Rwanda rejects JMC move

Rwanda has rejected a proposal to move the base of the Joint Military Commission (JMC) to Kinshasa, a Rwandan government official said on Thursday. “A proposal to that effect was presented to us but we rejected it....We cannot send our people to Kinshasa for security reasons,” Theogene Rudasingwa, advisor to Rwandan Vice-President Paul Kagame, told IRIN on Thursday. Sources close to a regional heads of summit held last month in Lusaka told IRIN the secretariat of the JMC, which is responsible for overseeing implementation of the Lusaka ceasefire agreement until the deployment of a peacekeeping force, had proposed shifting the body’s headquarters from Lusaka to Kinshasa to strengthen cooperation with the UN Observer Mission in the DRC (MONUC). The heads of state had approved the principle of a joint MONUC/JMC structure that would facilitate “close coordination during the period of deployment of the UN military observers in the DRC,” according to the summit’s joint communique.