The Republic of Congo denied on Friday that President Denis Sassou Nguesso had declined an invitation to visit France this weekend because he has been named in a lawsuit there over the disappearance and alleged murder of 353 Congolese refugees.
Presidential spokesperson Alain Akouala said Nguesso cannot attend Sunday’s ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of Allied landings to liberate Nazi-occupied France because they coincide with celebrations of Congo’s independence in 1960.
Akouala said the government was ”stunned” by a Radio France Internationale report that Nguesso does not want to visit France because of the lawsuit, filed in 2001 by relatives of the missing refugees. He noted that, as head of state, Nguesso is immune from arrest.
In a letter to French President Jacques Chirac last month, the families accused the Congolese authorities of ”organising and planning the massacre” of their relatives after they returned home in 1999.
The lawsuit, filed with a court at Meaux, east of Paris, accuses Nguesso, Interior Minister Pierre Oba, General Norbert Dabira and General Blaise Adoua, head of the Republican Guard, of torture, kidnapping and crimes against humanity.
France issued an international arrest warrant for Dabira in April for ”crimes against humanity”.
Nguesso is the second African head of state to decline the invitation to join Chirac for the ceremonies, which will honour more than 180 000 Arab and African soldiers then living under French colonial rule who took part in Operation Dragoon, which began on August 15 1944.
Earlier this week, President Omar Bongo of Gabon also cried off, saying he has to attend his country’s independence-day celebrations.
Gabon and the Republic of Congo were among four countries that became independent within days of each other in 1960 when the colony of French Equatorial Africa was dissolved.
Chirac’s office said on Wednesday that the presidents of the other two countries — Idriss Deby of Chad and Francois Bozize of the Central African Republic — will join the French head of state aboard the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle off the Mediterranean port of Toulon.
Operation Dragoon opened up the southern half of a pincer offensive launched 10 weeks previously by the D-Day landings in Normandy and helped hasten the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s German Reich. — Sapa-AFP