Congo, general agree to end of insurgency

DAKAR, Senegal — Congo's government reached an agreement Monday with a renegade general to end an insurgency that has forced more than 400,000 people from their homes and threatened to undermine the new democratically elected government, according to Congolese officials and Western diplomats involved in the negotiations.

Under the agreement, which is expected to be signed today after nearly two weeks of difficult negotiations in the eastern city of Goma, the government and the rebel troops will withdraw from some of their positions and U.N. peacekeeping forces will establish a buffer zone.

A commission of Congolese officials and experts from the United States, the European Union and the African Union will oversee the integration of the rebel troops into the national army and enforce a permanent cease-fire.

The rebels will also be granted amnesty on insurrection charges, which would have carried the death penalty, but they could still face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The agreement will also apply to other militias operating in eastern Congo.

The conflict between the Congolese government and a rebel army led by Laurent Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi general, was part of the deadly legacy of the Rwandan genocide, which ensnared Congo in a vast regional conflict that began in 1996 and has limped on despite a peace agreement formally ending the war in Congo in 2003.

By some estimates, the Congo war and its aftermath have killed more than 4 million people, mostly because of disease and hunger.

Nkunda had refused to surrender his command and integrate his troops into the national army, as other armed groups had done, contending that Congolese Tutsi faced a unique threat at the hands of the Rwandan Hutu extremists who carried out the Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered in 1994.

Many of the perpetrators in that conflict fled into Congo, then known as Zaire, in 1994, and an untold number remain there.

Battles between Nkunda's troops, government-allied militias and the Rwandan Hutu fighters have spawned chaos in eastern Congo over the past year, just as the country struggled to right itself after its first democratic elections in more than four decades. The battles have also heightened ethnic tensions in the region.

The agreement follows a pact signed in 2007 in Nairobi, Kenya, between the Congolese and Rwandan governments to disarm and repatriate the Rwandan Hutu militias.