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Friday, June 14, 2002 - Web posted at 7:42:54 am GMT

UNITED NATIONS, June 14 (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council was set on Friday to pressure Congolese President Joseph Kabila into making sure his country is not used to shelter Hutu rebels threatening neighboring Rwanda.

A resolution due to be adopted by the 15-nation council also encouraged the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda to get together to try to address each others' security concerns, which are at the heart of the continued fighting in Congo's four-year civil war.

The draft resolution would urge Congo's government "urgently to take all necessary steps to ensure that its territory is not used to support" ethnic Hutu rebels.

Rwanda, which invaded Congo in 1998, has refused to withdraw its forces as long as Hutu soldiers continued to menace it from Congolese soil. The Hutus fled into Congo after carrying out the 1994 Rwanda genocide in which some 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered.

The Rwandan army and Rwandan-backed rebels currently occupy some 40 percent of Congo's territory in the country's east, a stance Rwanda defends as necessary to protect against cross-border incursions by Hutu militias.

Their continued presence, despite a peace agreement requiring the withdrawal of all foreign forces, has been a key stumbling block in a long and frustrating U.N. drive to end the fighting in the vast central African nation rich in diamonds and minerals.

The Security Council recently suggested placing a "curtain" of peacekeeping troops along Congo's eastern border to give Rwanda a measure of border security.

But Rwandan officials last week tried to shoot down that idea, instead lobbying council members to begin disarming some 40,000 Hutu rebel soldiers they said were spread across central Congo, hundreds of miles (km) from Rwanda's border.

EXPLOITING VALUABLE RESOURCES

As that task could take years and would ignore another 15,000 Hutu rebels based much closer to Rwanda, some council envoys said they took the proposal as a sign Rwanda planned to remain in Congo for a long time, all the while exploiting valuable Congolese resources.

The draft resolution due to come to a vote later on Friday would extend for another year, until June 30, 2003, the life of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, known as MONUC.

But it would leave unchanged the current peacekeeping troop ceiling of 5,537, despite a request by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan for an additional 400 soldiers to be deployed to help with disarmament in the country's most restive eastern cities.

Despite the ceiling, there are only some 450 U.N. military observers and 3,200 support troops now in MONUC. U.N. officials blame the shortfall on U.N. members' unwillingness to offer the soldiers needed to do the job.

Council envoys said they decided against raising the ceiling at this time because the parties to the conflict appeared unwilling to move forward the peace process.

When the way was paved for national elections and disarming rebels, more peacekeepers would be authorized, they said.

But President Kabila said during a visit to Rome on Thursday that the United Nations would be wasting time and money extending MONUC's mandate unless thousands more troops were sent and new goals set.

"I believe the final solution is the reunification of the Congo, and if the U.N. mandate cannot cater for that, I should say it is a waste of time and a waste of money," he said. Nampa-Reuters

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