A pledge by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda to respect a two-year-old peace accord is no guarantee that the tensions in the volatile east of the DRC can be defused, observers warned yesterday.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame and DRC President Joseph Kabila recommitted themselves on Friday to the Pretoria agreement signed in July 2002 to end a four-year war between their two states, following a crisis summit in Nigeria.

But one Western observer in the DRC was sceptical about the true weight of the pledge, coming at the end of a month which saw the vast DRC and its eastern neighbour trade accusations of war-mongering and cross-border interference.

"To respect a peace accord signed two years ago: this is no great step forwards," said the observer based in eastern DRC, on condition of anonymity.

"I am not certain that the Abuja meeting marks the start of a solid political development," he warned.

In July 2002, Kabila and Kagame signed the Pretoria deal, under which Rwanda agreed to withdraw some 20,000 soldiers it had sent into the DRC in 1998 and Kinshasa agreed to round up, disarm and repatriate Hutu extremists who had fled into what was then Zaire after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Rwanda withdrew its troops in October 2002, and Kinshasa has arrested and repatriated some suspects in the 100-day slaughter of up to one-million people.

But accusations of interference have continued to fly, and recent clashes between the regular army and dissident troops in eastern DRC have triggered fears for the DRC's year-old peace process and for peace between the central African neighbours.

The DRC last week confirmed it had deployed 10 000 troop reinforcements to deal with the dissidents near its eastern border -- whom it claims are backed by Rwanda -- bringing tensions to boiling point.

Following the Abuja summit, a joint verification team is now to be set up to ensure that Hutu extremists in DRC are disarmed and demobilised, and that there are no more Rwandan troops on DRC soil.

But the United Nations peacekeeping mission in DRC, Monuc, was circumspect about the agreement.

"We hope that this will help to defuse tensions, but there needs to be genuine good will on both sides," warned Eliane Nabaa, spokeswoman for the UN mission in the key eastern town of Bukavu, which was held by dissident troops for a week early this month.

"The population is not yet truly reassured," she said.

Almost 100 people were killed in the fight for Bukavu, while thousands have fled the violence -- both dissident troops and regular forces are reported to have committed abuses during the seige including executions, rape, and looting.

Kagame and Kabila have made repeated pledges to abide by the Pretoria pact, but without any real progress towards the disarmament of Rwandan Hutu rebels, the observer in eastern DRC pointed out.

"This is nothing new," he said, warning that "fighting between the Congolese army and the dissidents risks continuing in the east, because both sides want to test their ability to win a major offensive."

The DRC's Foreign Minister Antoine Ghonda on Saturday praised the "good will" shown by the Rwandan president -- whose country has come under intense international pressure to cooperate to work to resolve the tensions peacefully.

"We don't want a new war. On the contrary we want to take away any pretext for those who do," said Ghonda.

The international community has voiced grave concern over the tensions in the region, and Britain and the United States sent top diplomats on Africa to visit both Kagame and Kabila this week.

The UN Security Council also urged dialogue and warned the DRC's three eastern neighbours, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, against any attempt to disrupt the peace process in the DRC.

DRC is struggling to emerge from a war that began as an uprising in the east in 1998 and grew into what has been called Africa's world war, drawing in half a dozen other African states at its height and claiming some 2,5-million lives.

Rwanda and Uganda were the main backers of two rebel groups from the east that rose up against the government, starting the conflict.

The war ended last year with a peace pact that set up a transition government and created a new army which brings former rebels from the war under Kinshasa's command.

But peace has yet to come to eastern DRC, where inter-ethnic clashes in the northeastern Ituri region have killed at least 55 000 people since 1999. – Sapa-AFP.