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An A frican Union (AU) delegation at the weekend went to Bukavu, a town in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where a week-long occupation by renegade soldiers resulted in around 90 deaths.

DRC government troops last week marched back into Bukavu without further bloodshed once the dissidents, mainly former rebels assimilated into the army, had left the town on the vast central African country's border with Rwanda.

"We've come to take a look for ourselves at the prevailing situation," the Senegalese leader of the pan-African delegation, Mame Dialy Sy, told journalists after talks with officials in the town, which is the capital of Sud-Kivu province.

His team stayed overnight Saturday. They had meetings with the new governor appointed by Kinshasa, Augustin Bulaimu, his deputy Didace Kinangini, military representative Major Simon Mutombo and Alpha Sow, the Bukavu head of the United Nations (UN) mission to DRC (Monduc).

"Our message is a message of peace, a message of solidarity, support and availability," Dialy Sy said. "We cannot accept seeing countries called on to live together tear themselves apart. We must do everything we can to save countries and Africa in general."

The AU Peace and Security Council, the continental equivalent of the UN Security Council, has "condemned what happened in Sud-Kivu" and deplores "the violations of human dignity, the loss in human lives and the violations of human rights" during the fighting for the town, he added.

Eastern parts of DRC remain volatile in the wake of a war which wracked the country from 1998 and officially ended in 2003, after the signing of an interim government and peace plan and other agreements covering the withdrawal of the foreign armies that had backed the rival sides.

During the war, Bukavu and other eastern towns were in the hands of the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), which saw fighters taken into the national army in the wake of the peace accords.

President Joseph Kabila's government in Kinshasa has accused Rwanda of being behind the unrest in Bukavu, which was taken by mainly former rebels led by Colonel Jules Mutebusi and General Laurent Nkunda.

Nkunda himself said that he had taken Bukavu, where hundreds of Monuc peacekeeping soldiers are deployed, because he wanted to protect local Banyamulenge, an ethnic Tutsi people close to the minority of the same name in Rwanda, from alleged massacres.

The US-based international Human Rights Watch accused both regular government troops and the renegades of serious rights abuses during the conflict.

"Once again, civilians have been targeted by all sides.

Commanders say they acted to protect civilians, but instead their soldiers have raped and killed," HRW Africa Division's Stephan Van Praet said.

"Government troops killed at least 15 civilians between May 26 and 28, including those from the minority Congolese ethnic group known as Banyamulenge," according to Van Praet's statement sent yesterday to AFP in Uganda.

Dissident troops killed civilians and carried out widespread sexual violence against women and girls, some of them as young as three years of age, HRW added.

"Investigations must be carried out on the serious crimes committed in Bukavu and those responsible brought to justice.

Guilty commanders must not be rewarded for their actions, a practice we have seen too frequently in the DRC," said Van Praet.

On Saturday, the army reported further clashes with renegades near Bukavu.

"There has been fighting there for the last four days between the regular army and Mutebusi's people," the DRC army chief in Kinshasa, Major General Sylvain Buki, said.

The fighting took place in and around Kamanyola, some 40 kilometres south of Bukavu, Buki said, without giving casualty figures.

An AFP journalist passing through a Rwandan area 10 kilometres away heard the sound of shelling coming from the direction of Kamanyola.

The AU mission, which has already been to Kinshasa, was to head on to the Nord-Kivu capital, Goma, then across the Rwandan border to Kigali, the team said. - Sapa-AFP

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