Global Policy Forum

President Joseph Kabila said on Tuesday that securing a lasting peace was the first step to luring foreign investors back to the mineral-rich country scarred by war.

Kabila, on a two-day state visit to Namibia, said his government was committed to ending the three-year-old civil war and creating an environment conducive to investment. "The first step, of course, is to bring peace to the (Congo)," Kabila told business leaders in the capital Windhoek.

Kabila's visit to Namibia, which sent troops to the Congo in 1998 to back the Kinshasa government, is expected to focus on the peace process and improving business ties between the two countries.

The former Zaire's civil war has drawn in armies from Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe, which backed the government against a rebellion supported by Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.

Kabila, who replaced his slain father Laurent in January, has allowed the deployment of UN peace monitors and helped to revive the stalled 1999 Lusaka peace accords.

Kabila's government has also pledged to reform the country's mining and investment codes to make them more investor friendly, and promised better legal protection for companies entering into contracts. "We now want to treat businesses separately as we had a lot of quarrels about contracts signed and then cancelled illegally," Kabila told the business leaders.

During his father's presidency, foreign mining companies complained that the government often cancelled mining contracts illegally, or made fresh demands after a contract was signed. Kabila is scheduled to visit several Namibian companies and meet with government ministers in a bid to expand economic ties. Namibian officials said Kabila would brief Namibian President Sam Nujoma on Congo's peace process on Tuesday night.

Kabila attended the opening of a week-long meeting in Botswana on Monday between Congolese government ministers, rebel factions, opposition parties and civic groups aimed at kick-starting an internal dialogue on ending the conflict. Delegates at the talks are to set a date, venue and rules for a dialogue that mediators hope will begin within six months.

A peace accord to end Congo's many-sided war, which experts say has claimed 1.7 million lives, was signed in the Zambian capital Lusaka in 1999. But the agreement has been stalled by violations from all sides in the conflict.

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