Kinshasa Demands Rwanda Sanctions

KINSHASA, Monday - The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government on Monday called for an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council after rebels barred some 120 UN peacekeepers from deploying in Kisangani, in the first serious setback to the peace process. The foreign ministry said here that Kinshasa would ask the Security Council to impose economic sanctions on Rwanda, which backs the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), one of the main rebel groups fighting DRC government troops since August 1998. It accused the RCD and the Rwandan government of engaging in "delaying tactics" to "continue to occupy and plunder eastern DRC." The peacekeepers from Morocco were to have deployed in Kisangani on Sunday under a UN-monitored peace agreement signed in December in the Zimbabwe capital Harare, but the RCD rebels stopped them. The rebels are demanding a UN condemnation of alleged ceasefire violations by government troops. The RCD also prevented the head of the UN observer mission in the DRC (MONUC), General Moutanga Diallo, from going to Kisangani, the DRC's third-largest city, to greet the Moroccans. The Senegalese general flew to the capital Kinshasa instead. The RCD had warned MONUC that the Moroccan soldiers "would not be able to deploy in Kisangani as long as (the UN) has not officially condemned the massacres of Kasai and Katanga where whole villages were torched and the civilian residents massacred by the soldiers of (President Joseph) Kabila," a rebel spokesman said. On Saturday, the rebel movement said six civilians were killed and 24 were wounded on April 6, and that soldiers had raped women and torched houses in Kasai and Katanga. "MONUC must go verify the serious violations and go to places where there are problems instead of staying in the cities," said Joseph Mudumbi Mulunda, the foreign relations chief of the rebels. He said Diallo had said a probe of the alleged ceasefire violations had "already begun, but it covers only four of the six places cited by the RCD." The peacekeepers could not deploy in Kisangani, Mudumbi said, until "the publication of the results of this investigation and condemnation by MONUC of Kinshasa." Ends