Congo fighting sparks diplomatic moves

KINSHASA - Gunbattles shook Congo's capital Kinshasa for a third day today as the United Nations and foreign leaders pressed President Joseph Kabila and an election rival to halt fighting between their feuding forces.

Violence has rocked the riverside capital since Sunday when electoral officials announced that a presidential election run-off would be held in October between Kabila and his vice president, former rebel chief Jean-Pierre Bemba.

The announcement followed historic but inconclusive July 30 elections, which were the first free polls in more than four decades in the vast, war-scarred former Belgian colony.

Battles broke out again today between soldiers loyal to Kabila and armed Bemba supporters near where UN and European peacekeepers had on Monday rescued a group of ambassadors to the Democratic Republic of Congo who had been trapped by clashes.

Each side blamed the other for starting the fighting and said they were responding to attacks.

But diplomats said it appeared some fighters from both sides were operating out of control and turning on their political rivals in the volatile capital.

A Reuters correspondent heard small arms fire and the occasional thump of heavier weaponry and saw two Congolese army tanks moving in the direction of the latest fighting.

Diplomats said units of Kabila's presidential Republican Guard were engaging Bemba's supporters in and around the diplomatic and residential quarter of Gombe, while foreign mediators struggled to broker an end to the fighting.

"This is clearly a push and shove between these two egos," one diplomat, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

Uruguayan and Spanish troops, part of UN and European peacekeeping contingents in Congo, were deployed in Kinshasa and the fighting was going on around them, diplomats said.

Bemba was under UN protection and UN military vehicles had been positioned around his house.

UN officials said Kabila's and Bemba's forces were supposed to have agreed to a truce on Monday.

"Our aim was to secure a ceasefire and ensure that the parties speak to each other because it is only this that can save the process," the top UN official in Congo, William Swing, told UN radio.

"People deserve more"

"The people deserve more than clashes like these. People are waiting for good elections and these cannot take place with guns but ballots," he added.

South African President Thabo Mbeki was also involved in talks to try to pacify the situation in Kinshasa, a top South African official said.

One senior UN military source said it appeared that some members of Kabila's presidential guard were out of control.

"I can only assume there is a dissident force within Kabila's presidential guard. Otherwise, attacking the vice president with ambassadors in the building would be political suicide," he told Reuters.

The United Nations has its biggest peacekeeping force - more than 17,000-strong - deployed in Congo, backed by a much smaller European Union military force.

UN peacekeepers, thinly stretched across the vast country the size of western Europe, had protected the July 30 polls.

In the first round vote, Kabila gained 44.81 per cent of the votes, well ahead of Bemba, who had 20.03 per cent.

But Kabila, who assumed the presidency when his father Laurent was assassinated in 2001, failed to obtain the more than 50 per cent needed to win outright in the first round.

The elections were meant to draw a line under a decade of conflict in the former Zaire, where a 1998-2003 war sparked a humanitarian crisis that killed more than 4 million people. But they have underlined deep political and ethnic divisions.

- REUTERS