{A Regional mini-summit on Lesotho’s political impasse and disarming a militia in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo was due to start in Pretoria on Monday night as President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe arrived.}
Only a handful of the 15 leaders of the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) were expected at talks hosted by President Jacob Zuma, which began late.
They included Mr Mugabe, Sadc’s chairman, and President Ian Khama of Botswana, where the Sadc headquarters are located.
Mr Zuma has devoted substantial time over the past month to Lesotho, a tiny kingdom which is entirely surrounded by South Africa and whose snow-capped mountains supply Johannesburg and Gauteng province with their water.
Lesotho’s intractable political dispute, now into its third week, looked like being the main issue at the talks which were expected to last deep into the night.
Both Prime Minister Tom Thabane and his deputy, Mothetjoa Metsing, were attending. Mr Thabane has gone back on his previous undertaking to Mr Zuma, the key mediator so far, to recall Lesotho’s parliament after suspending it in June. The Thabane camp says insecurity in the kingdom is too great to change parliament’s status at the moment but his opponents believe the real reason is that the prime minister will lose a vote of confidence and he will lose his job if parliament sits.
Mr Zuma may be hoping for more high-level support for his Lesotho mediation to exercise greater pressure on Mr Thabane and other protagonists.
Officially, the other key issue under discussion was a review of progress with the voluntary disarmament of an exiled Rwandan militia in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda) still have nuisance value but their numbers have shrunk after a South African-backed military offensive against them last year.
“There are thought to be only about 1 500 fighters left with a few thousand camp followers,” said Stephanie Wolters, a senior analyst at the Institute of Security Studies in Pretoria. She said about 11 000 fighters, many of them guilty of the genocide against Rwanda’s Tutsi minority in 1994, had returned home since 2001.
The level of significance of the Congo talks was in question because President Joseph Kabila was not present in Pretoria.
BDive
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