killed on Thursday.
“People are being slaughtered and MONUC [UN mission in DR Congo] did nothing,” Kudura Kasongo said.
A senior Western official attending the summit admitted that “more should have been done,” but said he remained confident that MONUC’s Indian contingent could prevent Nkunda from capturing Goma, even without backing from routed government forces.
The presidents of DR Congo, Rwanda and Kenya were among those attending the summit, as well as the UN’s newly-appointed envoy to Congo, former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo.
One of the main goals of the meeting is to rekindle dialogue between Kabila and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame, whose government has been accused of supporting the rebels, an allegation it has repeatedly denied.
But Louis Michel, the EU’s commissioner for development and humanitarian aid, said direct talks between the two were not on the agenda.
At a meeting in Nairobi a year ago almost to the day, their two countries committed to a plan aimed at stabilizing eastern DR Congo, but both sides have failed to deliver.
Under that agreement, Kinshasa was supposed to disarm Rwandan Hutu rebels wanted for a 1994 genocide and operating in eastern DR Congo, while Kigali was to stop supporting armed groups, including rebels using Rwanda as a staging ground.
Kagame has vehemently denied any involvement in the latest round of fighting and lambasted what he said was a misguided approach by an international community shirking responsibility.
Kinshasa has never exercised any real authority in eastern DR Congo and its regular troops fled in the face of Laurent Nkunda’s offensive, allowing the rebels to seize key towns and threaten the regional capital Goma.
MONUC is the UN’s largest peacekeeping force with 17,000 troops, but it has only a few hundred in the areas affected by the latest violence and has been unable to curb the fighting and displacement.
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