As 200,000 people in camps around the besieged town of Goma face hunger and a potentially deadly outbreak of cholera, the European Union said yesterday that it was too early to send troops to bolster the United Nations peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ministers in Brussels ignored calls from aid agencies to send EU forces to support the 17,000 UN peacekeepers. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said: “We should wait for the assessment by the UN investigator . . . then it will be for every country of the world to consider its own position.”

Juliette Prodhan, head of Oxfam in Congo, condemned as “air miles diplomacy” a recent joint visit to the region by Mr Miliband and Bernard Kouchner, his French counterpart.

Offers of regional African peacekeepers have been met with threats from the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, whose army has routed government soldiers. “I am ready to fight them,” he said.

General Nkunda’s National Congress for the Defence of the People is dug in near the outskirts of Goma, where a tenuous ceasefire has held since October 29. His ethnic Tutsi troops are facing off against the national Army, the Hutu fighters of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda and Mai Mai militias. The Southern African Development Community said that it would send military advisers to aid peacekeepers “if and when necessary”. “If [the peacekeepers] are coming in to support peace, there is no problem,” General Nkunda said. “If they come in and fight they will share the same shame as the Government.”

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