May 13, 2008, 19:51 GMT
Kampala - The Ugandan army said Tuesday that it killed two Congolese rebels and injured three others after Congolese insurgents attacked a border village in the remote south-western region.
Up to 20 Congolese rebels who are members of a militia force led by renegade general Laurent Nkunda made the attack near the Ugandan border village of Bunagana, about 500 kilometres from the capital Kampala Tuesday morning.
The Ugandan army engaged them in a fight, the regional army spokesman, captain Tabaro Kiconco, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur via telephone.
'The Congolese rebels made the attack this morning on civilians who were coming from a market in the village of Kibaya, about four kilometres from Bunagana,' Tabara said. 'Our solders swung into action and one rebel was killed. Others ran with injuries and one later died in Congo.'
Three others were injured, Tabaro said.
Large areas of Congo's volatile eastern region known as North Kivu are controlled by general Nkunda, an ethnic Tutsi army officer who refused to integrate his forces into Congo's national army when the six-year civil war ended in 2004.
Marauding rebels often clash with Congolese government forces, soldiers of the UN peace keeping group in Congo (MONUC) and fighters of the former Rwandan army who fled into the DR Congo after leading the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
The fighting often spills across the border. Last year, up to 20,000 Congolese refugees fled into Uganda's Kisoro district when Nkunda's forces battled with both the Congolese government troops and the UN peace-keeping forces.
The fighting later cooled down and many of the refugees returned to their villages in the Congo.
In a separate issue, a border dispute between the two countries was to be discussed by the presidents - Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Joseph Kabila of Congo - in Tanzania sometime this week, the government-sponsored New Vision newspaper has reported.
Uganda says Congolese troops recently moved four kilometres inside a disputed area of land along the border in its north-western region.
Uganda sent troops to the former Zaire in 1998, accusing the government in Kinshasa of supporting dissidents based there. It later withdrew the soldiers after intense international pressure in 2003.
The two states nearly went to war again two years ago when they amassed troops on either side of the border in an area where huge deposits of oil were found. That, too, was resolved through talks.
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