The partial failure of the Inter-Congolese Dialogue meeting at Sun City, South Africa, from 25 February to 19 April, has thrown the Congolese peace process into dangerous confusion. The limited agreement for a transition government, struck between Joseph Kabila’s government and Jean-Pierre Bemba’s Mouvement pour la Liberation du Congo, backed by the majority of delegates from unarmed political opposition groups and civil society, and approved by Angola, Uganda and Zimbabwe does not in itself offer any real solutions to the Congo’s problems.¹ Essentially, this agreement marks the beginning of a political realignment, most notably the end of the anti-Kabila coalition,...

After the failure of the Addis Ababa talks, when the Congolese government walked out at the end of a week-long negotiation in protest at the lack of adequate representation from the delegations present, the international community stepped in to try and defuse the situation. The first attempt came in November 2001, at the initiative of Kofi Annan. The three belligerents, who were attending a session of the joint military commission in New York, were invited to take part in an informal meeting chaired by the UN under-secretary general for political affairs Ibrahima Fall. They then agreed to meet again in...

The partial agreement between the government and the MLC was the minimum result required to save the face of an Inter-Congolese Dialogue that began badly, was poorly organised and expensive. It allowed the peace process to move forward after being blocked by the political and military dimensions of the Lusaka accord, and also put an end to the Congo’s marginalisation on the international scene. Over the last ten years, Mobutu’s Zaire then Laurent Kabila’s DRC have been subjected to a de facto embargo, making them easy prey for the expansionist appetites of neighbouring countries. The international community, particularly the France-Belgium-United...

The failure of the Inter-Congolese Dialogue calls into question the imposed framework of Lusaka and demands that the negotiations be refocused on the essential themes of the agreement. The complementary and inextricable nature of the three pillars of the Lusaka accords (disarmament of the negative forces, withdrawal of foreign troops and the Inter-Congolese Dialogue) cannot be overlooked.

None of the negotiations on power sharing in Kinshasa or the withdrawal of foreign troops will succeed unless the issue of disarming the Rwandan Liberation Army (ALiR) is tackled in a credible and practicable way. The Congolese government continues to support the ALiR,...