UN: We will prevent war

2008-10-10 21:10

Kinshasa - The UN will do everything possible to stop Congo's eastern conflict from becoming a wider war after the government accused Rwanda of sending troops over the border, a UN official said on Friday.

Democratic Republic of Congo has asked the UN Security Council to hold an emergency meeting on what it says was a Rwandan military incursion this week into eastern North Kivu province in support of Congolese Tutsi rebels.

Rwanda's government has denied the accusation, which has stoked fears of an escalation of recent rebel attacks into a regional conflict between the two Great Lakes neighbours, which have fought in the past.

"We will certainly do everything we can to prevent that from happening ... I think we all have to do all we can to lower tensions and find ways to renew a constructive dialogue," Alan Doss, head of the UN peace mission in Congo (MONUC), said.

Patrols from MONUC, which at 17 000 is the world's biggest peacekeeping mission, were trying to verify the Congolese accusation that Rwandan army troops had crossed into Congo to help Tutsi fighters led by renegade General Laurent Nkunda.

But Doss told Reuters this was not an easy task in a porous, volatile and geographically rugged border area where ethnic lines are blurred. Nkunda's rebels wear Rwandan uniforms and speak Kinyarwanda, a language used on both sides of the border.

"These are difficult areas. We're not talking about walking down a main street here," he said in Kinshasa.

For more than a decade, east Congo has remained a tinderbox of ethnic tensions that grew out of Rwanda's 1994 genocide and are at the root of the conflict in North Kivu.

Rwanda has twice invaded Congo in the past, including a major intervention during a 1998-2003 war.

- Reuters