CONGO-HUMAN RIGHTS: UN Asks for US Help to Push Investigation

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 14 1997 (IPS) - The United Nations is relying on on the United States to make a ‘last-ditch’ effort to allow beleaguered human rights investigators to verify massacre reports in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Stumped by the Kinshasha government’s continuing refusal to allow its three-member team, led by Togolese Justice Atsu-Koffi Amega, to travel to alleged massacre sites, the United Nations hopes that a diplomatic initiative by Washington can break the impasse, according to top officials here.

“The U.S. government has confirmed that it is its intention to appoint an envoy, or envoys, that will make the effort to persuade the Congolese government to agree to the terms on which the investigative team could return,” a senior U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Tuesday. “The envoy, or envoys, will deploy to the region very soon.”

Diplomats said that Washington plans to send at least one envoy, preferably an African American of high international visibility, to prod the government of President Laurent Kabila.

Although the U.S. State Department has not formally announced the appointment of an envoy to Kinshasa, officials have cited former U.N. Ambassador Donald McHenry as a top contender for the role. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was appointed Tuesday to serve as a roving human rights envoy in Africa, but the State Department did not specify whether the DRC dispute would be included among his duties.

Despite Washington’s interest, U.N. officials are not optimistic Kabila’s government will let the team, which temporarily pulled out of the Congo last month after six weeks of delays in travelling to the sites, proceed with its work.

Human Rights Watch/Africa (HRW), in a report last week, accused the DRC government of “cleaning up” evidence of massacres of thousands of mainly Rwandan refugees in eastern Congo while the U.N. team was blocked in Kinshasa. For now, the United Nations has rejected the idea that McHenry or another U.S. official could replace Amega and his team.

Kinshasa authorities regard the current team leader as biased, among other reasons, because Amega’s native Togo was allied to Kabila’s ousted predecessor, the late Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.(After defeating Mobutu in May, Kabila restored the country’s original post-independence name of Congo.)

Some U.N. officials confess that the standoff has proved difficult to resolve. They cite the Kabila government’s wariness of the United Nations, which some members of his Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) blame for the overthrow and death in 1961 of the country’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. But while U.N. officials want to demonstrate their good intentions, they contend that the pressure to proceed with the massacre investigations before the trail turns cold has hurt relations with the new Congolese government.

“Relations with Kinshasha are now in the political domain,” said Mary Robinson, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. “There is a danger of the political (domain) intruding against (that of) human rights.”

Regional politics has helped Kabila forestall the need for a quick investigation, with many African governments willing to give the ADFL the benefit of the doubt following the corruption and decay of the 33-year Mobutu regime. “Congo was a big hole in central Africa,” its Foreign Minister Bizima Karaha argued recently. “Now that Zaire is no longer there, we sincerely believe there is a better future for Africa.”

Several African leaders – including major regional voices like Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and South African President Nelson Mandela – have openly questioned why the world body is so intent on finding out what happened to several thousand Rwandan refugees in then-eastern Zaire over the past year and not on other massacres.

That disparity, in turn, has convinced Robinson of the need to push for further investigation of an earlier series of massacres in which as many as one million people were killed in neighbouring Rwanda in 1994. That genocide sparked the flight of the refugees, many of them believed to be perpetrators of the killings, who stayed in camps in eastern Zaire until the ADFL’s initial attacks last year.

“The lack of willingness to take adequate responsibility following the genocidal killings in Rwanda in 1994…has compounded the difficulties in the situation of refugees in the region and is linked to the current serious problems in the Congo,” Robinson said in Geneva Tuesday.

Some U.N. officials wonder whether Kabila is even capable of allowing the human-rights team to proceed given the sympathies of other countries believed to be involved in the conflict. In one senior diplomat’s view, an investigation could only help Kabila and the ADFL if it were found that “third party” forces committed the bulk of the killings. But other experts wonder if the ADFL has effective control of the suspected massacre sites.

HRW, in its report last week, named Lt. Col. James Kabarebe, who the rights group says “spent time in Uganda” as “the most powerful commander in Congo and a principal strategist during the seven-month war.” The report also claimed that several commanders seconded by the Rwandan Popular Army fought in key battles and may have been involved in massacres of refugees in towns like Mbandaka.

“The prsence of Rwandan troops is a real problem,” argued Guillaume Ngefa Atondoko, a human rights lawyer and president of the Zairian Association for Human Rights (AZADHO). “We don’t have a national army, we have factions: Rwandan, Ugandan, Angolan and Congolese factions. Zaire is now like different radio stations using the same frequency.”

The United States also has a murky record of involvement in the region ever since the Central Intelligence Agency assisted Mobutu’s rise to power in the early 1960s and later used Zaire as a base to destabilise the leftist government then in Angola. In the current fighting, according to the HRW report, witnesses reported seeing U.S. soldiers accompanying ADFL fighters at several early battle sites. The United Nations has not brought that matter up with Washington in their current effort to prod Kinshasa on the human rights team, sources told IPS.

Atondoko argued that the United Nations has already lost credibility in its slow, ineffective investigation thus far. Already, he said, the world body pulled out a previous human rights rapporteur, Chilean lawyer Roberto Garreton, whom the Kabila government accused of bias. If there is no accountability pressed by the United Nations, he added, “we will create more Kabilas.”