BUCHIZYA MSETEKA, Johannesburg | Tuesday
A SENIOR defence analyst has warned that initiatives by South African President Thabo Mbeki and leaders from six other African states to end the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are doomed until all rebel groups are consulted.
Mbeki, Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Angola’s Jose Eduardo dos Santos, Namibia’s Sam Nujoma, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Congo’s Laurent Kabila are to meet in Maputo on Wednesday in follow-up talks to assess progress on attempts to revive the Lusaka peace accord.
At last month’s Maputo talks, also chaired by Mbeki, the five African armies fighting in Africa’s third largest nation agreed to withdraw their forces from current positions.
But a senior analyst at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS) said Congo’s peace initiatives were doomed to failure because the rebel groups fighting Kabila were never consulted.
The rebels were not invited to the first Maputo summit, the Libyan talks and have not been invited to Wednesday’s meeting.
”This is a major problem because it simply means that decisions taken at these summits are not binding on the rebel groups,” said ISS analyst Jakkie Potgieter. ”And because the rebels feel they are not a part of these decisions, fighting continues on the ground.”
Rwanda, Uganda and their rebel allies control the northern and eastern parts of the former Zaire. The western half of the Congo is still held by Kabila and his supporters.
Another deal hammered out by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi last week calls involves an African military force being deployed to protect the Rwanda and Uganda borders and disarm and dismantle exiled Hutu rebels based there.
According to the plan, Ugandan, Rwandan and other foreign forces also would withdraw from Congo at an unspecified time.
All countries involved in the war signed a peace deal in the Zambian capital Lusaka last year to end the conflict. But fighting has continued unabated. The UN Security Council authorised 500 observers – along with 5 000 troops to protect them – to monitor the deal but fighting has delayed the deployment. – Reuters