The United Nations Security Council has scheduled an emergency closed session for Thursday afternoon to discuss tensions between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Burundi and Rwanda following last week's massacre of Congolese refugees in western Burundi.  

The meeting was set at the request of Jean-Marie Guehenno, UN under-secretary-general for peacekeeping, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard told reporters on Wednesday.

Eckhard said Guehenno has briefed Secretary-General Kofi Annan, currently on a trip to Geneva, by phone on the situation in the Great Lakes area, Central Africa, and would brief the Security Council on Thursday.

The spokesman said the United Nations was taking all possible "preemptive" measures to avert a potential crisis in the region.

"We are concerned about public statements by leading officials and military personnel in the area about a possible intention to retaliate for the massacre," he said.

"We have limited means, of course, but we have deployed additional troops to the border area, we are continuing helicopter surveillance over the border area and we are patrolling Lake Tanganyika," he added.

Burundi's Hutu rebel group, the Forces for National Liberation, claimed responsibility for last Friday's attack on a temporary camp near the border with the DRC, in which around 160 Congolese Tutsi refugees were shot, slashed and burnt to death.

But officials of Rwanda and Burundi, citing eyewitnesses' accounts, said a Rwandan Hutu rebel group based in the eastern DRC and other Hutu armed groups on the DRC territory participated in the attack. Both countries threatened to send troops across the border into the eastern DRC to fight the Hutu rebels.

(Xinhua News Agency August 19, 2004)