President Yoweri Museveni and President Paul Kagame met with the UN envoys
The presidents of
Rwanda and Uganda told U.N. Security Council envoys on Monday that
their countries were not responsible for bringing peace to neighbouring
Democratic Republic of Congo's volatile east, which has long been mired
in conflict and is bristling with armed groups.
Envoys from the 15-member
council met with Rwandan President Paul Kalama in Kigali and then
President Yoweri Museveni in Kampala after spending two days in Congo visiting the United Nations' largest peacekeeping operation.
Millions of people have been killed by
violence, disease and hunger since the 1990s as rebel groups have fought
for control of eastern Congo's rich deposits of gold, diamonds, copper,
cobalt and uranium.
Britain's U.N.
Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said both Kagame and Museveni described an
18-month rebellion by the M23 guerrilla group as just a symptom and not a
cause of Congo's problems, which were much more deep-seated in issues
such as a lack of governance.
"(They
said) it was really up to (Congolese President Joseph) Kabila to
resolve those issues. The international community could still help, but
it wasn't the responsibility of Rwanda and it wasn't the responsibility
of Uganda," Lyall Grant told reporters.
"They
felt that Kabila had made a lot of mistakes and that he didn't have
control of his own troops and that was the fundamental issue - not
anything else about cross-border interference," he said.
U.N.
experts have accused Rwanda of supporting M23, which is mainly led by
ethnic Tutsis, a charge that Kigali has rejected. The roots of the
rebellion in the region lie in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, where Hutu
troops killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Some
Security Council envoys described Kagame as defensive during the
meeting. He told them that Rwanda, where Tutsis and Hutus have
reconciled after the genocide, should not be lectured on what was needed
to bring peace to eastern Congo.
"It's
going to be the people and the countries in the region who determine
whether or not there is peace," U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power told reporters after the meeting with Kagame.
"The
armed groups need to be eliminated and every country in the region
needs to use whatever leverage it has to get rid of those groups," said
Power. "That's the only hope the people in the region have."
'WE ARE NOT HAPPY'
During
a visit by the ambassadors to the eastern Congolese city of Goma on
Sunday, U.N. officials said while M23 had captured global headlines,
just as great a threat was posed by the Democratic Forces for the
Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and the Islamist group Allied Democratic
Forces (ADF).
M23 has accused the Congolese army of receiving military support from the FDLR, an accusation Kinshasa rejects.
Civil
society leaders in North Kivu, where Goma is the capital, told the
council envoys that the Congolese government controlled only about 25
percent of the province, while the rest was in the hands of dozens of
armed groups.
African leaders
signed a U.N.-mediated regional accord in February aimed at ending two
decades of conflict in eastern Congo. Rwanda and Uganda both said they
were committed to implementing the pact, U.N. diplomats said.
Museveni
said he had to deploy more troops on the Ugandan border with Congo
because of the threat posed by the ADF. The Ugandan government says the
ADF is allied to elements of Somalia's al Shabaab movement, an al
Qaeda-linked group.
Congolese
forces, with the help of a new U.N. Intervention Brigade that has a
mandate to neutralize armed groups, successfully pushed M23 fighters
away from Goma - a city of one million people - in August. The military
defeat forced M23 to return to peace talks being brokered by the Ugandan
government.
During the meeting
with Museveni, Lyall Grant said envoys were told "that there was a real
chance of reaching agreement in the next few days," but diplomats were
wary of that prediction because there were still outstanding issues to
be resolved.
The United Nations
said on Saturday that a third of child soldiers who had escaped from
M23 were lured from Rwanda with promises of cash, jobs and education.
The
United States, which has called on Rwanda to drop its support for the
M23 rebels, stepped up pressure on Kigali last week by moving to block
military aid over the recruitment of M23 child soldiers in its
territory.
"I don't expect you to
hear me say that we are happy, we are not," said Rwandan Foreign
Minister Louise Mushikiwabo. "Rwanda does not tolerate children being
enrolled in any way near armed groups, not in our own army, and that's
Rwanda's position."
"Our belief is
that once this crisis (in Congo) is resolved, once we get rid of these
armed groups then there will be no longer the issue of child soldiers,"
she told reporters.
(This story corrects description of leadership of M23 in the seventh paragraph)
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; editing by Christopher Wilson)
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