Miliband refuses to rule out sending British troops

BRITISH Foreign Secretary David Miliband said yesterday he has not ruled out sending troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of a United Nations bid to avert a looming humanitarian disaster.

“It is possible,” he said following a two-day visit to the violence-hit African nation.

The head of the 17,000-strong UN peacekeeping force, its biggest ever mission, was in the country to assess the situation.

“It is right to see this through the UN perspective,” Miliband said — a day after appearing to pour cold water on the suggestion that already-stretched British troops could soon be caught up in a new overseas entanglement.

The current conflict in the Congo has its roots in the genocide 14 years ago in neighbouring Rwanda, where up to a million people were killed when Hutu extremists turned on their Tutsi neighbours.

Some 250,000 people are thought to have fled their homes in recent weeks since the breakdown of a UN-brokered ceasefire in the region — with a convoy of medical supplies reaching them yesterday.

The rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda has said he returned to arms in order to protect his Tutsi community from Rwandan Hutus who fled to the Congo after carrying out the genocide of 1994. However, his own forces — which are now poised on the outskirts of the regional capital Goma, after Congolese government troops fled in the face of their advance — have also acquired a reputation for murder, rape and looting.

The Rwandans have been accused of supporting Gen Nkunda — a claim they deny — while the rebels in turn accuse the Congolese government of backing the Hutu militias.

During their visit, Miliband and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner held talks with Congolese president Joseph Kabila and Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame in an effort to persuade them to use their influence to bring the fighting to an end.

Miliband said the engagement of the African Union “does offer some prospect that there will be a political engagement that makes a difference”.

But he said it was vital to secure aid supplies from being plundered by rebel groups — tens of millions of pounds of which is being sent by Britain. “Those rebel groups need to be engaged in a serious way in both military terms, but also in political terms. That is the foundation of progress in the DRC.”

Miliband joined fellow EU ministers for talks in the French port city of Marseilles yesterday amid calls from Oxfam for them to agree to send EU forces to the area.