A humanitarian disaster was predicted by aid officials in Congo last night if a fragile ceasefire ordered by commanders of a rebel army fails to hold.

Hundreds of thousands fled Goma, the regional capital, and the surrounding countryside in a mass exodus last week when Congolese Tutsi rebel forces commanded by the renegade general Laurent Nkunda captured several key towns and threatened to attack the strategic eastern city.

Defended by only 150 United Nations troops, Goma is directly in the path of rebel forces.

“People are just trying to stay safe. It’s muddy and wet and a lot of people are sick,” said one local aid worker.

A Red Cross spokesman in Kinshasa, the capital, said: “The situation is catastrophic. There is no other word.”

Nkunda’s forces were dug in yesterday just nine miles from Goma, where truckloads of drunken government troops had earlier looted stores, murdered men and raped women as they retreated in panic from the rebel advance.

In one typical incident they shot a barman dead because he failed to serve their drinks quickly enough.

Yesterday Goma, which sits on the border with Rwanda, was tense but calm. Residents who risked staying on said government troops were resuming their looting after dark.

Nkunda’s rebel forces also share a reputation for savagery. They are accused of war crimes including tying civilians in sacks and throwing them off a bridge into the Congo river. Nkunda said he had halted his advance and ordered a ceasefire to create a “humanitarian corridor” and allow people to return to their homes.

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, reported that some refugee camps in rebel-held territory had been “forcibly emptied, looted and burnt”. The refugees were in desperate need of help, said Antonio Guterres, its chief.

A woman clutching her brood of young children and looking for shelter said: “We are helpless, powerless.

“We do not believe anyone will treat us well. I am too afraid to go home, but who will feed us here? We feel abandoned.”

The Save the Children charity, which was forced to pull out of Goma after government troops went on the rampage last week, sent an emergency team back into the city yesterday. A priority is reuniting families split up in the chaos. Spokesman Dominic Nutt said: “A high number of young children have been separated from their parents in their bid to escape.”

The violence plaguing the eastern Congo was largely born out of the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda when 800,000 people, most of them Tutsis, were massacred by Hutu militias. A further destabilising factor is the struggle for control of the region’s huge mineral wealth.

Nkunda accuses the Congolese government of still supporting the Rwandan Hutu militias who took part in the genocide and then, after being defeated, crossed the border to find sanctuary in eastern Congo.

They allied themselves with the Congolese army as the Congo was plunged into a wider war between 1998 and 2003 which sucked in Rwanda and neighbouring African countries. Up to 5m people died.

It is the fear that the present fighting could rekindle conflict on such a scale that has led to the international scramble to solve the crisis.

Any deployment of British troops in the Congo will alarm British commanders at a time when the army is overstretched in Afghanistan and Iraq. If an European Union force is deployed, as the French suggested last week, Britain may have little choice. It is the so-called stand-by country which would be obliged to contribute.

Nkunda last week made it clear his men would resist any international force that took sides in the conflict, making the deployment of an EU force fraught with risk.

Times Online