Campaign of rape: Congolese army on the rampage as it flees

HUNDREDS of Congolese soldiers rampaged through several villages in eastern Congo, raping women and pillaging homes as they pulled back ahead of a feared rebel advance, the UN has reported.

Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich, the UN peacekeeping spokesman, said that the army troops had reportedly raped civilians near the town of Kanyabayonga, in attacks that had begun overnight and lasted into Tuesday morning.

Kanyabayonga is 60 miles north of the provincial capital, Goma.

Col Dietrich said 700 to 800 Congolese soldiers then left Kanyabayonga and went on a rampage through several villages to the north.

"They looted vehicles, they looted some houses," Col Dietrich said from Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The country's armed forces are notoriously ill-disciplined soldiers, historically better at looting than standing their ground. In recent days, some have been seen manning checkpoints drunk.

Meanwhile, Angola announced yesterday that it was mobilising troops to send to the DRC, heightening fears that the fighting in the central African nation will engulf other countries in the region.

Georges Chicoty, Angola's deputy foreign minister, did not say how many troops would go to Congo or what their mission would be, and it was unclear whether they would be acting as peacekeepers or supporting the government in its fight against rebels led by the former general Laurent Nkunda. He spoke on Angolan national radio.

The presence of Angolan soldiers in the volatile region would be seen as a provocation to Rwanda, which battled Angolans during Congo's devastating 1998-2002 war. That four-year-conflict ripped the DRC into rival fiefdoms, with rebels backed by Uganda and Rwanda controlling vast swathes of territory rich in coffee, gold and tin in the east.

At the time, Angola and Zimbabwe sent tanks and fighter planes to back Congo's government in exchange for access to lucrative diamond and copper mines to the south and west.

The DRC asked Angola for political and military support on 29 October, as Nkunda's rebels advanced on Goma. There have already been reports of Angolan troops appearing to guard a road alongside Congolese troops.

The fighting in eastern Congo is fuelled by ethnic hatred left over from the 1994 slaughter of at least 500,000 Tutsis in neighbouring Rwanda. Nkunda says he is fighting to protect minority Tutsis from Rwandan Hutu militants, who participated in the genocide before escaping to the DRC.

The rare nighttime gun battle erupted late on Tuesday between rebels and the army just north of Goma, at Kibati, where at least 75,000 people have sought refuge from the fighting. North of Kibati yesterday, the bodies of two dead government soldiers lay in the centre of the road beside a rebel checkpoint.

A few civilians walked past nervously. One, 18-year-old John Biamungu, said he and his family had spent the night in a banana field after the shooting erupted.

A few miles to the south, thousands of people lined up to get survival kits being handed out from five white International Committee of the Red Cross lorries. The kits contained buckets, blankets, soap, hoes and cooking utensils, said Abdallah Togola, an ICRC official in Kibati.

Mr Togola said the area was reaching its capacity to handle refugees.

"All the schools and churches are full," he said, adding that local families had taken in about six people each.

BACKGROUND

FIGHTING in Congo intensified in August and has since displaced at least 250,000 people despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world. Laurent Nkunda called a unilateral ceasefire on 29 October, but fighting has persisted.

After a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, members of the UN Security Council and the Congolese ambassador said broad agreement existed for beefing up the 17,000-strong peacekeeping force, which has been unable to stop the fighting or halt the rebel advance.

"The idea is more or less approved," Ileka Atoki, the Congo ambassador, said, adding the council is waiting for another report on Congo next week from the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon.