Museveni says he is committed to peace

The Ugandan presence there had severely strained relations with Rwanda, which says its own troops left last year.

The commitment came at a meeting of five regional presidents in Cape Town, South Africa, intended to avert another flare up of ethnic violence in the DRC.

The country has been devastated by nearly five years of war involving seven foreign armies.

Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni said his forces would leave by 24 April.

"They do not have any good reason to stay, especially if Rwanda promises it does not have any troops in the Congo," he said.

The Cape Town summit was a follow-up meeting to a DRC peace deal signed last week.

The gathering was given added urgency by the massacre of villagers in the Ituri region near the border with Uganda in the last few days.

Survivors described the savage machete attacks

South African President Thabo Mbeki said UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had been asked to move peacekeeping forces to the area.

The DRC leader, Joseph Kabila, announced a meeting would be held on Monday in Kinshasa with the body set up to implement the peace deal.

This group will ensure the transitional government and all the corresponding structures are in place for an election in two years' time.

Massacre figures

The UN has drastically cut its estimate of how many civilians were killed in the Ituri massacre.

DR CONGO'S WAR Four years Seven foreign armies At least 3 million dead Disease and abuses widespread

Witnesses had told them that nearly 1,000 people had been killed, but the UN is now saying the figure is likely to be somewhere between 150 and 300.

A member of a UN observer mission, Berhooz Sadry told a UN-run radio station that: "The other people included in the earlier toll were injured, some very seriously, in machete attacks."

He said an inquiry was continuing into the ethnic killings in Ituri - an area rife with political and tribal tension.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, has given a commitment that those responsible for the massacre would not go unpunished.

He said they could be brought before the International Criminal Court..