By Louis Charbonneau UNITED NATIONS, Nov 7 (Reuters) - The Security Council should urgently act on the United Nations' request for 3,000 additional peacekeepers to help prevent full-scale war from erupting in eastern Congo, a top U.N. official said on Friday. "We are very concerned that the situation may deteriorate further," Edmond Mulet, U.N. assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, told reporters in New York after returning from the Democratic Republic of Congo. "It is thus crucial that the Security Council considers without further delays our request to provide additional forces to MONUC, which have been requested a few weeks ago," he said. Last week, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon formally asked the council for 3,085 additional police and military personnel to top up the 17,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, known by its French acronym MONUC. The call for beefing up the U.N. force follows an intensification of fighting between Tutsi rebels and Congo's army that has uprooted hundreds of thousands of people near the border with Rwanda and created a humanitarian crisis. MONUC chief Alan Doss made the request for more troops when he briefed the council on Oct. 3 but the 15-nation body has yet to act on it. Council diplomats from Western countries have told Reuters that members were split on the question of whether MONUC, the largest U.N. peacekeeping force in the world, needs more troops or simply a redeployment of existing forces. Mulet said MONUC was already shifting forces to Goma, the capital of North Kivu province on the Rwandan border. However, he said that MONUC was stretched very thinly and was busy with armed militants on four separate fronts. "Things have taken a turn for the worse, the situation is really, really, really bad," he said. Mulet also dismissed reports that Angolan troops were present in Congo. He said Congolese government soldiers trained in Angola had probably been mistakenly identified as Angolan. GENOCIDE FEARS He added that the United Nations was convinced there was no military solution to the crisis in eastern Congo, a region the size of France that is rich in minerals and other resources. "The United Nations is actively engaging the parties at the political level," he said, referring to a summit in Nairobi where Ban, U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy and other U.N. officials were meeting with Congolese and Rwandan leaders. Le Roy was scheduled to brief the council on his MONUC reconfiguration plans on Tuesday, Mulet said. New York-based group Human Rights Watch on Thursday accused Congolese Tutsi rebels of war crimes in Kiwanja, where reporters accompanying U.N. peacekeepers found the bodies of numerous civilian shooting victims a day after rebels drove pro-government militiamen from the town. Rebel commanders said they had targeted only pro-government militia. Mulet said MONUC was working with the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate reports that as many as 70 civilians were murdered in Kiwanja. He said MONUC wanted to verify the numbers and "identify the perpetrators of these crimes." U.N. special adviser on prevention of genocide Francis Deng said in a statement that he was alarmed by the violence in eastern Congo and planned to visit the region "to assess recent developments from the perspective of his mandate." Among the many armed groups operating in eastern Congo are Rwandan Hutu militias accused of involvement in Rwanda's 1994 genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. (Editing by Eric Beech)
Democratic Republic of Congo's President Joseph Kabila listens to his Ugandan counterpart Yoweri Museveni after the opening session of the summit on the ongoing war crisis in eastern Congo in Kenya's ...
