Congo Says Troop Buildup No Threat

Congo on Monday denied claims by neighbor and rival Rwanda that it was massing troops for an attack, and international diplomatic pressure built to avert what one African leader called a “potentially catastrophic war” in Central Africa.

Congo’s defense minister said his country was sending 5,000 troops east to provinces bordering Rwanda -- Congo’s chief enemy in a devastating five-year war -- but insisted the deployment was to quell former rebels on its soil, not to invade Rwanda.

“We are not threatening the integrity of our neighboring country. We trust our neighbor and we want them to trust us,” Jean-Pierre Ondekane said in Kinshasa, the capital.

U.S. officials expressed deep concern over the developments and dispatched a key State Department official in a bid to defuse tensions.

Monday’s assurances followed three weeks of accusations, counteraccusations and denials between Rwanda and Congo, foes in a 1998-2003 war that was fought in Congo.

That conflict embroiled the armies of at least four other African nations and killed an estimated 3.3 million people, mostly through famine and disease.

The current crisis represents the greatest threat to the fledgling peace and to a 14-month-old interim government assembled from loyalists, ex-rebels and opposition figures after international pressure helped force out foreign armies and end fighting.

Congo’s east and northeast, de facto rebel states during the war, remain volatile.

The latest tensions erupted June 2, when two renegade former Rwanda-backed rebel commanders seized Bukavu, a Congolese city at the Rwandan border.

Government forces had routed the forces from Bukavu by June 9, but running battles with forces of renegade Col. Jules Mutebusi persist in and around nearby towns, the United Nations says.

A U.N. helicopter gunship fired rockets at renegade fighters north of Bukavu after coming under attack, a spokesman for the 10,800-member U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo said Monday.

“It was Mutebusi’s fighters who fired, and we responded with 14 rockets to discourage them,” said Abou Thiam, a spokesman in Kinshasa for the force.

U.N. troops suffered no injuries in Sunday’s clash near the town of Kamanyola, and they had no information on rebel casualties, Thiam said.

The U.N.’s Congo mission was speeding up deployment of 3,700 South African, Uruguayan and Nepalese troops to help the government secure eastern border provinces, U.N. spokesman Sebastien Lapierre said in Bukavu.

Congo itself had sent a “few thousand” troops to the east since trouble reopened, Lapierre said.

In Johannesburg, South African President Thabo Mbeki -- a key broker in Congo’s peace and power-sharing accords -- expressed alarm.

He warned of a “potentially catastrophic war” between Congo and Rwanda.

At the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, political affairs officer Eric Wong said U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had talked to presidents Joseph Kabila of Congo and Paul Kagame of Rwanda this month to urge restraint.

Washington was sending a top official from the African affairs bureau, Donald Yamamoto, to the region to try to defuse rising tensions, State Department spokeswoman Brenda Greenberg said.

“We are deeply concerned about the buildup of force in eastern Congo,” Greenberg said. “Hard-won efforts to bring peace to Congo are endangered by a major expansion of rebel and government forces in and around the city of Bukavu and other areas in the eastern Congo.”

Americans were particularly concerned about offers by Angola and Tanzania to provide Congo with military support, another U.S. diplomat said on condition of anonymity. Congo also received pledges over the weekend of South African military assistance in securing the east and northeast.