By Joe Bavier GOMA, Congo, Jan 25 (Reuters) - Congolese Hutu rebels said on Sunday they had clashed for the first time with a Rwandan-Congolese force deployed to crush them and civilians expressed fears they would be caught up in the violence. Congo's army said late on Saturday the joint force had killed nine rebels from the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in two days of fighting in violence-ravaged North Kivu province. Congo's United Nations peacekeeping mission has so far been unable to confirm the army's statement. FDLR military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Edmond Ngarambe told Reuters on Sunday he was seeking information from the field about the army's report, but said the FDLR had wounded an unknown number of Congolese and Rwandan soldiers in an ambush. Congo's ethnic Hutus feared they may be unfairly targeted by the joint military operation. "When they hunt down the FDLR, they are going to kill us as well, because we are Hutus and the FDLR are also Hutus," said a man in the North Kivu town of Rugari, asking not to be named. Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch, said those fears were legitimate. "In past operations...the distinction between combatants and civilians has not been respected, and many civilians have died," she said. MONUC, the U.N.'s largest peacekeeping mission with around 17,000 troops mandated to protect civilians, has said it was not involved in the planning of the anti-FDLR operations. FDLR fighters are accused of slaughtering civilians, mainly Tutsis, recruiting children, and using rape as a weapon during their 14-year presence in Congo. NKUNDA ARRESTED Rights campaigners fear the operations against the FDLR could provoke a new wave of killings. More than 600 Congolese villagers have already been slaughtered by Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army rebels fleeing a similar offensive launched last month by Uganda's army in the vast former Belgian colony's remote northeast. The FDLR, seen as a root cause of more than a decade of conflict in eastern Congo, vowed to fight off any attack. "We will defend ourselves if they come into areas where we are. There will be fighting, of course," Ngarambe said. The presence in eastern Congo of the FDLR, some of whom are responsible for the deaths of 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus during that country's 1994 genocide, unleashed a recurring cycle of bloodshed that continues to this day. Rwanda has twice invaded its much larger western neighbour under the pretext of rooting out the rebels, sparking a 1998-2003 war that triggered a humanitarian catastrophe estimated to have killed 5.4 million people. Congolese President Joseph Kabila's decision to allow Rwandan soldiers to pursue the FDLR within Congo has been touted by his government as a move to finally pacify the troubled east. In exchange, Rwandan authorities on Thursday arrested Congolese General Laurent Nkunda, whose Tutsi-dominated rebellion continued to receive support from Kigali as recently as late last year, according to a U.N. group of experts. Government officials in Kinshasa said on Saturday that they were awaiting his transfer to Congo to face charges for war crimes allegedly committed during his four-year insurgency. (Additional reporting by John Kanyunyu; editing by Daniel Magnowski and Philippa Fletcher)
Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda salutes during a rally in Rutshuru, 70 km (45 miles) north of Goma in eastern Congo, November 22, 2008. Rwanda and Congo on January 23, 2009 ...
