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 death toll from this attack is more than 40 dead and several hurt — all on the FDLR side,” said Hamuli, the spokesman for a joint Rwanda-Congo military operation aimed at stamping out the remnants of the Hutu militia.

He said the attack took place late Thursday in Kashebere, in the eastern Congo region of Masisi. The FDLR commanders were in the midst of a meeting when the air raids began. A few miles (kilometers) away, a second attack took place.

“The death toll there was high as well. The survivors threw the bodies in the river,” Hamuli said.

The echoes of Rwanda’s genocide are still being felt in Congo nearly 15 years later. The presence of the FDLR in Congo’s terraced hills has destabilized the region, giving rise to a counter rebel group, made up of Congolese Tutsis. While that group claimed to be protecting Congo’s Tutsi minority from the Hutu militia, it too is now accused of grave abuses.

Congo has long accused Rwanda of backing the Tutsi militia — known as the CNDP. Rwanda, on the other hand, has accused Congo of aiding the FDLR and the two countries twice went to war over the issue.

But in a recent turn, Congo agreed to join forces with Rwanda in order to finally root out the last of the FDLR. The joint operation began last month. Congo’s President Joseph Kabila, however, gave a news conference to make it known that he expects troops from his former enemy to leave Congolese territory by the end of February.

More than 40 rebels killed in Congo air raid – Los Angeles Times

“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.

Omalanga said the messages in the Rwandan language of Kinawanda are being broadcast in North Kivu region during the day and night. Rebels who surrender will have the choice of returning to Rwanda or staying in Congo as refugees, Omalanga said.

He stressed that no one will be forced to return to Rwanda, where the government is working with Congo in an unprecedented partnership to combat ethnic violence.

“It is part of our deal with Rwanda,” Omalanga said. “They are happy with this program.”

He said the rebels who have surrendered so far are “on their way to Goma,” a regional capital in eastern Congo.

As part of the partnership, Rwandan authorities on Friday arrested Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, a member of the Tutsi ethnic group, raising hopes for peace in the war-ravaged region. International observers hope that Nkunda’s arrest will lead the roughly 1,500 Tutsi fighters that follow him to join with government forces.

Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo have traditionally been on opposite sides of the conflict in eastern Congo — which has pitted ethnic Tutsis, supported by Rwanda, against Congo-backed Hutus.

The fighting is a carry-over from the ethnic slaughter of the 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were killed.

A harshly worded report from the U.N. last month accused Rwanda and Congo of fighting a proxy war in the region, using the ethnic groups. It said both sides had used execution, rape and child soldiers in the fighting.

On Saturday, fighting broke out between Hutu rebels and Rwandan and Congolese troops in Congo’s Lubero region. Omalanga said nine Hutu rebels were killed and one Congolese soldier was wounded.

United Nations spokesman Jean Paul Deitrich also confirmed nine Hutu tribal fighters were killed in the Saturday clashes in Lubero, about 124 miles (200 kilometers) northeast of Goma.

Omalanga said the coalition — the Rwandan and Congolese forces — were reacting to the rebels who “shot first.”

Congo to rebels: Surrender now – CNN.com

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.

French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert said some countries have offered troops, but the department of peacekeeping is still looking for the full number needed and it would take some weeks.

“Today, we authorized the DPKO [Department of Peacekeeping Operations] to recruit and increase the number of troops on the ground, but they have to do the work,” Ripert said. “But they have started planning for that, I think.”

Countries considering contributing troops are meeting at U.N. headquarters.

Diplomats say the reinforcement of the mission, known as MONUC, is necessary to help the fragile peace process and ease the growing humanitarian crisis.

The U.N. mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo is already the organization’s largest, with about 17,000 peacekeepers. But they keep watch over a territory the size of Western Europe, and a spike in violence since August has, according to U.N. officials, “overstretched” the mission.

Peacekeepers have been redeployed in recent weeks from other parts of Congo to North Kivu – the epicenter of the violence. About 6,000 peacekeepers are in that area now, particularly in and around the city of Goma.

Congolese government forces and rebel fighters led by renegade General Laurent Nkunda have clashed repeatedly in the eastern Congo since August, following the collapse of a January peace deal.

VOA News

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 base for U.N. peacekeepers, waiting nervously for the rebels.

“We are hungry and thirsty, but we don’t want any aid. We want security,” said 30-year-old Jeff Machozi, who built a makeshift tent three days ago with tree branches and bamboo he ripped out of the earth. “We want this war to stop.”

Clashes between fighters loyal to rebel leader Laurent Nkunda and the army and its allied spear-wielding militias exploded in August and has displaced at least 250,000 people.

But those refugee figures do not include remote towns like Kanyabayonga, whose entire population has fled, or Kayna, another town just to the north, which was also virtually deserted Monday.

Kanyabayonga is about 80 miles (130 kilometers) north of the regional capital, Goma.

Though Nkunda told U.N. envoy Olusegun Obasanjo on Sunday that he was committed to a cease-fire, his troops have been carving out an even greater territory in the remote hills north of Goma.

Early Monday, the rebels took control of Rwindi, the headquarters of Virunga National Park, after a night spent trading artillery and mortar fire with army forces. Rwindi is 10 miles (17 kilometers) south of Kanyabayonga.

U.N. peacekeepers at a base in Rwindi that was between the two sides said rounds flew overhead for more than an hour. Some exploded nearby, and one Indian soldier in a trench was wounded in the head by shrapnel, U.N. commanders at the base said.

Two government vehicles full of ammunition burned in the night, though peacekeepers said it wasn’t clear if soldiers destroyed them by accident or to keep rebels from taking them.

By Monday morning, peacekeepers said they woke to find rebels in the town.

Monday afternoon, rebel fighters were already marching single-file by the side of the road north toward Kanyabayonga, which sits on a hilltop. Wearing crisp military uniforms and black Wellington boots, they carried rockets, generators and Kalashnikov rifles.

Halfway up the road that zigzags to the top of the densely forested mountain, an army soldier waved a car of approaching journalists to stop — his presence marking the front line.

Kanyabayonga itself was virtually deserted, except for handfuls of people still fleeing with everything they owned. Women carried babies and plastic yellow Jerry cans and rolled mattresses on their backs. Children, doubled over under heavy loads, trekked behind.

Hundreds of soldiers could be seen in apparent retreat, walking down the same roads pushing wooden bikes laden with sacks, and carrying ammunition and bundles of belongings on their heads.

Hundreds of other troops stayed behind, though, scattered across the town of empty straw huts, their dry-mud walls held together with sticks.

One soldier in flip-flops, Jerome Roger, said government troops had fled Rwindi on the orders of their unit commander. He said he did not know his army’s plans or strategy — he and his colleagues had no radios to communicate with other units.

“We retreated from Rwindi; maybe we’ll retreat from here,” Roger said, shrugging his shoulders and smiling wildly as marijuana smoke wafted through the air.

On a hill near the U.N. base in Kanyabayonga, fearful residents tethered plastic tents to the jagged coils of concertina wire surrounding it. Others jammed tree branches into the ground, trying to build shelters.

John Mbusa, 60, said he fled Kanyabayonga last week after an earlier round of fighting drew near. He moved north with his wife and eight children, sleeping outside. Returning four days later, he found soldiers pillaging the town.

“We didn’t even stay home one night,” Mbusa said. “They took everything we had, mattresses, money. They were drunk. We left immediately.”

His next stop: the U.N. base.

Many residents had mixed feelings about the U.N. mission in Kanyabayonga. Its mere presence offers a modicum of security in a lawless part of the world, but refugees are skeptical about what protection the peacekeepers offer.

“The U.N. does nothing,” Mbusa said. “When there is fighting, they don’t even come out. They stare at us.”

Civilians crowded around the U.N. base farther south in Rwindi made similar complaints, but said peacekeepers had brought them rice and curry and had allowed them to sleep — outside — beside a U.N. shipping container during Sunday night’s exchange of artillery.

Congo has the world’s largest U.N. peacekeeping mission, with 17,000 troops, but the peacekeepers have been unable to either stop the fighting or protect civilians.

Nkunda declared a unilateral cease-fire in late October as his fighters swarmed toward Goma, which serves as regional headquarters for the provincial government, the U.N. and aid groups.

Since then, rebels have consolidated their positions, appointing their own local administrators and forcibly recruited young men and boys to join their ranks, aid workers say.

Though the rebels halted outside Goma, they have advanced farther north. Today they control the entire road from the outskirts of Goma to the doorstep of Kanyabayonga.

The dilapidated route winds through Virunga National Park, where elephants roam and troops of baboons can be seen scurrying through the road. Several park ranger stations and gates are abandoned, littered with boots and discarded uniforms.

“They are continuing their offensive farther north,” U.N. peacekeeping spokesman Col. Jean-Paul Dietrich said. “This shows they’re not respecting their own cease-fire they’ve declared.”

The Associated Press:

“We agree,“ Nkunda said in French, but he had asked Obasanjo to tell President Joseph Kabila’s government to also respect a suspension of military hostilities.

“We support his mission … he has got support from the international community … we are behind him and we are going to do our part so we can get on with this peace,“ the rebel leader, wearing a grey suit, told reporters earlier in English.

Obasanjo met Nkunda at his home village in the foothills of the Virunga mountains, close to the Rwanda and Uganda borders. As they met, fresh fighting flared between rebel and government forces to the northwest of Jomba in North Kivu province.

Obasanjo, who held talks on Saturday with Congolese President Joseph Kabila, is seeking to prevent the fighting in North Kivu from escalating into a repeat of a wider 1998-2003 Congo war that sucked in six neighbouring states.

The U.N. envoy, who flew back to the North Kivu provincial capital Goma, said the talks with Nkunda went “extremely well“.

“Nkunda wants to maintain a ceasefire but it’s like dancing the tango. You can’t do it alone,“ Obasanjo said. He and Nkunda, who carried a cane topped with an eagle head, danced with rebels and children outside the Jomba church compound where they met.

Weeks of combat between Nkunda’s Tutsi rebels and government troops and their militia allies have displaced around a quarter of a million civilians, creating what aid agencies call a “catastrophic“ humanitarian situation in east Congo.

Earlier, U.N. peacekeepers reported heavy artillery, rocket and small arms fire near the village of Ndeko, about 110 km (70 miles) north of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province.

Nkunda played down the latest clash, saying it was “not a problem“ and he had contacted the government to try to end it.

A U.N. military spokesman, Lt-Col Jean-Paul Dietrich, told Reuters: “It is difficult to say who started it but we can confirm it was between the CNDP and the army. We treated six army soldiers who were wounded and need to be evacuated“.

ETHNIC ENEMIES

The roots of the North Kivu conflict stem from Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, when extremist Hutu militias killed about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus before fleeing into Congo.

That led to two wars and a humanitarian crisis that killed more than five million people, mostly from hunger and disease.

In 2004, Nkunda rejected peace deals that ended the last war. He accuses Kabila of arming and using a Rwandan Hutu rebel group, the FDLR, which includes perpetrators of the 1994 genocide, to fight with the weak and chaotic Congolese army.

For his part, the Congolese president accuses neighbouring Rwanda, whose soldiers fought in Congo’s last war, ostensibly to hunt down the Hutu militia, of supporting Nkunda’s rebellion.

Nkunda spokesman Bertrand Bisimwa blamed government forces for the latest fighting on Sunday. “The army attacked us this morning and, as we warned, we have decided to push them back until we no longer consider them a threat.“

But he said this would not derail the peace talks. “He (Obasanjo) is not blind. He will see who is responsible for the clashes. While he talks peace, the government attacks us.“

The Congolese army was not available for comment.

Nkunda initially took up arms saying he was fighting to defend fellow Tutsis in Congo from attack by the Rwandan Hutu FDLR. But, after marching to the gates of Goma last month, he is now calling for direct negotiations with the president.

Kabila has so far rejected talks.

WELT ONLINE

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.

An estimated 250,000 people have been made homeless by the violence.

Mr Obasanjo’s visit follows Friday’s announcement that Rwanda and DR Congo have agreed to work together to deal with forces along their common border blamed for the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Speaking to reporters on Saturday, Mr Obasanjo confirmed that he would meet Mr Nkunda during a visit to the eastern North-Kivu region.

“I go to Goma [North Kivu's provincial capital], and from Goma, we will be seeing Nkunda. He was kind enough to ring me three days ago and speak to me while I was in Nigeria,” the envoy said.

“He explained that he is full of expectations for us to meet and talk face-to-face.”

The Associated Press quoted Gen Nkunda’s spokesman as saying the meeting was likely to take place on Sunday in the rebel-held town of Rutshuru, north of Goma, or Bunagana, on the Uganda border.

No details of Mr Obasanjo’s discussions with Mr Kabila have yet been given.

Earlier, Mr Obasanjo said he was hopeful his mission could achieve peace, but that it would not be easy.

Gen Nkunda says he is fighting to protect his Tutsi community from attacks by Rwandan FDLR Hutu rebels who fled to DR Congo after the genocide.

Some 250,000 people have fled violence that began in August between Gen Nkunda’s fighters and government forces.

The United Nations says it has caused a humanitarian catastrophe.

On Friday, for the first time after weeks of fighting, UN aid workers delivered maize and lentils to the first of at least 50,000 hungry civilians in Rutshuru territory, about 40 miles (70km) north of Goma.

“I can’t remember how many days my family hasn’t eaten – I think about four or five days,” said teacher Djuma Kabere.

“These are very small quantities. How can families survive? It’s more important to bring peace instead of food.”

Destabilising factor

Also on Friday, Rwanda and DR Congo agreed to co-operate in dealing with forces along their common border.

Foreign ministers from both countries said Rwandan intelligence teams would go into DR Congo to work with the Congolese army and the international community to help end the presence there of Hutu fighters, cited by Gen Nkunda as the justification for his rebellion.

The Hutu fighters – known as the Interahamwe – have lived in eastern DR Congo since 1994 and have been a key factor in destabilising the region.

The Congolese government has often promised to stop Hutu forces using its territory, but has not done so.

Its forces have been accused of instead working with the FDLR to exploit the region’s rich mines.

BBC NEWS

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.

The talks involving Congo President Joseph Kabila, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete came as renewed fighting threatened to unravel a cease-fire struck between the Congolese government and rebels forces.

The conflict in country’s east is driven by unresolved ethnic hatred stemming from the killings of a half-million Tsutis by Hutu militia in Rwanda and Congo’s civil wars in 1994.

The United Nations released a statement Thursday saying the secretary-general “is deeply concerned about the ongoing violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

The secretary-general “calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of forces to positions held prior to the resumption of fighting on 28 August,” the statement said, referring to when the latest wave of fighting broke out.

Ban “urges the armed groups involved in the ongoing fighting to support the current efforts to find a political solution to the crisis in the eastern DRC and to avoid activities that result in the further displacement and suffering of the civilian population.”

On Thursday, Madnoje Mounoubai, a spokesman for the U.N. in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said Tsuti General Laurent Nkunda’s rebels had battled government forces in eastern Nyzanale, North Kiva province on Thursday.

On Wednesday, Nkunda’s forces — the National Congress for the Defense of the People — fought pro-government Mai Mai militias, in Kiwanja, also in eastern Congo, said Kevin Kennedy, a spokesman for the U.N. mission.

“We encourage all the groups to restore the cease-fire,” he said.

Nkunda said his forces had not broken the cease-fire.

“We declared for a cease-fire, it was a unilateral cease-fire. And we ask the government to stop the attacks, even their allies,” he told CNN Thursday.

“So they attacked us,” he said.

“What we are asking for is only a cease-fire, then we go for peace talks and we ask the government to accept us through talks and to have a neutral mediator. That’s what we are asking. It’s not so many things.”

The rebel leader said the Mai Mai had been dressed in civilian clothing during Wednesday’s fighting, and he vehemently denied allegations that his forces had killed civilians.

“It’s not true,” Nkunda said. “These Mai Mai, these militia were in civil dress. … We asked the civilian population to get behind the front lines. So, the population were behind the front line,” he said.

“We cannot kill a civil population,” he said.

On Tuesday, the rebels battled Mai Mai fighters near Rutshuru, near Kiwanja.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said surgical teams had treated 50 people from Wednesday and Thursday’s fighting.

“Thousands of people who have fled the fighting in Kiwanja have sought shelter on the road between the two towns, in churches, and even inside Rutshuru hospital,” MSF said. It did not say if the people treated were civilians.

Anne Taylor, the head of the MSF mission in Goma, issued a statement saying, “MSF provides health care to all patients without discrimination.”

Around 250,000 people were displaced as a result of fighting in recent months, the United Nations estimates.

Tensions in the Congo have festered since its civil wars in the mid-to-late 1990s and since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Nkunda has repeatedly blamed the Congolese government for failing to protect the Tutsi tribe from Rwandan Hutu militia in Congo. Critics have alleged Nkunda to be a puppet of Rwanda.

The ongoing conflict and humanitarian crisis kills 45,000 people in Congo every month, according to a January 2008 report from the International Rescue Committee.

Hutu rebels have been active in the jungles of eastern Congo since Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, according to the United Nations. During the 100 days of that genocide the Hutu majority killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, the United Nations estimates.

• In another development, a correspondent for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has been freed — three days after militiamen kidnapped him in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the paper said Friday.

Belgian reporter Thomas Scheen, the newspaper’s longtime Africa correspondent, was captured by Mai Mai militiamen Tuesday after getting stuck between the lines of fighting in the conflict area, the paper said.

The paper said Scheen and his two Congolese staff are now with U.N. peacekeepers and are doing well.

“We would like to thank everyone in Germany, Belgium and Congo who worked so hard in the past days to free Thomas Scheen, especially the German Foreign Ministry, the Belgian authorities and MONUC,” said the newspaper’s publisher, Berthold Kohler.

CNN.com

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

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.

The Tories and Lib Dems say UN forces should be strengthened in DR Congo.

A tense ceasefire is holding in the eastern city of Goma, from which thousands of people fled as rebels advanced on Wednesday.

Rwanda talks

But the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, says it has credible reports that camps sheltering 50,000 displaced people in the eastern DR Congo have been destroyed.

Rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda says he is fighting to protect his Tutsi community from attack by Rwandan Hutu rebels, some of whom are accused of taking part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

It has been alleged that the Rwandan government has given him some support, which it strongly denies.

The European Union has been trying to bring Rwandan president Paul Kagame and Congolese president Joseph Kabila together.

Mr Miliband and Mr Kouchner are expected to urge both not to support forces involved, said the BBC’s world affairs correspondent Mike Wooldridge.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: “They will impress upon the leaders of both countries the seriousness of the situation in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo – the need to engage urgently to find a solution to the underlying problem and to take stock of the situation as they find it.”

He added: “They’re not going to set unrealistic ambitions for the visit but the fact that they are going illustrates the level of concern that we and the French have.”

Earlier International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander announced an extra £5m for aid for the country to ensure people had food, water and shelter. The UK already provides £42m to DR Congo each year.

For the Conservatives, Andrew Mitchell called for the UN mission in the African nation – already the biggest peacekeeping force in the world with 17,000 troops – to be increased.

Security Council

He told BBC Radio 4′s World at One programme that the UN force was outgunned in Goma by the 8,000-strong group of FDLR rebels.

“Unless the UN is reinforced, it is simply not going to be able to tackle this problem,” he said.

He said the UN had not yet delivered on a Security Council resolution passed in March to deal with the situation in Goma.

“It is a matter of ensuring that the will of the international community and the participants, as expressed through these different agreements, is enforced on the ground.”

For the Liberal Democrats, Edward Davey said the UN mission in DR Congo had been “starved of resources for far too long, making a difficult job impossible”.

“Britain, with our allies, should either contribute resources or help African countries who have the troops but not the cash,” he added.

Oxfam has removed its international staff from Goma as a “precautionary measure” and Save the Children began the evacuation of its staff in the North Kivu province because their lives were threatened, it said.

Aid agencies say the situation in and around Goma remained highly volatile with access to those in need extremely difficult.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said there were reports that the camps north of Goma had been forcibly emptied, looted, and burned.

BBC NEWS

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.

Rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda says he is fighting to protect his Tutsi community from attack by Rwandan Hutu rebels, some of whom are accused of taking part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The Congolese government has often promised to stop Hutu forces from using its territory, but has not done so.

Gen Nkunda has also objected to government plans for foreign involvement in exploiting the country’s vast mineral wealth.

The Congolese government has refused to negotiate with Gen Nkunda, calling him a terrorist.

‘Extremely unsafe’

With the lull in the fighting and a desperate shortage of food and water in Goma, thousands of people who sought refuge there have been leaving the city, heading to the village of Kibati, about 12km (7.4 miles) to the north.

The BBC’s Peter Greste in Goma says the road from the city is choked with human misery.

For mile after mile, it is full of families bent forward with their lives on their backs: stoves, food, clothes, bedding and children.

Aid agencies have all but stopped work because of security fears.

“The whole population in Goma, and around Goma are feeling extremely unsafe,” Red Cross spokesman Marcal Izard told the BBC.

“They need food, water, shelter and, most of all, protection, [and] some sense of knowing that they will not be attacked, that they will be spared by this new round of clashes.”

A spokesman for the UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, told the BBC that the situation was “extremely critical”.

A Congolese aid-worker based in Goma, Godefroid Marhenge, told the BBC’s Network Africa programme that some displaced people were without water or shelter, and “in desperate need of humanitarian assistance”.

Oxfam and other leading international aid agencies have withdrawn international staff from the city, where a main hospital as well as numerous businesses and homes have been looted.

Gen Nkunda said on Thursday that he was opening a “humanitarian corridor” for people to return to their homes, and so that aid could reach those trapped between his forces and UN soldiers backing up government troops in the city.

Our correspondent said that instead of an open corridor, he found people hurrying back to Goma.

“Someone has been shooting at us,” one breathless woman said. “We can’t go any further.”

But those who did reach Kibati told the BBC that they had more chance of getting food in the forests and bushes around the village than inside Goma.

Aid group Mercy Corps has begun to distribute water to the new arrivals.

Further north, the UNHCR says that it has received reports that several camps for internally displaced people near Rutshuru, about 90km (56 miles) north of Goma, have been forcibly emptied, looted and burned.

About 50,000 people are living in camps in the area, and aid workers are in the process of trying to verify the reports, the UNHRC said.

Overstretched peacekeepers

After several days of fighting, Gen Nkunda declared the ceasefire late on Wednesday, and his Tutsi forces are positioned some 15km (nine miles) from Goma – the provincial capital of North Kivu.

However, Gen Nkunda has threatened to take the city unless UN peacekeepers guarantee the ceasefire and security in Goma.

Looting, killings and rapes were reported in the city on Thursday, much of it blamed on retreating Congolese troops.

Meanwhile, intense international diplomatic efforts are going in a bid to maintain the ceasefire and bring an end to the fighting:

• The parliament in DR Congo has called on government to negotiate with Gen Nkunda, although President Joseph Kabila has previously refused to do so

• UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said he is “deeply concerned” about the situation, and has called on regional leaders to take concrete measures to broker a peace deal

• EU are diplomats meeting in Brussels to discuss whether to send troops to back up UN peacekeepers, after EU envoy Louis Michel met Mr Kabila and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame

• The EU is also to discuss sending troops to the area to aid the humanitarian effort

• An African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council is to hold crisis talks at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa

• US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer has held talks with Mr Kabila in DR Congo’s capital, Kinshasa.

BBC NEWS