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DURBAN, South Africa, July 9 (AFP) - Officials from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda said Tuesday they are discussing establishing a buffer zone on their shared border with the help of UN troops in a bid to end their four-year war.

"We are talking about putting in place a curtain between the two countries," Vital Kamerhe, the DRC government's commissioner to the UN peacekeeping force there, told Nampa-AFP.

A special envoy for Rwandan President Paul Kagame said Kagame could meet with DRC President Joseph Kabila and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in Durban, South Africa to discuss the plan on the sidelines of the first African Union summit, which opened here Tuesday.

"We are expecting that Kagame and Kabila will meet along with Kofi Annan and (South African President Thabo) Mbeki," Patrick Mazimhaka told Nampa-AFP.

He said Rwanda's understanding of the buffer zone was that it would be "an area patrolled by both Congolese and Rwandese troops under the supervision of the UN".

Their task would be to prevent incursions by Hutu rebels from the east of the DRC into Rwanda and disarm them.

The rebels are former members of the Rwandan army and militias who carried out the 1994 genocide in that country in which Hutus slaughtered around a million Tutsis and then fled to the former Zaire as the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front won the four-month civil war.

Kagame believes the rebels pose a threat to Rwanda's security and the Kinshasa regime's failure to rout them is one of the main reasons why his troops backed DRC rebels who launched the biggest war in Africa in 1998.

It brought in the armies of Angola, Chad, Namibia and Zimbabwe on the government side -- Chad and Namibia have since withdrawn -- while Rwandan and Ugandan troops supported the rebels, as did Burundian troops at times.

The Kinshasa regime believes Rwanda's presence -- it has some 20,000 troops in the DRC -- is the main obstacle to peace.

"We have agreed to withdraw if the zone is established," Mazimhaka said. "What we now have to decide is when and where it will be, how deep the joint force can go into the Congo.

"But we do not have a deal yet because the Congolese have not given us enough detail on how this will work."

The buffer zone was first proposed by the UN Security Council in April after 50 days of peace talks on the DRC in South Africa failed to deliver a general accord.

The Kinshasa government signed a sidelines pact at those talks with the Ugandan-backed Congolese Liberation Movement and some DRC political parties under which they would join the government, but the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), which controls the eastern third of the DRC, was left out in the cold.

DRC Communications Minister Kikaya bin Karubi said the Kinshasa government had accepted the idea of the buffer zone and was eager to implement it.

"We have agreed to this and we are now trying to agree on how, when and where exactly," Bin Karubi told Nampa-AFP.

Bin Karubi said the DRC was also, in separate efforts, trying to relaunch peace talks with the RCD.

"The UN is trying to help us arrange another meeting with them," he said.

Sources said however the question of the RCD was bedevilling a deal between Kinshasa and Kigali.

Kabila mistrusts them too much to give them a place in his government, while Kagame is insisting on a government of national unity in Kinshasa for the men who helped him fight the war, they said.

"Until such time as the Congolese set up a stable government including all parties to the Inter-Congolese Dialogue in Sun City (South Africa) ... and taking into account the concerns of neighbouring countries, the situation will remain as it is today," he told reporters in Kigali on July 3. - Nampa-AFP

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