UNITED NATIONS, Jan 15 (Reuters) - The United Nations said on Monday it was sending experts to northeast Central African Republic to assess the aid needs of as many as 150,000 people forced from their homes by fighting near the Sudan border. "Tomorrow we are sending a team up to the northeast by road. This will be the first team that has gone up to the northeast areas along the border of the Darfur region of Sudan," said Toby Lanzer, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the landlocked former French colony. "Clearly, we are very worried about the humanitarian situation. It is extremely serious," Lanzer told reporters. He spoke after briefing the U.N. Security Council behind closed doors on the situation in the Central African Republic, one of the world's poorest countries. As many as 1 million people have been affected by violence in the country's remote north, a lawless area near the border with both Chad and Sudan, where armed raiders regularly loot villages and terrorize civilians. All three countries have been shaken by conflict or civil war and various rebel groups in all three use neighboring states as bases to launch attacks into the others. Lamine Cisse, a Senegalese who heads the overall U.N. peacebuilding mission in the Central African Republic, said the world body hoped to launch a dialogue within a month between the country's government and rebel forces, in hopes of resolving their differences in a political deal that could bring peace to the northeast area and promote reconciliation. The United Nations was also looking into an attack that took place Sunday night on the town of Paoua in northwestern Central African Republic, to determine whether it was carried out by a known rebel group, highwaymen or criminals, Cisse said.
