Belgian socialist MP calls for aid limit

Belgian Socialist Party Member of Parliament Dirk Van der Maelen has asked the government to withhold additional economic aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) until there is a comprehensive agreement among all belligerents in the country's war.

He was speaking at a news conference on Tuesday in Brussels, the Belgian capital, after a weeklong tour of the DRC cities of Kisangani, Goma, Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, on behalf of his party. He told reporters that the Sun City agreement between DRC President Joseph Kabila, the leader of the Mouvement de liberation du Congo, Jean-Pierre Bemba, and about 30 unarmed opposition groups had just been "a first step toward a comprehensive deal".

The accord, reached in the South African resort city in April, provides for the formation of a transitional government in which Kabila would remain president and Bemba would be prime minister. The Rwandan-backed Rassemblement congolais pour la democratic-Goma (RCD-Goma) dismissed the arrangement as "a joke".

Its forces are fighting in the eastern part of the country in their bid to unseat Kabila, causing thousands of people to flee. Van der Maelen said "only a political solution with Kigali" could normalise the humanitarian situation in that part of the country. He called for increased pressure on Kigali, adding that after eight years it had failed to capture those responsible for 1994 genocide, but continued "to seize the pretext to maintain battalions in the DRC, hundreds of kilometres away from its [Rwanda's] border".

Rwanda has vowed to withdraw all its troops from the DRC as soon as the perpetrators of genocide - the Interahamwe Hutu militia and former Rwandan armed forces - are disarmed. Van der Maelen called on regional leaders and the international community to help Rwanda withdraw its 40,000 troops.

He also called on the Belgian Foreign Ministry to re-evaluate its support for the DRC, because individuals who had supported the late Congolese president, Mobutu Sese Seko, had started worming their way into other political structures, mainly through those of Bemba, Kabila and the RCD-Goma.

Belgium, the former colonial power, maintains political and economic interests in Congo. Therefore, Maelen said, a code of conduct was needed for Belgian companies doing business in the country. "Some of them still have an active role in the looting of natural resources of eastern Congo," he said.

Prominent among them, he added, was the Forrest Group in Lubumbashi, which, he said, was receiving Belgian government money. The firm, he said, had been looting germanium, a rare metalloid used in transistors, also used as a catalyst, and to strengthen and harden alloys. He said the government could impose sanctions all firms guilty of looting the DRC by withdrawing financial aid for between five and 15 years.