Congo's "last chance" disarmament is still fragile

By Joe Bavier

BUNIA, Congo, July 9 (Reuters) - With just weeks to go before launch of a "last chance" programme to disarm three notorious Congo warlords, some rebels say the government has yet to create the conditions for them to lay down their arms.

Ahead of elections in July last year, Congo's government, with the backing of a 17,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force, opened talks to bring Mathieu Ngudjolo, Peter Karim and "Cobra" Matata out of the bush in the north-eastern Ituri region.

Since initial disarmament in Ituri began in 2005 following a local ethnic conflict that grew out of Democratic Republic of Congo's 1998-2003 war and killed more than 70,000 people, around 21,000 fighters have already been demobilised or reintegrated into a new national Congolese army.

Ngudjolo, Karim, and Matata lead the last three remaining militias in Ituri, where they have been accused of arbitrary killings, levying illegal taxes and looting villages.

After an agreement last November, which made the three men colonels under the command of government forces, implementing a demobilisation deal has stalled.

At his inauguration in December, newly elected President Joseph Kabila vowed to bring security to Congo's volatile eastern provinces. The militias, however, say his government is dragging its feet over a partial amnesty promised in November.

"We're still waiting for the government," Ngudjolo, flanked by machinegun-toting bodyguards wearing bandoliers of spare ammunition, told Reuters in Bunia, Ituri's largest town.

"Since they made promises, we are waiting for these promises to be kept ... It's been held up a long time, and it's worrying. It's blocking things."

SECURITY "STICK"

Due to begin in early August, the "last chance" disarmament programme is due to run for 60 days. Anyone carrying a weapon after that deadline will be considered outside the law.

Ross Mountain, deputy head of the U.N. mission in Congo known as MONUC, said the process was the final opportunity for the holdout militias to peacefully disarm.

"There's a stick. We do have troops up there and we would be willing to support a government operation to finally settle security in Ituri," he said.

Ituri armed groups did not sign the peace deal that ended Congo's five-year war and were not included under an amnesty law that pardoned fighters on all sides for political crimes, such as rebellion and threatening state security. Under the initial agreement with them last July, Congo's government promised an amnesty for the militia leaders, who human rights groups say are responsible for ethnic massacres, rape, using child soldiers and forced labour.

That clause was later modified to incorporate the Ituri militias into the existing amnesty law, which excludes immunity for war crimes and the gravest human rights abuses. But the government has yet to approve the legislation.

"Amnesty is not something we hand out like peanuts," said Yvonne Iyamulemye Kabano, Congo's Deputy Minister for Ex-Combatants, adding legal details were still being worked on.

The government is not the only one accused of stalling.

Karim's Front of Nationalists and Integrationists (FNI), responsible for the murders of nine U.N. peacekeepers in 2005, fought army forces and U.N. peacekeepers until February.

Matata consistently disobeys orders from his army superiors and last week refused to attend a ceremony to officially launch the disarmament.

Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, doubts the disarmament will end Ituri's troubles.

"What we've seen is that when abusive militia leave, they have been replaced by Congolese army, who also abuse. We can't say, all of the sudden, Ituri is a paradise."