U.N. urges Congo-Rwanda talks to avert war

By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA (Reuters) - The United Nations urged Congo and Rwanda on Friday to hold talks to avoid a war after Kinshasa accused its eastern neighbor of sending troops over the border to back Congolese rebels.

U.N. peacekeepers in Democratic Republic of Congo are investigating the Congolese allegation that Rwandan army troops this week crossed into North Kivu province to help insurgents led by renegade Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda.

Rwanda has denied the accusation but Congo has asked the U.N. Security Council to hold an emergency meeting on the alleged incursion. The war of words has stoked fears of an escalation of Nkunda's rebellion into a wider conflict between the two Great Lakes neighbors, who have fought in the past.

U.N Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was following the situation on Congo's eastern border with "increasing concern," spokeswoman Marie Okabe said at U.N. headquarters in New York.

"The continued fighting between the (Congolese army) and the National Congress for People's Defense (CNDP) of Laurent Nkunda add to the suffering of the civilian population and risks provoking wider conflict in the region," she added.

Ban appealed to both sides to cooperate in implementing an immediate ceasefire and "to bridge their differences using diplomatic and other peaceful means available to them."

In Kinshasa, Alan Doss, head of the U.N. mission in Congo (MONUC), said the U.N. was working to stop the conflict escalating. "We all have to do all we can to lower tensions and find ways to renew a constructive dialogue," he told Reuters.

At 17,000-strong, MONUC is the world's biggest U.N. peacekeeping mission. The force is checking if Rwandan army regulars are inside North Kivu.

Doss told Reuters this was not easy in a porous, volatile and geographically rugged border area where ethnic lines are blurred. Nkunda's rebels wear Rwandan uniforms and speak Kinyarwanda, a language used on both sides of the border.

ETHNIC TENSIONS

For more than a decade, eastern Congo has been a tinderbox of ethnic tensions that grew out of Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

Rwanda has twice invaded Congo, including a major intervention during the 1998-2003 war. The war and the humanitarian crisis it sparked have claimed an estimated 5.4 million lives, mostly from hunger and disease.

Analysts said there was evidence of strong links between Rwanda and Nkunda's CNDP rebels, but direct Rwandan army involvement in North Kivu was more difficult to prove.

"We have documented in the past a degree of Rwandan support for the CNDP, including recruitment in Rwandan refugee camps," Human Rights Watch Congo researcher Anneke Van Woudenberg said.

"But we have received no information indicating a significant presence of Rwandan troops in eastern Congo."