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.

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.

UNITED NATIONS | U.N. peacekeepers are spread too thinly through eastern Congo to protect civilians or quell the fighting between rebel and government forces, U.N. officials warned Thursday.
The assessment came while thousands of Congolese took advantage of a fragile day-old cease-fire to flee the regional capital of Goma in eastern Congo.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, has warned of a crisis of “catastrophic proportions” in eastern Congo. But to Pierre Kondoli, newly arrived on the outskirts of Goma with his wife and three children, and with no place to sleep it is one more turn in what seems an endless cycle of suffering.
The Kondoli family walked for three days from Rutshuru this week to escape an assault on the town by the region’s Tutsi rebel chief, Laurent Nkunda, in the stricken region’s latest surge in fighting.

KILIMANYOKA, Congo – The Congolese army said troops from Rwanda have crossed the nearby border and attacked its soldiers Wednesday in support of a minority Tutsi rebellion, as thousands of refugees cowered from the shelling just a few miles down the road.
The military spokesman for Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government immediately denied the Congolese allegations.
A helicopter gunship from the United Nations mission flew high in the sky toward the battlefield and Uruguayan peacekeepers deployed on a hilltop ridge.