Russia in turn accused Georgia of exceeding its troop allotment in the region under a 1992 peacekeeping agreement.
Earlier today, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, appealed to his EU partners for support to help stabilise the peacekeeping agreement.
The troops in Ituri, a United Nations spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said yesterday, are there to monitor the peacekeeping agreement, not to restrain warring militias from the Hema and Lendu ethnic groups.
As early as 1916 he began to draw up an international peacekeeping agreement, and in 1919, when he was sent to the peace conference in Paris, his ideas proved generally compatible with those of United States President Woodrow Wilson and South African Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, the other prominent advocates of the League.
At the same time, peace agreements and peacekeeping operations must include full-fledged demobilisation programmes specifically designed for child soldiers.
For peacekeeping you need the agreement of all the parties on the ground, and if you do not have that, you need to call it something else".
A settlement would require international guarantees, aid, peacekeeping and enforcement of the agreement.
Even a small peacekeeping operation, or an informal agreement to work together, would be useful.
With an agreement on a peacekeeping force, diplomats turned their attention to talks scheduled to begin Friday in Arusha, Tanzania, aimed at persuading the various rebel groups fighting in Darfur to unite and move toward a peace deal with the Sudanese government.
Congress cut peacekeeping contributions in defiance of international agreements in 1995.
But not all are happy to let the United States take the lead, saying that decisions in Washington, including a vote by Congress to lower American peacekeeping assessments in violation of international agreements, have caused much of the problem.
