A United Nations Security Council mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Monday called for faster moves towards post-war elections, saying all parties it had met said this was their own aim.
”Everybody we’ve met has expressed a desire to go the polls,” France’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jean-Marc de la Sabliere, said after talking to President Joseph Kabila and other parties in a transitional government.
The UN team arrived in Kinshasa on Saturday to assess political progress in the long return to democracy in the vast Central African country that began in 2003 with formal treaties ending the latest conflict there.
”The process to end the transition must be speeded up so it’s over by June 3O,” De la Sabliere told a press conference after the talks with Kabila; the DRC’s four vice-presidents, including former rebels; and the speakers of both Houses of an interim Parliament.
”Considerable progress has been made since last year,” he added, pointing to voter registration so far of more than 20-million people by an independent electoral commission and the training of six brigades in a post-war army being restructured to include ex-rebels.
Thousands of UN troops and civilian personnel have been deployed across the country for several years with the dual role of helping to lay groundwork for the first free polls since independence in 1960 and overseeing the disarming of forces embroiled in the 1998-2003 war.
Working in cooperation with government troops, the UN mission in the DRC (Monuc) has a tough task on its hands, particularly in eastern border provinces where more than a dozen local militia groups and armed renegades — notably from neighbouring Rwanda — keep the area unstable.
”The Congolese people want to vote,” De la Sabliere said. ”The elections are an important stage to come out of the transition after more than five years of war, which claimed more than three million lives. They’ll open the way to development.”
The figure of three million he gave is at the high end of assessments made of the death toll by UN sources, rights organisations and charities in the DRC, and is an estimate that includes those killed by starvation and lack of medical care as indirect casualties of a war that embroiled the armies of more than six other African countries.
The Security Council mission wanted to talk to all parties about progress and setbacks during the transition period, which was extended this year in line with UN resolutions allowing for it, once it became obvious the country was not ready for a free and fair vote.
Team members met business people and prominent representatives of social groups as well as politicians, including veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, whose party has signed up to the transition but declared itself a non-participant once the process was delayed.
Asked about a memorandum that his party, the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS), sent UN Secretary General Kofi Annan demanding a ”political readjustment” in the transition, De la Sabliere said ”the Security Council can’t settle internal problems in the Congo”.
The UDPS had contended that only changes under a UN aegis ”could avoid a forced landing at the end of the transition and give the necessary credit and legitimacy to the results that will come out of the ballot boxes”.
The UN team spoke to Kabila on Monday morning about the elections and he ”stressed the degree to which this process is irreversible”, the French envoy said. ”We also covered reforms in the security services and he said he was determined to complete them.”
The delegation also discussed normalising ties with Uganda and Rwanda, which both backed rebels in the last war. The latter case is complicated by the need to disarm and repatriate Rwandan rebels in the eastern DRC.
Leaving the capital after the briefing, the team headed for the central Kasai Oriental province and was set to visit Katanga in the south-east, one of the most mineral-rich provinces, before going on to Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania. — Sapa-AFP