Fighting Rages in Congo Around U.N. Camp (UN and French wring hands)

Fighting Rages in Congo Around U.N. Camp

By EDDY ISANGO

KINSHASA, Congo -

Rival tribesmen battled with guns and machetes Wednesday in east Congo outside U.N. offices jammed with more than 10,000 terrorized civilians. The United Nations (news - web sites) scrambled to assemble an international force to end the bloodshed.

The fighting in Bunia killed at least 10 people Wednesday — including women and children. Most victims were hit by mortar fire as they crowded around the U.N. compound in Bunia.

As the violence raged, Britain confirmed it was considering a U.N. request to send troops, while France said it had been asked to send a battalion of up to 1,000 troops. Uganda said it was willing to send troops back to Congo as U.N. peacekeepers, if asked.

A Western diplomat at the United Nations said the French had approached other African countries, India and Pakistan about participating.

Rival Hema and Lendu fighters have battled in Bunia for a week, leaving scores dead as they vied for dominance in the power vacuum left by the May 7 withdrawal of the last of 6,000 troops from neighboring Uganda.

Rotting bodies lay in the streets and near homes. Two Red Cross workers were killed Tuesday as they collected some of the corpses, officials of a local rights group, Justice Plus, said.

As Congo appealed for a massive international deployment, an overwhelmed 625-man Uruguayan U.N. contingent shot automatic rifles into the air as fighting crept nearer the U.N.-held airport and base.

"There's firing everywhere, from mortars, Kalashnikovs and other heavy arms," Patricia Tome, a U.N. spokeswoman, said by telephone from the U.N. base, a three-story building on a few acres surrounded by walls.

"The people are piling up on each other at the compound, inside as well as out," said a civilian, identifying himself only as Christian.

"They use the Kalashnikovs to scare people, and the machetes to kill them," said another U.N. official at the compound, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Wednesday's fighting saw mortar rounds slam within 50 feet of the compound, said Tome.

Shrapnel hit a building next-door where families had sought cover, unable to push into the overcrowded compound.

"I saw only civilians, poor women killed with their children," said Michel Kassa, a U.N. coordinator of humanitarian affairs.

Uganda's pullout came as part of peace deals meant to end the five-year, six-nation war in Congo, Africa's third-largest nation. Relief groups estimate the war killed as many as 3 million people, most of them civilians.

In pulling out of Bunia, Ugandan forces left behind an arsenal of anti-aircraft batteries, anti-tank guns and other arms that the tribal militias have seized, Gen. Mountago Diallo, commander of the U.N. military mission in Congo, said Wednesday.

In Kinshasa, Congo's capital, government spokesman Kikaya Bin Karubi appealed to the United Nations to send an intervention force — rather than the stretched-thin observation force now in place.

"It's truly urgent, because the Ugandans and the Rwandans have left in place their militias, to kill each other, and exterminate the Congolese people," the spokesman said.

At U.N. headquarters in New York, Margaret Carey, an African expert in the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations, was optimistic that an effective multinational force sent quickly could control the violence.

"The key thing here would be that this force would have to use force," she said. "The numbers I don't think are that important if you've got ... the right kind of troops with the right kind of equipment."

Uganda and Rwanda and their rebel allies held eastern Congo during the war. The two countries each accuse the other of backing rival sides in the Ituri province conflicts.

Bloody turf battles between Lendu and Hema fighters have made the lawless province a flashpoint. A series of such skirmishes in April killed 1,000.

Victims in the latest fighting in Bunia include at least two priests and dozens of civilians slain over the weekend as they took refuge in a parish church.

U.N. authorities and others repeatedly have invoked fears of genocide in Ituri, citing mass killings in Rwanda in 1994, when the then-Hutu-led government oversaw the killing of at least a half-million people.

Trying to stop the slaughter, Congo President Joseph Kabila flew to internationally brokered talks with Bunia's militia leaders, due to start Thursday in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam.

Eighty percent of the city's 90,000 people already had fled, Tome said.

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EDITOR'S NOTE — Associated Press reporter Rodrique Ngowi contributed to this report from Kigali, Rwanda.

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