Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette

Kigali, Rwanda - Rwanda said today that it was ready to begin a gradual withdrawal of its troops from Congo, a step that members of the United Nations Security Council say could be the first real opening for negotiations to end a two-year war that now involves six African nations.

The extent of the breakthrough will be tested on Monday, when council members on a peace mission in Africa will meet the last - and now perhaps most crucial - player in the Congolese war, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

The war has made enemies of the Congo's president, Laurent Kabila, and his erstwhile allies, Rwanda and Uganda, who first helped him oust Congo's longtime dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, then attacked Mr. Kabila's forces in 1998. He has responded by drawing in 12,000 troops from Zimbabwe and smaller contingents from Angola and Namibia in his defense.

Besides consulting with the leaders of countries embroiled in Congo's tangled conflict, the council mission will attempt to quell another African war - between Ethiopia and Eritrea - by visiting both those nations later on Monday, officials with the group said late tonight. Peace talks between those two countries collapsed last week.

After several hours of talks today, Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, and the visiting council team led by Richard C. Holbrooke, the American ambassador to the United Nations, released a joint statement in which Rwanda said it was "prepared to move quickly to implement a phased withdrawal." The Rwandan government also said it was willing to discuss the release of prisoners of war through the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The declaration, which also includes commitments to intensify efforts toward a political solution to the Congo war, does not specify the target of the first withdrawal discussed today, from the town of Kisangani in eastern Congo. The Ugandans and Rwandans exchanged artillery and small-arms fire there last week, leaving as many as 10 people dead and 100 wounded, and complicating the Congo conflict even more. Both countries have troops in the town.

Using the sudden outbreak of fighting between allies, council members are trying to parlay an end to that dispute into a pledge by both sides to pull their troops out of Kisangani, the capital of Orientale Province, a potentially rich diamond-producing area.

In the view of the United Nations officials, Kisangani could then be declared the first "neutral" town, occupied by neither the Congolese army nor the Rwandans, Ugandans and the Congolese rebels they support.

In the next few days, the United Nations hopes to send about nine additional cease-fire monitors into Kisangani, to bolster a few already there in preparation for deployment of a broader United Nations group of about 5,500 officials and peacekeepers across Congo, a country the size of Western Europe.

Talks with President Museveni, Uganda's leader, are critical because they could provide the final string in a net of mutually beneficial moves that Security Council members are trying to weave around the combatants in the Congo war.

Mr. Museveni is, to some extent, on the defensive because the United States has publicly blamed Uganda for the unexpected fighting in Kisangani. And since Uganda is the last stop on this Congo mission, the delegation will arrive with the rest of a package, however flimsy, in place.

In addition to President Kagame's pledges of troop pullouts, the council has in hand an agreement from Mr. Kabila to allow United Nations peacekeepers a certain level of access - yet to be tested - in regions of Congo that he controls.

Last night in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, the council mission was told by President Robert Mugabe that he would not block the withdrawal of foreign forces from Congo - but he insisted that the Rwandans go first. Mr. Mugabe, whose generals are widely believed to be profiting from the trade in Congolese diamonds but who faces mounting disgruntlement about the war at home, told council members for the first time that he had indeed agreed to accept payment in Congolese resources in return for military support, but that so far he had yet to receive a single diamond.

In Congo, a Zimbabwean officer said in an interview that there was "not one Zimbabwean soldier who does not want to go home now." Diplomats in the region, who are mindful of the current chaos in Sierra Leone and have seen many United Nations ventures collapse, are very wary of the optimism of the diplomats from New York.

But this Security Council mission is an unusually strong team. Apart from Mr. Holbrooke, who began his career negotiating with the Vietnamese in the 1970's and is most well-known for the 1995 Dayton accord that ended the Bosnian war, there is Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador, a policy strategist and analyst who was President Jacques Chirac's security adviser until he was assigned to New York.

There are also three experienced African diplomats: Martin Andjaba of Namibia, Said ben Mustapha of Tunisia and Moctar Ouane, who until recently was the diplomatic adviser to the president of Mali. On the United Nations secretariat side, Secretary General Kofi Annan has appointed Kamel Morjane, a skilled Tunisian relief and emergency expert who studied in Switzerland and the United States, as his special representative. In an interview today, Mr. Levitte said that he - and the French government - were particularly concerned that Congo not slide into a situation like that in Cyprus, where the cease-fire line became a de facto boundary and people gave up on political solutions.

Mr. Levitte, who will be the Security Council president for June, said in an interview that he will concentrate on two steps to augment military moves in Congo: a proposed meeting in New York of major political figures involved in the Congo conflict and a plan to establish a panel of outside experts to look into the exploitation of Congolese resources, not only diamonds, but also gold, timber and agricultural wealth. It will be modeled on a report on the illegal trade in diamonds from Angola, a project of Canada's United Nations representative, Robert Fowler. "Everybody considers that in Africa, diamonds and other resources are food for war," Mr. Levitte said.

Although the crisis in Sierra Leone has overshadowed the Congo peace mission in recent days, the effects have been largely confined to the Security Council mission, not African leaders. There is scant coverage of the crisis in the press and almost no discussion of it, except in Zambia. Hundreds of that country's soldiers have apparently been taken hostage by rebels in Sierra Leone.

The decision to send peacekeepers to Congo has already been made by the Security Council. It is now up to Secretary General Annan to recommend when to send them. The council mission will issue a report on its return that is expected to be critical to the United Nations' next moves.