A TEAM of UN Security Council ambassadors wrapped up a gruelling eight-country peace-boosting tour of central and southern Africa on Monday with the sense that an end to the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Burundi was within reach.
Their message to all actors was straightforward: talk, don’t fight.
The delegation did not expect to make any dramatic breakthroughs in their whistle-stop tour and none were delivered.
Rather, their aim was to remind all parties to both conflicts that, despite the drama in the Middle East, the world was watching them, willing to do everything to help them on the road to peace, and ready to take appropriate action against those who persisted in travelling in the opposite direction.
”We will continue to say: meet again, show flexibility. Time is of the essence,” the delegation’s French leader, Jean-David Levitte, said in remarks addressed to DRC’s political leaders.
”Our sense is that they are not far away (from reaching an inclusive power-sharing deal), and so with goodwill, and an understanding of the other side’s reservations… there can be a formula, and pretty soon,” he said, speaking after meeting Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a key actor in the DRC war.
Rwanda — then Uganda — deployed troops into neighbouring DRC in 1998, concerned that its security was threatened by the presence there of thousands of hostile Hutu fighters backed by Kinshasa, many of whom carried out the 1994 slaughter of up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda.
Kigali formed a close alliance with the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), a rebel group that now controls, with the Rwandan troops, about 40% of the DRC.
Troops from Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia quickly came to the aid of the DRC government.
The Security Council put pressure on the RCD, both directly and through Kagame, to join a power sharing deal struck last month by DRC President Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba, a businessman who leads a separate rebel group, the Uganda-backed Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC).
It is universally acknowledged that unless all DRC’s political forces can agree on sharing power during a transition phase, no progress can be made on two other key peace process elements: the disarmament and demobilisation of the armed groups in the east, and the withdrawal of foreign forces.
One of the ambassadors’ main achievements while in Africa was to get representatives of the government, the MLC and the RCD to sit down in the same room together.
Nothing concrete came of the meeting, except the promise of more talks, but that was enough for Levitte to repeatedly talk of important progress.
Unsurprisingly, all those the Security Council met — Kabila, Kagame, presidents Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Eduardo Dos Santos of Angola, Bemba and RCD leaders — expressed their commitment to the current DRC peace process.
But few showed great willingness to go out on a limb. Kagame, for example, maintained his wait-and-see stance and admitted he had nothing new to put on the table.
”The commitments we have made today (Monday, to the ambassadors) are the same commitments we have made before,” he told reporters.
”We can begin with trust, that’s fine, but we always test trust in terms of tangible results and how much we realise our main goals and objectives,” he said.
The Security Council also tackled the equally devastating conflict in Burundi, meeting in South Africa with squabbling leaders of various rebel groups, and, in Bujumbura, leaders of a transitional government set up last November.
Here Levitte refused to get bogged down in the labyrinthine complexities and subtleties of Burundi’s political and military landscape, and simply issued an unambiguous appeal to Hutu rebels fighting an army dominated by the Tutsi minority elite.
”Nothing justifies the FDD (Forces for the Defence of Democracy) and FNL (National Liberation Forces) to continue a fight that has no sense any more… Join the process that is underway. It is not too late (but) it is very late,” he said after meeting President Pierre Buyoya, who heads the shaky coalition government. ? AFP
