DR Congo's new prime minister on Monday said he would not rule out a "state of emergency" in the country's east, where the armed forces are struggling with militia groups.

"No option will be excluded," Prime Minister Jean-Michel Sama Lukonde said in his inaugural speech to the National Assembly, referring to violence gripping three eastern provinces, North and South Kivu and Ituri.

Among the possibilities, he said, was "the declaration of a state of emergency by the head of state in all areas subject to violence and armed conflict."

Measures could notably include "the replacement of the civilian administration by military administration in such areas," he said.

More than 120 armed groups, many of them a legacy of regional wars in the 1990s, roam the east of the vast Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The bloodiest of them is the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which has carried out a string of massacres in the last 18 months.

The United States last month declared the historically Ugandan Islamist group to be linked to the so-called Islamic State (IS) group.

According to the Kivu Security Tracker, an NGO that monitors violence in the DRC's troubled east, the group has killed more than 1,200 civilians in the Beni area alone since 2017.

On March 19, the UN said a surge of ADF attacks since the start of the year had claimed nearly 200 lives and forced 40,000 people to flee their homes.

Sama Lukonde was appointed after a prolonged tussle for power between President Felix Tshisekedi, who took office in January 2019, and supporters of his predecessor, Joseph Kabila.

The pro-Kabila camp commanded a majority in the National Assembly, forcing Tshisekedi into a coalition government that, he complained, thwarted his agenda for reform.

Lukonde's government was massively endorsed by legislators on Monday, by 410 out of 412 MPs present in the 500-seat assembly.

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