08 10 13 Rwanda, Uganda tell U.N. envoys peace in Congo is not their problem

 

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 led by ethnic Tutus, 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.

"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.