GOMA, DR Congo (AFP) — Fighting between the regular army and renegade troops resumed Monday in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, UN observers said.
We're extremely alarmed by renewed clashes reported from the Ngungu zone, south of Sake," about 30 kilometres (20 miles) from Nord-Kivu province capital Goma, said Sylvie van den Wildenberg, local spokeswoman for the UN mission in DRC (MONUC).
Large numbers of civilians fled villages over the weekend in the Masisi and Rutshuru highlands west and north of Goma, she added. The truce had held for that period apart from skirmishes, as the two sides repositioned their forces.
The main force that took on the DRC army again in several places last week is led by cashiered general Laurent Nkunda, a powerful local leader.
The fighting has claimed more than 100 lives, according to regular army commanders.
There was no word Monday from DR Congo army chiefs on the numbers of casualties in the Sake region, but the UN estimated that more than 650,000 civilians were now displaced in Nord-Kivu for fear of conflict.
Meanwhile conservationists warned that the highly endangered mountain gorillas in south-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo were now threatened by the renegade troops over-running their habitat.
Forces loyal to Nkunda had attacked Jomba and Bikenge patrol posts in Virunga National Park, near the border with both Rwanda and Uganda, Wildlife Direct said in a statement.
His troops looted weapons, ammunition and communication equipment.
A third patrol post in Bukima was being evacuated pending an imminent attack, leaving the rare primates exposed to massacres.
"If anything happens to the mountain gorillas now, there is nothing we can do," said Norbert Mushenzi of the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature.
The army last year sought to deal with the threat Nkunda poses in a volatile part of a vast, war-ravaged nation by forming mixed brigades incorporating his men and their officers, which were deployed in January.
But mass defections ensued once the army high command entrusted the brigades with the task of tracking down armed Rwandan Hutus from a politico-military movement established in the Kivu provinces since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Nkunda is a Tutsi, like Rwanda's minority population targeted in the 2004 genocide carried out by then Hutu troops and youth militias in the smaller nation across the border, and he claims one of his aims is to protect Congolese ethnic Tutsis.
In Rutshuru, 50 kilometres north of Goma, pro-Nkunda Colonel Sultani Makenga late Sunday withdrew his men from the headquarters of the army's mixed Bravo Brigade and headed towards the area bordering on Rwanda and Uganda further north, where other defectors have already massed.
On their way, they looted a local radio station beside the army base, making off with "the transmitter and six journalists," Beguine Uwimana, a Goma manager of the station Radio Colombe said. "Three (of the journalists) managed to escape and get home, but we have no news of the other three."
The situation in the east of the country is seriously worrying both the Kinshasa government and the MONUC mission.
Troops from MONUC -- which weighs in as the world's largest and most costly UN peacekeeping force with more than 19,000 personnel -- have battled Nkunda's men in situations such as a post-war attack on the Sud-Kivu province of Bukavu, where the general contended that Tutsis were being slain.
MONUC helicopters have overflown the region for days and reported big troop movements by both sides. In November 2006, the "Nkundists" attacked Sake, which was the last notable town on a route to Goma, before being driven back by UN forces.
A Western regional analyst who asked not to be named said Monday that "there is a serious risk of endangering Goma and Sake," since though "the situation on the ground remains rather confused" the regular army appeared to be moving into Masisi and north Rutshuru, leaving south Rutshuru and border areas.
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