Soldiers, UN Retreat As Rebels Advance In Congo -- Yahoo News/APKILIMANYOKA, Congo – Rebels vowing to take Congo's eastern provincial capital of 600,000 people advanced toward Goma on Tuesday as Congolese troops and U.N. tanks retreated, while tens of thousands fled to a makeshift shelter.
The sudden influx tripled the size of the camp in Kibati in a matter of hours, said Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency. A hundred refugees a day, mostly women and children, were also fleeing across the border into Uganda, that country's Red Cross said.
In Kibati, a few miles from the front line, young men also lobbed rocks Tuesday at three U.N. tanks with Uruguayan troops heading away from the battlefield.
"What are they doing? They are supposed to protect us," complained Jean-Paul Maombi, a 31-year-old nurse from Kibumba.
On Monday, peacekeepers fired into the air at one U.N. compound that came under a hail of rocks, and city leaders said three people were killed. Mobs hurled the stones to protest the U.N.'s failure to protect them from the rebels, despite having 17,000 peacekeepers in its Congo mission.
Renegade Gen. Laurent Nkunda has vowed to seize Goma, a lakeside city of 600,000 on the border with Rwanda in Central Africa.
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