Congo militia suspends peace process participation
By Joe Bavier
KINSHASA, March 28 (Reuters) - A shaky 2-month-old Congolese peace deal plagued by delays and daily ceasefire violations faced additional uncertainty on Friday when a major eastern militia suspended its participation in the process.
PARECO, a faction of the Mai Mai traditional warrior militia and one of the principal armed groups to sign a Jan. 23 deal, said it was withdrawing its delegates in a dispute over the composition of commissions set up to monitor the peace process.
"We have decided to pull out," PARECO spokesman Theophile Museveni told Reuters.
He said special ordinances signed last week setting up the commissions favoured the government and PARECO's traditional enemies, renegade Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda's National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP).
"We saw that the government is very much represented. We saw that the CNDP was very much represented. And us? ... There was cheating," he said.
He did not give the group's demands or conditions for an eventual return to the process.
The United Nations and Western governments brokered the deal in the hope of establishing a lasting peace in Congo's turbulent east, where rebel and militia violence has persisted long after the formal end of a 1998-2003 war in the central African state.
However, small scale clashes have continued despite the ceasefire, and few of the nearly 450,000 residents of violence-ravaged North Kivu province displaced by fighting last year have returned home.
Last month Nkunda suspended participation in the peace process over U.N. allegations his Tutsi fighters killed at least 30 Hutu civilians while his rebel group negotiated the ceasefire.
He later returned to the talks following intense European Union and U.S. mediation.
Apollinaire Malu Malu, the government-appointed head of the peace process, told Reuters the announced PARECO boycott would not derail the implementation of the deal and suggested not all the militia's members supported the decision.
"This is nothing. I've just spoken to PARECO coordinators and they say this has nothing to do with them," he said.
The conflict has its roots in neighbouring Rwanda's 1994 genocide in which around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered.
Nkunda says the rebellion he has led since 2004 seeks to protect eastern Congo's ethnic Tutsi minority against the Rwandan Hutu rebels he says are backed by Congo's government.
PARECO leaders say the militia was established to help government forces combat Nkunda's insurgents. (For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: africa.reuters.com) (Editing by Alistair Thomson)
