Kabila under fire

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has criticised his DRC counterpart and ally President Laurent-Desire Kabila for refusing to give ground on two key issues of the peace process, namely the deployment of UN peacekeepers and acceptance of the inter-Congolese dialogue facilitator. Speaking after the abortive Lusaka summit on Tuesday, Mugabe told IRIN that Kabila “has to start listening to the SADC (Southern African Development Community) leadership if this conflict is to be resolved, otherwise no progress can be made”. In a summit communique, the SADC leaders appealed to Kabila to reconsider his position and issued a veiled threat of sanctions. Zambian President Frederick Chiluba, the SADC-appointed mediator, said at the close of the meeting on Tuesday that pressure had been applied to Kabila to accept former Botswanan president Ketumile Masire as facilitator and create conditions for the deployment of UN peacekeepers. [For more details, see separate IRIN item of 15 August, headlined “DRC-SOUTHERN AFRICA: Mugabe chides Kabila].

Rwandan President Paul Kagame said Kabila “cannot afford to stand [alone] against the rest”. Addressing a press conference on his return to Kigali from Lusaka, he said there was a “clear consensus” at the summit that the DRC government was to blame for the failure of the Lusaka peace process. He believed the Lusaka meeting was successful in that it reaffirmed support for the Lusaka process. The semi-official Ugandan ‘New Vision’ on Wednesday slammed Kabila’s “intransigence” and said he should be “pressurised” to comply with the Lusaka accord. “Kabila wants war,” the paper commented. “Kabila should be held responsible...the world should not let him undermine peace efforts.” It added that Africa “does not need the Kabila mentality now...instead Africans should unite and compel him to accept peace.”

The US also issued a stern warning to Kabila, AFP reported. “The United States calls on the government in Kinshasa to honour this agreement [Lusaka peace accord] it has signed and to join all the other parties in a cooperative resolution to the Congolese conflict,” Nancy Soderberg, a senior member of the US mission to the UN, was quoted as saying.

The UN, for its part, said it was still awaiting details of the meeting before reacting officially. “If there was a breakdown in the talks, we regret that, but we have to see,” UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said. The OAU called on the DRC government to create a “conducive environment” for the deployment of UN peacekeepers. Speaking in Dar es Salaam, OAU Secretary-General Salim Ahmed Salim said the Kabila government “had shown it did not agree with the principles of the Lusaka peace agreement”, Tanzanian radio reported.