ABUJA: President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame were locked in meetings in Nigerian yesterday aimed at pulling their neighbouring countries back from the brink of war.
The two presidents went into the crucial talks, called by Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo in his capacity as Chairman of the African Union’s First Peace and Security Council, shortly before noon in the federal capital of Abuja.
Obasanjo’s spokeswoman, Remi Oyo told AFP the talks would focus on “reconciliation and peace”.
She said Obasanjo “has been talking at different points separately with the presidents,” whose two countries have come to the brink of war after a month of unrest in eastern DRC, which Kabila has blamed on Rwanda.
Obasanjo announced Thursday that he would host the talks, two days after the DRC confirmed it had deployed reinforcements to its volatile eastern region to deal with rebels it claims are backed by Rwanda.
This move, which followed renewed clashes between “dissident soldiers” and loyalist troops, triggered fears for the future of DRC’s year-old peace process and for a slightly older peace pact between the central African neighbours.
Diplomatic sources in Kinshasa said Obasanjo had on June 18 during a brief stopover in DRC on his way back from a state visit to Zambia, issued an invitation to Kabila to attend talks on the crisis with Rwanda.
The two leaders arrived in Abuja within half an hour of each other. Kagame, who arrived first, was met by a protocol officer and then waited in the presidential lounge at the airport until his DRC counterpart’s plane had touched down.
The two leaders then walked with Obasanjo to a government building near the airport for the mini-summit.
DRC is struggling to emerge from a war that began as an uprising in the east in 1998 and grew into what has been called Africa’s world war, drawing in half a dozen other African states at its height and claiming an estimated 2.5 million lives.
The war ended last year with a peace pact that set up a transition government and created a new army which brings former rebels from the war under Kinshasa’s command.
In July 2002, Kabila and Kagame signed a peace pact, under which Rwanda agreed to withdraw some 20,000 soldiers it had in DRC and Kinshasa agreed to round up, disarm and repatriate ethnic Hutu extremists who fled into what was then Zaire after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Rwanda withdrew its troops in October last year, and Kinshasa has succeeded in arresting some suspects in the Rwandan genocide, and in repatriating many lesser players in the 100-day slaughter, but accusations of war-mongering and illegal incursions onto the other’s territory have continued to fly between the two neighbours.
And despite peace returning to most of DRC since last year’s peace pact, violence has continued to rock the east of the vast country, which is almost the size of western Europe and has more than 200 ethnic groups.
For the past month, the region around the eastern town of Bukavu has been the scene of clashes between so-called dissident soldiers, who have refused to be incorporated into the new army, and government troops.
Kabila has accused Rwanda of having a hand in the unrest, which culminated in the seizure of the town of Bukavu on June 2 by the dissidents, which the rebellious soldiers held for a week.
Even as Kabila and Kagame met to talk peace in Abuja, the UN mission in DRC, MONUC, said hundreds of civilians have in recent days fled the town 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Bukavu after dissident soldiers set up camp there.
Locals began fleeing Minova as rumours circulated that “military reinforcements for General Nkunda, one of the leaders of the dissident soldiers who overran Bukavu- were massing nearby, MONUC spokesman, Madnodje Manoubai told AFP by telephone from eastern DRC.
Kabila announced on Tuesday in a televised statement that the DRC was strengthening its military presence in the east of the country to “protect the population and neutralise armed groups.”
DRC’s two latest wars began in the east and both involved Rwanda.
In 1996, what was then Zaire plunged into war when Rwanda sent troops to support rebels who ousted the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
In August 1998, Banyamulenge soldiers launched an uprising in the eastern towns of Goma and Bukavu aimed at toppling Mobutu’s successor, Laurent Kabila.
Kigali again sent soldiers to back the rebels and neutralise the threat posed by the Rwandan Hutu extremists who had fled to the eastern DRC after carrying out the 1994 genocide.
