The army chiefs of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) met on Monday for 48 hours of security talks behind closed doors.
Monday’s talks in the city of Lubumbashi, in the south-east of the DRC, were also due to be attended by the United Nations mission in the DRC (Monuc) in an ”observer” role, according to the Senegalese General who heads the mission, Babacar Gaye.
The so-called ”Tripartite Plus” nations of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and the DRC have been meeting since 2004, under the aegis of the United States, in an attempt to piece together a joint military strategy against the various armed groups operating in the region, principally in the eastern DRC.
”The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the ins and outs of joint military operations to combat armed militias in the affected region,” a military source said.
The face-to-face talks follow a meeting in August in Kigali where the four armies reaffirmed their determination to find peace and tackle rebel forces in the troubled region.
Thousands of rebel Hutus from the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR), some of them accused of participating in the 1994 Rwandan genocide of the minority Tutsis, have been living for the past 13 years on the Congolese side of the Rwandan border.
At the start of September, there were violent clashes in Nord-Kivu in the eastern DRC between the DRC army and the rebel forces loyal to Tutsi leader and former army general Laurent Nkunda, who accuses the Kinshasa government of President Joseph Kabila of allying with the FDLR.
Thousands of civilians have been displaced as a result of the violence, while Kabila has pledged to restore peace ”by all possible means”.
Monuc was first set up in 1990 and is now the world’s biggest peacekeeping force, with 17 600 members deployed across a vast nation emerging from a devastating war. About 4 300 of them are deployed in Nord-Kivu province.
Tensions between the DRC and Uganda have also shot up since Ugandan forces last week shot dead six Congolese nationals — including a woman and child — on Lake Albert.
The lake, which forms a natural border between the two states, is now the subject of intense interest from oil firms, after Canadian and Australian firms discovered large oil deposits and promised to start extracting in 2009. — Sapa-AFP