France denies influencing UN report

The French government on Monday denied it was behind a UN report which accused Uganda, Rwanda and the rebels in the DRC of looting the country’s resources, AFP reported. It quoted French Cooperation Minister Charles Josselin as describing as “totally aberrant” accusations by the Goma-based rebel Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie (RCD-Goma) that France had dictated the conclusions of the report, which accused the rebels and their allies of plundering minerals, thereby fuelling the war in that country. He told journalists in Paris that Rwanda was trying to deflect criticism away from its role in the DRC.

“The Rwandans are accepting badly the report’s conclusions, which incriminate them. We know the close ties between Rwanda and RCD rebels,” he said. RCD had said at the weekend that the UN report’s conclusions “seem clearly to have been dictated to a group of people put into place by the UN Secretary-General... and whose intellectual author was France, whose moral responsibility in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has caused it to lose all common sense towards Rwanda”.