By Joe Bavier KINSHASA, Jan 5 (Reuters) - A fragile ceasefire appears to be holding in Congo's troubled North Kivu province as the government meets with renegade general Laurent Nkunda in neighbouring Rwanda, United Nations officials said on Friday. Rwanda has been mediating talks between Congo's government and Nkunda, a former army general who launched attacks against government positions near North Kivu's capital Goma in November, sparking more than a month of on-off fighting. The mediation is aimed at ending the latest round of fighting in Congo's east without a military showdown. "There is a ceasefire, an informal ceasefire. They haven't been shooting for the last few days," said Lieutenant Colonel Didier Rancher, spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Democratic Republic of Congo. "These are discussions. We are not calling them negotiations," he told Reuters. U.N. and Congolese military sources based in North Kivu say fighting there stopped around Dec. 28. A peace deal officially ended Congo's six-year war in 2003 but clashes between the Congolese army and local militias have continued in the east, despite the presence of the world's largest U.N. peacekeeping force. Nkunda, a former high-ranking general in the Congolese army, led his soldiers in a mutiny against President Joseph Kabila in 2004, claiming his rebellion sought to protect fellow Tutsis. He is currently under an international arrest warrant for war crimes allegedly committed during a week-long occupation of the eastern city of Bukavu. Congolese army commanders have been meeting with Nkunda's officers in North Kivu for the last two weeks. On Sunday and Monday, they held talks in Kigali with the Rwandan government serving as mediator. More talks are expected in the coming week. Neither Nkunda's camp nor the Congolese government in Kinshasa have officially recognised their participation in the talks but a spokesman for Kabila told Reuters he was 'aware' of the meetings in Rwanda. Major Jill Rutaremara, spokesman for the Rwandan Defense Forces, confirmed Rwanda was brokering the discussions and said the initial recommendations of the meetings had been positive. Rwanda has had a stormy relationship with its neighbour, with its forces backing various eastern Congo-based rebel factions during the 1998-2003 war, which killed an estimated 4 million people, many of them from disease and starvation. Rutaremara said Rwanda's latest mediation efforts showed the level of trust that had since developed between the governments of Congo and Rwanda. "It is in the spirit of the government of Rwanda that Congo and the Great Lakes region in general are peaceful," he said.
