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Credit: Reuters
The presidents of Rwanda
and Uganda told U.N. Security Council envoys on Monday that their countries
were not responsible for bringing peace to neighboring Democratic Republic of
Congo's volatile east, which has long been mired in conflict and is bristling
with armed groups.
Envoys from the
15-member council met with Rwandan President Paul Kagame in Kigali and then
President Yoweri Museveni in Kampala after spending two days in Congo visiting
the United Nations' largest peacekeeping operation.
Millions of people have
been killed by violence, disease and hunger since the 1990s as rebel groups
have fought for control of eastern Congo's rich deposits of gold, diamonds,
copper, cobalt and uranium.
Britain's U.N.
Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said both Kagame and Museveni described an 18-month
rebellion by the M23 guerrilla group as just a symptom and not a cause of
Congo's problems, which were much more deep-seated in issues such as a lack of
governance.
"(They said) it was
really up to (Congolese President Joseph) Kabila to resolve those issues. The
international community could still help, but it wasn't the responsibility of
Rwanda and it wasn't the responsibility of Uganda," Lyall Grant told
reporters.
"They felt that
Kabila had made a lot of mistakes and that he didn't have control of his own
troops and that was the fundamental issue - not anything else about
cross-border interference," he said.
U.N. experts have
accused Rwanda of supporting M23, which is mainly led by ethnic Tutsis, a
charge that Kigali has rejected. The roots of the rebellion in the region lie
in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, where Hutu troops killed 800,000 Tutsis and
moderate Hutus.
Some Security Council
envoys described Kagame as defensive during the meeting. He told them that
Rwanda, where Tutsis and Hutus have reconciled after the genocide, should not
be lectured on what was needed to bring peace to eastern Congo.
"It's going to be
the people and the countries in the region who determine whether or not there
is peace," U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power told
reporters after the meeting with Kagame.
"The armed groups
need to be eliminated and every country in the region needs to use whatever
leverage it has to get rid of those groups," said Power. "That's the
only hope the people in the region have."
“We Are Not Happy”
During a visit by the
ambassadors to the eastern Congolese city of Goma on Sunday, U.N. officials
said while M23 had captured global headlines, just as great a threat was posed
by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and the Islamist
group Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).
M23 has accused the
Congolese army of receiving military support from the FDLR, an accusation
Kinshasa rejects.
Civil society leaders in
North Kivu, where Goma is the capital, told the council envoys that the
Congolese government controlled only about 25 percent of the province, while
the rest was in the hands of dozens of armed groups.
African leaders signed a
U.N.-mediated regional accord in February aimed at ending two decades of
conflict in eastern Congo. Rwanda and Uganda both said they were committed to
implementing the pact, U.N. diplomats said.
Museveni said he had to
deploy more troops on the Ugandan border with Congo because of the threat posed
by the ADF. The Ugandan government says the ADF is allied to elements of
Somalia's al Shabaab movement, an al Qaeda-linked group.
Congolese forces, with
the help of a new U.N. Intervention Brigade that has a mandate to neutralize
armed groups, successfully pushed M23 fighters away from Goma - a city of one
million people - in August. The military defeat forced M23 to return to peace
talks being brokered by the Ugandan government.
During the meeting with
Museveni, Lyall Grant said envoys were told "that there was a real chance
of reaching agreement in the next few days," but diplomats were wary of
that prediction because there were still outstanding issues to be resolved.
The United Nations said
on Saturday that a third of child soldiers who had escaped from M23 were lured
from Rwanda with promises of cash, jobs and education.
The United States, which
has called on Rwanda to drop its support for the M23 rebels, stepped up
pressure on Kigali last week by moving to block military aid over the
recruitment of M23 child soldiers in its territory. [ID:ID:nL1N0HT24L]
"I don't expect you
to hear me say that we are happy, we are not," said Rwandan Foreign
Minister Louise Mushikiwabo. "Rwanda does not tolerate children being
enrolled in any way near armed groups, not in our own army, and that's Rwanda's
position."
"Our belief is that
once this crisis (in Congo) is resolved, once we get rid of these armed groups
then there will be no longer the issue of child soldiers," she told
reporters
