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afrol.com, 14 September - Throughout the course of this week, the panel of experts examining the illegal exploitation of natural resources and other forms of wealth in Congo Kinshasa (DRC) is holding meetings at the United Nations. Especially Uganda and Rwanda have been accused of "looting" the far east of the country, while the Zimbabwe government is accused of supporting Kabila in exchange for resource exploitation concessions. The five-member panel, which is chaired by Safiatou Ba-N'Daw of Côte d'Ivoire, gathered in New York Tuesday and will be conducting meetings with various officials to familiarize themselves with the issues. Those meetings are expected to wrap up later this week, after which the panel members will start to relocate themselves to the UN Office at Nairobi, where the panel is to be based. The panel's arrival in Nairobi is to be completed before the end of this month, and it intends to visit other countries in the region and elsewhere over the course of its work. This panel was named by the Secretary-General in mid-August, following a request by the Security Council, in a Presidential Statement issued on June 2, for the establishment of a panel to collect information on the illegal exploitation of natural resources in the DRC, and to analyze the links between that exploitation and the continuing conflict there. The Security Council last week had stated that it was "deeply concerned at the continuation of the hostilities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, at the dire consequences of the conflict for the humanitarian situation and at reports of abuses of human rights and of illegal exploitation of that country’s natural resources." Both sides in the conflict have accused each other for anything from exploitation of the Congo's resources to outright looting. In April, for example, the Zimbabwean ambassador to the UN, Tichaona Joseph Jokonya, accused Rwanda and Uganda of invading Congo and making her "the victim of armed violence because of the abundance of lootable resources". "Since August 1998, pillage of the country’s natural resources had been the major preoccupation of the Rwandese and Ugandan occupation forces in the eastern region," he went on. Zimbabwe, a firm ally to Kabila's Congo, on the other hand is accused of being involved in the Congo fighting only because of the personal economic interest of president Mugabe and his closest. The powerful in Zimbabwe have been given indeed very lucrative concessions to exploit the natural resources in Congo by the contested president Kabila. Zimbabwe itself is spending enormous resources in maintaining heavy armed troops in Congo, at the increasing protest of local opposition. On this background, the Security Council in June requested the Secretary-General to establish for a period of six months an expert panel on the illegal exploitation of natural resources and other forms of wealth of the Congo, which should produce recommendations on the matter. Source: Based on UN
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