Congo to Let U.N. Look Into Reports of Massacres

LUBUMBASHI, Congo —  President Laurent Kabila agreed Saturday to cooperate with a U.N. investigation into reported massacres and other human rights abuses in refugee camps in this Central African nation, U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson announced after meeting with the new leader.

Richardson, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, said a U.N. advance team will arrive in the country within two weeks and a formal investigative commission will begin work in early July.

The announcement on the commission was among several made after the meeting, which was intended to push Kabila into stepping up the transition of his government to a free-market democracy.

Kabila has repeatedly denied reports that forces under his command killed Rwandan refugees in eastern Congo during the country’s seven-month civil war, and he reiterated that denial Saturday, saying, “There are no mass killings in our country.” But he has been reluctant to cooperate with U.N. efforts to locate the up to 230,000 refugees still unaccounted for in the country, formerly known as Zaire.

On Saturday, Kabila backed away from restrictions he had imposed on the U.N. and agreed to let the world body’s refugee agency and the International Committee of the Red Cross “go wherever they need to go to do their job,” in the words of one senior U.S. official present at the meeting. The refugees are mostly ethnic Hutus who fled neighboring Rwanda in the wake of that country’s 1994 genocide of up to 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

“We guaranteed . . . our complete willingness to work with the agencies of the United Nations, as we have always done,” Kabila said. “We also took the opportunity to reaffirm our complete engagement in the protection of refugees who find themselves on our territory.”

Refugee workers remain deeply skeptical that Kabila will cooperate with an independent investigation. “We almost always hear the right words, but the implementation is much different,” one said.

Kabila seized power in this mineral-rich nation, which he has renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo, last month when his Tutsi-backed rebel alliance overthrew longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

Obtaining Kabila’s cooperation with the U.N. probe was a top priority of Richardson’s three-day mission to Congo, which ends today. He was accompanied by 16 other U.S. officials, including John Shattuck, assistant secretary of State for human rights; Rep. Cynthia A. McKinney (D-Ga.), a member of the House International Relations Committee; and representatives of the State, Defense, Treasury and Commerce departments.

Richardson has become Washington’s de facto special envoy to the country: This visit is the second in six weeks he has made to the region. In April, he conferred with Kabila and Mobutu as he lobbied for a peaceful transition of power, and Saturday he promised to return again.

One official who attended both meetings said Kabila now seems more comfortable in power and more in command of his advisors. Nonetheless, at Kabila’s instigation, the meeting was held in this provincial mining town rather than the capital, Kinshasa, where his political opposition is strongest.

After Saturday’s meeting, both Richardson and Kabila called the talks a success, and Richardson spoke of “a new era in relations between the United States and the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

He praised Kabila for his promise to hold elections in two years; for including in his Cabinet representatives of other Mobutu opposition groups; and for repeating an earlier pledge to prosecute any soldiers found to have committed human rights abuses.

Richardson also said Kabila agreed to appoint an Election Commission soon to begin preparing for the 1999 balloting.

A U.S. official who attended the meeting said Kabila was advised bluntly that he must improve his human rights record if he wants to attract the international aid and investment that Congo needs to overcome the economic decline it suffered under the three-decade Mobutu regime. That warning was accompanied by a detailing of American aid and military cooperation that will be available if Kabila meets U.S. expectations for protection of human rights and advancement toward democracy.

The Clinton administration has allocated $10 million in the current fiscal year for aid to Congo. Representatives of the U.S. Agency for International Development are already in the country laying the groundwork for some of those expenditures.

A senior U.S. official said details of how the U.N. investigative commission will operate have not been worked out. But it will investigate the full cycle of ethnic and political violence that has surrounded the refugees since 1994, he added. In that year, more than 1 million Hutus fled Rwanda for eastern Zaire. Many of the Hutu extremists responsible for the Rwandan genocide joined the exodus, using the refugees as a shield for carrying out raids into Rwanda from refugee camps in this neighboring country.

Humanitarian workers fear that the large number of missing indicates another round of massacres.

The senior U.S. official said the U.N. investigative commission is expected to complete its report and make recommendations by the end of the year.