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DRC rebels, army exchange fire
23/11/2007 08:36 - (SA)
Todd Pitman
Goma - Rebel fighters exchanged fire for a second day on Thursday with army troops in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, forcing streams of civilians to flee the latest round of violence in the region, United Nations officials and humanitarian workers said.
Insurgents dug into hilltop positions near the village of Rugari fired at vehicles passing on a road below that runs north from the provincial capital, Goma, to Rutshuru with small arms and heavy machine-guns, said Indian Major Prem Kumar Tiwari, a spokesperson for the UN peacekeeping force.
Army units deployed in the region repelled the attack,
Bob Kitchen, IRC's emergency response team coordinator, said a team of aid workers from the International Rescue Committee stopped on the road after hearing government shelling boom through the surrounding hills.
'There's a lot of displacement'
Kitchen said the team was "waiting for the fighting to pass, but they had to turn back to Rutshuru", a nearby town further north that was attacked by former general Laurent Nkunda's fighters a day earlier, forcing most of its inhabitants to flee.
Kitchen said the IRC team saw "hundreds, maybe thousands" of people fleeing down the road. "This environment of war has got people extremely sensitive to the sound of fighting. There's a lot of displacement," said Kitchen, adding the fighting was making it increasingly difficult to reach those affected by it.
Exchanges of fire also broke out on a road east of Rutshuru on Thursday, Kitchen said. Though most Rutshuru residents fled the town after it was attacked, most had returned by Friday, Tiwari said.
IRC ran health and water programmes in several villages in the region.
Violence displaces 800 000
Clashes between Nkunda's men and government loyalists erupted in August and had battered the countless verdant hills of North Kivu province, forcing more than 176 000 people to flee, according to the UN figures.
The region had been insecure for years, and the latest violence had pushed the total number of displaced in the province to about 800 000.
On Wednesday, Nkunda fighters attacked an army battalion headquarters in Rutshuru, said Tiwari. Fighting lasted about an hour, and armoured UN peacekeeping vehicles were deployed to protect a nearby-displaced camp.
Helicopter gunships flew over rebel positions in a "show of force" that helped end the attack, said Tiwari, adding that peacekeepers did not open fire.
Nkunda defected from the army several years ago and formed his own militia soon after the DRC's war ended in 2002, claiming he needed to protect his minority Tutsi ethnic group from Rwandan rebels who had occupied forests in east DRC since fleeing Rwanda's 1994 genocide, which their leaders helped organise.
More than 500 000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed during the Rwandan slaughter 13 years ago.
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