Oct 3 (Reuters) - Congolese Tutsi rebel chief Laurent Nkunda has no immediate plans to wage war outside his eastern stronghold, his spokesman said on Friday, as the army dismissed a threat by him to "liberate the people of Congo". Here are some details of the conflict in eastern Congo. * ORIGINS OF THE CONFLICT: -- The roots of renegade General Nkunda's rebellion lie in unresolved ethnic and political tensions that make racially mixed eastern Democratic Republic of Congo a tinderbox. -- The presence in east Congo of both Tutsi and Hutu rebels stems from Rwanda's 1994 genocide, in which 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in 100 days by the Hutu-led government and ethnic militias. -- Hutu militias fled to Congo, their presence provoking Tutsi-led Rwandan invasions that helped ignite Congo's wider 1998-2003 war. The war and an ensuing humanitarian crisis have killed some 5.4 million people, most through hunger and disease. -- Nkunda led a revolt in 2004 with 4,000 soldiers and briefly captured the South Kivu capital Bukavu. An international arrest warrant was issued for him for war crimes committed while occupying Bukavu, but Congolese officials say this has expired. -- After 2006 elections aimed at drawing a line under the 1998-2003 war, President Joseph Kabila promised to bring peace to east Congo. -- In November 2006 U.N. Mission in Congo (MONUC) helicopters and armoured vehicles killed hundreds of Nkunda's fighters in fierce clashes. -- Under a Rwandan-brokered January 2007 peace deal, Nkunda's fighters joined special mixed army brigades, but walked out again that August. Subsequent peace deals also fell apart. -- Nkunda has said he was fighting to protect his Tutsi people in eastern Congo against attacks by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Rwandan Hutu rebel group which controls parts of North Kivu. He says Kabila's government backs the FDLR, a charge the government denies. -- The FDLR includes former Rwandan soldiers and members of Hutu militias, or Interahamwe, which took part in the Rwandan genocide. * CEASEFIRES: -- A month after the Rwandan-brokered January 2007 peace deal collapsed, U.N. mediators announced a limited ceasefire on Sept. 6, 2007 after two weeks of fighting in North Kivu province. -- Nkunda, who had made parts of North Kivu province into his personal fiefdom, later said he was abandoning the ceasefire because of attacks by the government, which in turn accused him of pushing the country towards war. -- Fresh talks opened in January 2008 in Goma. On Jan. 23 nearly two dozen rebel and militia movements signed the peace accord with Congo's government to end a decade of conflict in North and South Kivu. The deal, brokered by the United Nations and Western diplomats, was plagued by almost daily ceasefire violations from the start and fell apart by mid-2008. * RENEWED CONFLICT: -- The latest wave of clashes is worsening an already dire humanitarian crisis with more than 830,000 North Kivu people having fled on-off fighting in 2007 and sporadic clashes during this year's eight-month peace process, plagued from the start by daily ceasefire violations. -- August and September saw the worst direct fighting between Nkunda's rebels and the army since the January peace deal. Each side accused the other of provoking clashes. -- Nkunda's rebels have suspended their participation in the peace process, accusing the government of preparing operations against them. MONUC has blamed Nkunda's troops for instigating most of the recent fighting and called on eastern rebel and militia groups to abide by the January peace agreement.
People holding a mask of the former Bosnian Serb leader and indicted war crimes suspect, Radovan Karadzic, and a poster of Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, show their support for Karadzic ...
