DR Congo Rebels Defy Calls To Quit Goma

Rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo have dismissed international calls for them to leave the city of Goma, as the army launched an offensive against the M23 group.

A leader of M23 insisted the rebels would not withdraw from the strategically important eastern city, which the fighters captured easily despite the presence of UN peacekeepers, unless President Joseph Kabila agrees to peace talks.

"There must first be a dialogue with President Kabila," Bishop Jean-Marie Runiga Lugerero said, before heading to Uganda for urgent talks with President Yoweri Museveni.

Thousands of residents fled as the latest fighting erupted around the town of Sake, about 15 miles away. Rebel fighters reportedly rushed from Goma to face the offensive by government troops.

Explosions and automatic gunfire could be heard across Sake, but in Goma shops reopened in the relative calm.

A UN armoured vehicle guards the entrance to Goma's closed airport

Meanwhile, Mr Kabila has suspended Major General Gabriel Amisi as head of the land forces over UN accusations that he runs a huge arms smuggling network supplying Congolese rebels and other groups, a spokesman said.

A UN report has accused both Uganda and Rwanda of backing the M23, claims both countries strongly deny.

Prime Minister David Cameron spoke to the presidents of Rwanda and the DR Congo in a telephone call on Thursday night.

A Downing Street spokesman said: "He used the calls to welcome the joint communique signed by Presidents Kagame, Kabila and Museveni condemning the M23 rebel group and calling on them to pull out of Goma.

"He made clear that the international community could not ignore evidence of Rwandan involvement with the M23, and that President Kagame needed to show that the government of Rwanda had no links to the M23."

A watchman guards shops in Goma, closed by the fighting

International alarm about the unrest in the war-blighted central African nation has mounted since the mainly ethnic Tutsi rebels overran Goma, the main city in the mineral-rich North Kivu region on the shores of Lake Kivu.

The rebels, who first launched their uprising in April, have threatened to march all the way to the capital Kinshasa, about 950 miles (1,500km) away.

M23 takes its name from a peace deal, signed on March 23, 2009, that was meant to bring former rebels into the national army, but which the group says the government has violated.

The former Belgian colony is one of the world's least developed countries despite a wealth of cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold and coltan, a key component of mobile phones.

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