Agreement, funds short ahead of dialogue, says mediator

Preparations for the inter-Congolese peace and reconciliation dialogue among the government, the political opposition and rebel movements in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have run into last-minute obstacles, AFP reported a mediator as saying on Friday. "October 15 [in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia] is still the working scenario date for the mediation team, but there are difficulties and some of these problems are still not sorted out," Hacen Ould Lebatt.

He said the problems were the way in which various forces - like the Mayi-Mayi Congolese militias, the Ugandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy-Liberation Movement, and civil society - would be represented; and the financial difficulties.
"The new, good thing is that everyone agrees that the Mayi-Mayi should be part of the political process, but they don't agree how," Labett was quoted as saying at the conclusion of a two-day meeting in Nairobi of the Consultative Committee of the inter-Congolese dialogue.

As special representative of Botswana's former head of state Ketumile Masire - the facilitator agreed to by all parties to the 1999 Lusaka peace agreement - Labett said "time is tight". The money so far raised to pay for the main talks in the Ethiopian capital "is far short of what is needed", he added, urging the donor community to provide "the promised funds".

The committee, made up of two members from each of the six parties at the Gaborone talks - the Kinshasa government, the three armed opposition groups, political opposition groups and civil society - were also scheduled to discuss such issues as its method of operation and frequency of meetings. The Nairobi meeting was convened by Masire, the dialogue facilitator, and is being chaired by his special representative, Hacen Ould Lebatt. DRC government forces, backed by Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe, have been fighting rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda since August 1998.