Kinshasa wants errant officers sent back from Belgium

The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has asked Belgium to hunt down and send back 12 Congolese army officers who were recently reported absent without leave (AWOL) from their military training camps, Defence Minister Jean-Pierre Ondekane said on Wednesday.

"We have asked the Belgian authorities to look for them and send them back to Kinshasa for prosecution," he said.

The officers who went AWOL were among 280 sent to Belgium for training as military instructors for the new Congolese army.

"The training of the others will continue and officials have taken measures so that there will be no further incidents of this kind," Rene Mordan, a Belgian naval captain in charge of Belgian-Congolese military cooperation, said in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital.

Jacques Ebanga, the director general of Labor Optimus, a centre for strategic and security studies based in Kinshasa, said the criteria used to select officers for this training in Belgium was flawed.

"The selection criteria should be based on aptitude, competence and loyalty; but unfortunately nepotism and tribalism could be noticed when one looked at the different lists," Ebanga said.

Ondekane said the government was preparing 16 sites to enable the Belgian-trained instructors to train their colleagues on their return.

However, the programme to demobilise, disarm and reintegrate fighters into society, which should end with the establishment of a new unified army, is still at the point of sensitising the close to 300,000 men from former rival rebel factions.

Kinshasa's request for the return of the errant officers came as Belgian foreign and cooperation ministers, Karel de Gucht and Armand de Decker respectively, arrived on Wednesday in Kinshasa where they met with President Joseph Kabila.

They were also due to hold talks on political issues with other government officials and Congo's four vice-presidents. The country is in political transition after five years of war and is due to hold democratic elections in 2005.

The Belgian delegation is due to visit the volatile east of the country on Thursday to take stock of the situation there. They will visit Bukavu, capital of South Kivu, where fighting erupted between army dissidents and loyalist troops in June, and later the southeastern city of Lubumbashi in Katanga Province.

Congo is a former colony of Belgium, which granted it independence in 1960. The mineral-rich country has had a history of instability and underdevelopment. As it moves towards democratic elections, Belgium is helping to integrate former belligerents into a new national army.