DRC:The Democratic Republic of Congo will host a peace conference today aimed at ending fighting in its eastern Kivu provinces, Human Rights Watch said.
The conference, to be held in the North Kivu capital, Goma, will probably last 10 days and will bring together government officials and representatives of armed groups, including those of dissident commander Laurent Nkunda, the New York-based human rights group said. The conference "is an important opportunity to resolve thorny and deep-rooted problems in the region," it said.
"During the past year, hundreds of civilians have died, thousands of women and girls have been raped and hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes."
The conflict in the Kivu provinces is a remnant from two civil wars in the central African nation between 1996 and 2003, in which four million people died.
President Joseph Kabila promised to bring peace to the country's east after winning elections in 2005, the nation's first democratic ballot in over four decades.
Previous mediation efforts and military campaigns, including a government offensive in December against Nkunda's forces, have failed to end the violence in the east of the country, the agency said. Nkunda claims he is fighting to protect the minority Tutsi community from attacks by Hutu combatants of the opposition Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda.
Congo is Africa's biggest tin producer and three-quarters of the metal is exported from Goma. The country also has a tenth of the world's copper reserves and a third of its cobalt. - (Bloomberg)