Citation
UNITED NATIONS, April 5 (Reuter) - The Security Council Tuesday renewed
peacekeeping forces for Rwanda for four months but threatened to close
down the U.N. operation if the central African country did not honour
last August's peace accords.
In a resolution adopted by a unanimous 15-0 vote, the council said the
U.N. Assistance Mission for Rwanda, known as UNIMIR, could not continue
unless there was full and prompt implementation of the Arusha Peace
agreement.
The council will review the operation within six weeks after another
report from Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on the agreement,
signed in Arusha, Tanzania, that ended a three-year civil war.
The United Nations now has 2,539 military personnel from 24 countries,
including 900 from Bangladesh and 440 from Belgium, to enforce a
ceasefire between the government, dominated by the majority Hutu ethnic
group, and rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), composed of the
central African country's former Tutsi rulers.
Close to a million Rwandese had been driven from their homes and at
least half a million are now in danger of starvation if food does not
arrive quickly.
Under terms of the Arusha agreement, an interim government and a new
parliament should have been set up last December. But both have been
delayed by political wrangling between the RPF and the government of
President Juvenal Habyarimana.
The latest dispute concerned the Coalition for the Defence of the
Republic, a rightwing party, which the RPF objects to while the
president insists they be in the assembly.
Boutros-Ghali in his latest report said that security had deteriorated
over the last six months, with banditry and politically-motivated
murders on the increase.
He proposed the Rwandese police be monitored by another 45 U.N.
civilian police in addition to current contingent of 60 now in the
capital of Kigali.
But the council turned down the 45 monitors until its six-week review.
Diplomats said the United States did not want to seen to be
strengthening the mission without progress.
Rwanda, at the insistence of France, was the last new peacekeeping
mission approved by the council after President Clinton last September
said money and resources at the United Nations and the United States
were wearing thin.
The council subsequently turned down a request for 100 obnservers in
neighbouring Burundi where a bloody civil war between the Hutus and
Tutsis sent refugees streaming into Rwanda, further destabilising both
countries.
But Council President Colin Keating of New Zealand tol reporters
Burundi would be discussed again.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
