By Hereward Holland, Reuters
November 14, 2008 - 12:00 a.m. EST

GOMA, Congo (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of refugees at a frontline camp in eastern Congo will be urgently moved to prevent them being caught in crossfire between rebels and the army, aid officials said on Thursday.

More than 65,000 civilians who have fled weeks of fighting are camped at Kibati, a few kilometers south of combat lines between Tutsi rebels loyal to renegade General Laurent Nkunda and government troops.

The refugees, squatting in cramped, dirty conditions within sight of a live volcano, are among 250,000 civilians forced from their homes since a resurgence of fighting in late August in Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province.

Artillery and machinegun battles near Kibati have disrupted aid distribution to the refugees and sent thousands streaming south toward the provincial capital Goma, 10 km (6 miles) away.

"We noticed these people might be in serious danger and the humanitarian community decided we should move them from there ... as soon as possible," Ibrahima Coly, head of the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) in North Kivu, told Reuters.

Relief agencies planned to truck civilians who agreed to go to a camp at Mugunga, 10 km (6 miles) west of Goma, he said, adding he hoped this could start in a week's time.

Refugees at Kibati said they lived in fear of attack.

"We're not safe in the camp ... we don't know who might come, it could be CNDP (Nkunda's National Congress for the Defense of the People rebels), it could be FARDC (Congolese army), but I also worry about thieves," said Norbert Alimasi Mwamba, carrying a sack filled with possessions on his head.

The U.N. has its largest peacekeeping force in the world, 17,000-strong, in Congo but U.N. peacekeepers have been unable to protect hundreds of thousands of uprooted civilians in North Kivu from killings, lootings and rape. Human rights groups say both rebels and government troops have committed abuses.

"What I heard from (U.N. peacekeepers) is that ... they don't have the capacity to protect people (in Kibati)," one aid worker, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

Nkunda, who wants President Joseph Kabila to agree to talks on Congo's future, last month pushed an offensive by his battle-hardened guerrillas to the gates of Goma, attracting a wave of international attention to the North Kivu conflict.

He suspended the offensive by declaring a ceasefire.

FEAR OF CHOLERA EPIDEMIC

Aid officials say the fighting has created a "catastrophic" security and humanitarian situation, and the risk of a repeat of the kind of human devastation caused by a 1998-2003 war that killed several million in the former Belgian colony.

The World Health Organization said it was worried about a wider cholera epidemic developing in the Goma zone, where cases tripled between early October and early November, because of unsafe water, poor sanitation and weak health services.

"Such an increase of cases in a region that is already endemic for cholera is an early warning sign," Eric Laroche, Assistant Director-General for WHO's Health Action in Crises cluster, said in a statement.

The aid worker who requested anonymity said there was a risk Nkunda's fighters may mingle with the refugees at Kibati.

"If clashes happen, displaced (people) will be moving from the camp to Goma. This might facilitate the infiltration of armed people among the displaced running toward Goma," the worker added.

Humanitarian agencies are clamoring for urgent U.N. troop reinforcements for eastern Congo. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has asked the Security Council to approve 3,000 more.

"The major preoccupation for us is security," Marjon Kamara, head of UNHCR's Africa department, told Reuters in Senegal.

But U.N. officials say even if approved, troops could take two months to deploy. Eastern and southern African states have offered peacekeepers, but only under a U.N. or regional mandate.

At Kiwanja, near Rutshuru, 70 km (40 miles) north of Goma in the rebel-held zone, human rights groups accuse Nkunda's rebels and a rival pro-government militia of killing dozens of civilians, mostly adults, in tit-for-tat reprisals last week.

They say these took place despite U.N. troops being nearby.

Commanders of the U.N. force in Congo, known as MONUC, say their force, despite its size, is not enough to cover a country the size of Europe with few roads, where marauding rebel and militia factions are preying on civilians on several fronts.

(Additional reporting by David Lewis in Kinshasa and Laura MacInnis in Geneva; writing by David Lewis and Pascal Fletcher; editing by Andrew Roche)