AFP
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A deal set to be signed today between the Democratic Republic of Congo and defeated M23 rebels is “a very important step for peace”, the UN’s special envoy to the war-torn Great Lakes region told AFP yesterday.
“It’s a very important step for peace in the Great Lakes because it enables us now to move forward,” Mary Robinson said, vowing that the national army and a special UN intervention brigade would press on with efforts to defeat other rebel groups.
“There is a different perception of what the government and MONUSCO together are doing in eastern Congo, but now all of the armed groups are going to be taken on,” the former Irish president said in an interview.
The M23 rebels, one of a myriad of armed groups operating in the mineral-rich but impoverished east of the DR Congo, have suffered a resounding rout at the hands of the national army backed by Monusco, a 22,000-strong UN force.
They are expected to sign a peace deal in Kampala, Uganda, today, formalising their pledge to abandon their 18-month insurgency and disband.
“It’s very positive that the army of the Congo, the FARDC, has had a military victory and has shown good discipline as the army of the country against a rebel group,” Robinson said.
“It’s been good for morale in the Congo. It’s good now that we conclude the Kampala (agreement) tomorrow because there’s an understanding” on reintegrating M23 fighters back into the national army or at least allowing them to return home, she added.
And for the long-suffering civilians in DR Congo’s Kivu region, the deal “is a new and welcome news for the people... who have tolerated or have had to endure for far too long these armed groups, with the raping and re-raping, with the displacement of people”.
“It has been intolerable, and now there really is hope,” she said.
Robinson said the priority would now shift to defeating the DRC-based Rwandan Hutu rebels of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a descendant of Rwandan Hutu extremist groups that carried out the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Neighbouring Rwanda’s minority Tutsi-led government views the FDLR as a major security threat, and had been accused by the UN of backing the Tutsi-dominated M23 in the region as a way of protecting its strategic interests.
But Robinson said Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni—whose country has also been accused of backing the M23 rebels—were committed to an 11-nation regional peace agreement signed in February.
“I’ve had a lot of contact and interaction with President Museveni of Uganda, with President Kagame of Rwanda, and I must say they have a very strong commitment to the framework,” she said.
“I think there is a recognition that we need to deal with the deeper causes because underneath the rebel group M23 is real grievance of the Tutsis who don’t feel at home in their own country, the Congo.”
“I am getting a very strong collective sense that they want to sort out this problem, that it’s holding this part of Africa back, not just the DRC but Africa,” Robinson added. Rwanda silent after defeat of DR Congo’s M23 rebels.
Rwanda, under intense international pressure over its alleged covert aid to M23 rebels in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, has maintained total silence since the group’s defeat.
UN experts have accused Uganda and in particular Rwanda of backing the rebels, and despite angry denials, officials in Kigali have been clearly anxious over the turn of events. On the eve of M23’s formal surrender, Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo warned in a radio interview that Kigali’s arch-foe, the DRC-based Rwandan Hutu rebels of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), were moving into positions abandoned by the M23.