May 14, 2001
A UN Security Council mission will make a first-hand survey of the peace settlement in the Democratic Republic of Congo by visiting African countries that signed the 1999 Lusaka agreement on the Congo, it was announced Monday.
French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte, who is heading the 12-member mission that will leave New York for Johannesburg Monday night, said the main purposes of the visit are to ensure that foreign troops will have withdrawn from Congo and to look at plans for the disarmament and reintegration into society of rebel troops in that country.
Levitte said the mission will be briefed by African ministers on May 21 and 22 on the troop withdrawal and disarming of rebel troops inside Congo. "The UN role and that of the UN Security Council is to monitor the implementation of the 1999 Lusaka cease-fire agreement and to help and encourage the parties (in that agreement)," Levitte said.
He said signers of the Lusaka agreement are responsible for the implementation and the UN is not their substitute. Several hundred UN troops and military observers are already in the Congo, monitoring the disengagement of troops and their withdrawal from Congo.
The UN mission, comprising 12 of the 15 ambassadors on the council, will hold discussions on Tuesday with South African leaders as well as former President Nelson Mandela. Following the South African stop, the group will visit Angola, Congo, Namibia, Zambia, Burundi, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda.
The 10-day visit will allow the mission to meet nearly all leaders in the Great Lakes region and to take the opportunity to discuss the possibility of organizing a peace and security conference on that region, Levitte said.
"We are there not to help one country at the expense of the other, but to help the region as a whole," Levitte said. The French diplomat insisted that leaders in the region are responsible for their countries' peace and security while the UN can only motivate them.
After the overthrow of former dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, the country has been plagued by civil conflict that has drawn in forces from five other countries, including Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia backing the government and Uganda and Rwanda backing rebel troops.
