Struggle to aid fleeing Congolese

The town of Sake is almost empty

Aid workers in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo are struggling to cope with a surge of people fleeing recent fighting.

A BBC correspondent says they need emergency help - food and shelter, while the UN has started vaccinating children against measles.

A ceasefire agreed on Thursday was broken earlier but the area is now quiet, a rebel leader has told the BBC.

The clashes had raised fears of further conflict following a five-year war.

The BBC's Karen Allen in Mugunga, 15km from Goma, says thousands of women with young children on their backs have joined men in tattered clothes trying to get food.

More than 10,000 people have fled their homes in the past week.

Meanwhile, a Russian-made Antonov cargo plane has crashed after landing at Goma airport, with at least five dead.

"The tyres exploded on one side and then blew on the other side as well, and the plane slid into the [petrified] lava at the end of the runway," one witness told Reuters news agency.

Gorilla threat

"This is a real and worsening crisis," said World Food Programme deputy Country Director Claude Jibidar.

"The fighting is uprooting more people every day and making it ever harder for WFP to reach them with the assistance they urgently need.

Dissident Gen Laurent Nkunda said government forces had attacked his force's positions in Rutshuru, before he informed UN peacekeepers and calm was restored.

Rutshuru is some 60km from Goma, in the Virunga National Park, home to endangered mountain gorillas.

Park rangers have been searching for 50 gorillas in four family groups after rebels seized parts of the park earlier this week, conservationists told the AFP news agency.

Nine gorillas were killed in the area last month. Just 700 remain - half in Virunga.

Government forces and UN troops are in control of the centre of Sake, which the rebels tried to capture on Thursday, according to a BBC correspondent in the town.

But rebel forces are in mountains just 1km away.

Civilians who fled Sake in the past few days are starting to come back, but the town still appears empty, he says.

Some 200,000 people have fled their homes in eastern DR Congo this year, the UN says.

Ethnic tension

UN emergency relief chief John Holmes has described the humanitarian situation in the region as deplorable.

Mr Holmes said fighting was confined to parts of the single province of North Kivu, but warned the crisis might worsen in a large country like DR Congo - the size of western Europe.

Profile: Gen Nkunda

In other parts of North Kivu, men loyal to Gen Nkunda have pulled out of villages near the Rwandan border, and were replaced by ethnic Hutu Rwandan rebels.

Ethnic tension following the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda lies at the heart of the fighting.

Gen Nkunda says he is protecting Congolese Tutsis from the forces who carried out the genocide and then crossed the border.

Elections last year, won by President Joseph Kabila, were supposed to draw a line under years of conflict in DR Congo.

Some four million people are believed to have died during DR Congo's five-year conflict, which officially ended in 2002.

The UN has some 17,000 peacekeepers in DR Congo - the largest such force in the world.