BURUNDI and Rwanda have threatened to invade the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to disarm rebel groups blamed for a massacre that has jeopardised the fragile peace in the region.

More than 150 refugees were shot or hacked to death at a camp in Burundi on Friday. The victims were Tutsis from the DRC who had crossed the border to escape attacks from local militia.

Brigadier-General Germain Niyoyankana, the head of Burundi’s Army, said yesterday that his forces were prepared to act if the Kinshasa Government failed to disarm the rebels. “We must avoid a new attack . . . so the Burundi Army does not rule out an offensive in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” General Niyoyankana said.

The slaughter at the Gatumba camp was a grim echo of the genocide in Rwanda ten years ago, when more than 800,000 Tutsis were killed by their Hutu countrymen. Many of the attackers fled to the DRC to escape retribution. The UN estimates that up to 10,000 rebels remain in the country, and clashes with the Tutsi-dominated armies of Rwanda and Burundi have plagued Central Africa since.

Rwandan troops invaded the DRC in 1996 and 1998, claiming that they needed to flush out the rebels.

A Rwandan government official said that this may now happen again. “Failure to disarm (the rebels) may force Rwanda to take measures. Rwanda is not prepared to tolerate the status quo,” he said.

The Hutu Forces for National Liberation, a rebel group in Burundi, said that it carried out the massacre at Gatumba. But experts suspect that Congolese and Rwandan Hutus were also involved after survivors reported seeing some of the assailants return across the border with the DRC.

A Congolese official reacted angrily to the threat of invasion, saying that the DRC had been working with the UN for five years to disarm Hutu rebels.

For Burundi, the timing of the massacre could not have been worse. Elections are scheduled for October, and it was hoped that the appointment of a new power-sharing government would end a decade-long war between Hutus and Tutsis that has claimed 300,000 lives.

The renewed violence was also a sign of the precarious situation in the DRC, which last year emerged from a civil war that involved six nations and cost three million lives.

Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, said on Monday that the peacekeeping force in the DRC should be more than doubled from 10,800 troops to 23,900, making it the largest UN peacekeeping operation in the world.

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