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Pres ident Joseph Kabila yesterday named a transitional government in the Democratic Republic of Congo to lead the country out of a civil war that has killed millions, urging citizens to put aside tribal and ethnic differences and unite the vast nation.

"With the formation of the transitional administration, the war which still shrouds several parts of the nation... has lost its purpose, as all pretexts put forward to justify it are void," Kabila said in an address to the nation, on the 43rd anniversary of its independence from Belgium.

Kabila spoke a few minutes before a decree was read on state television announcing the new government, which comprises 36 ministers and 25 deputy ministers.

The final obstacle to nominating the interim administration, which is to take the mineral-rich but impoverished nation to democratic elections in two years, was removed on Sunday when the former warring parties resolved the issue of control of the army.

The deal gave the main rebel group, the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), control over ground forces, with rival rebel group, the Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC), commanding the navy.

In the administration named yesterday, the RCD and the MLC each have seven ministers and four deputy ministers, as does the government and political opposition.

"The country is emerging painfully from a war that has sorely tested national cohesion," said Kabila.

"I call on you to commit yourselves to the nation... as political affinities and regional divisions cannot take precedence over the overall good of the country, no more than does belonging to a tribe or an ethnic group".

"Reunification, the return to peace, the restoration of territorial integrity and the reestablishment of the authority of the state over national territory are not negotiable".

The interim government was provided for under a peace pact signed in December to end more than four years of war in the former Zaire, a country the size of western Europe.

The conflict, which began in 1998 when Rwanda and Uganda invaded to support rebels seeking to oust the government in Kinshasa, drew in a dozen African nations at its height and killed some 2,5-million people, either in combat or through disease and hunger.

It was fuelled by the DRC's huge mineral wealth, with all parties using the chaos to plunder the country of its natural resources.

A peace pact, which provides for the transitional government to be set up, came into force in April this year, but unrest has continued in the northeastern Ituri and Kivu regions, where hundreds have died in recent months in various conflicts between ethnic militias and rebel groups.

A French-led European Union peacekeeping force has been deployed to stop further bloodshed in Bunia, the main city in the Ituri region.

Diplomats in the capital Kinshasa were confident the overall peace deal would stick.

"I hope that this accord and the establishment of a transitional government will mean that a lasting peace has come to Congo," said Moustapha Niasse, the former Senegalese prime minister who mediated the negotiations, on Sunday.

US President George W Bush last week joined calls for the belligerents in DRC to set up the transitional government yesterday, when the country celebrates its anniversary of independence from Belgium in 1960.

Under the peace deal, Kabila, who assumed power after the assassination of his father Laurent in January 2001, will share power with four vice presidents.

One will come from each of the two main rebel movements, one from the government and one from the political opposition.

Ministries will be divided up between the different parties to the government, and former rebel fighters will be integrated into the army and police force.

Elections are due to be held within 24 months of the investiture of the transitional government, but that period may be extended.

The elections would be only the second that the DRC, ruled from 1965 to 1997 by the staggeringly corrupt Mobutu Sese Seko, has held since independence. - Sapa-AFP.

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