Annan calls for accord implementation aid

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Thursday issued an international appeal for aid to be extended to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda to help them implement the peace accord they signed in the South African administrative capital, Pretoria, on 30 July.

In this context, Annan said he had ordered the UN Mission in the DRC (known as MONUC) to examine ways by which it could help the parties render the agreement effective, thereby ending four years of war between the two nations, and enabling hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons to return to their homes.

"However, the parties need to be perfectly clear in the tasks to be performed, and provide the necessary information in order for MONUC to define its specific role," he said, as quoted by UN News.

He said he would return to the Security Council with recommendations regarding MONUC, after the council had held consultations with the main parties concerned. He was speaking at the opening of the Council's meeting on the DRC attended by DRC Foreign Minister Leonard She Okitundu, Rwandan Special Presidential Envoy in the Great Lakes Patrick Mazimhaka, and Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma of South Africa, which is the mediating country.

She Okitundu told the Council that his government would faithfully implement the Pretoria accord, which calls for the disarmament, demobilisation, repatriation, resettlement reintegration of all armed foreign groups currently deployed on DRC territory. He said the disarmament of Rwandan dissidents in the DRC would present a sufficient response to Rwanda's security concerns, and that the accord had "set out the national sovereignty and territorial integrity" of the DRC. He also called for the Council to redefine MONUCs mission "to reflect recent developments". UN News said.

Mazimhaka, for his part, said the accord had provided solutions to the two core issues that had till now blocked the path to peace: disarming the Interahamwe and the ex-Forces armies rwandaises (ex-FAR), and the withdrawal of all foreign troops from the DRC. He said Rwanda had undertaken to withdraw its troops from the DRC as soon as the disarmament and demobilisation process was under way and judged to be irreversible.

Since 1994, he said, many members of the ex-FAR had joined the new Rwandan armed forces or had been demobilised. He said 2,000 captives of the 2001 attack on northwest Rwanda had, for example, been settled, with some of them working for national reconciliation.

Dlamini-Zuma told the Council that the Pretoria accord should be seen as complementary to the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement and subsequent agreements, on the basis of the recognition that peace could not be achieved in the Great Lakes region without a settlement of the DRC-Rwanda conflict.

[Full report on http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf]