US plans to train Congo anti-rebel force -diplomat

KINSHASA, Oct 29 (Reuters) - The United States plans to help train a Congolese army rapid reaction force to tackle rebel and militia groups in the country's conflict-torn east, the top U.S. diplomat in Democratic Republic of Congo said on Monday.

Congo's armed forces have been battling a Tutsi-dominated rebel movement led by renegade General Laurent Nkunda in eastern North Kivu province since August.

Local Mai-Mai militia and Rwandan Hutu rebels have also been involved in fighting in North Kivu, which has forced more than 370,000 people from their homes since the beginning of the year.

"The Congolese have asked for special training to go into these areas and take on these militias. It would be a kind of rapid reaction force," Samuel Brock, the acting head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Congo, told Reuters.

Brock said U.S. State Department officials were negotiating the terms of a training contract between the two countries.

He added a deal could be completed by January 2008 with the actual instruction courses to begin soon afterwards.

Congo, a longtime Cold War ally of the United States, has for decades sent officers for training at American military academies. However, the new proposed training scheme would be carried out on Congolese soil, using either active duty American army instructors or retired officers.

"It's not completely new, but it would be more intense," Brock said.

The proposed extra training for Congo's army comes amid intense American diplomatic efforts to solve the problem of persisting violence in eastern Congo, which bore the brunt of a 1998-2003 war that killed an estimated 4 million people.

Last week, Congo's President Joseph Kabila met with President George W. Bush at the White House to ask for American support for his efforts to extend government control to the east, following his victory in national elections last year.

The Congolese president earlier this month gave his armed forces a green light to launch an offensive against Nkunda's estimated 4,000 fighters after they ignored an Oct. 15 deadline to disarm and rejoin the national army.

Diplomats said Kabila had agreed to delay the offensive, to give Nkunda's fighters more time to come in from the bush, after intense pressure from the United Nations and western states.

VISITING U.S. ENVOY

Tim Shortly, senior advisor for conflict resolution to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer, was in Congo's capital Kinshasa on Monday before a planned visit to North Kivu this week.

Washington is planning to appoint a diplomat to be permanently based in North Kivu's provincial capital, Goma.

Nkunda says he is defending Congo's Tutsi ethnic community against attacks by Rwandan Hutu rebels he says are supported by Kabila's army. The Congolese leader denies such support and says he also plans to disarm the Hutu rebels, who are accused of involvement in Rwanda's 1994 genocide killings of Tutsis.

U.N. relief agencies fear an all-out army offensive will sharply worsen the humanitarian situation in North Kivu.

Congo's army has been singled out by rights campaigners as the worst human rights abuser in the country. Rights activists accuse government troops, as well as rebels and militia, of rapes, torture and both arbitrary and targeted killings.

Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch, said that although the need for security sector reform and training was widely accepted, the process needed to be handled carefully.

"We urge them (the Americans) to do adequate screening for those that go into the training programme ... Otherwise you're just training killers to be more efficient," she said.