Congolese rebels are preventing UN observers from investigating allegations made by local residents that Rwanda has sent troops back into the country's restive east, a UN spokesman said Wednesday.
Congolese Rally for Democracy insurgents -- supported by Rwanda during a bloody five-year war that officially finished this year -- turned UN officials away from a military camp and prevented them from speaking with fighters in Ruwangabo in North Kivu province, Hamadoun Toure, UN spokesman in Congo, told reporters.
Rebels hampered UN military observers who were "verifying information relative to the presence of Rwandan troops on Congolese soil," he said.
Rebel authorities "need to let us check to lift all suspicion," Toure added.
Rwanda pulled its roughly 30,000 troops out of eastern Congo after a July last year accord. In return, Congo agreed to disarm and repatriate former Rwandan Hutu fighters who took part in Rwanda's 1994 genocide, which killed at least a half-million people.
Rwandan Foreign Minister Charles Murigande paid a visit to Kinshasa this month, but complained earlier that Congo was not doing enough to contain the Rwandan Hutu fighters.
Congolese residents had told UN officials they believed Rwandan troops were in the area and asked them to investigate. Rwanda maintains all its soldiers were withdrawn last year.
Rwanda poured troops into Congo in August 1998 to back Congolese rebels seeking to oust then-president Laurent Kabila, sparking a war that drew in half a dozen African countries.
The conflict has since officially ended and Congo launched a new power-sharing government that includes rebel leaders in a bid to ensure peace. The vast central African nation's north and east remain volatile, however, with deadly attacks and ethnic fighting.
In Kanyabayonga, in eastern Congo, rival governors of an eastern Congolese province met Wednesday in a UN-backed effort to build trust and, eventually, unite the province of North Kivu -- one of the main battleground's in the civil war in this vast central African nation.
The meeting between the two former rebel leaders was arranged by the UN mission to Congo and intended to get their two groups, which are sitting together on the other side of the country in the capital Kinshasa in a transitional government, to work together in North Kivu, said Lena Sundh, the deputy head of the UN mission.
Despite the peace agreement, North Kivu and other eastern provinces remain split between two former rebel groups -- the Congolese Rally for Democracy, or RCD, and the Congolese Rally for Democracy-Liberation Movement, or RCD-ML.
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