A UN relief convoy which entered a rebel-captured zone of east Congo today for the first time since heavy fighting last week found deserted refugee camps emptied of their tens of thousands of occupants.
"All the camps are empty. They have all left. All the shelters have been destroyed ... nothing remains," Francis Nakwafio Kasai, a field officer with the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said.
The UN convoy, carrying aid workers and medical supplies and escorted by UN troops, crossed the conflict front line in Democratic Republic of Congo's eastern North Kivu province to reach the rebel-held town of Rutshuru.
The UN refugee agency UNHCR had said it feared that at least 50,000 displaced civilians may have abandoned, or been forced out of, unprotected camps around Rutshuru, which is 70 km north of the North Kivu provincial capital Goma.
Mr Kasai said humanitarian workers were trying to establish whether the camps' occupants were expelled, or had fled. Some may have sought safer areas, or returned home, he said.
Many were feared to be roaming the bush, seeking shelter and help after fleeing attacks by Tutsi fighters loyal to rebel General Laurent Nkunda. The UN says renegade Congolese army soldiers have also carried out killings, lootings and rapes.
The recent offensive by fighters loyal to General Nkunda, combined with killing and looting by renegade Congolese army troops, turned an already difficult humanitarian situation into one described as "catastrophic" by aid groups.
European, US and UN envoys have criss-crossed the Great Lakes region in recent days, trying to prevent the newly resurgent Tutsi rebellion in the eastern Congolese borderlands from escalating into a rerun of Congo's 1998-2003 war.
After a weekend diplomatic shuttle that took them to Congo, Rwanda and Tanzania, the French and British foreign ministers called for more international aid to Congo's North Kivu. A cease-fire by General Nkunda appeared to be holding yesterday, although authorities in Goma declared a night time curfew.
While appealing for more international aid and the securing of routes to deliver it, the French and British ministers, Bernard Kouchner and David Miliband, stopped short of announcing a deployment of European Union troops to Congo. France, which holds the rotating EU presidency, had floated the proposal but encountered resistance from some member states.
Instead, the ministers recommended reinforcing the United Nations peacekeeping force in Congo, already the world's biggest but badly stretched across a nation the size of Western Europe.
Reuters