Hundreds flee as Congo Tutsi rebels hunt Hutu foes

RUTSHURU, Congo (Reuters) - Hundreds of Congolese civilians fled east into neighboring Uganda on Wednesday to escape reported attacks on villages by Tutsi rebels who said they were hunting their Rwandan Hutu militia enemies.

A U.N. refugee official in Uganda said families were streaming across the border at Ishasha from Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province, where a Tutsi rebel spokesman said rebel forces had launched "policing" operations.

The rebel activities and related refugee exodus signaled recurring violence and unrest in North Kivu despite a week-long relative lull in combat between rebels loyal to renegade General Laurent Nkunda and the Congolese army.

A U.N. envoy, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, was preparing to begin another peace mission to try to prevent the North Kivu conflict from escalating into a repeat of the wider 1998-2003 war that devastated Congo.

Fighting in North Kivu since late August has driven a quarter of a million people from their homes, creating what aid workers say is a humanitarian catastrophe.

Roberta Russo, spokesperson for the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR in the Ugandan capital Kampala, told Reuters that 1,300 Congolese refugees had crossed through Ishasha on the Congo/Uganda border since Tuesday afternoon.

"My colleagues at the border say there is just a stream of people coming," she said.

Some of the newcomers, joining more than 13,000 Congolese who had already fled into Uganda since August, reported their villages between Rutshuru and Ishasha had been attacked two days ago by Nkunda's fighters, she said.

"We have some people who said their villages were directly attacked, and family members killed, by what they said were Nkunda rebels," Russo said.

Rebel-held Rutshuru was calm on Wednesday and U.N. agencies distributed aid supplies to civilians there.

A spokesman for Nkunda, Bertrand Bisimwe, said rebel forces had since Saturday launched operations north of Rutshuru against locations occupied by Rwandan Hutu fighters of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).

Nkunda's Tutsi fighters are sworn enemies of the FDLR, which includes perpetrators of Rwanda's 1994 genocide in which Hutu soldiers and militia slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

"We've launched policing operations to force them (the FDLR) to withdraw. They are fleeing, but they're taking the population hostage, using them as shields," Bisimwe told Reuters.

"SMALL SKIRMISHES"

He said the rebel actions involved no clashes with Congo's government army and did not affect a ceasefire declared by Nkunda. "This has got nothing to do with the ceasefire."

"But there's no ceasefire for the FDLR because every Congolese has the right to chase them out of the national territory, because they are foreigners," Bisimwe said.

A spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo (MONUC), Lt.-Col. Jean-Paul Dietrich, described the latest incidents as "some small skirmishes, but not really fighting."

Uganda's army said it had deployed soldiers on the border to prevent any spillover of violence from Congo.

The U.N., which is preparing to send 3,000 extra troops and police to bolster its 17,000-strong peacekeeping force in Congo, has accused both Nkunda's rebels and government forces of carrying out mass killings, rape and torture.

Nkunda, from Congo's minority Tutsi community, cites the presence of the FDLR in the east as the justification for his four-year-old rebellion, which he says aims to defend Tutsis.

Tutsi-led Rwanda denies repeated Congolese government allegations that it supports Nkunda.

Nkunda is demanding direct talks with President Joseph Kabila's government, protection for minorities like the Tutsis and integration of his fighters into the ranks of the army and the administration.

But the government says it will only talk to Nkunda within the framework of a January peace pact signed with several armed groups including his National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP). Nkunda has repudiated this deal as one-sided.

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(Reporting by Frank Nyakairu in Kigali, Joe Bavier in Kinshasa and Pascal Fletcher in Dakar; writing by Pascal Fletcher, editing by Tim Pearce)