Global Policy Forum

By Thalif Deen

The United Nations, perhaps for the first time, is on the verge of abandoning a proposed peacekeeping operation in Africa even before it can get off the ground.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to recommend to the Security Council sometime next week that the planned UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) be aborted before take-off. Unless there are dramatic new developments in the UN's current peace efforts, the Security Council is likely to go along with Annan's recommendation.

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said the proposed UN mission has met ''repeated obstacles'' to its deployment right from the beginning. ''There have been complaints about the neutral facilitator's role, the inter-Congolese dialogue has broken down, and now they have denied the right to deploy armed peacekeepers,'' he said. ''So this is a mission that appears to be blocked on just about every front,'' Eckhard added.

Currently, there are about 228 military observers and military liaison officers deployed in and around the DRC. But the key element in the UN peace effort, namely the deployment of a 5,500- strong peacekeeping force, remains stalled.

Last week the United Nations announced it had suspended the deployment of Tunisian and Moroccan troops who formed part of the first armed units to have arrived in the DRC. Other countries volunteering troops for MONUC include Senegal and Pakistan. The new crisis has arisen because of the intransigence of the government of President Laurent Kabila who has also laid down fresh terms and conditions which are not acceptable to the world body.

Eckhard said the decision to suspend the deployment of troops was taken following the DRC government's announcement that it would not permit armed UN troops inside Kinshasa, the capital, or in any other Congolese city. Kabila has insisted that UN troops should be deployed only in rebel-held territory and not in the areas controlled by government forces. But this is not acceptable to the United Nations.

The UN force was expected to supervise a cease-fire and the withdrawal of foreign forces under a peace agreement signed in Lusaka last year. Under this agreement, the UN was called upon to deploy troops throughout the strife-torn country. Last week the Security Council issued a statement asking signatories to ''adhere to the commitments they made'' in the Lusaka Accord.

Kabila is being militarily supported by Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia while the different rebel factions are being backed by Uganda and Rwanda. But the Ugandan and Rwandan military forces have turned their guns on each other creating a totally new crisis in the DRC.

''The renewed outbreaks of fighting in Kisangani between the Rwandan and Ugandan armed forces are a cause of profound disquiet,'' Annan said in a report to the Security Council in June. ''The civilian population of Kisangani has already suffered grievously in the crossfire between the two foreign forces that are fighting each other on Congolese territory,'' he added.

The report also warned that the deployment of UN troops in the DRC presented a particularly acute problem of logistics. ''The degraded state of the infrastructure in the country, the effective blocking of its inland waterway system by the conflict, and the lack of roads make it necessary initially to conduct all deployments and sustainment by air,'' it added.

This fact, the report said, has placed particular importance on the provision of specialised units to prepare and ensure the security and safety of airstrips in the interior, without which deployment cannot take place.

Hedi Annabi, Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, told the Security Council last week that the fighting between government forces and rebel groups has also caused ''a critical humanitarian'' problem on the boundary between the DRC and the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville).

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been trying to gain access to an estimated 45,000 refugees displaced by fighting in that area alone.

Last week the Secretary-General's Special Representative to the DRC, Kamel Morjane, together with the Mission's Force Commander Mountaga Diallo, left for Lusaka to attend a meeting of the Political Committee of the Lusaka peace accord.

Meanwhile, Kabila has criticised the neutral facilitator, Sir Ketumile Masire, saying that he has no confidence in him. The Congolese president has asked the Organisation of Africa Unity (OAU) to propose a new neutral facilitator.