The European Union is considering sending troops to eastern Congo after rebels captured a key town last week, threatening the country's fragile peace process, Belgium's foreign minister said on Monday.
Louis Michel said EU member states were mulling an emergency intervention force similar to the 1,100-strong French-led mission that restored calm to the north-eastern town of Bunia last year before handing over to United Nations troops.
"We are in agreement on the principle (of deployment)...But we have to be sure of the modalities," Michel told a news conference in Congo's capital Kinshasa.
"In principle I am not opposed to this idea. It is a good idea if it is necessary," he said, adding that the EU was expected to discuss the matter later on Monday.
A spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said the bloc favoured seeking a diplomatic solution to the crisis while Michel and an EU special envoy remained in Kinshasa.
"We shouldn't exclude anything but we would like to underline the priority for diplomacy," she said.
The EU approved the Bunia mission - the bloc's first military deployment outside Europe - in June last year.
Congo's east has plunged into a fresh spiral of violence since renegade troops captured Bukavu last week, triggering concerns it could spark a wider conflict.
The fighting is the most serious challenge yet to the transitional government of President Joseph Kabila, which is struggling to restore its authority across the vast country, Africa's third largest, after five years of war.
It has also reignited tensions with tiny neighbour Rwanda, which invaded the former Zaire in 1996 and 1998 saying it was defending itself from attacks by Hutu militias involved in Rwanda's 1994 genocide and still hiding in Congo's forests.
Some 90 people have been killed in more than a week of fighting in Bukavu. The renegade troops left the town on Sunday but in fresh violence, two United Nations peacekeepers were killed after their convoy was ambushed outside Goma, a border town some 120 km (80 miles) to the north.
Congo blames neighbour Rwanda for aiding the rebel troops in the mineral-rich former Belgian colony who say they are fighting government forces to protect fellow Tutsi tribesmen. Rwanda has denied any involvement.
A local government official said Rwandan Hutu militiamen - known as Interahamwe - had kidnapped 78 people for ransom in the Rusizi Plain area south of Bukavu at the weekend.
"Many Interahamwe attacked the localities of Kihinga and Rugeje on Saturday and abducted 78 persons after burning and looting their houses," Uvira administrator Medard Majaribu Mufumbe told Reuters.
UN officials in Bukavu, who estimated the number kidnapped at about 60, said the militiamen were demanding a ransom of $100 per person.
Michel, who had talks with Kabila, said he would travel to neighbouring Uganda's capital Kampala to meet Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former rebel leader backed by Uganda and one of Congo's four vice presidents, as well as Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.
In Addis Ababa, the African Union's (AU) Peace and Security Council appealed to the United Nations to increase the size of its mission in Congo (MONUC) - now numbering 10,800.
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