Africa, Development & Aid, Europe, Headlines, Population

POLITICS: EU to Support Congolese Poll

Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS , Dec 21 2004 (IPS) - The European Union has pledged support for general elections that are scheduled to take place in the Democratic Republic of Congo in June next year.

“There is no alternative to the transition to democracy if we want a Congo that is at peace, that is reconciled and prosperous,” European Union (EU) development commissioner Louis Michel said Saturday, after signing an agreement pledging 80 million euros (almost 110 million dollars) for the elections.

The signing ceremony took place in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kinshasa, which Michel visited in the course of a five-day tour of the Great Lakes region.

“This financial support is the largest contribution that the EU has ever dedicated to supporting an election process,” he noted.. “These 80 million euros signify in my eyes that peace and stability, and therefore prosperity, are within reach.” The upcoming poll will be the first in the DRC since it gained independence from Belgium in 1960.

The DRC is still struggling to recover from a five-year civil war in which some three million people died in combat, or from disease and malnutrition. The war was officially declared over last year, but violence has continued to plague eastern DRC, where neighbouring Rwanda claims Hutu extremists have taken refuge.

These extremists are accused of helping to carry out the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which some 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed.

Last month Rwandan President Paul Kagame again threatened to send troops into the Congo to disarm Hutu guerrillas on the grounds that they posed a security threat to Rwanda. However, he later reversed this position, saying the problem of Hutu militants would be left to the “international community” to resolve.

Rwanda previously invaded the DRC in 1996 and again in 1998. The second attack sparked the DRC’s five-year civil war, which saw the government – supported by Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia – clash with rebels backed by Uganda and Rwanda.

Despite Kagame’s most recent pronouncements, violence has flared in the eastern Kivu region during recent days, pitting the Congolese army against troops previously said to have formed part of a faction of the rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD).

This faction, based in the eastern town of Goma, had links with Rwanda during the civil war. Congolese authorities have accused Kigali of dispatching its own soldiers to support rebel fighters in the latest clashes, a charge Rwanda denies.

Michel urged the international community to take the issue of Hutu militants more seriously, saying “it is a real problem which has been underestimated over the years, and until it is resolved it will poison the whole of the region.”

Nonetheless, the European Parliament and the European Commission, the EU executive, have called on Rwanda to withdraw “any troops still present on the territory of the DRC.”

A United Nations peacekeeping force (MONUC) that has been deployed in the DRC since 1999 also said this weekend that its observers were certain foreign troops had entered the DRC. However, it had not been verified that these forces were Rwandan.

While security concerns have undoubtedly played a part in Rwanda’s involvement in the DRC, the country’s actions also have an economic motive. Two panels of experts convened by the United Nations have implicated Rwanda and several other states in resource exploitation in the DRC. In all, nine African countries have been directly or indirectly involved in the Congolese conflict.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tuesday that the latest violence in eastern DRC had displaced more than 180,000 civilians, raising the spectre of a “new humanitarian crisis” in the region.

HRW quoted a UN official as saying this movement constituted the biggest displacement since a transitional government was put in place in June 2003. It also claimed that MONUC had yet to intervene to protect civilians.

The International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based think-tank, urged the UN last week to take tougher action to prevent renewed civil war in the DRC.

In a report titled ‘Back to the Brink in the Congo’, the ICG notes: “The Security Council should immediately direct the peacekeeping mission to secure key border points, then sit all parties down urgently, decide on a specific course of action with a time- line, designate responsible actors, establish UN verification, and apply a mix of muscle and diplomacy to make a comprehensive solution possible.”

If Rwanda or the DRC should fail to fulfil existing obligations or those assumed in the course of the new process, the report recommends sanctions “including a targeted suspension of international assistance with care to minimise effects on the civilian population; an arms embargo; and an assets freeze and travel ban against high officials.”

In October the UN Security Council authorised the number of MONUC troops to be increased from 10,000 to almost 16,000. With a deployment costing about 700 million dollars a year, MONUC is currently the most expensive UN peacekeeping force.

The latest developments in the DRC have raised fears that the country may be too unstable to hold elections for a permanent government in six months time. At present, President Joseph Kabila heads an interim administration that comprises members of former rebel groups, opposition politicians and presidential supporters.

And, while the funding announced by Michel is substantial, it meets less than half the anticipated cost of the 2005 poll, put at 285 million dollars. Additional money and considerably more political commitment will be needed to bring the Congolese peace process to fruition.