Congo Peace Agreement Signed in S. Africa

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, December 17, 2002

Congo Peace Agreement Signed in S. Africa

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Various parties of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) signed an agreement early Tuesday in Pretoria, the capital of South Africa to end four years of conflict and set up a power sharing government.

Under the agreement, President Joseph Kabila will remain as head of state of the DRC during a two-year run-up to the first elections since independence from Belgium in 1960.

Kabila will be seconded by four vice-presidents selected from the ranks of the government, the rebel Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC), the rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) and the unarmed opposition.

Ministries will be split among the various parties.

The agreement was signed by delegates representing the Kinshasa government, rebels, militias, opposition politicians and civil society after 9-day negotiations in the Presidential Guesthouse in Pretoria from Dec. 9 to Dec. 17.

The mediators, UN special envoy Moustapha Niasse and South African Provincial Affairs Minister Sydney Mufamadi, had earlier given the delegates, who have been negotiating on and off since February, a deadline of December 14 to reach an agreement.

The Kinshasa regime and two rebel groups, which started fighting in August 1998 with the help of Rwanda and Uganda, agreedlate October in principle to set up an interim government to take the vast war-torn DRC into democratic elections.

The breakthrough came as the Ugandan-backed Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC) dropped its objections to the appointment of four vice presidents to help President Joseph Kabila.

The MLC previously said this would give Kabila too much power and the UN-chaired talks had been deadlocked on the issue since they opened in Pretoria on Saturday.

The United Nations is hoping that the Pretoria talks, the latest of many such meetings in the past year, will see a power-sharing government put in place in the DRC in January 2003.

It is meant to reunite the vast country, of which the rebels control almost two-thirds, and to organize its first elections since independence from Belgium in 1960.

The former Zaire suffered more than three decades of ruinous dictatorship before war broke out in 1996 when Rwanda invaded in pursuit of militia who had carried out the 1994 genocide in that country.

It did so again in 1998 to back the rebellion to oust then president Laurent Kabila, and the insurgency grew into Africa's biggest war, killing an estimated 2.5 million people.

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