Chris McGreal
The United Nations has accused the new government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire) of showing little more respect for human rights and democratisation than Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship.
A report was released as UN investigators returned to Kinshasa to probe massacres of Rwandan Hutu refugees in the east of the rechristened Congo after months of prevarication by the new administration. The UN human rights report damned President Laurent Kabila for curtailing freedoms since he seized power in May.
“The regime has eliminated the civil rights to life, liberty, physical integrity … the rights of political participation have been suspended; there are no measures to ensure the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights,” it said.
The report’s author, Roberto Garreton, a Chilean lawyer, said Kabila’s administration has made contradictory announcements about free elections, and that no effort is being made to implement them. Instead, Garreton said, Kabila “exercises executive and legislative power and judges and magistrates are answerable to him; all laws which contradict the new precepts laid down by the president have been repealed”.
At his inauguration, Kabila gave himself virtually limitless powers to rule by decree until presidential elections scheduled for April 1999. On Monday, the government installed a commission to draw up a new constitution. The UN report said the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire’s victory over Mobutu “had some positive aspects” by bringing an end to the endemic extortion and looting, increased security in the cities and a drop in ordinary crime.
But Garreton launched an attack on the political prominence of Tutsis – many from Rwanda -who provided the force which propelled Kabila to power. He described them as one ethnic group predominating over hundreds of others while the police and army “are at the service of the political and ethnic power group in the government and commit abuses against opponents and `enemies’.”
The new state structure, based on an omnipresent state party (although this is denied), the absence of a short, medium, or long-term democratic project, and the fact that there is nobody capable of controlling the exercise of power all lead the special rapporteur to conclude that the Congolese people do not enjoy, and will not enjoy in the foreseeable future, the human right to democracy,” Garreton concluded.
There was no immediate reaction from Kabila’s administration. Few of the liberties Garreton accuses the new government of denying Congo’s citizens existed under Mobutu’s three-decade dictatorship, which the UN failed to criticise until he fell from favour with Western powers.
Garreton has clashed with the government before after it accused him of bias as head of the UN’s investigation into massacres of Rwandan refugees in the east of the former Zaire. At the time, Garreton accused Kabila’s administration of obstructing the probe but he was forced to step aside under pressure from the UN headquarters in New York which feared a total collapse of the probe.
UN investigators returned to Kinshasa this week saying they had secured a new agreement to go ahead following intervention by the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, and the American envoy to the UN, Bill Richardson.
Congo’s minister of the interior has said publicly that his government does not trust the UN.