Rwanda confirmed on Wednesday it will meet in South Africa this week with officials of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government, with which it has been at war for four years, to pursue efforts to restore peace to the devastated country.
”We are going to Pretoria to continue what we started in Durban,” Rwanda’s special presidential envoy for the DRC and Burundi, said Patrick Mazimpaka.
He said a Rwandan delegation would leave Kigali for South Africa on Wednesday and start talks the following day.
The discussions are expected to follow on from talks held in Durban on the sidelines of an African Unity summit in Durban, where Rwandan President Paul Kagame met his DRC counterpart, Joseph Kabila.
This meeting, also attended by UN chief Kofi Annan and South African President Thabo Mbeki, focussed on how best to satisfy Rwanda’s concerns about the security of its border with DRC, an issue that led Kigali to deploy troops and back rebels there in 1998.
The central issue of the meeting was a proposal to set up a security cordon along the border with troops from Rwanda, DRC and the UN working in a joint force.
The eventual aim is to bring about the withdrawal of some 20 000 Rwandan troops deployed deep inside the DRC.
Kagame accuses the DRC of continuing to support Rwandan rebels in the east of the former Zaire and said in Durban that until this stopped the situation would remain unchanged.
The rebels are members of the Interahamwe militia and former Rwandan army who carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rwanda’s Tutsi minority in 1994 before they were defeated by Kagame’s forces and fled to the eastern DRC.
The DRC takes the line that as foreign forces the Rwandan troops have no business in the DRC and should withdraw without delay.
The Rwandan troops are supporting rebels in the four-year-old DRC war, which at its height also involved Ugandan and Burundian troops supporting rebels and soldiers from Angola, Chad, Namibia and Zimbabwe supporting the government.
Kabila signed a power-sharing agreement in late April with the Ugandan-backed Congolese Liberation Movement and a number of political parties, but it has yet to come into force. – Sapa-AFP