Goma (DR Congo) (AFP) – Advancing government troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo cleared rebels from strategic positions in the restive east, a local official said Sunday, as the M23 warned it would pull out of stalled peace talks.

The FARDC regular army took back control of both the city of Rutshuru and the rebel-held town of Kiwanja, home to a base used by the UN mission MONUSCO that had been repeatedly looted by rebels, local governor Julien Paluku said.

“Rutshuru has just fallen to the FARDC (regular army). There were some clashes but the rebels have fled,” Paluku said.

Earlier Paluku told AFP that troops had entered Kiwanja, adding the “M23 are no longer in Kiwanja”.

MONUSCO said a Tanzanian officer was killed in Kiwanja, where UN forces joined the army to drive out rebels on the third day of clashes since a fresh flare-up in violence on Friday. The circumstances of his death were unclear, said the UN force.

The soldier was the third Tanzanian with the UN brigade to have been killed in recent months.

“The soldier died while protecting the people of Kiwanja,” said MONUSCO head Martin Kobler in a statement. “I condemn emphatically people or groups involved in such actions, which are attempts to prevent us in doing our job: protecting civilians.”

Two rebels and an army soldier were hurt in the clashes, a MONUSCO official said.

M23 said it had “retreated without combat”, saying it “refused to fight in Kiwanja”.

The renewed violence has prompted calls from the international community for restraint and to reopen the peace talks in Uganda between Kinshasa and the rebels that collapsed last week.

But the M23 threatened Sunday to abandon the negotiations once and for all if the fighting did not end immediately.

“If dialogue does not result in an immediate halt to hostilities to allow peace talks to resume then our movement will be forced to withdraw its delegates from Kampala” where talks had previously taken place, Amani Kabasha, communications chief for the M23, said in a statement.

M23 “warns government forces and their allies that it will not tolerate further military action against any positions held by our soldiers,” Kabasha said.

Calls for restraint

Earlier Sunday, a UN official and a high-ranking army officer said fighting was continuing in Kibumba, 25 kilometres (12 miles) north of the regional mining hub of Goma.

Kibumba, high on a plateau at an altitude of nearly 1,800 metres (6,000 feet), is an outpost that commands access to rebel territory further north, and home to the M23 since a MONUSCO offensive in late August that pushed the frontline of fighting back some 15 kilometres.

It was around Kibumba that the latest bout of fighting broke out Friday, the heaviest since August.

The new clashes come less than a week after the breakdown of the peace talks, part of a framework both sides agreed to last year, following a rebel offensive that saw the M23 briefly take control of Goma.

The United Nations has since deployed a special brigade of 3,000 African troops with an unprecedented offensive mandate but observers remain wary of an escalation that could draw in the entire region.

Late Saturday, the army claimed to have captured Kibumba — a claim dismissed by the M23 as “propaganda” while the MONUSCO officer described it as a partial takeover.

The MONUSCO officer said Sunday that other fighting was under way on a second front on the road between Mabenga and Kahunga, further north.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon’s top envoys to the conflict, Kobler and Mary Robinson have voiced grave concern over the fresh fighting, calling for “maximum restraint”.

The United States has also voiced alarm while EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton has urged “all actors in the region to prevent further escalation and internationalisation of the conflict”.

DR Congo’s neighbour Rwanda on Friday accused the Congolese army of firing three shells over the border into its territory and threatened to retaliate.

Kinshasa has long accused Kigali of pulling the strings behind the rebellion and UN experts have even said that the M23’s “de facto chain of command” was topped by Rwanda’s defence minister.