Global Policy Forum

By Marc Lacey

The long-awaited peace talks to end the Congo conflict opened here this week, but ending that country's intractable civil war is clearly a long way off.

Even the talks, billed as a 45-day inter-Congolese dialogue, almost never got off the ground. First, organizers came close to canceling the entire affair for lack of money.

Then, some of the most central participants, President Joseph Kabila of Congo among them, decided to stay away.

Finally, there were fundamental disagreements among the parties who did show, not least regarding who was most responsible for violating a 1999 cease-fire aimed at ending the war.

The conflict began soon after the longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was overthrown in 1997 by Laurent Kabila, Joseph Kabila's father. It has since become Africa's widest war, drawing in the armies of five outside nations: Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe and, to some extent, Namibia.

The armies of those countries have trod on Congolese soil in a multipronged conflict of shifting alliances that has seriously destabilized the continent. Nobody knows the toll but estimates put the number of casualties at 100,000 people.

But as the negotiations here began, Mr. Kabila remained in Kinshasa, his capital, saying he considered the talks only a preliminary discussion aimed at setting the parameters of real peace negotiations sometime in the future.

"President Kabila will only come when the real dialogue starts," said Leonard She Okitundu, the Congolese foreign minister and Mr. Kabila's stand-in.

The absence of the Congolese leader prompted angry rebel commanders, who had hoped to lay the groundwork for a transitional government this week, to boycott the opening of the session as well.

Jean-Pierre Bemba of the Uganda- backed rebel group, the Congolese Liberation Front, said he would not participate if Mr. Kabila were not there.

Adolphe Onusumba, leader of the Congolese Rally for Democracy, remained in his Addis Ababa hotel to make a similar point.

"Once conflict starts, there is mutual mistrust that builds up and that is itself a stumbling block," observed President Frederick J. T. Chiluba of Zambia, the lone head of state to participate. "The attitudes harden. Sometimes the ground becomes pretty hostile."

But Mr. Chiluba, who mediated the 1999 agreement that laid the groundwork for the current negotiations, said he took solace in the fact that the talks began at all. There were many doubters, especially after the recent United States bombing of Afghanistan seemed to divert the world's attention even further from the Congo war.

"There appear to be long odds against the inter-Congolese dialogue ever starting," a research organization known as the International Crisis Group said in a recent report. "If it does begin, it is likely to become a new theater for strife between all the competing interests."

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