EMSIE FERREIRA, Sun City | Thursday
MARATHON peace talks on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) hit trouble again on Thursday, with the facilitator announcing a one-week extension but the Kinshasa government rejecting it.
”We will continue here until April 18,” said the facilitator, Sir Ketumile Masire of Botswana, on the eve of the original deadline for the six-week ”Inter-Congolese Dialogue” in the South African gambling resort of Sun City.
After weeks of deadlock, progress has been made on key issues over the past few days at the talks, which began February 25 and were due to end Friday.
Masire said the extension was designed to allow the 360 delegates, drawn from the Kinshasa government, rebel groups, political parties and civil society, time to reach an accord on an interim government pending the first elections since independence from Belgium in 1960.
Vital Kamerhe, a representative of the Kinshasa government, said it was totally opposed to the extension.
”The Lusaka accord (signed in 1999 by the belligerents in the DRC war) says that the dialogue cannot exceed 45 days. We reject the extension,” he said, though stopping short of saying that the Kinshasa delegation would leave or not take part in further consultations in Sun City.
Advisors to Masire argued that although the Lusaka pact limited the dialogue to 45 days, delegates had not worked anywhere near that number of days because of an initial 10-day boycott by rebels and a later week-long pullout by Kinshasa.
Though diplomats and some delegations have called for the dialogue to continue with fewer delegates, the facilitation insisted that they continue with the full complement even though funding for the talks had run out.
”Any decision has to be adopted by all 360 delegates,” an aide to Masire pointed out.
The talks deadlocked on a row between the rebels and Kinshasa about whether President Joseph Kabila will keep his job in the transition government.
Kinshasa insists that this is non-negotiable, with Kamerhe telling journalists Thursday: ”The dialogue is not an election and does not affect the position of the president.”
The Ugandan-backed Congolese Liberation Movement said this week it wanted a rotating presidency in which Kabila would rule for one year of a three-year transition.
But the country’s other main rebel group, the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), has rejected attempts to keep the unelected Kabila as head of state, saying this would amount to dictatorship.
The RCD on Thursday welcomed the extension as did some of the opposition political parties represented at Sun City.
”We have to stay here and continue to talk until we find a solution,” said a member of the movement, which has been accused of blocking a deal because Rwanda is not ready to make peace with Kabila.
Both rebel groups on Wednesday rejected a proposal made by South African President Thabo Mbeki in a last-minute bid to rescue the talks that would see Kabila stay in power for 30 months.
It was predictably welcomed by Kinshasa.
Veteran opposition politician Etienne Tshisekedi of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress said: ”I am happy that the talks are continuing but on condition that we use this time to arrive at an accord. We must use President Mbeki’s proposal as a base for our discussion.”
Despite their failure to find a political settlement, the delegates have reached agreement on the integration of the three armies in the DRC –those of the rebels and Kinshasa — on an economic rescue plan, ways of reconciling the 50 million Congolese, protecting minorities and on social programmes, leading the facilitation to declare that ”80 percent of the work is done.”
The accord on the merger of the armies came late on Wednesday after Kinshasa bowed to rebel demands for an equal say in the formation of the new military.
The outstanding political deal is meant to end the complex war that began in 1998 when Rwanda and Uganda invaded to back the rebels.
Angola and Zimbabwe are fighting on the side of the government. – Sapa-AFP