Congo army says close to deal with renegade general
Source: Reuters
By Joe Bavier KINSHASA, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Army officials in Democratic Republic of Congo said on Saturday they were close to a deal to end fighting with renegade general Laurent Nkunda, but his supporters said much still remained to be negotiated. Nkunda, a former high-ranking general in the Congolese army, led two brigades in a mutiny against President Joseph Kabila in the east of the vast country in 2004, a year after the official end to Congo's wider six-year war. His men attacked government positions in the volatile North Kivu province in late November, sparking a month of on-off clashes. The two sides have observed an informal ceasefire for the past 10 days while talks are held between their commanders. Colonel Jean-Paul Finda, an aide to Congolese army chief General Major Kisempia Sungilanga Lombe, told Reuters the deal included a plan to mix Nkunda's renegade forces with three government brigades already stationed in North Kivu. "We are already working on the documents," he said in a telephone interview from the provincial capital Goma. "Beginning Monday, you'll know more." Following the end of Congo's latest war -- a 1998-2003 conflict which killed an estimated four million people, mainly from starvation and disease --the army has been undergoing a disarmament and reintegration process meant to include rebel fighters in a new national force. Usually, fighters from rival sides are redeployed elsewhere in the former Belgian colony, but in the case of the deal drawn up for Nkunda's men the renegade soldiers would remain in North Kivu in the same brigades as loyalist troops. A Congolese army delegation met on Saturday with several of Nkunda's commanders in North Kivu, their seventh encounter since talks began two weeks ago. The meetings have coincided with talks in neighbouring Rwanda, brokered by Kigali, between Congolese officials and supporters of Nkunda, who is wanted for war crimes allegedly committed in 2004. A source close to Nkunda, who asked not to be named, told Reuters the proposed mixing of the brigades was a demand of the Congolese government delegation and that Nkunda's own conditions must be met if a long-term solution was to be found. "This is a question with many aspects that cannot be negotiated between military commanders alone," the source said. "There are other political questions. But we are now dealing with the military side." Nkunda's demands included the guaranteed safe return to North Kivu of thousands of Congolese Tutsis now living in Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda, and the expulsion of Hutu Interahamwe militias. Hutu rebels fled to eastern Congo, the cradle of a decade of war in the country, after helping to carry out the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed. Rwanda's army invaded Congo twice in the late 1990s saying it wanted to hunt down those who led the genocide.
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