GOMA, Congo — More than 40 rebels suspected of atrocities during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide were killed in an overnight air raid, a military spokesman said Friday.
The raids targeted one of the positions of the rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR, said Oliver Hamuli, the spokesman for the military operation.
The group is made up primarily of ethnic Hutus from Rwanda who fled across the border into Congo following the 1994 slaughter of more than 500,000 mostly ethnic Tutsi civilians.

The Congolese government is broadcasting messages to Rwandan rebels within its borders demanding they surrender, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s communications minister told CNN on Sunday.
“We would … prefer a voluntary disarmament,” Mende Omalanga said. “We are campaigning for them to put [down] their guns.”
So far, about 160 of the estimated 6,500 Rwandan rebels in Congo’s eastern regions have heeded the call and laid down their arms, he said.

The U.N. Security Council has approved the deployment of 3,000 more police and peacekeepers to reinforce the overstretched U.N. mission in eastern Congo. From United Nation’s headquarters in New York, VOA’s Margaret Besheer has more.
The council unanimously approved the secretary-general’s request for a temporary surge in peacekeepers. But the question now is who will contribute the troops and how soon will they arrive in the conflict zone.

KANYABAYONGA, Congo (AP) — On one side of this mountaintop ghost town, a line of black-booted rebels approaches on foot with rockets and tin boxes of ammunition, seizing new territory with each footstep despite promises of a cease-fire.
On the other side, government soldiers in flip-flops balancing portable generators and luggage on their heads have begun to flee.
In between, the vast Central African nation’s deepening humanitarian crisis is laid bare: Thousands of desperate civilians who used to live in this eastern Congo town huddle against coils of concertina wire surrounding a …

Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda agreed on Sunday to support a United Nations peace process for eastern Congo, including respecting a ceasefire and creating a humanitarian corridor to aid refugees. After talks with a special U.N. envoy, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, at Jomba in Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province, Nkunda said he had agreed to three requests from him — to respect a ceasefire, open a humanitarian corridor and support the U.N. peace initiative.
“We agree,“ Nkunda said in French, but he had asked Obasanjo to tell …

UN special envoy Olusegun Obasanjo, the former Nigerian president, is in the Democratic Republic of Congo for talks aimed at ending months of violence.
Having met President Joseph Kabila in Kinshasa, Mr Obasanjo is heading east to see rebel leader Laurent Nkunda. He has already spoken to him by phone.
Meanwhile the first UN aid delivery has reached areas hit by fighting between rebels and Congolese government troops.

(CNN) — An emergency summit got underway in east Africa Friday in an attempt to halt an escalation in fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo that has displaced tens of thousands of people.
Regional leaders and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon are were meeting with seven African leaders in Nairobi, Kenya, in the latest diplomatic effort to tackle what aid agencies say is developing into a major humanitarian crisis.

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.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband is flying to the Democratic Republic of Congo, amid fierce fighting between government and rebel forces.
He and his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner will also visit Rwanda to impress on both countries the need to find a solution “urgently”.
More than 200,000 people are estimated to have been forced from their homes since fighting resumed in August.

Fierce fighting between government and rebel forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo is causing a humanitarian catastrophe, the Red Cross has said.
It said the number of displaced people was growing by the hour and that the precarious security situation was making it difficult to deliver aid.
Intense diplomatic efforts are under way to end the crisis, which has displaced a total of 250,000 people.
A tense ceasefire is holding in and around the eastern city of Goma.