WORLD> Africa
Congo rebels make roadblock out of bodies
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-11-13 11:48

A woman displaced by fighting sleeps in a shelter at Kibati, north of Goma in eastern Congo, November 12, 2008. Packed into squalid refugee camps or roaming in the bush, hundreds of thousands of Congolese children face hunger, disease, sexual abuse or recruitment by marauding armed factions, according to aid workers. [Agencies]

A few miles (kilometers) to the south at Kibati, thousands of people lined up to get survival kits being handed out from five white International Committee of the Red Cross trucks. The kits contained buckets, blankets, soap, hoes and cooking utensils, said Abdallah Togola, an ICRC official in Kibati.

Togola said the area was reaching its capacity to handle refugees.

"All the schools and churches are full," he said, adding that local families have taken in about six people each.

Tuesday's fighting, which lasted nearly an hour, sent some families rushing for what they hoped was the safety of refugee camps. Others ran into the bush.

Biamungu said he'd slept with his mother and two siblings in the open under a banana field, fearing the camp could be targeted. It wasn't.

Many are to afraid to return to villages to the north seized by rebels in the last few weeks. Biamungu said he fled the village of Rugari months earlier. He risked going back Wednesday to bring back a sack of sweet potatoes and illegal charcoal he hoped to sell in Kibati for $10.

UN peacekeeping spokesman Col. Jean-Paul Dietrich urged both sides to show restraint.

"It's not acceptable that in the proximity of 75,000 people (in Kibati), they cannot cease hostilities for a few days," Dietrich said. "We are working hard to separate them. They have to be responsible actors."