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Uganda: Museveni to Meet Kabila Over LRA Rebels
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New Vision (Kampala)
2 December 2007
Posted to the web 3 December 2007
Geresom Musamali And Agencies
Kampala
PRESIDENT Yoweri Museveni will on Wednesday meet Congolese President Joseph Kabila and the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice over the presence of the Lord's Resistance Army rebels in eastern Congo.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Burundi leader Jean Pierre Nkurunziza, the African Union and the UN Mission in Congo will also participate in what is referred to as the Tripartite Plus Summit.
Foreign affairs permanent secretary James Mugume yesterday said the Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) meeting would also discuss the other negative forces in eastern DR Congo.
LRA chief Joseph Kony is in Garamba National Park in the DRC. Renegade Congolese Gen. Laurent Nkunda also operates in the east of the country.
The other rebel forces in eastern Congo include the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (Nterahamwe) and Uganda's Allied Democratic Forces.
The Tripartite Plus member countries hope to agree on effective ways of consolidating regional security, and enhancing cooperation. The Ugandan delegation will include ministers, security chiefs and ambassadors.
The summit follows a September meeting at Munyonyo in Kampala. Mugume said other issues to be discussed include the situation in the Sudan and in Somalia.
AFP, an international news agency, yesterday quoted the American State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, as saying that Rice would hold several meetings in Addis Ababa on Wednesday and Thursday before going to Brussels for a NATO meeting on December 7.
According to AFP, Rice will discuss existing security mechanisms, including a DRC-Rwandan plan to disarm the Nterahamwe, a group implicated in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
The eastern province of North-Kivu in the DR Congo has seen heavy clashes since the end of August between some 4,000 insurgents loyal to Gen Nkunda and more than 20,000 government forces.
The summit is expected to build on a US-backed regional approach to help "build the capacity of the Congolese to address these negative forces in their country."
The region has seen violence since the early 1990s, with the civil war that began in Burundi in 1993, the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the regional war that raged in the DR Congo between 1998 and 2003.
AFP said during her two-day visit, Rice would also discuss Somalia, where Burundi forces are set to join the Ugandans in an African Union peace mission. Somalia has been without effective government since 1991.
"We're hoping that the consultation will focus on how to achieve a more inclusive political dialogue and reconciliation to move the country towards 2009 elections," US African Affairs secretary Jendayi Frazer said.
"It will aim to tackle a humanitarian emergency and "isolate extremists and spoilers who continue to use violence and then to push for quicker deployment of the African Union (AMISOM) force into Somalia," she said.
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Frazer said the talks would also touch on the role of Eritrea, which she said supports not only extremists operating in Somalia but also "legitimate" non-violent opposition groups there.
Rice will also discuss efforts to shore up the fragile 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Arab Islamist government of President Omar el-Beshir in Khartoum and the mainly non-Muslim southern Sudanese.
Rice has also planned bilateral talks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi on renewed tensions with Eritrea.
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