Heavy fighting threatens East Congo peace deal

By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Government forces fought Tutsi rebels on Thursday in the fiercest clashes for months in eastern Congo, threatening a struggling peace process, the defence minister said on Thursday.

Mortar fire erupted between rebels loyal to renegade Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda and government soldiers in North Kivu province on Thursday morning, Congo's United Nations peacekeeping mission said.

The clashes were among the worst outbreaks of direct fighting between the rebels and the army since Congo signed a peace deal with more than a dozen armed groups in North and South Kivu provinces in January.

North and South Kivu account for at least 80 percent of Congo's production of cassiterite, a tin ore.

"Everybody's known for weeks that Nkunda was preparing to attack, Defence Minister Chikez Diemu said

He feared the fighting could endanger the already fragile peace agreement.

"(Nkunda) is playing a dangerous game. He's playing with fire, and he's going to get burned," he said

Colonel Marc Kalongi, a commander for Nkunda's rebel forces, blamed the army for starting Thursday's clashes in the Rutshuru area north of North Kivu's provincial capital Goma.

"Government forces attacked all of our positions in Rutshuru. For months the government has been carrying out maneuvers to prepare this attack," he said.

Kalongi said rebel positions were still being bombarded by government artillery in the afternoon. No reports of casualties were immediately available.

The U.N. mission appealed for both sides to return to their original positions.

The January peace accord, a U.S. and EU-backed attempt to end a year of sporadic violence and draw a line under a conflict that has continued despite the end of Congo's broader 1998-2003 war, has struggled since the very beginning.

The U.N. estimates some 857,000 North Kivu residents have been forced to flee their homes since fighting broke out between Nkunda and government soldiers in December 2006.

(Editing by Daniel Magnowski and Angus MacSwan)