Corpses litter tense frontline in eastern Congo

Kibati: The bodies of two Congolese soldiers, buzzing with flies, lay sprawled on a road of black volcanic grit in eastern Congo on Wednesday after new clashes in spite of world appeals to stop the simmering war.

This is the tense frontline in Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province, where Tutsi rebels and government troops face each other just 200 metres apart in the verdant bush beneath the steaming Nyiragongo volcano.

The soldiers, both shot through the head, were killed in a sharp exchange of artillery, mortar, rocket and machine gun fire late on Tuesday a few kilometres from a refugee camp at Kibati sheltering 80,000 civilians displaced by violence.

United Nations peacekeepers, who want the Security Council to dispatch more troops to stop the fighting in east Congo, sent in helicopters to try to halt any more combat on the lines some 15 kilometres north of the North Kivu provincial capital Goma.

"We are trying to separate them to de-escalate any new fighting. This is a must. The rebels and army are too close," Lt Col Jean-Paul Dietrich, military spokesman for the UN mission in Congo, known as MONUC, said.

Despite earnest appeals from around the world -from UN chief Ban Ki Moon to Pope Benedict -for a shaky ceasefire to be respected in North Kivu, civilians, soldiers and rebels are still being killed daily in skirmishes.

Weeks of fighting have driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes or previous refugee camps, triggering a swelling humanitarian crisis.