AP News, September 7th, 2007
New clashes erupted Friday between a renegade general's forces and government troops in eastern Congo, and the U.N. said violence was hampering efforts to deliver food to tens of thousands of displaced civilians.
The latest fighting pitting supporters of former Gen. Laurent Nkunda and army troops took place in Rumangabo, a village about 40 miles north of the regional capital, Goma, said Maj. Gabriel De Brosses, a spokesman for U.N. peacekeepers.
The two sides have clashed elsewhere in North Kivu province for a week. On Thursday, commanders agreed to a truce in the town of Sake, west of Goma.
Reached by phone from the area, Nkunda accused the army of breaking the truce. The army "tried to get back positions we captured in Rumangabo," Nkunda said. "We are resisting, that is why there is fighting."
Army officials could not be reached for comment, but a U.N.-funded radio station in Congo cited army and police sources as saying that Nkunda's men attacked the village.
De Brosses said the U.N. peacekeeping mission brokered Thursday's truce, but it only applied to Sake.
The fighting has displaced tens of thousands of people in Congo. Up to 35,000 refugees have also crossed the border into Uganda in the past five days, the U.N. refugee agency said in a statement in Kampala, Uganda. The refugees began crossing Monday into the small Ugandan border town of Bunagana.
The U.N. World Food Program said the fighting had forced a U.N. helicopter airlifting flour, peas, cooking oil and sugar to turn back.
"This is a real and worsening crisis," said WFP Deputy Country Director Claude Jibidar.
Aid workers said the displaced population at a makeshift camp at Mugunga, had swelled to 27,000 people, most of whom fled Sake and its environs.
"We sleep under the stars without shelter. We have nothing to eat because we brought nothing with us," one of the displaced, a pastor named Jean Balengele, told AP by telephone. "Nobody here is giving us anything."
State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said Thursday the U.S. "calls on all leaders to stop the violence which continues to threaten innocent lives and displace thousands of civilians."
Eastern Congo has long been wracked by fighting between local militias, renegade soldiers and the army. The region was once nominally controlled by rival rebel factions who later signed a peace deal that ended a 1998-2002 war.
Nkunda, who is believed to be close to top military officials in Rwanda, quit the army and launched his own rebellion after Congo's war ended, claiming the country's transition to democracy was flawed and excluded the country's ethnic Tutsi minority.
Nkunda has said he is also fighting against Rwandan Hutu rebels who took refuge in Congo following Rwanda's 1994 genocide. In 2004, he briefly captured the eastern Congo city of Bukavu. His troops have been accused of torture and rape, and he is named in an international arrest warrant for war crimes.
Also Friday, a cargo plane crashed into a chunk of hardened lava at Goma's airport, bursting into flames and killing at least eight _ five crew members and three girls, the regional governor said. It was not clear why the girls were aboard the plane.
The An-12 landed too far down the runway to avoid the rocks, North Kivu Gov. Julien Mpaluku told The Associated Press by telephone. A volcano erupted in 2001 and spread lava through half of Goma and the airport.
Mpaluku said the plane took off from Kinshasa carrying oil and beauty products. Goma is on Congo's eastern border with Rwanda, on Lake Kivu.
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Associated Press Writer Katy Pownall in Kampala, Uganda, contributed to this report.
