His rebel fighters have helped to force a quarter of a million Congolese villagers from their homes in the past three months and kept a region in turmoil. Yesterday, however, General Laurent Nkunda emerged from the bush in a smart suit and fine Italian shoes to do what he does best.

For three hours he entertained visiting dignitaries with promises of a ceasefire.

He talked, kissed babies and wooed the international media, even as his followers engaged government troops in heavy fighting.

After meeting Olusegun Obasanjo, the UN peace envoy and former Nigerian President, General Nkunda insisted that he was ready to negotiate. “Let me tell you we have agreed a ceasefire and are waiting for the other side to respect it,” he said.

The talks took place inside a church hall in the rebel-held town of Jomba, about 60 miles (96km) from the regional capital, Goma. General Nkunda’s National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) came within a few miles of taking Goma during fighting in October. Aid workers were withdrawn and the Government pulled out its troops before an expected rebel advance that never came. Since then the conflict has settled into a routine of tit-for-tat muscle-flexing as both sides try to gain territory ahead of any negotiations.

General Nkunda claims to be protecting ethnic Tutsis from Hutu militias who fled from Rwanda after the 1994 genocide.

Yesterday a UN official reported exchanges of artillery, rocket and small-arms fire near the village of Ndeko, about 70 miles north of Goma, shortly before Mr Obasanjo’s arrival.

Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich, the chief military spokesman for the 17,000-strong peacekeeping mission, said: “It is difficult to say who started it, but we can confirm it was between the CNDP and the army. We have treated six army soldiers who were wounded and need to be evacuated.”

Mr Obasanjo was appointed by Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, to attempt to help to end the fighting.

The venue for talks was a neat mission station built during Belgian colonial rule. Sunday school was cancelled and hundreds of locals — the men in smart shirts, the women in vibrant fabrics — milled around after Mass.

Flanked by militiamen, General Nkunda said that he was ready to talk to the Government without setting any preconditions.

“Today is a great day for us because we were losing many men and now we have a message of peace. We should work with this mission,” the general said. “We agreed to open humanitarian corridors to support the process.”

Mr Obasanjo said the talks had gone well and he would relay General Nkunda’s words to Joseph Kabila, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo. “Nkunda wants to maintain a ceasefire, but it’s like dancing the tango. You can’t do it alone,” he said.

It was an apt turn of phrase. Within minutes the two men were dancing and laughing with a troupe of young performers who beat out a rhythm on a goatskin drum.

General Nkunda, clutching his trademark cane topped with a silver eagle’s head, kissed babies and posed for photographs before both men inspected a guard of honour.

His media offensive has been every bit as effective as his military operation, allowing him ample opportunity to claim his 7,000-strong rebel army is about to march on the capital, Kinshasa, or to take Goma. Some doubt his capacity to fulfil these threats — but the result is a land filled with fear. Thousands of people are crammed into the squalid camps that surround Goma. While all sides stand accused of looting, pillaging and raping their way through village after village, there are many who fear General Nkunda’s rebel army in particular.

Anne-Marie has been sleeping on the floor of a school since fleeing her home in Rutshuru, on the main road north from Goma.

A group of men she believes were rebels, dressed in fatigues and wellington boots, called at her simple wooden house late one night. They shot her five daughters and her husband. “My children were killed in my sight. I fainted but then I was lying in a pool of blood so that they might think I was not alive,” she said in Swahili.

She survived — but only after being marched into the forest and raped by five men.

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