(Adds details, comment from defence minister, byline) By Joe Bavier KINSHASA, Aug 11 (Reuters) - Congo has suspended Tutsi-led military operations against Rwandan Hutu rebels in an effort to avoid further ethnic tension in the country's troubled east, a senior army official said on Saturday. At least 165,000 civilians have fled fighting in Congo's North Kivu province since February, when Tutsi-commanded army brigades began operations to drive the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebels out of Congo. Congo's ground forces commander General Gabriel Amisi told journalists in Goma, the capital of North Kivu, the decision to suspend operations was taken after consultation with the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo (MONUC) and foreign diplomats. "They said we could not carry out mono-ethnic operations: Tutsis against Hutus. That will create genocide. After that, the supreme commander suspended (operations)," he said. Parts of the press conference were broadcast on U.N.-sponsored radio. Democratic Republic of Congo held its first free, democratic elections in four decades last year, following the end of a 1998-2003 war which killed an estimated 4 million people, many of them through violence-related disease and hunger. But the east, long a crucible of violence, remains volatile. Amisi said the army planned to work with MONUC to prepare a programme to properly blend the so-called mixed brigades into the military and dislodge them from their eastern stronghold. The U.N. mission has for months decried the worsening humanitarian situation in North Kivu. Human rights campaigners accuse the mixed brigades of grave abuses including rape, forced displacement, summary executions, and using child soldiers. In June a visiting delegation of U.N. Security Council ambassadors called on Congo on to work with Rwanda to find a political solution to violence. "The method of dialogue is the best way to finish with the problems that have made this country suffer for so long," Congo's Defence Minister Chikez Diemu told Reuters. "We favour peace. We want to favour dialogue." Large areas of North Kivu along the border with neighbouring Rwanda are under the control of the FDLR. The rebel group is composed in part of former Interahamwe militia who fled to Congo after taking part in the genocide in Rwanda that killed some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. Their continued presence in the east was used by Rwanda to justify two invasions of Congo in 1996 and 1998. The second helped spark a five-year war that left an estimated 4 million people dead, mainly from war-related hunger and disease.
