CENTRAL AFRICA-POLITICS: Kinshasa Rules Out Regional Talks

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Nov 1 1996 (IPS) - When East and Central African leaders meet here next week, one chair will not be occupied.

That chair is supposed to be filled by Zaire whose embattled Prime Minister Kengo wa Dongo said Kinshasa would not send any delegation to any regional summit called to resolve the conflict in the region.

“We shall not attend any regional summit when part of Zaire is being occupied by foreign forces,” he told parliament in the Zairean capital of Kinshasa on Thursday.

Explaining the hardline, Prime Minister wa Dongo said Kinshasa would not negotiate with rebels in eastern Zaire who he claimed were backed by neighbouring Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.

Tuesday’s (Nov. 5) summit, to which leaders from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Zaire and Zambia have been invited, was called by President Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya on Thursday.

It is the same group which imposed sanctions Jul. 31 on Burundi to force ethnic Tutsi strongman, Major Pierre Buyoya, to return the strife-torn Central African country to civilian rule.

Zaire’s foreign minister Jean-Marie Kititwa-Tumasi attended the group’s last mid-October meeting in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha where the leaders, unsatisfied with the level of reform in Burundi, extended the embargo in that country for one more month.

Zaire, apparently uncomfortable to sit at the same table with its enemies Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, has taken its case to the United Nations Security Council and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), accusing its neighbours of helping the Banyamulenge rebels to destabilise eastern Zaire.

The United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali Wednesday appointed Raymond Chretien, U.N. Special Envoy to the Great Lakes Region, to help stop the conflict in eastern Zaire.

Chretien, who is the Canadian ambassador to Washington D.C., told journalists this week that his immediate task was to help achieve a cessation of hostilities in the region.

“It is an extraordinarily complex situation, an extraordinarily difficult mandate. But I will give it my best shot,” he said.

Chretien, who is a former ambassador to Zaire, Burundi and Rwanda, said he had an advantage in his new job because he knew the players in the region.

In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the OAU’s central organ for the prevention of conflicts Thursday called for the respect of territorial integrity in the region.

The meeting urged that an OAU delegation visit eastern Zaire to probe Kinshasa’s claims of invasion of its territory by neighbours.

“The OAU expresses grave concern over the deteriorating security and humanitarian situation in Zaire as well as cross- border incursions and the implications of these developments for peace and security in the entire Great Lakes Region,” said a communique issued by the organ after the meeting.

The organ, “underscored the need for the respect of the cardinal principle of territorial integrity of member states and the inviolability of their borders”.

Zaire has accused Rwanda of wanting to expand its territory to engorge areas in eastern Zaire inhabited by people of Tutsi origin.

According to sources in Kigali, Vice-president Paul Kagame, who is also his country’s defence minister, denied the claim at a press conference on Wednesday. He said if the Banyamulenge wanted to secede from Zaire, only they could make that decision, not Rwanda.

Kagame’s remark came one day after Rwanda acknowledged that its forces had crossed into Zaire in retaliation for the shelling Cyungungu( a town on the Rwandan side of the border) suffered on Tuesday at the hands of the Zairean army detachment in Bukavu, which faces Cyungungu. It said 10 Rwandan soldiers had been wounded in the fighting and mentioned no deaths.

It was the first time that Rwanda had openly admitted any involvement in the conflict between the Zairean army and Zairean Tutsi rebels.

The rebels, known as the Banyamulenge, have been denied Zairean citizenship. They are ethnic Tutsis who arrived in eastern Zaire up to 200 years ago from what are now Rwanda and Burundi.

The fighting in the region heightened in early October after South Kivu deputy governor Lwasi Ngabo Lwabangi ordered the Banyamulenge rebels to leave eastern Zaire (where South Kivu is situated) within seven days or face fullscale war.

Since the fighting erupted, the Banyamulenge have captured a number of strategic towns along the border with Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.

The Banyamulenge are said to have struck an alliance with other Zaireans bent on overthrowing the regime in Kinshasa.

Laurent Kabila, chief co-ordinator of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, Thursday told journalists in Uvira, a town on the border with Burundi that was liberated by the Banyamulenge two weeks ago, that Zairean soldiers were running away, without putting up a fight.

Fighting alongside the Zairean army are the 40,000-strong ethnic Hutu former army of Rwanda, overthrown by Rwandan Tutsi rebels in 1994.