Masire seeks funds for January peace talks

Following hours of talks with the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Thursday, the facilitator of the inter-Congolese dialogue, Ketumile Masire, said he hoped enough money for the conference would be forthcoming early in 2002.

"We hope by the end of January we shall be able to convince the donors to provide sufficient funds to hold the dialogue," he said in Kinshasa.

Masire, the former president of Botswana, presented donor nations with a cost estimate of US $4 million for the forthcoming dialogue to be held in South Africa. This includes the operating costs of the facilitation team's two offices and preparatory meetings to be held in advance of the peace talks.

The facilitation team said it had about $1 million to hold the dialogue, too little for the six-week meeting that is foreseen, especially if the planned 350 delegates are housed in four- or five-star hotels. Diplomatic sources said this week that the delegates had rejected the hostel at a conference centre proposed by the South African government.

"As far as the objections to the accommodation is concerned, the South Africans have not yet shown us the facilities available," Masire said. "Our team there will be shown alternative places, more than one place, where the dialogue can be held."

While Masire said there was as yet no fixed date for the dialogue, diplomats in Kinshasa said on Wednesday that the dialogue was provisionally set for the fourth week in January. However, all agreed that setting a date would be conditional on adequate funds and on settling outstanding issues of representation at the talks. This includes resolving the question of how Congolese Mayi-Mayi militias might be represented.

Asked how he felt about a proposed meeting on 10 December in Abuja, Nigeria, among DRC President Joseph Kabila, Jean-Pierre Bemba of the Ugandan-backed Mouvement pour la liberation du Congo (MLC) armed opposition movement, and Adolphe Onusumba of the Rwandan-backed Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie (RCD-Goma), Masire said: "If two or three or four parties to the dialogue want to get together to work on the dialogue, it's all right with us."

On Wednesday, Foreign Affairs Minister Louis Michel of Belgium, which currently holds the presidency of the European Union, expressed strong support for the Abuja meeting and said it was "illusory to think the dialogue is possible without a rapprochement between the belligerents". Speaking in Kinshasa, Michel also said the unarmed opposition and civil society in the DRC "will certainly be marginalised at the talks unless they form a common platform".