19 June 2000
Text: Ambassador Holbrooke's UNSC Remarks on the DRC
(Peace in the Congo is in all our interests, ambassador says) (2910) United Nations -- Let the world see that the United Nations is not turning away from Africa, U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said June 15 at the beginning of two days of Security Council meetings on peace efforts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with senior officials from the region. In addressing the council, Holbrooke criticized the recent fighting between Rwanda and Uganda in Kisangani, saying "there is no excuse for what happened" or for the renunciation of the OAU-appointed facilitator of the national dialogue. The extraordinary high intensity of the fighting left "hundreds of people killed and thousands wounded, causing enormous damage to the infrastructure of Kisangani -- damage which the international community will have to pay to clean up. Otherwise it won't be done," Holbrooke said. "Diverting resources from long-term reconstruction and essential health and education needs is one of the most troubling things that I have ever seen in my career in diplomacy." Holbrooke led a special Security Council mission to the DRC in May in an effort to bolster the imperiled Lusaka peace process. The council set aside June 15-16 to meet with the Lusaka signatories. The ambassador said that not only do many problems remain regarding DRC, but they have became more serious recently. After all the meetings and efforts of the past weeks, "I am not sure where we are today," he said. Holbrooke also said that: -- the withdrawal of all foreign forces from DRC is still mandatory; -- there is an urgent need for all parties to abandon support to all non-signatories of the Lusaka accord, especially the Ex-FAR Interahamwe; -- discussing the withdrawal of Rwandan and Ugandan forces does not lessen DRC's obligation to participate in the national dialogue; -- Rwanda and Uganda have legitimate security concerns; and -- states don't fail; leaders do. "We cannot give up hope," the ambassador said. "Leadership can make a difference." Following is the text of the ambassador's remarks: (begin text) Statement by Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Open Meeting on the Situation in the DRC, Security Council, June 15, 2000 Thank you Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. Secretary-General, for joining us today. Thank you Mr. President (General Assembly) for descending from the high podium to represent your own country. It is always an honor to have two presidents in the room. I take your presence in the room as of enormous significance to all of us. I want to express to you, Ambassador Levitte, Mr. President, our country's very great appreciation for the leadership that you and France have taken on behalf of peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I thank all of our friends and colleagues from the Lusaka Process, who hosted us with such graciousness and generosity on May 6 and 7, for again making the long journey to New York. Your presence here represents your commitment to finding a solution for the problems of the Congo, and I hope that the world, which is focused on those problems, understands that everyone is here voluntarily, to help solve them. I am particularly honored in that regard, to speak after my friend Minister Mbabazi of Uganda, one of the most distinguished statesmen of Africa, who I have now had the honor of working with increasingly in the last few months, and whose speech deserves careful perusal by all of us. And of course, I am delighted at the presence of the other representatives here in the room and of the Secretary-General's Special Representative, Ambassador Morjane, who is doing a good job under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Mr. President, this is an important day for all of us, as we proceed with this long odyssey which began, although Minister Mbabazi was gracious about the American month in January, the discussions really began earlier than that, and I want to pay a tribute to the December chairmanship of the British, Sir Jeremy Greenstock and Ambassador Eldon, in starting the process. This process has now gone on for many months. Let the world see that the U.N. is not turning away from Africa, and let the world see that there is no double standard. Africa is at the center of our attention. This is doubly true since we are simultaneously today dealing with two other major African issues in Sierra Leone and the Ethiopia-Eritrea problem, and there will be separate meetings going on concurrently on the latter issue in conjunction with the OAU. But the problems remain, and they have become more serious in at least two areas in recent days, as Minister Mbabazi's comments made clear. The people of the Congo are looking to us, to help find a way out of the hell in which they have been living for so long. They look to us to help them build lives not defined by conflict. There have been a lot of statements made in recent months about how the people of the Congo need peace, but these statements, many of them made around this historic horseshoe in this historic room, have not yet been acted on. Thirty-six days ago, Mr. President, you and I were with our colleagues from Great Britain, the Netherlands, Mali, Tunisia and Namibia in the region on behalf of the entire Security Council. We were greatly honored to represent all of you and we did, I think, a fairly good job of carrying the weight of the U.N. into the Great Lakes. However, I am not sure where we are today. Nonetheless, I do note that the delegation, three Africans, three European nations and one country from neither Europe nor Africa, the United States, symbolized our common commitment. I would stress again that the reason that the Latin American and Asian representatives were not with us is that they had gone to Kosovo on a parallel mission. When you decided last month to convene today's meeting, Mr. President, we had anticipated that we could build on the momentum, but the events of the last two weeks changed the nature of this meeting. Let me start with Kisangani, as you did, and let me be honest to both my friends from Rwanda and Uganda. There is no excuse for what happened in Kisangani. There was no excuse when the fighting began around May 3 or 4. The immediate cessation of it after the Security Council negotiated cease-fire May 8 was promising, but there was a resumption of the fighting in the last few weeks, at an extraordinarily high level of intensity, leaving hundreds of people killed and thousands wounded, causing enormous damage to the infrastructure of Kisangani -- damage which the international community will have to pay to clean up. Otherwise it won't be done. Diverting resources from long-term reconstruction and essential health and education needs is one of the most troubling things that I have ever seen in my career in diplomacy. I talk now not about the initial fighting, but about the resumption of it a few weeks ago. Now, I agree with Minister Mbabazi that there is now a cease-fire in place, and we need to lock it in. But it is a fragile cease-fire, and as the Secretary-General has so correctly warned us in meeting after meeting, we are facing a gap between the cease-fire, which took effect a few days ago, and the arrival of any peacekeeping forces. And we must be honest with ourselves: it is more difficult now to peacekeeping forces than it was a few weeks ago, precisely because of the events in Kisangani. It is more dangerous, more problematical and governments and their populations have more reservations, and it will be harder to fund these efforts, because of what happened in Kisangani. So let us be honest about this in this room. I personally am not interested in a court of inquiry into who started Kisangani. The leaders of both sides have been very clear with all of us that it was the other side that started it. Based on similar experiences that I have been involved in places like Bosnia and Kosovo and Cambodia, I am certain that we are never going to get to the bottom of who started it. The issue is to stop it permanently and never let it happen again. That can only be done with the highest level political leadership. Mr. Secretary-General, I salute you for your around-the-clock tireless efforts with the leaders in the region to stop that fighting. Without your personal involvement, I think the chances are very high that this fighting would still be going on. As for the fighting in Equator Province between the armed forces of Congo and the MLC, the Movement for Liberation of the Congo, that too, is a serious problem. It is threatening to bring the war closer to the population centers. I say it quite frankly today, in the presence of the Lusaka signatories and, particularly in this case, the Foreign Minister of the DRC and the representative of the MLC, that we need to see a willingness on your part to halt the fighting. Let me turn now to the national dialogue. Again, I speak with great respect for the sovereign government of the DRC. But I must say in all candor what my government has already said publicly. I am obligated to repeat it here in public. We do not believe that the renunciation of the OAU-appointed facilitator and attacks on the national dialogue can be regarded as anything other than an attack on the Lusaka Peace Process. If there are differences between the parties in this room and the facilitator, let those be ironed out. But let us not attack the process itself, unless we are ready to confront the extraordinary implications of that. I have heard the problems that the government in Kinshasa has with the National Dialogue. Maybe some of them are justified. But an attack on the process itself can only be regarded as an attack in Lusaka. Mr. President, the Lusaka Cease-fire Agreement is one of the few things standing between order in the DRC and its degeneration to warlord-dominated, resource-driven satrapies. Last January, when we in this room sat with the seven presidents of the region, a commitment was made to redouble our efforts for peace. I hope, Mr. President that that will be the result of this very important meeting that you are chairing today, only one level below the chief of state level. In order to bolster the peace process, the Secretary-General has recommended the reordering of some of Lusaka's tasks, particularly the sequencing of foreign troop withdrawals. He suggests that priority be given to the withdrawal of Rwanda and Uganda forces from the Kisangani area. I think that this recommendation is extremely appropriate given recent events. That is one of the major things that we will be discussing. But I would like to underscore, as I support the Secretary-General's position, a few critical points. First of all, in no way does prioritizing the withdrawal of the forces that fought each other in Kisangani diminish the long-standing call of this council, on the record in resolutions, to withdraw all foreign forces. We are not in any way, shape or form abandoning Lusaka by accepting, as I hope and believe we should, the prioritization recommended by our Secretary-General. Second, there is an urgent need for all parties to abandon all support to the non-signatory groups, particularly the Ex-Far Interahamwe. The fact that this group is still allowed to stay in business is truly unacceptable. It is among the most odious groups in Africa, if not in the world, and it must be dealt with through concerted regional action. Third, the discussion of withdrawing the Rwandan and Ugandan forces should not in any way detract from the obligations of the DRC to participate in the National Dialogue, to allow other Congolese parties the same right and to abide by the process. Fourth, in regard to this point, let us not let this discussion detract from the legitimate need to take into account the security concerns of Rwanda and Uganda. Those are legitimate, although the explosion of fighting in Kisangani, which had nothing to do with those needs, was extraordinarily lamentable. We cannot allow a situation to occur where the EX-Far Interahamwe resume their 1995-1996 campaign of terror inside Rwanda. Mr. President, all of this should be done to strengthen Lusaka. Let us recall again that this is not an outside-imposed agreement, but an African initiative, one that is, as Salim Salim put it, an African solution to an African problem. There are some, Mr. President, who say that Congo's struggle and the slow process of Lusaka, somehow prove that in some places, failure is certain. People are simply pre-disposed to killing each other. I heard this in Bosnia. I heard it in Kosovo. I heard it in Vietnam, and in an earlier era, we heard it in regard to the great European powers, who are finally, after a century of brutality, putting their internal differences behind them so that wars today in the central part of Europe, once so common, are no longer possible. And I hope that we will see in our lifetime and our professional career, the leaders of Africa reach the same level of achievement. If they do so, they will have done it much faster than the Europeans. But I hope they can learn, as Ambassador Levitte so eloquently put it, when we were in Addis Ababa, four or five days before that war broke out. I hope that they will learn, as Ambassador Levitte put it, I regret to say unsuccessfully, to Prime Minister Meles, to learn from Europe's mistakes. I categorically reject the notion that Africa is not ready for democracy or that it needs strong men, dictators, to ensure stability. Or that among certain peoples or tribes, conflict is inevitable. Such opinions, which we all heard in regard to Bosnia as well, are uninformed and in a subliminal form, at a minimum, carrying a racist connotation. They were wrong in Bosnia, they were wrong in Kosovo, they are wrong in Africa. Let us also stand together to reject the notion that has reached some prominence among commentators that some states have become failed states. States don't fail. Leaders do. Much is made of the artificial nature of Africa's borders. Many claim that this makes conflicts inevitable. I share the concern about those borders and the way they were drawn in the late 19th century. But those were the borders that the countries of Africa chose to maintain when they became independent. Once having made that decision, the leaders must figure out a way to live within those boundaries, or if they wish to change them, change them voluntarily, as has happened in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, but not through wars. All of this means that we cannot give up hope. Leadership can make a difference. Mr. President, last January when we embarked on the month of Africa, we said it would be the year of Africa. You have set a very high standard by maintaining the attention of the Security Council on this issue. At that time, the Permanent Representative of Zimbabwe reminded us that our commitments to peace efforts, from the U.N.'s many efforts throughout the world to our own commitments in the United States to the Mideast Peace Process, must be strong enough to survive numerous setbacks - some of them catastrophic and seemingly fatal. The Ambassador from Zimbabwe warned us that in Africa, like everywhere else, we must be prepared to accept setbacks and not let them deter us from moving ahead. I believe that one should always accept good advice, especially when it comes from such an esteemed colleague. Setbacks are, unfortunately, part of any peace process, but they should not diminish our resolve, they should increase it. In conclusion, Mr. President, let me remind all of us that we have come here together today to bolster a peace process that, while imperiled, is one we are all committed to. We haven't come here out of a sense of charity, simply to right past wrongs, although that must be done, but because we all recognize that peace in the Congo and peace and democracy throughout Africa is in all our national interests - Europeans, Asians, Americans, Western Hemisphere friends and neighbors alike. As we proceed with our discussions today and tomorrow and as we move forward in the coming weeks, I hope we will draw inspiration from what Ambassador Greenstock, Ambassador Van Walssum, and Ambassador Andjaba saw, when they made their trip to Kananga a month ago. Thousands of ordinary Congolese people lining the streets of that city, deep, deep in the heart of a beleaguered and isolated area -- thousands of ordinary Congolese shouting, "Peace, peace, peace." Let us help these people fulfill their hopes and dreams. This, Mr. President, this, my friends from the Lusaka Process, from the political committee -- this is the best possible reason for us to continue working for implementation of the Lusaka Agreement and for peace in the DRC. Thank you, Mr. President. (Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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