(Adds details of fighting, changes dateline from GENEVA) By Joe Bavier KINSHASA, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Congolese army tanks pounded rebel-held hilltops and repelled an attack on a military base in the east on Tuesday in the latest round of fighting that has displaced 150,000 people in six weeks, the United Nations said. The army fired at least 500 tank rounds at rebel positions during a two-day battle at Tongo in North Kivu province that killed and wounded civilians in a nearby camp for internal refugees, the U.N. peacekeeping mission, MONUC, said. U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said fighting in North Kivu between the army and renegade Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda, whose January peace deal with the government collapsed in late August, had forced around 100,000 civilians from their homes. Another 50,000 Congolese villagers had fled raids by Uganda's rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northeastern Ituri district along the border with Sudan last month, it said. In North Kivu, Congolese Army (FARDC) troops successfully repelled the rebel assault on their base at Tongo, 50 km (32 miles) north of the provincial capital Goma, MONUC said. "The FARDC control most of Tongo now," MONUC military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich said, adding the army was mopping up resistance in nearby high ground. "Both sides used heavy weapons," Dietrich said. "The use of heavy weapons is a serious threat to the civilian population and especially to the displaced." Clashes further west around the village of Nyanzale trapped around 25 aid workers from medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and around 60 of their patients inside a local hospital for two days. FRESH ONSLAUGHT FEARED The latest violence in the troubled province had largely died down by late Tuesday, but Dietrich said both sides appeared to be repositioning troops for another wave of fighting. "We don't really know what's going to happen next," he said. Last week, Congo gave the U.N. Security Council photographs it said supported its accusation that Rwandan soldiers helped Nkunda's rebels attack an army base in North Kivu last week. Rwanda has denied making an incursion into Congolese territory. U.N. peacekeepers in Congo are investigating. Rwanda has twice invaded its much larger neighbour in the past, including a 1998 intervention that helped spark a 5-year war and lingering humanitarian disaster that together have killed an estimated 5.4 million people over the past decade. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned last Friday that the fighting could spill over into yet another regional conflict and called for an immediate ceasefire. Eastern Congo has become a battleground for armed groups from across central Africa. The UNHCR said many refugees from last month's attacks by the Ugandan LRA were in dire need of humanitarian aid. Local authorities have said the bodies of some 100 civilians were dumped in a nearby river and some 80 children were missing, leading their parents to fear they were "forcefully recruited by the LRA," UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond told a briefing in Geneva. The LRA, which has led one of Africa's longest-running guerrilla wars against the government in Kampala, is notorious for abducting children to use as soldiers and sex slaves. The LRA has been driven out of northern Uganda but continues to carry out raids in Congo, Sudan and Central African Republic from bases in Congo's Garamba National Park. (Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; editing by Alistair Thomson and Mark Trevelyan)
Afghan refugees sit in a truck as they flee from the troubled area of Bajaur tribal region in Pakistan October 9, 2008. Pakistani authorities have begun expelling Afghan refugees from a ...
