Cape Town — President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo says the future of opposition leader Jean-Pierre Bemba, who left the country for Portugal two months ago, is in the hands of the Congolese senate and justice system.
“It’s no longer an issue [of] what… President Kabila is favoring,” Kabila said in Cape Town on Thursday. Nor was it up to him whether Bemba returned to the country from Portugal, where he is receiving medical treatment.
Kabila was answering a question from allAfrica at a joint news conference with President Thabo Mbeki during a state visit to South Africa. He later addressed a joint session of the South African Parliament.
Bemba, formerly Kabila’s vice-president and now a senator, took refuge in the South African embassy in Kinshasa on March 23 after violent clashes between his guards and Congolese armed forces left hundreds dead in the capital. The Senate gave him permission to leave the country on April 11 after negotiations with the Congolese and Portuguese governments.
Asked whether there was any prospect of Bemba returning to join the political process in the DRC, Kabila told the news conference: “The situation is very, very clear.”
Whether Bemba returned or not was “not part of my job. Not at all.” Shortly after Bemba left, the country’s prosecutor-general had asked the Senate to remove his immunity as a senator “so that he can answer a number of charges pertaining to the situation between the 22nd and 23rd of March in Kinshasa.
“It is now up to the Senate to agree to that demand, accept that demand or not. Otherwise the issue is as simple as it presents itself. It’s not at all complicated…. [It is] an issue for the institutions.”
Asked whether South Africa was urging Kabila and Bemba to seek reconciliation, Mbeki said southern African heads of state had agreed with Kabila’s stance at their last meeting in Dar es Salaam in March.
“We’ve now got a democratic country, which has got its own institutions and procedures... and basically the region said it would be important for everybody, including Jean-Pierre Bemba, that we respect those institutions and procedures,” he said.
Kabila also declared his “passionate determination” to bring peace to the eastern Congo.
“Decisions have been taken by the senior defense councils in my country with a view to finding sustainable solutions,” he said. “Measures have been taken at political, diplomatic and indeed at military level with a view to finding solutions…. people living in this part of our country have had enough now.”
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Kabila said that in an address to the business community on Friday, he would outline the benefits of investment in the Congo for the international private sector – political and economic stability, democratic institutions, security and justice reforms, and attractive mining and investment codes.
