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Security Council mission to Central Africa to seek 'solid political process'

4 June – A United Nations Security Council mission to Central Africa this week will seek to launch a "solid political process," without which there can be no solution to the region's conflicts no matter how many UN emergency forces are deployed there, the delegation's leader said today.

One of the mission's main stops will be Bunia, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where fighting between rival ethnic militias has killed more than 400 people in recent weeks. The Council last Friday authorized the deployment of an international emergency force led by France.

"Of course the Council is sometimes led to adopt an approach that might be called ground based, namely deploying the Blue Helmets (UN troops), authorizing a multi-national force such as in Bunia, but none of this has any hope of succeeding unless there is a solid political process," the mission's leader, Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sablière of France, told a briefing on the eve of its departure.

"And it is precisely to strengthen this political process that the mission is going to Central Africa," he added, stressing that the human cost of the conflicts is "absolutely unacceptable."

Ambassador de La Sablière said the main message of the mission, which will also visit another conflict-riven country, Burundi, as well as major regional players South Africa, Angola, Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda, was that the principal obstacle to the political process is instability.

"The mission will tell all its interlocutors that the fighting must stop," he stressed. "That means that the offensive launched by certain parties must cease immediately. It also means that any form of support, primarily military, to armed groups or militias in the DRC must cease as well. And it means that all who have some influence on these armed groups or militias must use that influence to put a stop to the fighting."

He said the peace process in the DRC and Burundi differed in many ways but the conflicts had two points in common. "Firstly, the human cost is unacceptable, absolutely unacceptable, and this means that the international community must remain strongly mobilized," he declared. "Secondly, the other common point is that there is a need to strengthen the political process without which these conflicts will not be resolved."

The mission will also ask everyone involved to stop the looting of the DRC's natural resources, which has become a main engine in the conflict, tell the parties that they must implement the reforms to which they have committed, such as reforming the security forces, and remind them that they had a duty to ensure respect for human rights and to guarantee the full access of humanitarian organizations, Ambassador de La Sablière said.