Advancing government troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo cleared rebels from strategic positions in the restive east, a local official said today, as the M23 warned it would pull out of stalled peace talks.
The FARDC regular army took back control of both the city of Rutshuru and the rebel-held town of Kiwanja, home to a base used by the UN mission MONUSCO that had been repeatedly looted by rebels, local governor Julien Paluku said.
"Rutshuru has just fallen to the FARDC (regular army). There were some clashes but the rebels have fled," Paluku said.
Earlier Paluku told AFP that troops had entered Kiwanja, adding the "M23 are no longer in Kiwanja".
MONUSCO said a Tanzanian officer was killed in Kiwanja, where UN forces joined the army to drive out rebels on the third day of clashes since a fresh flare-up in violence today. The circumstances of his death were unclear, said the UN force.
The soldier was the third Tanzanian with the UN brigade to have been killed in recent months.
"The soldier died while protecting the people of Kiwanja," said MONUSCO head Martin Kobler in a statement. "I condemn emphatically people or groups involved in such actions, which are attempts to prevent us in doing our job: protecting civilians."
Two rebels and an army soldier were hurt in the clashes, a MONUSCO official said.
M23 said it had "retreated without combat", saying it "refused to fight in Kiwanja".
The renewed violence has prompted calls from the international community for restraint and to reopen the peace talks in Uganda between Kinshasa and the rebels that collapsed last week.
But the M23 threatened today to abandon the negotiations once and for all if the fighting did not end immediately.
"If dialogue does not result in an immediate halt to hostilities to allow peace talks to resume then our movement will be forced to withdraw its delegates from Kampala" where talks had previously taken place, Amani Kabasha, communications chief for the M23, said in a statement.
M23 "warns government forces and their allies that it will not tolerate further military action against any positions held by our soldiers," Kabasha said.
