Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette

Twelve Security Council ambassadors who are visiting Congo and neighboring countries to encourage a peaceful resolution of Africa's widest war are finding positive developments across the region, the group's leader said today.

The leader, Ambassador Jean-David Levitte of France, said in an interview today from Lusaka, Zambia, that all the major foreign participants in Congo's war were now committed to a withdrawal, and that Congolese rebels were also ready to disarm. The war has pitted Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, along with several rebel groups, against the Congolese government, backed by Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe. "The mood is good," Mr. Levitte said, after representatives of all the parties to the conflict met on Tuesday in Lusaka and pledged to revive a moribund peace agreement signed there almost two years ago.

The improved atmosphere, he said, comes after Joseph Kabila took over the presidency of Congo after his father and predecessor, Laurent D. Kabila, was assassinated in January. A year ago, the first mission to Congo, led by Richard C. Holbrooke, then the American ambassador at the United Nations, left the country much more pessimistic.

This time, the delegation's reception in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, was markedly warmer. Last year, a series of difficult meetings produced only one hard-won accord governing the stationing of United Nations forces — a pact the Congolese then violated. This time, the delegation won agreement on several new measures, including the beginning of a discussion among Congolese political factions, the stationing of international human rights monitors and the reopening of the Congo River to commercial traffic. Mr. Levitte said renewed river traffic in a huge country without major roads was important to an economy in disarray.

The cooperation of President Kabila has marginalized the rebel groups, Mr. Levitte said, mentioning the Movement for the Liberation of Congo and the Congolese Rally for Democracy. Both had the potential to spoil a cease-fire. "They are a bit lost, and they are on the defensive," Mr.Levitte said. Under the old rules of the game, he added, "the bad guy was Laurent Desire Kabila. And so the others appeared, naturally, as the good guys. Now the good guy is a Kabila, and so the others are really destabilized."

Mr. Levitte acknowledged that tensions still existed, and that this mission did include some "very difficult discussions." Moreover, attacks have been reported in Rwanda by Hutu-led rebels whom the Rwandan government has accused Congo of aiding. The rebels are drawn from the exiled militias and former Rwandan Army troops that carried out a genocidal campaign against ethnic Tutsi in 1994. And today in Kinshasa, an investigation panel charged that Rwanda had been responsible for the killing of the elder Mr. Kabila. Such developments could arouse old antagonisms.

President Kabila has, however, begun to talk with Presidents Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Pierre Buyoya of Burundi about how to defuse these tensions. The council expects to receive by mid-June details of a plan to disarm Rwanda's enemies. The Security Council mission arrived today in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, to lend its weight to a separate peace mission there led by Nelson Mandela. Burundi is feared to be on the threshold of another civil war.