Thirty-two killed in eastern Congo clashes

By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Thirty-two people have been killed in three days of fighting in eastern Congo between government soldiers and Rwandan Hutu rebels backed by Congolese militia allies, a top army officer said on Friday.

Clashes broke out late on Wednesday when gunmen overran army positions near the town of Nyabiondo, around 110 km (70 miles) northwest of Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu, in Democratic Republic of Congo's volatile eastern borderlands.

Government troops, who with United Nations backing are waging an offensive against the Rwandan rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), retook the positions during an early morning counter-attack on Friday.

"There were 27 dead on the enemy side ... These were FDLR and their allies, according to our information," Colonel Bobo Kakudji, the army's operations commander for North Kivu, told Reuters, adding that five government soldiers were also killed.

Congo's U.N. peacekeeping mission, MONUC, could not confirm the death toll given by the army.

A military spokesman for the peacekeepers said they believed Wednesday's attack was led by a 1,000-strong Congolese militia, dissatisfied that it had not yet been integrated into the army following a January peace deal.

That agreement is under strain because of the failure of the latest efforts to bring rival factions into a united army.

The Hutu rebels, some of whom orchestrated Rwanda's 1994 genocide in which some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed, are seen as a root cause of over a decade of violence in eastern Congo that has left an estimated 5.4 million dead.

Anti-rebel operations began after a deal between Congo and Rwanda, but they have had little impact on the FDLR's estimated 6,000-strong fighting force.