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Congo's
Kabila Praises Indictment of his Enemies, UN Spins Kivu Displacement
Byline:
Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press in Africa:
News Analysis
KINSHASA, June 7 – After being
scoffed at by Sudan's
president Omar al-Bashir, that the U.S. would demand compliance with
the
International Court of which it is not a mention, and after Chad's
president
Idriss Deby Itno did not even meet with them, the UN Security Council
members
on Saturday found an African leader who praised them, albeit behind
closed
doors. Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
came in to the blue-ceilinged meeting room where the Ambassadors were
waiting,
shook hands and asked what the press was doing there. In the
closed-door
meeting that followed, Kabila said that he's found that arrest by the
International
Criminal Court of militia leaders, most of them his opponents, "is a
very
good thing," according to Inner City Press' sources in the meeting.
It's
not surprising that he would praise these arrests, of opponents in
Ituri and
most recently of Jean-Pierre Bemba, his main challenger in the last
election.
After
the meeting,
Inner City Press asked French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, the
leader for
this leg of the Council's ten day cross-Africa tour, if the issue of
the
draw-down of the UN Mission in the Congo had come up. Of
course, he
said, but it will not happen soon, and should not happen abruptly. When
the UN
and its Council finally find a place they are wanted, they want to
stay. The UK's
John
Sawers, who confirmed that he is leaving the delegation tonight then
headed to London to prepare for a visit by Ban Ki-moon, bragged that
his country has
become the biggest aid donor to the DRC. "France can't be happy with
that," it was suggested. Then they should raise their foreign aid, was
the
reply.
Ban and Kabila, criticism of UN not shown
That
the UN or at
least its officials in the know are, however, looking beyond the DRC is
exemplified by the plan by the long-time spokesman for MONUC, Kemal
Saiki, to
decamp for a similar position with the UN Mission in Darfur by
mid-July. He
will be replaced by Kevin Kennedy from UN Peacekeeping in New York, but
only in September.
How
will messages be
crafted in the interim? For example,
faced with NGOs' exposes that the number of displaced in North Kivu has been increasing so far this year,
MONUC has tried to
ascribe this to increased humanitarian access. According to MONUC, it's
a
positive and not negative story in the Eastern
Congo.
Being so Pollyanna is, however, a double-edged sword. If things are so
good,
the drawdown should begin. The Council's
next stop will be in North Kivu --
watch this
site.
Footnote: The press waited in the
palace's first floor,
where six air-conditioners cooled an open-air patio facing the river.
There
were portraits of Kabila, in nearly every room, and also once on the
second
floor of Patrice Lumumba. On the way into the compound, soldiers with
automatic
weapons demanded that no photos be taken.
* * *
These reports are
usually also available through Google
News and on Lexis-Nexis.
Click
here for a Reuters
AlertNet piece by this correspondent
about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Click
here
for an earlier Reuters AlertNet piece about the Somali National
Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's $200,000 contribution from an
undefined trust fund. Video
Analysis here
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