KINSHASA - Congo's leaders, foreign donors and the United Nations were slow to see the risk of fresh conflict in the nation's east, leaving civilians open to murder, rape and looting by armed groups, Human Rights Watch said.

Government soldiers, renegade Tutsi fighters and Hutu rebels from neighbouring Rwanda were all responsible for widespread abuses in Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province, including the massacre of civilians, forcing children to fight and gang rape, HRW said in a report published on Tuesday.

"The Congolese government, backed by the international community, tried several short-term solutions to the fighting but failed to deal with the underlying causes of conflict," the New York-based rights group added.

"The inability of the state to protect its citizens from attack, the claims of armed groups to control parts of the territory and exploit its wealth, and the near total impunity for perpetrators of crimes, all remain unsolved."

Congo's army has been fighting rebels loyal to Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda since August, when his men abandoned a January peace deal and pulled out of mixed government brigades. The clashes have displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

Pleased with the success of last year's presidential polls, the first democratic vote in the former Belgian colony for four decades, foreign donors had been quick to sign development deals with Congo but slow to condemn rights abuses, the report said.

The United Nations mission in Congo (MONUC) had been preoccupied with redefining its role to take account of the newly elected government, while also dealing with allegations of corruption among its own ranks in North Kivu, HRW said.

"By the time national and international leaders recognised the risk of renewed armed conflict, Nkunda had increased the number of his combatants and enlarged his territorial base. The FDLR (rebels) had reportedly acquired new arms and ammunition," it said.


RISK OF FULL-SCALE WAR

The crisis in North Kivu has been worsened by the involvement of other groups such as the Rwandan FDLR rebels, who include ex-Hutu militiamen and Rwandan soldiers responsible for that country's 1994 genocide.

Human Rights Watch said Congolese politicians and foreign diplomats were now "scrambling to avoid full-scale war" in the province, and documented widespread cases of murder and sexual abuse.

"When the firing started, people started to flee in all directions. My mother was too old to flee and hid inside her house with eight family members and four neighbours," the survivor of a March attack by Nkunda's men told HRW.

The woman spent the night covered in long grass to hide herself but around dawn the fighters returned.

"The people inside the house had been speaking, a baby was crying and they had started a fire to heat food. Smoke was coming out. The soldiers knocked on the door and massacred eight people inside the house," she said.

She fled deeper into the bush as the rebels attacked her village of Buramba. When she returned, she found the bodies of her children and mother.

"The bodies were in latrines. I could see the feet of my mother sticking out," she said.

HRW called for diplomats to increase their pressure for a political solution in North Kivu.

"If their efforts ... produce no results, it will be the people of North Kivu who will suffer once more," it said.