REBEL GROUP WITHDRAWS FROM DR CONGO PEACE TALKS
A Ugandan-backed rebel group in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) said on Monday it has suspended its participation in peace talks being held in South Africa, complaining it had become ”marginalised.”
”We have informed the UN special envoy that our movement has suspended its participation in the work in Pretoria until our just demands are taken into account,” the leader of the RCD-Liberation Movement (RCD-ML), Mbusa Nyamwisi, told AFP.
He said the South African talks had become a ”surrealistic psychodrama” where the signing of an accord had become more important than achieving peace.
”The RCD-ML has been marginalised although its concrete contribution to pacification and reunification of the country is without equal,” said Nyamwisi.
The RCD-ML is a small rebel group backed by Uganda and a rival to the mainstream Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), which is backed by Rwanda.
Government and rebel negotiators said Saturday in Pretoria they had reached an understanding on the principles of sharing power ahead of elections in the DRC.
But the only major agreement announced during the week of talks was the appointment of four vice presidents under DRC President Joseph Kabila during a two-year run-up to the first elections in the huge central African country since those at independence from Belgium in 1960.
The vice presidents will represent the government, the RCD, the Ugandan-backed Congolese Liberation Movement and opposition politicians.
The government rejects power-sharing beyond the executive and the two houses of parliament, but the rebels want quotas for power-sharing down to village level and in the police, the army, the intelligence service, the diplomatic service and state enterprises.
The war in DRC broke out in 1998 as an attempt to topple then president Laurent Kabila, father of the current president, and at its height drew in seven foreign nations.
It is estimated to have left some 2,5-million dead in the mineral-rich but impoverished country. – Sapa-AFP