Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette

United Nations - The top United Nations envoy to Congo said today that a new cease-fire has been holding for more than a week and that there are hopes that forces fighting in the civil war there can soon be separated to allow the stationing of international peacekeepers.

Kamel Morjane, the special envoy from Secretary General Kofi Annan, said at a news conference that a plan was being discussed among the warring parties to create buffer zones about 20 miles wide between combatants on the war's multiple fronts. Talks began first with rebel forces in eastern Congo, who are backed by Rwanda and Uganda. "It's a sort of prudent optimism I have," Mr. Morjane said.

At least four other African nations are also involved in the conflict, some of them on the side of President Laurent Kabila, who has justified their presence by charging that his country, the former Zaire, has been invaded by Rwanda and Uganda, his former allies, and is not in a civil war. Mr. Kabila gets military help from Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia.

The Kabila government, which had blocked United Nations liaison officers and an African mediator, Sir Ketumile Masire, from traveling in the country for months, has recently become more cooperative, Mr. Morjane said.

Sir Ketumile, a former president of Botswana, also spoke to reporters here today but appeared less optimistic than Mr. Morjane. Sir Ketumile said there was no predicting how events would unfold. "I'm encouraged that there is this convivial atmosphere," he said. "But one does not know how long it will last."

Sir Ketumile and Mr. Morjane, a Tunisian who studied disaster management at the University of Wisconsin and was formerly chief of the Africa bureau for the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, briefed the Security Council in advance of an unusual trip that representatives of seven council member nations plan to make to Congo next week. They hope to see the situation firsthand and to meet with Mr. Kabila before making a decision about sending in United Nations peacekeepers.

The Security Council team will be led by the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Richard C. Holbrooke, and will include the ambassadors of Britain, France, Mali, Namibia, the Netherlands and Tunisia. They will also stop in Lusaka, Zambia, for talks with other African leaders involved in the war.

Another Security Council team will leave on Wednesday for Kosovo to inspect a huge United Nations operation there. These trips add a new facet to Security Council work, getting them out of consultation rooms and into the field. A council delegation's visit to Indonesia last summer proved crucial in getting Indonesia to agree to the sending of an international peacekeeping force to East Timor.

Confronting a war in Congo and the failure of a cease-fire last year, the council has decided to send 500 cease-fire monitors, backed by about 3,400 troops and a support staff of about 1,500 people. But the council is waiting for a credible cease-fire so that the peacekeepers will not be caught up in fighting.

A plan outlined by Mr. Morjane today calls for the peacekeepers to be divided into four battalions, each in a different part of the country, to protect the monitors. Then weapons could be collected and soldiers dispersed to their homes or other centers.

African leaders say they would have preferred a more active force to disarm combatants by force if necessary, but the council did not agree. Peacekeeping missions in Africa have sometimes gone disastrously wrong in the past, as in Somalia in 1993 or in Rwanda the following year.