Skirmish mars Congo truce

A shaky cease-fire in eastern Congo ruptured again Friday when a brief skirmish between rebels and government troops sent thousands of civilians fleeing a displacement camp as they lined up to receive food aid.

In what is becoming a familiar scene, panicked families ran at the first sound of gunfire, dashing toward the city of Goma.

United Nations peacekeeping officials said the skirmish started when a squad of rebels fired their guns in the air. Fearing they were under attack, government troops lobbed mortar and artillery shells at the rebels, prompting a 40-minute battle.

“It was an accident,” said U.N. spokesman Col. Jean-Paul Dietrich. He said that peacekeeping troops responded and that the situation was quickly contained.

Rebel leader Gen. Laurent Nkunda last week declared a cease-fire, but clashes have resumed.

Nkunda has warned that he will renew assaults if Congolese President Joseph Kabila rejects his demand for direct talks. He says he is fighting to protect minority Tutsis in eastern Congo from Hutu militiamen who escaped Rwanda after carrying out the 1994 genocide.

Kabila has called Nkunda a terrorist set on overthrowing the Democratic Republic of Congo’s elected government.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned Friday that the crisis was threatening to embroil the entire region. Eastern Congo was the center of two Central African conflicts in the 1990s in which nearly 5 million people died, mostly of disease and starvation.

“This crisis could engulf the broader subregion,” Ban said at a summit in Nairobi with seven African leaders, including Kabila and Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

Both sides in Congo accuse the other of receiving foreign assistance. Rebels say the government is helped by Angola and Zimbabwe. Congo’s government accuses the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda of backing Nkunda.

U.N. officials said they were investigating the allegations. They said there was evidence that Rwanda’s military had fired weapons across the border at Congolese troops, but no proof that Rwandan soldiers crossed the border.

Angola is known to be providing special forces training to the Congolese army and has military advisors in Congo, but it was unclear whether Angolan troops had taken part in fighting, said one U.N. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment.

An unnamed U.N. official told the Associated Press on Friday that Angolan troops arrived four days ago to assist with fighting around Goma.

Aid groups say violence is blocking efforts to provide humanitarian assistance to the nearly 1 million people displaced by the fighting, including 250,000 driven from their homes in the last two months. Last week, near-riots broke out at one camp as UNICEF attempted to distribute high-energy biscuits to children.

“We are enormously concerned for the people we haven’t been able to reach,” said World Food Program spokesman Marcus Prior, who was at a food distribution site just outside Goma on Friday morning when the sound of gunfire sent people running.

“People were lined up and it was very orderly,” he said. “Then shooting started to ring in the hills to the north. Within five minutes, the place was empty. It really underscores how tricky the situation is.”

He said his agency hoped to resume the food distribution today.

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edmund.sanders@latimes.com