Government representative names potential premier

A spokesman for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) government on Tuesday proposed a leading rebel as a potential prime minister of a transitional government.

Vital Kamerhe, government commissioner for liaison with the UN, named Olivier Kamitatu, the secretary-general of the rebel Mouvement pour la liberation du Congo (MLC). "He could be prime minister," he said. "He's a good guy and we could work with him."

This came after the MLC leader, Jean-Pierre Bemba, had withdrawn his earlier demand that Joseph Kabila should step down as president at the end of the inter-Congolese dialogue (ICD). The Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie (RCD), by contrast, is maintaining its anti-Kabila stance, sparking fears that the government and the MLC may have reached an agreement that would exclude the RCD, a charge that has been denied by Kamitatu.

Earlier, government spokesmen at the ICD had said it was too early to consider who might be prime minister, a post which currently does not exist in the DRC political hierarchy. The press in Kinshasa reported last year that the government had offered the premiership to Jean-Pierre Bemba, but that he had turned it down.

Kamerhe did not name any members of RCD - backed by the DRC's arch enemy, Rwanda - as suitable candidates for top positions.

Reacting to Kamerhe's suggestion, Kamitatu said he suspected the government did not want to negotiate a new political order, which is an agenda item for the ICD. "It's not for the MLC to say we're going to enter Kinshasa's institutions," he said. "We want new institutions. And we have the problem of agreeing on new criteria for choosing the office holders in those institutions."

The overriding problem is that the government's interpretation of the "new institutions" which the ICD is to set up differs from that of the opposition and rebel movements. For the rebels and the opposition, the presidency is included in the "new institutions" which need to be created, and filling the presidency should be on the dialogue agenda. The government's position, however, is that the post of president, during a transitional period and prior to elections, is not vacant.

Meanwhile, diplomatic observers were saying that the ICD would be futile unless the DRC and Rwanda reconciled, and the root cause of the war - the fear that former Rwandan soldiers and militiamen living in the DRC will attack the Tutsi minority in Rwanda - had been done away with, AFP reported. Members of the RCD on Wednesday vowed that the movement would never accept a deal under which Kabila stayed in power, the agency reported. "What the country needs is a neutral leader, not necessarily from the RCD, but someone we can trust," an RCD delegate said.