Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-16-Speech-4-153"
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"en.20041216.12.4-153"2
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"Mr President, I speak in place of Mr Van Hecke, who has had to leave Strasbourg early as he is travelling to the Democratic Republic of the Congo tomorrow.
The current situation in eastern Congo shows that the Congolese peace process is still very fragile. Indeed, there have been reports of new exchanges of fire yesterday. The ALDE Group warmly welcomed the initiative to draft an urgency resolution on the Congo. Ultimately, however, our group decided not to endorse the compromise resolution. We feel that the compromise text fails to identify the core problem of the continuing instability in the region and of the difficult relationship between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its neighbouring countries, especially Rwanda.
The issue is this: since the end of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 a large group of extremist Hutus have been hiding in a remote area of the Congolese rainforest in the east of the Congo. After all these years they have still not been disarmed. The presence of these heavily armed militias is a constant threat to the peace process in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and to security in the entire Great Lakes region. The massacre at the Burundian refugee camp of Gatumba last August was only one in a long series of provocative actions. MONUC, the UN Peacekeeping Mission in the Congo, was supposed to disarm and neutralise the rebels, but has failed to do so.
Although MONUC's mandate has been strengthened and there are extra troops, they are poorly trained and there is a serious lack of information and technical assistance. We feel that the joint resolution does not acknowledge that if Rwanda is crossing the border into the Congo to put an end to the activity of the armed gangs, it is happening in the context of MONUC having failed to do the disarming.
We would suggest that the European Union and the Member States need to get more actively involved in the DRC and the Great Lakes region, focusing very much on rapid disarmament of the rebel forces. Perhaps European troops could be used to strengthen the UN peacekeeping forces. The troops from Pakistan, Nepal, Uruguay and other countries that are in the Congo at the moment simply do not have enough experience with military operations in sub-Saharan Africa. Europe has that experience.
We have to consider all the options in order to make disarmament happen. It is by far the most important prerequisite to get the peace process back on track.
In summary, we feel that although the resolution has many points that we support, it is unbalanced. So, with regret, I will abstain."@en1
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