By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA, Feb 28 (Reuters) - Fighters in Congo's volatile Ituri district have started a process meant to integrate them into a national army, as the country's new government attempts to bring order to the troubled east.

Some 170 militia members, including 42 children, from the Front of Nationalists and Integrationalists (FNI) came out of the bush, bringing with them a cache of rifles, machine guns, mines and rocket-propelled grenades.

"It has started. Many things could happen of course, but we are reasonably optimistic," Kemal Saiki, spokesman for Democratic Republic of Congo's 17,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission, told Reuters on Wednesday.

The FNI, led by warlord Peter Karim, is considered one of the main obstacles to a peace in Ituri.

Under a 2003 deal to end a six-year war -- in which an estimated 4 million people died from violence and from war-related hunger and disease -- government forces, rebels, and militia have been grouped into the new national army, the FARDC.

The FNI was one of three Ituri groups which signed deals in mid-November, weeks before the swearing in of President Joseph Kabila, who won Congo's first democratic elections in more than four decades. But renewed clashes erupted in December.

Despite a tenuous ceasefire since January, Karim had failed to meet a series of deadlines and promises to disarm.

"All the main groups have now made a gesture," said the FARDC's Ituri commander of operations, General Vainqueur Malaya. "(The FNI) are there. They are already in the camps."

Malaya said Karim would send another 200 fighters to be disarmed next week. All are eventually to be demobilised or incorporated into the army.

VIOLENCE CONTINUES

Widespread violence and human rights abuses have continued in Congo's eastern provinces despite the official end to the 1998-2003 war and the presence of the world's largest peacekeeping mission.

In North Kivu, dissident General Laurent Nkunda, who led two brigades into rebellion in 2004, began bringing his forces back into the FARDC last month. The move was part of a deal brokered in Rwanda that will allow Nkunda's soldiers to remain in the province, where they claim to protect fellow ethnic Tutsis.

A similar deal may now be extended to armed groups in neighbouring South Kivu.

After his election, Kabila promised to bring order to Congo's east. Army officials have so far called the process, known as "mixage", a success. But others are less optimistic.

"What we're seeing in the east is due to the failure to deal militarily with these groups," said Jason Stearns, senior central Africa analyst with the International Crisis Group.

"They are buying these militias off. But this is a fragile solution. As soon as they aren't satisfied they just pull out again," he said. "I think this is far from over."

More violence broke out in North Kivu last week soon after the deployment of brigades recently integrated by Nkunda's forces. The fighting pitted them against members of the FDLR, a Rwandan Hutu rebel group now based in eastern Congo.

Dozens of FDLR fighters and several Congolese soldiers have been killed in the recent fighting, according to U.N. officials.

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