OWN CORRESPONDENT, Paris | Tuesday
FRANCE has denied that it is behind a damning UN report accusing Uganda, Rwanda and rebels fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) of looting the country’s mineral resources.
French Cooperation Minister Charles Josselin described as “totally aberrant” accusations by rebels that Paris had dictated the conclusions of a 56-page UN report, which accused rebels and their backers of plundering valuable minerals such as coltan, diamonds, copper, cobalt and gold – and thereby fuelling a war that has raged in the DRC since August 1998.
The rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) in Goma said the report’s conclusions “seem clearly to have been dictated to a group of people put into place by the UN Secretary General … and whose intellectual author was France, whose moral responsibility in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has caused it to lose all common sense toward Rwanda.”
France was accused of having politically and militarily supported the Hutu government in Rwanda before the 1994 genocide, in which Hutu officials, soldiers and militia participated in a mass slaughter campaign that killed up to 800 000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Josselin said Rwanda was trying to deflect criticism away from its role in the DRC.
“The Rwandans are accepting badly the report’s conclusions which incriminate them,” Josselin said, adding: “We know the close ties between Rwanda and RCD rebels.”
The UN panel of experts who wrote the report were from Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Senegal, the United States and Switzerland.
In presenting the report last week, UN chief Kofi Annan called on the Security Council to impose sanctions on the rebels and their backers and for an immediate, temporary ban on exports of minerals and timber from and to Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.
The assets of rebels and their supporters should be frozen, and an arms embargo imposed, he urged. – AFP