David Miliband faced the toughest diplomatic challenge of his career yesterday as he departed on an emergency Anglo-French peace mission to end the violence in eastern Congo.

Mr. Miliband and his French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner, flew to Congo and Rwanda at just a few hours notice as warnings grew of a “humanitarian catastrophe” with tens of thousands of civilians fleeing fighting, looting and raping by armed groups.

“The situation is catastrophic, there is no other word,” Pierre Emmauel Ducre, the Red Cross’ spokesman in the Democratic Republic of Congo said as fresh reports emerged that Rwandan-backed Tutsi rebels had forced 50,000 civilians from the camps where they had taken refugee and burned them to the ground.

The rebel offensive towards the regional capital, Goma, has created tens of thousands more internal refugees, swelling the ranks of the quarter million already displaced by the conflict since August. The envoys will see for themselves the scale of the humanitarian fall-out when they visit the besieged city on their way to neighbouring Rwanda.

France has called for the deployment of European troops to bolster the overstretched United Nations force there but Europe remains deeply divided over the proposition, preferring a diplomatic solution.

The Tutsi rebels are led by Laurent Nkunda, a renegade former Congolese general who claims to be fighting for the rights of his ethnic Tutsi minority. But they are also backed by the Tutsi government in Rwanda, angered at the Congolese government’s failure to disarm ethnic Hutu militias who operate in the forests of eastern Congo where they fled following the 1994 genocide.

Lingering ethnic sensitivities and competition for shares in eastern Congo’s fabulous mineral wealth have hampered efforts to secure peace since the 2003 UN-brokered truce that ended Africa’s most brutal war. But the latest explosion of violence is by far the most serious, threatening a return to the all-out war that killed more than 5 million and dragged in eight African nations.

British and French officials said that the sudden decision to dispatch their most senior envoys was a testament to the gravity of the situation and that the leaders of Congo and Rwanda must now be forced to sit down at the negotiating table. “Our view is that it’s a political problem,” a senior British official said. “They need to stop.”

Rwanda’s refusal to acknowledge its role may complicate the mission. France has almost no traction with Rwanda’s Tutsi government, which still blames it for failing to prevent the genocide. But France has considerable clout with the Francophone Congo while Britain’s influence in Rwanda has blossomed under its Anglophile president Paul Kagame.

Lord Malloch Brown, the minister in charge of Africa, acknowledged that the mission could be arduous. “It’s bold of them both,” he told the Times. “But this is a duo who should be able to use their leverage.” Mr. Miliband and Mr. Kouchner will urge the Congolese president Laurent Kabila to make good on his ceasefire commitment to disarm the Hutu militias. Mr. Kagame will be warned that continued support for General Nkunda may lose Rwanda the friends it has made on the international stage as a result of Western guilt over its failure to prevent the genocide.

Injecting European troops into the current chaos could be unhelpful, Lord Malloch Brown argued. “There were European troops in Rwanda when the genocide started but they were overwhelmed by the situation.”

Recent statements from players in the conflict, however, suggest there may be more to securing peace than a neat political solution. General Nkunda has called for a Chinese mining deal with the government to be scrapped, suggesting that he is hungry for his share of the east’s extraordinary natural wealth. China has poured money into Congo in recent years to satisfy its ballooning needs for raw minerals. More worryingly, eastern Congo is one of the few places on earth with uranium mines and was the source of the uranium used in the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. There are sound economic and security reasons as well as humanitarian ones to fear the region falling into unsafe hands.

In the meantime, it is beleaguered civilians who are paying the price for the competing ambitions. While an uneasy ceasefire with the rebels has held since late Wednesday night, retreating government soldiers have gone on the rampage through Goma, raping, looting and burning. One witness described how soldiers broke into a brothel demanding free sex, shooting dead prostitutes when they refused.

Bodies with gunshot wounds lay in Goma’s lava-clad streets as refugees carrying bundles of clothes streamed by, using the break in fighting to get out of the city where they had fled for sanctuary. “There’s no shelter, there’s no food, my only choice is to go home,” Rhema Harerimana, one of the displaced said. “We’ve had nothing to eat for three days.”The UN blamed renegade government troops for the worst of the lootings, killing and rapes in the city. Around Rutshuru, however, captured by General Nkunda’s troops this week, the UN said refugees had been forced from the camps, their belongings looted and their shelters burned.

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