EMSIE FERREIRA, Sun City | Friday
PEACE talks on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) collapsed early on Friday as the Kinshasa regime and two rebel groups failed to reach an accord to end their war and govern together, the parties said. The talks cost in excess of R50-million.
The negotiations between the three belligerents, mediated by South African President Thabo Mbeki, achieved “nothing”, said Olivier Kamitatu, secretary general of the Ugandan-backed Congolose Liberation Movement (MLC) rebels.
This means, Kamitatu said, that a two-way deal between the MLC and Kinshasa signed on Wednesday will go ahead and that the other party to the war — the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) — will be excluded.
“There is no deal with the RCD, but there is an accord between the MLC and the government,” he said.
The pact between the Ugandan-backed rebels and President Joseph Kabila’s government risks reigniting the four-year war in the former Zaire. RCD secretary general Azarias Ruberwa said: “This means that the country will not be reunited. It is a deal between two groups, a deal without consensus, without inclusivity.”
That deal retains President Joseph Kabila (30) as head of state and commander-in-chief of the army and installs as prime minister the MLC’s 40-year-old leader, millionaire businessman-turned-rebel Jean-Pierre Bemba. The deal was cut on the sidelines of wider eight-week talks in South Africa grouping the rebels, Kinshasa, militias, opposition parties and civil groups which were meant to lay the basis for a peaceful transition, but failed to do so. Mbeki intervened last week in search of an accord that could include the RCD, which controls the eastern third of the DRC.
He tabled a peace plan that sought to keep Kabila as president but would slash his power and give equal status to the rival rebel groups.
The RCD backed the plan, but it was rejected by Kinshasa and Bemba’s group, which controls the northern third of the huge central African country and which instead offered the RCD a minor role in the alliance — the presidency of parliament and some say over control of the army.
In six hours of closed-door talks with Mbeki, neither side budged and each blamed the other for the predictable stalemate.
“The two others have blocked an accord. The ambitions of Jean-Pierre Bemba and Joseph Kabila are to blame for the failure,” said the RCD’s Ruberwa.
Kabila’s presidency minister, Augustin Katumba Mwanke countered: “We have offered them enough but they do not want peace.”
The failure of the talks risks renewing the war in the eastern DRC, with Rwanda this time facing not only Kinshasa’s allies Angola and Zimbabwe but one more enemy in the form of erstwhile ally Uganda.
Katumba said the government would now try to push Rwanda out of the DRC, by military or peaceful means.
“Rwanda has to leave the Congo now, with fighting or no fighting.”
A source close to the South African negotiating efforts said they had been doomed from the start as the three main belligerents “were not ready to agree and make peace”.
“The RCD was never going to give in and with Kinshasa and the MLC now having formed an alliance, they did not need to give in. The war will continue and there was nothing we could do,” the source said.
Government and MLC insiders said they calculated that they could sell the pact to the DRC’s 50 million war-weary people as an agreement between belligerents which would isolate the RCD.
The RCD is seen by most Congolese as promoting the interests of the unpopular Tutsi-dominated regime in Rwanda and the approximately one million DRC Tutsis, known as Banyamulenge.
The MLC and RCD said the parties would take their differences to a plenary of all the participants early Friday.
But asked if there was still hope for a deal there, the MLC’s Kamitatu answered: “No.”
The peace talks formally close Friday and most of the DRC’s weak political opposition parties are expected to then join the new alliance, which has been welcomed on the streets of Kinshasa by its citizens.
The conflict has claimed an estimated 2,5-million lives and plunged the 50 million Congolese even deeper into poverty after Mobutu Sese Seko’s 35-year kleptocracy. – AFP