DEMOCRATIC Republic of Congo (DRC) President Joseph Kabila said on Wednesday that Rwandan-backed rebels could still join a power-sharing deal aimed at ending the war in his country.
“The RCD-Goma is still welcome to come aboard. Its place is still assured within that particular agreement that was signed,” he told Zimbabwean state television, after meeting with President Robert Mugabe.
“No body excluded the RCD from the agreement. I should say they excluded themselves,” he said.
Kabila was in Harare on a one-day official visit for talks with Mugabe, whom he briefed on the deal reached after marathon talks aimed at shaping a post-war DRC ended inconclusively last month in the South African resort town of Sun City.
“We wanted to know how far the agreement went and what the way forward from now on is going to be,” Mugabe said.
Although all parties in Sun City agreed on about 40 issues, a power-sharing deal reached by Kabila and his former rebel foe Jean-Pierre Bemba was rejected by the Kigali-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD).
The RCD, which was offered minor posts under the deal, said the accord was struck outside the framework of the formal inter-Congolese Dialogue and only received the number of signatures it did due to bribery.
The talks come a day after Kabila held talks with a visiting UN Security Council team in Kinshasa and two days after the same delegation visited Zimbabwe.
The UN Security Council delegation is on an eight-nation tour aimed at accelerating the peace process in the DRC, where Zimbabwe has troops.
Committing about 12 000 soldiers, Zimbabwe was the largest military backer of the Kinshasa government during its war against rebel insurgence backed by Rwanda and Uganda which started in 1998.
DRC Information Minister Kikaya Bin Karubi, who is travelling with Kabila, said in an interview with state television at the airport he hoped the UN would step up pressure on Rwanda to pull out of the vast central African country.
“We hope the United Nations will pull all its weight and pressurise Rwanda to withdraw its troops because now it is only Rwanda which is creating problems,” bin Karubi said.
“They are reinforcing their troops at the time Uganda has been withdrawing and some of our allies like Namibia have withdrawn,” he added.
“So we hope the United Nations will talk to (Rwandan) President (Paul) Kagame to stop doing that, so that peace can prevail in the Great Lakes region,” he said.
Meanwhile in Angola, delegates from the six nations fighting in the DRC were in a two-day meeting of the “political committee” created to oversee the 1999 Lusaka peace accord, an earlier attempt at ending the war.
“We are here to look for common ground that will allow us to better discuss this case with the United Nations,” minister Joao Bernardo de Miranda said at the opening of the meeting.
Delegates from all the nations in the war – Angola, the DRC, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe – should be represented at the political committee meeting in Luanda, which UN delegates also plan to attend, Angola’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
They are expected to discuss the “retreat and repatriation of negatives foreign troops,” referring to Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers.
The DRC government’s three allies – Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe – plan to ask the other players in the war there to back a power-sharing deal with Ugandan-backed rebels, an Angolan official said on Wednesday.
Representatives of Angola and Zimbabwe, which have troops propping up the government, and of Namibia, which withdrew its troops last year, made their position clear at a meeting in Luanda late Tuesday, the official said on condition of anonymity. – AFP