African summit attempts to calm Congo violence

African leaders and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon were holding a crisis meeting today aimed at ending the latest fighting in eastern Congo.

The African Union summit in Nairobi hopes to get Congo and Rwanda to act on promises to disarm the numerous militia groups in the area.

The conflict is fuelled by festering ethnic hatred left over from the 1994 slaughter of a half million Tutsis in Rwanda and Congo’s civil wars.

The meeting follows a series of visits by high-level European Union and American officials to push for a diplomatic solution to the fighting that has displaced tens of thousands in the eastern Congo region of North Kivu.

Meanwhile the fighting continued with both rebel leader Laurent Nkunda’s forces and government troops accused of massacres in the area.

Nkunda’s men took the village of Kiwanja on Wednesday following heavy fighting with the pro-government Mai Mai, one of many signs that the conflict is spreading.

The villagers said rebels had killed unarmed civilians suspected of supporting the Mai Mai, but the rebels said the dead were militia fighters who had been armed.

A UN official said Kiwanja had in fact suffered two rounds of terror: First the Mai Mai arrived and killed those they accused of supporting Nkunda’s rebels, then Nkunda’s rebels stormed in, killing men they said were loyal to the Mai Mai.

Human Rights Watch said at least 20 people were killed and another 33 wounded during the battle for the town.

“The UN should not leave these defenceless people to be slaughtered by fighters on both sides,” said a spokeswoman for the rights group.

Nkunda’s spokesman said armed government troops and allied Mai Mai militia had infiltrated Kiwanja in civilian clothes and began killing villagers who supported the rebels.

Nkunda defected from the army in 2004, saying he needed to protect his tiny Tutsi minority from Rwandan Hutu militias. He has since expanded his mission to “liberating” Congo from an allegedly corrupt government.

Nkunda insists his mission justifies the suffering of some 250,000 forced from their homes since he launched an offensive in August.

Congo’s government has accused him of war crimes, and Human Rights Watch says it has documented summary executions, torture, and rape committed by soldiers under Nkunda’s command in 2002 and 2004. r daughter.