Harare | Sunday
THE head of a UN team probing the looting of natural resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo has talked to Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, who has sent up to 12_000 troops to the war-ravaged country.
Egypt’s ambassador to the United Nations Mahmoud Kassem met with Mugabe on Friday for what state media described as a briefing on the conflict in the DRC, which has become known as Africa’s World War.
Mugabe did not make any public remarks after the meeting, but Kassem told the state-run Herald that the UN team was in Harare to update its information about the illegal plundering of the DRC’s natural resources by foreign armies fighting in that nation’s war. Last April, the UN expert group accused rebels in the east of the DRC and their backers — Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi — of looting the huge mineral wealth of the country, which has been effectively split in two by almost three years of war.
After presenting the panel’s first report, Ba-NDaw told a press conference that her team was not able to get as much information from Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola as from the other nations involved in the war.
The independent Zimbabwean weekly Financial Gazette reported on Thursday that the team wants to determine the extent of alleged looting by Zimbabwe and Namibia in the DRC.
“During the investigations which led to the report against Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, some prima facie evidence pointing to the involvement of Zimbabwean generals in the looting of the DRC surfaced,” an official working with the UN team told the paper.
The war has generated a number of lucrative business interests for Zimbabwe, notably in timber, energy, mining, transport and communications. But Zimbabwe has never given any public account of the war’s casualties or its economic benefits.
Mugabe’s military campaign in the DRC has been hugely unpopular among Zimbabweans, who are suffering through the nation’s worst-ever economic crisis and who see little benefit to their involvement in the war.
Zimbabwe’s troops have fought alongside those from Angola and Namibia to prop up the DRC government against rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda.
Namibia has now withdrawn its troops, as UN observers have been deployed to monitor a peace deal.
In the past, Mugabe has defended Zimbabwe’s wartime business interests in the DRC as legitimate, because the DRC government had invited Zimbabwe into the country to help defend the government.
When the UN report was released in April, the government hailed it as a validation of Mugabe’s motives in the tangled conflict.
Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda have all angrily denied the UN team’s findings. – AFP