Brussels meeting expected to ease tensions

A meeting of the foreign ministers of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, scheduled for 11-12 July in the Belgian capital, Brussels, will focus on reviving economic cooperation as a way of easing tensions among the three nations, a Rwandan minister told IRIN on Monday. "We want to revive cooperation in areas of banking, electricity distribution and agriculture which existed before the war," Regional Cooperation Minister Protais Mitali said in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. He said the three ministers, meeting at the invitation of their Belgian counterpart, Louis Michel, were due to discuss the revival of the defunct Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries (ECGL), which collapsed when fighting broke out between Rwanda and the DRC in 1998. "We hope this process will also create a forum where we could discuss any political differences, especially between us and the DRC, without necessarily involving other countries," Mitali ssaid. Once revived, he said, the ECGL would promote regional economic cooperation, particularly in the operation of joint services such as electricity distribution and banking. He noted that before its collapse, the ECGL had had an electricity distribution company in Rwanda, a regional bank in the DRC and an agricultural research centre based in Burundi. The Brussels meeting comes after several months of escalating tensions between the DRC and its eastern neighbour Rwanda, with both countries trading accusations of cross-border interference. The Kinshasa government has accused Rwanda of fomenting unrest in eastern DRC, following fighting between the DRC army and dissident troops, which, the DRC government claimed, was backed by the Kigali government; the Rwandan government denied the allegation. DRC President Joseph Kabila and Rwanda's Paul Kagame pulled back their countries from the brink of war in late June when they held crisis talks in Nigeria, during which they renewed their commitments to the terms of the 2002 Pretoria peace pact, which committed them against engaging in hostilities.