20120730
AFP
DR Congo President Joseph Kabila has openly accused neighbouring Rwanda of being present in the volatile east of the country where rebels are fighting government forces.

"As for Rwanda's presence, that is an open secret," Kabila said on state television late Saturday, calling for a buffer force between the warring sides as he agreed with his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame earlier this month.

The force would neutralise militias in the resource-rich region and patrol the DR Congo-Rwanda border, Kagame said then.

Rwanda has persistently denied reports that it is backing the rebel M23 movement, formed in the DR Congo's eastern Nord-Kivu province in April.

But report by the UN Group of Experts published in late June said M23 has been receiving direct aid from top Rwandan officials, including weapons, ammunition and recruits.

The United States, Netherlands and Germany have suspended all or part of their aid to Rwanda over the reports.

The M23 are Tutsi ex-rebels from the Rwanda-backed National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP).

They were integrated into the regular army of the DR Congo in 2009 as part of a peace deal that followed their failed 2008 offensive on the Nord-Kivu capital Goma.

But the ex-rebels mutinied in April, demanding better pay and the full implementation of the March 23, 2009 peace deal, and have been engaged in running battles with loyalist soldiers in Nord-Kivu.

On Saturday, fighting broke out near Kibumba, about 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Goma and described by a Western diplomat as the "last (government) stronghold" before the regional capital.

Early last week the rebels reached that point but were repelled by an army counter-attack backed up helicopter gunships and tanks.

Helicopters of the UN peacekeeping mission in DR Congo, MONUSCO, fired on rebel positions Tuesday.

MONUSCO has some 17,000 troops, deployed mainly in the chronically unstable east, to protect local residents.

The army has fallen back in recent days because its tanks and helicopters ran out of ammunition, a Western source told AFP.

There have long been tensions between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Rwanda has been accused on several occasions of aiding Tutsi forces in DR Congo to combat Hutu rebels on its western border. It charges the Hutu rebels with joining the 1994 genocide and says they remain a threat to their country.

Rwanda accuses Kinshasa of renewing cooperation with Rwandan Hutu rebels who have been based in eastern DR Congo since the bloodbath in Rwanda.

It is a measure of how unstable the region is that two recent wars in DR Congo -- between 1996 and 1997, then from 1998 to 2003 -- started in Kivu.

And in both, Rwanda -- led by the Tutsis of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, who seized control after the genocide -- sent troops and supported rebels inside DR Congo.

Its government argued that it needed to ensure its own security, particularly given the presence of the Rwandan Hutu rebels.

The second DR Congo war brought in several other African countries on either side and claimed at least two million lives.

Kabila asked Saturday: "Can diplomacy be the answer? In any case there are three roads to a solution: military, political and diplomatic, or all three at the same time."