About 250,000 people have fled the fighting between rebels and pro-government forces [EPA]

The clashes on Sunday broke out close to Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich, spokesman for the UN mission in Congo (Monuc), said.

"There have been heavy weapons clashes since 5am (03:00 GMT) this morning" in the town of Ngungu, about 60km west of Goma, he said.

"Thousands of people are arriving at the Monuc base at Ngungu" to take shelter from the fighting, he said.

The clashes came after a day of relative calm in the east of the country.

Kgalema Motlanthe, the South African president, on Sunday called for a ceasefire between Congolese government forces and fighters from the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP).

"We call for an immediate ceasefire to allow humanitarian assistance to the displaced people," he said at the start of a Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit.

"We firmly believe that there is no military solution to the problem."

Hundreds of people are believed to have been killed in recent fighting between government forces and the CNDP rebels, which are loyal to Laurent Nkunda, a renegade general.

More than a quarter of a million people have been displaced by the violence, the UN says.

Civilians 'executed'

On Saturday, the UN said it has evidence that CNDP fighters and pro-government militias have killed civilians in eastern DR Congo.

Alan Doss, the senior UN envoy in DR Congo, said that "war crimes that we cannot tolerate" were committed in the village of Kiwanja, about 80km north of Goma.

"We condemn them, we deplore them, and we remind the different groups involved that international law is very clear on this," he said.

UN officials said that local fighters, known as Mai Mai, attacked the villagers first on Tuesday.

Fighters from the CNDP then won control of the village and killed those who they thought supported the Mai Mai.

The UN mission said on Friday its investigators had "visited 11 communal grave sites, containing at least 26 bodies, fighters and civilians".

Executions

Anneke Van Woudenberg, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, and Dietrich said it appeared the rebels had committed many more executions than the militia.

Some residents told the Associated Press news agency that many victims were shot in the head, while others said the rebels dressed the dead in military uniforms.

UN forces stationed in DR Congo have had little impact in stopping the fighting [EPA]

The killings highlighted the inability of UN peacekeeping forces to protect civilians across the huge region.

Monuc has a base in Kiwanja, but it has only 120 soldiers to protect up to 50,000 people.

"We have tried our utmost to portect civilians wherever we can," Doss said.

"Please remember that this is a huge area. There are 10 million people in Kivu and we have less than 10,000 peacekeepers.

"The fact is that in many places we are the only presence there to protect people.
The situation would have been infinitely worse had we not been there.

"It is not the UN that is the root cause of these problems - it is the armed groups, and is some cases the national army, that is responsible for human rights violations. They must respect international law; they must put an end to the fighting."

Dietrich said that UN forces had been pinned down under crossfire for some of the first day of the killings and were hampered because militiamen were hiding in houses among civilians.

Peacekeepers were also trying to stop CNDP attacks on two other towns, Nyanzale and Kikuku, while the killings continued on Wednesday.

"It's very difficult to protect thousands of civilians, especially at night,'' Dietrich said.

Civilians flee

Meanwhile, thousands of people are heading towards overcrowded refugee camps to escape the violence, Adow said.

"People in the camps are living in terrible conditions. There is no shelter left at the camps so people are building shelters out of banana leaves - that is all they have to protect themselves from the rain," he said.

"It has been raining every day for the last nine days. These people do not have clean water and they have nothing to treat the water that they use. Diseases like cholera have broken out in some places.

Aid is not reaching those who need it because government forces have closed roads acorss North Kivu province, Adow said.

"People do not have food. Aid agencies have not only been caught unaware by the fighting - which is said by people to be among the worst ever - they have also been caught out by hijackings. Not much aid is getting to people."

The UN estimates that about 253,000 people have been displaced since September.

The CNDP says it is fighting to protect the rights of ethnic Tutsis in DR Congo, while the country's government has accused neighbouring Rwanda of aiding the rebels.

The Rwanda government denies that it has given any support to the CNDP, calling the crisis a purely Congolese problem.

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