UN force urged to establish peace

Former US undersecretary of state for African affairs, Herman Cohen, has stated that the UN’s refusal to send peacekeepers to the DRC until there is peace on the ground created “a vicious circle”, because many people, including himself, felt there could not be peace without the “blue helmets”. Interviewed by Congolese state television in his capacity as “special adviser to President Laurent-Desire Kabila” Cohen, who runs a lobbying firm, said that DRC rebels were “not willing to see peace return” because their sponsors, Rwanda and Uganda, would then be forced to leave and the rebels would be left with nothing. According to the television, he said successive resignations in the Rwandan government showed that “an apartheid system” was taking root there. “There is no great difference between this system and the apartheid we witnessed in South Africa,” he was quoted as saying.