Kagame says Zambia no longer an honest broker

The Lusaka summit on the DRC had been postponed after Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s refusal to attend, according a Zambian foreign ministry official cited by Reuters. Kagame told reporters in the Rwandan capital Kigali on Sunday that a meeting to revitalise the Lusaka process was important, and he would like to attend if it were somewhere else, but he would not travel to Lusaka because Zambia was no longer an impartial mediator in the DRC conflict. Kagame said on Radio Rwanda that his government was angered when Zambia was used as a “conduit for the DRC army to launch boats onto Lake Tanganyika for future use against it, and in support of [President Joseph] Kabila’s forces, ex-Forces armees rwandaises (ex-FAR) and Interahamwe militias”. Zambia had said this was a mistake and was being investigated, but then a second, “more serious”, incident happened, Kagame said. On that occasion [in December], Hutu rebels, ex-FAR and Interahamwe from Rwanda had accompanied Congolese government troops who fled from fighting in Katanga Province, southeastern DRC, into Zambia. Rwanda had indicated to Zambia its belief that among these men were commanders, officers and militias who were involved in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and advised that it could seek assistance from the UN or other regional governments “in order to now hold and disarm these groups”. However, even as Rwanda was raising its concerns with Zambia, the authorities there decided to hand all those forces back to the DRC, thereby “simply recycling the problem”, Kagame said. “On the one hand, you are telling us we should resolve the problem; on the other, you are complicating the problem,” he said of the Zambian government. [The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) had been given permission to interview the soldiers who fled into northern Zambia from the DRC but - after meetings between Zambian and Congolese leaders and military chiefs, including the late DRC President Laurent-Desire Kabila and Zambian leader Frederick Chiluba - the soldiers were sent back to Mufulira, outside the government stronghold of Lubumbashi in southeastern DRC, without any screening on their potential involvement in the Rwandan genocide.]