The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Tanzania have agreed at a meeting to repatriate 152,000 Congolese refugees to South Kivu Province in September, despite concerns by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, about the security and human rights conditions there.

While the armed groups of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo continue reaping terror, the financial dimension of the pillaging of natural resources, particularly in favour of Uganda and Rwanda, remains the key to their presence and justifies the decision adopted by the Security Council to extend the arms embargo: this is the picture' of the situation in the eastern provinces of ex-Zaire given by Mamadouh Bah, spokesman for the MONUC (United Nations Mission in DR-Congo), presenting a report of UN experts in the capital Kinshasa.

A local official of the UN humanitarian office, OCHA, said on Friday that 12 diamond miners working in a pit 84 km northwest of the town of Punia in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Maniema Province are dead and many others are seriously ill from what appears to be a hemorrhagic fever.

Businessmen in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have collected 120 tons of maize flour and other food for 2.5 million hungry people in Niger, a high ranking government official said on Thursday.

Violence in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) Katanga Province has been displacing thousands of civilians, according to local media and two international NGOs.

Some 1,000 refugees in camps in Tanzania returned to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) late in July in order to register to vote in the 2006 general elections, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.

The UN Mission in Congo, known as MONUC, has called for an inquiry into the killing of Pascal Kabangulu, a prominent Congolese human rights activist, officials at the mission told reporters in Kinshasa on Wednesday.

The Independent Electoral Commission of the Democratic Republic of Congo has said 2.9 million people in Kinshasa, the capital, had signed up to vote in the 2006 elections by the time registration centres closed on Sunday.

Registration of voters started on Monday in two provinces outside Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as preparations continued for general elections scheduled for 2006, officials said.

Uganda said on Monday it would not allow the newly-created rebel Congolese Revolutionary Movement or any other armed group to launch attacks from its territory on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).