Rebels tighten grip on eastern Congo

Tutsi-led rebels tightened their hold Saturday on newly seized swaths of eastern Congo, forcing tens of thousands of frightened, rain-soaked civilians out of makeshift refugee camps and stopping some from fleeing to government-held territory.

Aid organizations said they were increasingly worried about a lack of food and shelter.

European officials offered sympathy but no concrete promise of military reinforcements for the Congolese troops and United Nations peacekeepers routed by rebel forces in the sudden and dramatic escalation of eastern Congo’s civil war in the last week.

The rebels appeared to be maintaining a unilateral cease-fire they declared last week, focusing on consolidating territories that stretch to the doorstep of the provincial capital, Goma, instead of taking the city.

The rebels, who said people were leaving the refugee camps of their own will, asserted that they had stopped short of Goma in hopes of stopping the chaos that had engulfed it as government troops fled along with tens of thousands of refugees.

The area that rebel leader Gen. Laurent Nkunda has seized is a minerally and agriculturally rich region that commands much of the access to the Rwandan and Ugandan borders.

British Foreign Minister David Miliband, who rushed to the region with French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner after the outbreak of fighting, downplayed the possibility of an European Union peacekeeping force.

“Nothing is being ruled out, and that remains the point,” he told reporters in the Rwandan capital after leaving a refugee camp outside Goma. “But we have a 17,000-strong [U.N.] force, and that is of course the first call for security support in the Congo.”

Kouchner said his government was committed to humanitarian assistance, but not necessarily sending in troops.