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Congo on the brink of new civil war amid genocide accusations By Adrian Blomfield in Bukavu (Filed: 05/06/2004) The rebel commander who could re-ignite Africa's bloodiest war relaxed in his deckchair yesterday, admiring the view across Lake Kivu. As United Nations peacekeepers spent a third day trying to end fighting in the Congolese town of Bukavu, Brig Gen Laurent Nkunda, who made cheese before he took up arms, insisted he is not trying to topple President Laurent Kabila. Renegade troops prepare to leave the Congolese town of Bakavu He marched into the eastern city at the head of 4,000 renegade...

Kigali - General Laurent Nkunda, a leader of dissident troops in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, threatened the government with war on Sunday unless it sets up a commission to deal with alleged crimes against his ethnic group. "If no commission of enquiry is created, we'll go back to Bukavu and we'll be at war with the government," Nkunda told AFP in neighbouring Rwanda by telephone. "We will wait until tomorrow (Monday)." Nkunda, one of two officers whose mainly former rebel soldiers took the eastern town of Bukavu between June 2 and 9 in fighting which claimed about 90 lives,...

Congo The battle lines are redrawn, again Jun 10th 2004 | BUKAVU From The Economist print edition Though the rebels have withdrawn, they haven't given up on war THE Congolese rebels made no apology for their murder, rape and pillage. But, as they withdrew this week from Bukavu, eastern Congo's biggest town, they did concede that their week-long occupation of it had been a “mistake”. Their leader, Brigadier-General Laurent Nkunda, said he had been “mis-led” into thinking that the national army had been massacring Congolese members of his own Tutsi ethnic group in Bukavu. With that, General Nkunda's columns of...