With Congo cease-fire called, weary refugees trudge home

UN oversees truce between rulers, rebels

Displaced Congolese leave Goma, where rebels halted their advance Wednesday and called for a cease-fire. (WALTER ASTRADA/AFP/Getty Images)

KIBUMBA, Democratic Republic of Congo - International envoys converged on eastern Congo yesterday to help end some of the worst violence the Central African nation has seen in years, as thousands of anxious, hungry refugees struggled to get home amid a fragile cease-fire.

Associated Press reporters saw a crush of people, sweat streaming down their faces, back on Congo's dirt roads again after fleeing the battlefront between the army and Laurent Nkunda's rebel movement.

"We've had nothing to eat for three days," said Rhema Harerimana, traveling with one baby nursing at her breast, another on her back, and a toddler clinging to her skirt.

Harerimana said she has been on the run for five days but was heading home yesterday to Kibumba, about 17 miles from the eastern provincial capital of Goma, where rebels halted their advance Wednesday and called for a cease-fire.

The conflict is fueled by festering ethnic hatred left over from Rwanda's 1994 genocide and Congo's unrelenting civil wars. Nkunda claims the Congolese government has not protected ethnic Tutsis from the Rwandan Hutu militia that escaped to Congo after helping slaughter half a million Rwandan Tutsis.

All sides also are believed to fund fighters by illegally mining Congo's vast mineral riches, meaning they have no financial interest in stopping the fighting.

Ordinary people are bearing the brunt of the dispute.

According to the United Nations, some 50,000 Congolese appear to have fled refugee camps near Rutshuru, a village 55 miles north of Goma, in recent days. Several aid agencies reported that three camps and makeshift settlements were empty, and one aid worker said the camps were burned down, said Karl Steinacker, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

The UN's deputy representative and humanitarian coordinator in Congo said more than 1 million people have now been displaced, 220,000 of them since August.

"This is extraordinary," Ross Mountain said. "A million [displaced] in a province of 6 million."

Outside Goma, the bodies of several soldiers lay on the streets as the senior US envoy for Africa, Jendayi Frazer, arrived yesterday along with Alan Doss, the top UN envoy in Congo. As they arrived, the UN peacekeepers put on an unusual show of force, deploying at least four tanks around the city, putting armored cars on patrol, and sending UN troops with riot shields to patrol on foot.

"The cease-fire is fragile," Doss said. "It will not hold if there isn't progress on other fronts, those political and diplomatic."

He said both sides had assured him they would respect the cease-fire.

Meanwhile, rebels were manning checkpoints on the outskirts of Goma. Peacekeepers have retreated to within 3 miles of the city, abandoning positions north of Goma to rebels who have fired rockets at their armed cars and one missile at a helicopter gunship.

Bernard Kouchner, France's foreign minister, and David Miliband, British foreign secretary, were expected to visit both Goma and the Congolese capital, Kinshasa.

The international envoys aim to get Congo President Joseph Kabila and Rwandan President Paul Kagame to sit down together and sort out the issues at the root of the conflict. Louis Michel, EU development commissioner, who was holding separate talks with Kabila and Kagame, said yesterday in Kinshasa that both leaders had agreed to hold a peace summit in Nairobi.