UN-AFRICA: Annan Tries to Build Trust in Great Lakes Region

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 11 1997 (IPS) - The United Nations must build trust among the new leadership in Central Africa and also insist on investigating reports of atrocities in the region, U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan said Thursday.

“We are dealing with new regimes which are to some extent fragile and not that well-established,” Annan said of the governments of the Great Lakes region, which includes Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire).

The U.N. chief added, however, that regardless of the fragility of governments in the region “the record id disturbing,” particularly reports of human rights violations.

Annan urged greater actions to investigate human rights abuses, and he supported the decision of U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, Sadako Ogata, to suspend refugee work in eastern Congo as long as the Kinshasa government forcibly repatriates Rwandans and Burundese living in camps there.

In the past, he has been limited in what he can do, and was criticised by human rights groups for bowing to several of Kinshasa’s demands, including replacing outspoken U.N. human rights rapporteur Roberto Garreton. But Annan insisted Thursday that he would continue to push for an investigation into reports that the Congolese government – once the rebel force that ousted Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who died Sunday – conducted massacres in the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu.

“We are determined to get to the facts,” he said. “If difficulties persist and (U.N. rights monitors) are not allowed to do their work, then the facts will be there for the world to judge.”

At the same time, Annan noted that the history of the region could have convinced many new leaders not to trust the United Nations or Western powers, which have been blamed for propping up the Mobutu regime. Some of the leaders in Central Africa, he noted, were supporters of Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.

“For some of them, they believe the international community deprived them of the chance to rule Congo,” Annan argued. As a result, he said, many regional leaders are wary of U.N. involvement because they believe that they could also be overthrown.

Several regional leaders – notably pro-Lumumba President Laurent Kabila of Congo, Rwandan Army chief and Vice President Paul Kagame and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda – have mentioned support for Mobutu as a reason to maintain their distance from some western countries.

Museveni, Kabila and Kagame forged close ties when they were resistance leaders based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and remain in close contact, U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson noted recently.

Annan’s comments underscores the bitterness that lingers in the region nearly 40 years after hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers lost their lives – including then Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, – intervening in the affairs of newly-independent Congo.

Lumumba was overthrown in 1962, reportedly with the assistance of the the U.S. central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He died in the hands of troops of the leader of the then leader of secessionist Katanda province, Moise Tshombe.

U.N. peace-keepers, dispatched to the Congo shortly after independence in 1960, left in 1964 when Tshombe briefly became president, only to be ousted by Mobutu one year later.

For a veteran Lumumbist like Kabila, who set up several mini- states in Zaire to resist Mobutu’s regime, neither the United Nations nor the West played a distinguished part in what became Mobutu’s economically ruinous 32-year dictatorship.

Since Kabila assumed power in May, Annan conceded, the United Nations has received mixed signals from Congolese officials, repeatedly delaying its investigation into the massacre reports in the eastern provinces.

The U.N. chief voiced some sympathy for the suspicions of regional governments and conceded that “history will judge us very harshly” for the U.N. failure to act to prevent the 1994 massacre of as many as one million Rwandans). But Annan has also conceded that the record shows that some of the main actors in the region, including the Rwandan Army, have committed abuses which must be investigated.

Richardson, who has met with Kabila several times in recent months, has also recently urged stronger steps to deal with Kinshasa’s rights record. After months of suggesting that Kabila needs time and support to establish his government, the U.S. ambassador this week admitted that the tone of a recent letter by Kabila allowing U.N. rights monitoring was disturbing.

“Unless the United Nations takes categorical steps to make clear to the Kabila government the importance of letting the investigation proceed, it may not be able to assist the refugees,” tens of thousands of whom remain in eastern Congo, said Binaifer Nowrojee, counsel to Human Rights Watch/Africa. “I am not convinced that they are going to do so.”

Annan, however, still hoped to be able to complete that investigation, and to assist in mediating the conflict in the neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville. Although plans to dispatch U.N. troops there have been set aside while fighting rages in the capital, Annan said that troops could be sent once a peace agreement between President Pascal Lissouba and former President Denis Sassou-Nguesso is in place.

He added that there had been hopeful signs that the fighters in that conflict were becoming tired of waging their struggle in Brazzaville. Perhaps the United Nations should appeal to soldiers directly in such conflicts, Annan said, since ‘it is they who are being killed, not necessarily the leaders.”