GOMA (Congo), Oct 28: Congo’s army was preparing on Tuesday to abandon a town in the blood-stained easterly province of North Kivu in the face of a rebel advance that has sent tens of thousands of civilians fleeing for their lives.

Heavily armed Tutsi rebels loyal to renegade General Laurent Nkunda were battling their way along a road towards Rutshuru, about 100 km north of North Kivu’s provincial capital Goma on the third day of their offensive.

“The situation is very serious. It won’t be much longer before I have to leave here,” said Colonel Delphin Kahimbi, the army’s commander of operations in North Kivu.

“There is total panic in town. The fighting is now around 5 km from Rutshuru,” local administrator Dominique Bofondo said by telephone.

UN peacekeepers had to scrap an attempt to evacuate around 50 foreign aid workers from Rutshuru in a convoy.

“The situation is very tense. They were blocked by both the population and soldiers. There are also attacks on humanitarian installations and looting,” said Evo Brandau, spokesman for the UN humanitarian office OCHA.

“The army is no longer guaranteeing security.”

Rutshuru normally shelters tens of thousands of internal refugees displaced by nearly two years of on-off fighting in the tin-mining region, but Kahimbi said the camps had emptied.

REFUGEES FLEE AGAIN: The UN refugee agency UNHCR said it was preparing for the arrival of about 30,000 displaced people at its Kibati camp 10 km north of Goma, including 20,000 from the village of Kibumba, 20 km from Goma, which insurgents attacked on Monday.

The UN’s peacekeeping mission, MONUC, sent attack helicopters against rebel positions north of Goma on Monday, drawing anti-aircraft fire from Nkunda loyalists.

“MONUC will use all available means to protect urban centres including Rutshuru, Sake (to the west of Goma), and Goma,” said Michel Bonnardeaux, spokesman for the peace force, whose 17,000 personnel are mostly deployed in Congo’s east.

A worker with the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said that its staff in Rutshuru had been able to hear blasts from MSF’s headquarters at the main hospital on Tuesday.

“In Rutshuru, the population is fleeing north. We’ve heard about an evacuation, but for the moment we have no plans to leave,” said Axelle de la Motte Saint-Pierre, MSF’s deputy head of mission in North Kivu.

Nkunda’s National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) accuses Congo’s army of collaborating with the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), which includes Hutu militias and ex-Rwandan soldiers responsible for orchestrating Rwanda’s 1994 genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Around 250,000 civilians have fled their homes in North Kivu since a January peace deal collapsed in August. Nearly two years of sporadic fighting had already displaced around 850,000 people before the latest fighting began, according to UN figures.—Reuters