ZAIRE-U.N.: French Proposal for Peacekeepers Meets Mixed Response

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 6 1996 (IPS) - France’s proposal Tuesday to dispatch an international force to troubled eastern Zaire has garnered only slight approval at the United Nations, diplomats here told IPS.

The French government has begun to lobby the 15-member U.N. Security Council on the need to deploy some kind of voluntarily funded international force which can protect the roughly 1.2 million Rwandan refugees who have been uprooted by fighting in recent days.

The force, sources told IPS, would consist of possibly tens of thousands of troops from France and other concerned countries. It would guard refugees in parts of the Zairean provinces of North and South Kivu.

But some veto-wielding Council members, notably the United States and Russia, are wary of any outside military intervention in the current crisis, which pits ethnic Tutsi Banyamulenge rebels and the Rwandan Popular Army (RPA) against Zaire’s armed forces and the Hutu-dominated former Rwandan Army (FAR).

“I’m not going to predict anything at this point,” U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright said. She declined to say whether Washington might support the French proposal.

France insists that the proposed mission will not be a replay of ‘Operation Turquoise’, a French peacekeeping operation which guarded south-western Rwanda in the summer of 1994, after the FAR was routed by the then-rebel RPA.

At the time, the Rwandan government accused France of protecting FAR leaders and ‘Interahamwe’ militias, responsible for the killing of up to one million mainly Tutsi Rwandans between April and July of that year.

“This is not exactly like Operation Turquoise,” a French diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. “The idea is to have an international force in place, rather than one from any one country.”

That approach may help quell the concerns of those who have charged that Paris wants to protect both the FAR and the Zairean government, which is led by long-time French ally Mobutu Sese Seko. France also insists that any force would be paid for by participating countries, so that U.N. member states do not have to foot the bill.

Yet the French proposal has met at best a mixed response, sources here say privately. Part of the problem, the diplomats say, is that France’s record in central Africa has included support for dictators, like the ailing Mobutu and the late Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, who helped fuel the current crisis.

A new U.N. report, which the Security Council has yet to release officially, states that a former French vice consul in Rwanda met with former FAR chief Gen. Augustin Bizimungu in Zaire, to help arm the FAR forces based in refugee camps in eastern Zaire. France denies the allegations.

France still has much to answer for in its support for FAR and its Zairean allies, said Joanna Weschler, U.N. representative for Human Rights Watch. She added that there is no confirmation, however, that France has helped arm the Hutu forces based in the refugee camps in eastern Zaire.

The camps have fallen to the RPA-Banyamulenge and allied forces over the past week. The Banyamulenge are Zairean Tutsis who were branded “illegal immigrants” by the Kinshasa government in 1981. Most of the Rwandan refugees, including some 700,000 people in Goma, have now fled deep into central Zaire, U.N. spokeswoman Sylvana Foa said.

A different proposal, submitted by Germany, for the United Nations to open humanitarian corridors in Zaire for the refugees to find assistance in Rwanda or Burundi has also gained some attention in the Council. “There is the sense that some kind of international presence is needed” to help the refugees, British Ambassador John Weston said.

But all proposals face a common problem, U.N. officials say: they still do not resolve the two-year-old dilemma of assisting refugees without also aiding the FAR and Interahamwe forces as well.

“Even if you have troops secure a corridor, who’s going to go down that corridor?” one U.N. official asked. “The Interahamwe controls the camps.”

The official told IPS that, even as the refugees have fled the Banyamulenge advances in recent days, the 40,000 to 50,000 ethnic Hutu FAR and Interahamwe forces have maintained the same centralised structure and command they had in the refugee camps.

Their control has meant that relief agencies — which have maintained the camps at a cost of more than million dollars a day for two years — have essentially offered the FAR safe haven and an opportunity to rebuild and re-arm. The threat posed by the re- armed FAR encouraged the RPA to intervene on behalf of the Banyamulenge in Zaire.

Now that the refugees are in flight once more, said Weschler, any international or U.N. force deployed to the region should try to separate legitimate refugees from military and militia forces.

Human Rights Watch is also seeking the public release of the latest U.N. report on arms sales to the FAR, which are banned by the Security Council. The report alleges the Hutu forces benefited from “huge, loose, overlapping webs of more or less illicit arms deals, arms flights and arms deliveries spanning the continent from South Africa as far as Europe, particularly eastern Europe.”

Council President Nugroho Wisnumurti of Indonesia said the U.N. executive body “is not as yet decided to fix a date for the release of the report.”

As Zairean troops retreat from North and South Kivu, another major problem has emerged: the threat, voiced by many U.N. officials, that Zaire, a nation of some 43 million people on a land mass one-quarter the size of the United States, may disintegrate.

Mobutu has been ailing from prostate cancer, and is currently in France. His prime minister, Kengo wa Dondo, is fending off accusations that, as part-Tutsi, he must resign from government. By all accounts, Zairean troops lack the training and discipline to control much of eastern, and even central, Zaire.

As one U.N. official noted when Zaire failed to show up at an emergency meeting in Nairobi Tuesday to discuss the crisis, “Perhaps they couldn’t send anybody because the government might fall.”