Regional Leaders Plan to Sign Congo Armistice

Hoping to lay the cornerstone for a more stable Africa, leaders from half a dozen nations are scheduled to sign a cease-fire agreement today to end 11 months of war in the heart of a continent ridden with violent conflicts.

Newly elected South African President Thabo Mbeki, who will attend the ceremony as an observer, has placed such high hopes on a Congo settlement that his foreign minister, Nkosazana Zuma, spent most of her first three weeks on the job at the cease-fire negotiations in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia.

“We remain convinced that a stable, prosperous and sovereign Democratic Republic of Congo is central to the success of the vision of an African renaissance,” said Mbeki, who has pledged South African troops to enforce the deal.

Today’s scheduled signing ceremony in Lusaka comes on the heels of a peace pact this week in Sierra Leone. The eight-year war in the West African nation, marked by the mutilation of civilians and the widespread deployment of child soldiers, has destroyed virtually every aspect of normal life there.

“I shall sign [the agreement] for the thousands of children of Sierra Leone,” President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, embracing a little girl whose hand had been amputated, announced at a signing ceremony in Lome, the capital of Togo.

The apparent breakthroughs in Congo and Sierra Leone have some Africans talking about a turning point for the war-weary continent. Zambian President Frederick Chiluba predicted “the dawn of a new era in Africa” when he announced the tentative Congo agreement this week.

Kaire Mbuende, executive secretary of the Southern African Development Community, one of several groups that brokered the Congo cease-fire deal, said African leaders are already planning to build on the momentum. The next goal, he said, is to stop the fighting in Angola, which resumed in 1998 after several years of relative quiet.

“We would like to make the next century the African century,” Mbuende said. “We want to bid farewell to poverty, war and conflicts.”

Others in Africa are less hopeful, saying this week’s deals in Congo and Sierra Leone were due more to exhaustion and arm-twisting than to real commitments to peace. There are fears that the settlements, when put to the test, will collapse or spawn new conflicts.

African blood is being spilled in fighting in Angola, Burundi, the Republic of Congo (next door to Congo), Ethiopia, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda. Even leading up to today’s ceremony, fighting was reported Friday in Congo, as rebels and government troops jockeyed for last-minute control of key routes to diamond-rich areas.

“It is important to avoid being a prophet of doom and unduly pessimistic,” said Laurie Nathan of the Cape Town, South Africa-based Center for Conflict Resolution, who is also an advisor to the South African Defense Ministry. “But at the same time, it would be foolhardy to be overly optimistic and avoid the many problems.”

In Sierra Leone, where a previous accord collapsed within months, there is already a dispute over provisions on blanket amnesty for combatants. The United Nations, which probably will enforce the pact, says the amnesty does not apply to cases of genocide or crimes against humanity. The rebel groups--whose leader has been elevated from convicted criminal to vice president under the pact--say the slate has been cleaned.

“Everyone wants this terrible civil war to end, but the peace deal can’t simply ignore eight years of atrocities,” said Peter Takirambudde of Human Rights Watch/Africa, which has documented hundreds of cases of murder, mutilation and rape in Sierra Leone.

The Congo agreement also is beset with problems. There is no specific plan for disarming the militias, particularly the Interahamwe, the ethnic Hutu group active in Congo and largely responsible for the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Policing the deal also poses difficulties, since a U.N. peacekeeping force--even if approved by the Security Council--would take an estimated six months to pull together.

The United States and many other countries have been vague about committing troops to such a force. The last U.S. peacekeeping effort in Africa, in Somalia, ended disastrously after 18 U.S. soldiers were slain in 1993.

“We’re going to carefully study any proposal for a U.N. peacekeeping operation, especially its mandate, before making any decisions about U.S. support for the operation or role in it,” said James Foley, a State Department spokesman.

There also was speculation Friday that Congolese President Laurent Kabila and his chief foreign sponsor, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, might not show up in Lusaka today, dooming the Congo deal to failure before it gets started. The two leaders held a news conference Thursday in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, in which they were reported to have been ambiguous about their support for the cease-fire.

Both leaders are under great pressure to end the conflict, which the rebels have been winning, but they also have much to lose if their enemies ultimately rise to power.

“There are a lot of serious, contentious issues on the ground which have not really been addressed fully in the agreement,” said Claude Kabemba, an analyst from Congo at the Johannesburg-based Center for Policy Studies. “Signing the agreement is a first step for work to get started. But it does not guarantee in itself the peace.”

Congo, Africa’s third-largest country in area, has been a source of turmoil on the continent since Kabila led an insurrection that toppled the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko two years ago.

Last August, Kabila became a target himself. The conflict soon spilled across international boundaries, with about half a dozen African nations getting involved directly or by proxy. The rebel movement also splintered, pitting rebel against rebel in some corners of the vast, mineral-rich country that under Mobutu was known as Zaire.

Kabemba said the country never had a chance to sort out Mobutu’s legacy before becoming embroiled in Kabila’s problems. The double-layered conflict, he said, has made the current peace talks especially troublesome.

“Matters of ideology, political direction, policies and programs that could have been resolved through internal political activity were glossed over in the naive hope that things would somehow turn out well,” Kabemba said. “Thus the second rebellion in the Congo is a continuation of the first.”

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Times staff writers John J. Goldman at the United Nations and Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.