Facilitator says US-UN cooperation "vital"

The new facilitator of the inter-Congolese dialogue, former Botswanan president Ketumile Masire, has said US-UN cooperation is "vital" for a successful resolution of the DRC conflict. "Without this cooperation, the exercise in naming me facilitator to the Congo crisis would be futile," he said in an interview with the State Department's US Information Agency
(USIA). "We have cases in the past, like Rwanda, where there was not such cooperation and it ended in a situation where close to a million people were slaughtered." He said his first task would be to get all the key players to sit together for a "general discussion". The Lusaka peace accord had gone part way in achieving this, "but it should be followed by a dialogue by the Congolese, and there must be someone to sit in adjudication".