Congo rebels shun power sharing deal
KINSHASA, Congo (Reuters) -- Congo's main rebel group said on Monday it had shunned the first session of a committee overseeing a power-sharing peace deal because of inadequate security guarantees.
The accord is the latest attempt to try to end more than four years of fighting in Africa's third biggest country in which millions of people have died, mostly through hunger and disease.
Members of three rebel factions joined officials of President Joseph Kabila's government, tribal militia fighters, opposition politicians and civic groups in Kinshasa on Monday to start work on the commission.
But the biggest rebel group, the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD-Goma), said its representatives had not traveled to the capital because they had not been given adequate security guarantees.
"We wrote a letter to Kabila, but he has not yet replied," senior RCD-Goma official Joseph Mudumbi told Reuters from the group's base at Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
The 14-man body is supposed to deal with issues like the composition of a national army. Then it will oversee the setting up of a transitional unity government to rule Congo until democratic elections are held in two years time.
All parties to Congo's four-and-half year war, including RCD-Goma, signed up to the power-sharing deal in South Africa on April 2. The war at one stage dragged in the armies of several other African states.
RCD-Goma wants a "neutral force" of at least 200 men to be deployed to Kinshasa, a United Nations peacekeeping mission to have a stronger mandate, and to be able to bring up to 15 bodyguards per delegate.
"It is regrettable that they are to make a whole country, that has suffered for four-and-a-half years of war, wait for them, while they deal with their little problems," Kabila's spokesman Mulegwa Zihindula told Reuters.
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