CONGO-BRAZZAVILLE: UN’s Push for Help Too Late – Again

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 15 1997 (IPS) - Reports that President Pascal Lissouba has been ousted from power in the Congo Republic provide another example of the problems the United Nations faces in deploying its forces to prevent conflict in Africa.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the 15-nation Security Council Tuesday night to consider dispatching U.N. peacekeepers to Brazzaville following reports of stepped-up fighting. But the Council’s slowness to act on the fighting ensured that no decision was taken by Wednesday, when forces loyal to former President Denis Sassou-Nguesso were reported to seize control of the Congo Republic.

Although the United Nations was unable to confirm their whereabouts, both Lissouba and his prime minister, Bernard Kolelas, were reported to have fled Congo-Brazzaville, on Wednesday, following several days of fighting involving troops from neighbouring Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo formerly Zaire.

The apparent victory of Sassou-Nguesso, who conceded defeat in elections to Lissouba in 1992, rendered U.N. peacekeeping efforts in the five-month power struggle all but meaningless, officials here conceded. It also focuses U.N. attention now to the more than 33,000 refugees believed to have fled the the Congo Republic for the Congo-Kinshasha since June.

“We’re talking about a conflict that, just in the past few hours, has shifted in favour of one of the factions,” U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said following reports that Sassou- Nguesso’s loyalists had seized the capital, Brazzaville, and the city of Point-Noire. “(A peacekeeping force) clearly has no role either if fighting intensifies, and there is no peace to keep, or if one side vanquishes the other.”

With one side having the upper hand, he added, “the situation on the ground does not look promising” for deploying U.N. troops.

That admission is a significant comedown for the United Nations, just one day after Annan lobbied the Security Council to take forceful action following months of street fighting between militias loyal to the three Congolese politicians.

“Given the involvement of neighbouring countries and the possibility that this would spill over to other countries in the region, if we do not act now and put pressure on them…it may be worse later on,” Annan said Tuesday.

He added that, although Washington has repeatedly halted U.N. peacekeeping plans for African nations, the gravity of the Congo crisis should compel the U.S. government to press for action. “Given the urgency of the situation, I hope the agreement of Washington would be forthcoming,” he said. “I don’t think anyone would want to be responsible for holding back international action in this very difficult situation.”

Yet once again, the United Nations has received a growing clamour for action only after the parties on the ground have taken matters into their own hands. In recent years, U.S. worries about lengthy, risky peacekeeping ventures has prevented the United Nations from sending troops to Burundi, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic and other troubled states. The world body only sent a short-lived, Canadian-led force to the eastern DRC – then Zaire – last December, after a rebel insurgency seized the region.

The slow U.N. decision-making on Congo-Brazzaville was no exception. Although U.N. envoy Mohamed Sahnoun asked this summer for member states to provide peacekeepers if Lissouba and Sassou- Nguesso agreed to a cease-fire, there was no clear call for action by the Security Council or key Western states.

The United Nations cannot be expected to do more, Eckhard argued. “If you want a ‘911’ (emergency) international force to go in and impose peace every time there is a domestic dispute, that facility doesnt’ exist yet,” he said.

For several years, it seemed that the United Nations provided just such a force. By 1993, the world body fielded more than 70,000 soldiers in 17 international conflicts. But the deaths of 24 U.S. soldiers in a failed attempt to capture a militia leader in Somalia embarrassed U.S. President Bill Clinton and forced Washington to place strict pre-conditions for U.N. peacekeeping operations.

Following the Somalia fiasco, Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25), which stated that U.N. missions must have a clear end point and objectives and stability on the ground before Washington would grant approval.

Annan conceded that “there are regulations on PDD-25 and they will need to have extensive consultations in Washington before they can say one way or another” about the Congo crisis. U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson last month used the logic of PDD-25 to argue against deploying U.N. troops then, saying, “Before there is a commitment to a peacekeeping force, there has to be a political settlement. That has yet to happen.”

Even with U.N. reports of Angolan and Comngo-Kinshsha involvement over the past few days, the momentum to provide troops never gathered – encouraging the political leaders in the Congo republic to solve their problems by force, and neighbouring countries to intervene.

Both Lissouba, whose term as president expired in August, and Sassou-Nguesso, who was prepared to run in elections that had been scheduled for July but never took place, had tentatively agreed to halt fighting and pave the way for a UN-monitored election. Yet fighting picked up again last week, and U.N. and other sources estimated that 1,000 Angolan troops crossed the border into the country from the Cabinda enclave over the weekend.

“From the reports reaching us in addition to the local forces fighting on both sides, there are Angolan troops alleged to be there, and so are troops from the DRC, and there are mercenaries on the ground from various conflicts,” Annan confirmed.

“We oppose cross-border activity of this kind,” U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin said on Tuesday of the Angolan intervention. Angolan officials, however, said their troops only crossed the border in response to fresh attacks by a rebel group seeking independence for Cabinda, which the Luanda government believes enjoyed support from some of the Congolese leaders.

The intervention from the former Zaire, came only after its new president, Laurent Kabila, signed an agreement on Oct 2 with Lissouba that allowed some Congo-Kinshasa troops to deploy in Congo-Brazzaville. “Our troops are not there to occupy Brazzaville,” Kinshasha Foreign Minister Bizima Karaha said after the agreement. “Our soldiers were in Brazzaville just to make sure we can secure Kinshasa…The (recent) shelling of Kinshasa, which we believe is deliberate, has been coming from known locations in Brazzaville.”

Kabila’s main reason for involvement may be to stop shelling from across the border, but Angola’s motives presumably have more to do with the suspected support of Lissouba for the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

Lissouba, along with Zaire’s late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, was viewed in Luanda as a conduit for arms and assistance to UNITA – and, just as they helped Kabila oust Mobutu in May, Angola now seems to have played a decisive role in bringing Sassou-Nguesso back to power this week.