CONGO-RIGHTS: Kinshasa Denies UN Charges

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 2 1997 (IPS) - The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, insists that it supports U.N. investigations into human rights violations and has brushed aside complaints from the United Nations that its work is being hampered.

Congolese Foreign Minister Bizima Karaha declared Thursday his government supported a U.N. investigation into reports that thousands of mainly Hutu Rwandan refugees may have been murdered by the then rebel Alliance of Democratic Forces, and its allies, since late 1996.

“Everybody is supporting the idea of knowing what really happened,” Karaha said. “The (U.N.) team can go anywhere, and the team will be insisted.” But the foreign minister added that, so far, the government had been unimpressed with the investigators’ work. “They don’t seem to have so much work to do, because they are still in Kinshasa.”

U.N. officials, however, contend that the three-member team, led by judge Atsu-Koffi Amega of Togo, has been blocked by the Congolese government from travelling to suspected massacre sites.

On Wednesday, declaring frustration with the lack of progress in the group’s five-week stay, the United Nations pulled out its investigators in the Congo who will report back to the U.N. headquarters in New York next week. However, a small entourage of experts remains in Kinshasa to await the team’s return after consultations, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said.

The main dispute between the Congo and the world body centres on where the team can travel. Karaha told IPS that the U.N. team must first investigate conditions in the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, where the refugees resided between 1994 and the rise of the Alliance last year. U.N. officials insist, however, that they must also be able to visit other locations alleged to have served as massacre sites, including the western town of Mbandaka.

The United Nations says 200,000 refugees remain unaccounted for since last September when the Alliance launched its successful drive to unseat Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. The rebels seized power on May 17. According to some accounts, many of the refugees travelled through Mbandaka after being flushed out of eastern Congo by the Alliance’s first attacks last year.

To the new Kinshasa government presided by Alliance leader Laurent Kabila, however, an investigation into western towns is unacceptable given that the refugee crisis began in the east. The refugees “spent maybe a week in Mbandaka” before travelling to other countries, Karaha told IPS. On the other hand, he argued, eastern camps like Mugunga held the refugees for three years. “Aren’t they at least curious?” he asked of the team’s refusal to travel to the east.

The Amega team has stood firm on the need to travel to Mbandaka first – partly on the belief that, if they went there later, key evidence of massacres could be destroyed. Following U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s decision to pull the team out for consultations, the United States and other key governments insisted that the rights monitors be allowed to follow their own itinerary.

“Our bottom line remains the same, which is that the government in Kinshasa must allow the team to carry out its mandate anywhere in the country,” said U.S. State Department spokesman James Foley. “There was a protocol that was signed between the government and the United Nations that authorised the U.N. investigators to cover the entire range of the country, wherever they felt they needed to go.”

“President Kabila’s continued refusal to cooperate with the investigation team despite repeated promises is a direct snub to the international community,” argued Amnesty International in a statement. “The longer the investigation is delayed, the greater the risk that refugees and other unarmed civilians will continue to be killed in the DRC.”

Karaha responded that “we do not have a problem with the United Nations,” arguing instead that the vital step was for the U.N. team to begin its work in eastern Congo. But the foreign minister added that some countries may not want a full investigation into the refugee camps since those camps were being run by former Rwandan Army troops and paramilitaries linked to that country’s 1994 genocide.

“Someone called them refugee camps when they were military camps,” he said. “They gave them treatment as refugees (but) some of the people had committed genocide.”

Several human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Africa Rights, have agreed with that argument. The camps, HRW argued, were effectively run by ex-Rwandan Army officials and ‘Interahamwe’ militia leaders linked to the genocide.

One HRW report released in 1995 contended that the Mobutu government was helping to funnel arms to the refugee camps so that the former Rwandan armed forces could re-invade their home country, which they fled in 1994 after carrying out massacres of minority Tutsi in which as many as one million people were killed.

Some U.N. officials, including Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson, conceded that it may be a complex task to pursue an investigation into the massacre reports concerning the refugees given the world’s inability to intervene to prevent the Rwanda killings. “This investigative team is a very important way of breaking the cycle of impunity” in central Africa, she said.

Nevertheless, prospects look dim for a quick resolution to the conflict. Karaha said he did not expect to have anything to do with the team upon their return to New York, but added that he hoped Annan would give them clear instructions on their future work.

U.N. officials say that what is needed, is for Kinshasa to allow the team to carry out its work as previously agreed by both sides.