UN forces joined Congolese soldiers on the front line today where they fought rebels in the country's volatile east for hours, officials said, as border tensions escalated between Rwanda and Congo.
Scores of angry residents took to the streets of Goma in protest following several days of violence that have left at least seven dead in this city of nearly a million people near the Congo-Rwanda border.
"We are using artillery, indirect fire with mortars and our aviation, and at the moment we have troops in the front line alongside the FARDC (government forces)," the UN force commander in Congo, Gen Dos Santos Cruz, said.
The UN's new intervention brigade, which has a stronger mandate than past UN peacekeeping missions and is authorised to fight the rebel forces operating in eastern Congo, engaged this week in fighting for the first time since it was created in March.
There has been widespread skepticism in Congo that the intervention brigade will be a game-changing addition to the existing UN force, which stood by when M23 fighters briefly captured Goma late last year.
Congo's information minister immediately blamed today's rocket attack that killed three people in Goma on neighbouring Rwanda, which has long been accused of supporting the eastern Congolese rebel movement known as M23.
"We wonder, for how long will the international community continue to tolerate these offences?" Lambert Mende, a spokesman for the Congolese government, told The Associated Press.
However, the UN force commander told journalists he had no doubt the rockets were fired from M23 rebel positions. Rwanda, which has vigorously denied allegations by the United Nations and others that it has provided support to the M23 rebels fighting the Congolese government, also accused Congolese forces of attacking Rwanda. The Rwandan army said mortar fire landed in several villages along the border on yesterday.
Brig Joseph Nzabamwita, a spokesman for Rwanda's military, said "acts of provocation that endanger the lives of Rwandan citizens will not remain unanswered indefinitely."
The M23 rebel group briefly took Goma last November and subsequent peace talks in neighbouring Uganda have repeatedly stalled. M23's leaders previously headed other rebel groups in the region that were backed by Rwanda. The rebel group is made up of hundreds of Congolese soldiers mostly from the Tutsi ethnic group who deserted the national army last year after accusing the government of failing to honour the terms of a deal signed in March 2009.
