{{African leaders failed on Monday to sign a U.N.-mediated peace deal aimed at ending two decades of conflict in eastern Congo, said a senior Congolese diplomat, who pointed to concerns over who would command a new regional military force.}}<\/p>\n
The agreement was to include the deployment of several thousand extra soldiers to tackle armed militias in the mineral-rich east. <\/p>\n
The brigade would fight under the banner of the U.N.’s MONUSCO peacekeeping force.<\/p>\n
Diplomats at an African Union summit in Ethiopia said the troops would come from the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), notably Tanzania.<\/p>\n
Leaders from the Great Lakes region had originally been expected to sign the deal on Monday morning.<\/p>\n
Seraphin Ngwej, a senior diplomatic adviser to Congolese President Joseph Kabila, said SADC members had raised questions over who would command the intervention force – SADC or MONUSCO.<\/p>\n
“(SADC) wants assurances the brigade can do what they want it to do,” said the diplomatic source who declined to be named.<\/p>\n
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he had postponed the signing because of “procedural differences” and stressed there were no fundamental differences on the agreement’s content between the eight regional states involved.<\/p>\n
A fresh rebellion launched last year in Congo’s east, a region where ethnic tensions and vast mineral deposits have fuelled a series of cross-border wars – raised fears of another conflict in the borderlands zone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{{African leaders failed on Monday to sign a U.N.-mediated peace deal aimed at ending two decades of conflict in eastern Congo, said a senior Congolese diplomat, who pointed to concerns over who would command a new regional military force.}} The agreement was to include the deployment of several thousand extra soldiers to tackle armed militias […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[99],"byline":[170],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-5482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-greatlakesnews","byline-igihe"],"bylines":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"contributors":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5482"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=5482"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=5482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}