Sun City | Tuesday
PEACE talks for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have run into more trouble as negotiations on the country’s political future deadlocked and rebels warned they would stop working with UN observers.
The Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) rebel movement said it would not demilitarise two key towns in eastern DRC after the UN Observer Mission to the Congo (Monuc) failed to prevent government forces from recapturing Moliro, a village where renewed fighting has flared in recent weeks.
The setback came just 11 days before the landmark peace talks in South Africa, aimed at bringing a definitive end to the DRC’s complex war and setting the vast country on the road to democracy, are due to end.
Azarias Ruberwa, the secretary general of the RCD, said the rebel movement felt betrayed because Monuc had “not stopped the government from recapturing Moliro.”
“The betrayal is such that we are no longer obliged to cooperate fully with Monuc,” he told journalists at a press conference on the sidelines of the peace talks at the Sun City casino resort.
“It is therefore no longer a question of talking about Pweto and Kisangani,” Ruberwa added, referring to two towns the rebels are under pressure to demilitarise.
Pweto is the biggest town between Moliro, in southeastern DRC on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, and Lubumbashi, the capital of mineral-rich Katanga province which remains in government hands but is considered the rebels’ next stop if there is a return to all-out war.
But Ruberwa said the rebels’ complaints about the military situation did not jeopardise their participation in the talks.
“This does not mean that we will leave the dialogue. We will remain here until the end,” he said.
The RCD took Moliro in mid-March, reportedly with massive help from Rwanda, prompting Kinshasa to pull out of the peace talks for a week.
The rebels finally withdrew from the town on Wednesday after the UN Security Council condemned the offensive. But they demanded UN assurances that the town would not be allowed to fall back into government hands.
At the weekend, however, Monuc confirmed the presence of members of the Congolese Armed Forces (FAC) in Moliro, saying there could be about 250 government troops in the town.
The RCD’s announcement came after Kinshasa on Monday stone-walled attempts in the South African resort of Sun City, where the talks are being held, to begin work on a new constitution for the DRC.
Opposition politicians said the government reneged on an agreement reached on Friday, under which a small working group would begin drafting the constitution, and demanded that belligerents first reach a global accord on post-war powersharing.
“We are in a deep deadlock on this matter,” said Valentin Mubake of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS).
“They (the government) argue that we first need to agree on a global political compromise before they will participate.”
A compromise would require the rival sides to solve a long-standing dispute that has become the key sticking point at Sun City: whether President Joseph Kabila is allowed to keep his job during the political transition period.
Kinshasa is insisting that Kabila, who came to power after his father Laurent Kabila was assassinated in January 2001, remain in power to lead the country to its first elections in more than 40 years. The country’s rebel movements argue Kabila’s post, like all others in government, should be considered vacant.
Since they began on February 25, the talks have delivered tentative agreements on an economic recovery plan for the DRC, national reconciliation and the review of war-time contracts that have allowed foreign allies to plunder the country’s plentiful natural resources.
But there has been no agreement yet on the integration of rebels and regular soldiers in a new national army, a deadlock linked to the row about how much power the present government should retain.
President Thabo Mbeki on Monday met with key actors at the talks to discuss their progress.
when Zambia hosts a summit of southern African nations embroiled in the DRC war, which broke out in 1998 and drew in Angolan, Zimbabwean and Namibian forces on the side of Kinshasa, and Rwanda and Uganda on the side of the rebels. – AFP