April 3, 2001
First talks to pave the way for inter-Congolese dialogue among rival forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will take place at the end of April, said rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba. Bemba, who heads the Congolese Liberation Front (FLC), added that he had on Sunday spoken to Ketumile Masire, Botswana's former president appointed "facilitator" in dialogue as part of the DRC peace process.
Masire's visit to Beni, a base of the Ugandan-backed FLC in the northeast of the vast war-wracked country, "went very well", Bemba told AFP in Kigali by telephone. The preparatory talks will take place among rival DRC parties who signed a ceasefire pact in Lusaka in 1999 - the Kinshasa government, Bemba's movement and the other main rebel group, the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD).
Bemba gave no precise date and the venue for the meeting was not known. Masire has been brought back into the peace process since the death in January of DRC president Laurent Kabila, whose son Joseph succeeded him. The late president had opposed Masire as mediator, accusing him of bias, and while he was in power the Lusaka accords, which were also signed by the foreign countries with armies backing rival DRC sides, remained a dead letter.
Since then, however, Bemba has been the main stumbling block to the disengagement now under way of military forces from the front lines and the deployment of UN troops who will protect an observer force.
The current war which has split the country in two began in August 1998, when rebels launched an insurgency against the Kabila regime. The FLC leader made the withdrawal of his own forces from the front conditional upon the arrival of UN soldiers. He told AFP that on Saturday he told foreign ambassadors who went to see him in Beni that had "stressed the need to protect the civilian population", particularly in the northwestern Bolomba sector.
"Our adversaries on this part of the front line are Interahamwe militia (Rwandan Hutu extremist rebels who took part in their own country's 1994 genocide), who belong to the Jaguar Battalion," he said. "We thus have reason to fear massacres if we pull back from our positions." "We also want to see the allies of the Kinshasa regime pull back, as Uganda and Rwanda are doing today," Bemba said. The Interahamwe he referred to were driven out of Rwanda by mainly Tutsi rebels who ended the genocide and set up the current regime in Kigali. "It worries us to see that Zimbabwe and Angola are, on the contrary, reinforcing their positions and even taking it upon themselves to disarm Congolese government troops in Kinshasa," he added.
In Harare on Monday, a Zimbabwean army spokesman charged that Bemba's rebels had attacked the "allied forces" - those on Kinshasa's side - during the disengagement process. Lieutenant-Colonel Mbonisi Gatsheni also stated that Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia had "finished the first phase of the disengagement and redeployment" in line with the Harare accord and subsequent agreements.
All the protagonists had been due to withdraw by 15km from the front lines stretching across the divided country by midnight on March 28. The Senegalese general heading UN military forces last week spoke of some hitches in the process, but said that it was largely on track.
