Rwanda’s president said on Monday his country and the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC or DR Congo) were making “very good progress” in restoring peace to war-torn central Africa.
Paul Kagame said a January offensive by forces from the two countries aimed at disarming Rwandan Hutu fighters in DR Congo achieved a “major breakthrough” by drastically decreasing fighting and seriously weakening the command of the Hutu rebels.
However, Kagame said both countries recognize “that there is still a lot of work to be done.”
“We’re making very good progress,” he said in a speech to the International Peace Institute. “The major problems have been resolved. That’s the starting point.”
Central Africa’s Great Lakes region has been a hotbed of political instability and fighting since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda saw more than 500,000 people, most of them from the country’s Tutsi minority, slaughtered by a regime of extremists from its Hutu majority.
After Tutsi rebels led by Kagame ended the genocide, the extremist Hutus fled into neighboring eastern Congo.
Since then, Rwanda has, together with neighbor Uganda, twice invaded DR Congo — in 1994 and 1998. During each invasion Rwanda has said it was chasing down the Rwandan militias. The second invasion sparked a five-year, six-nation war in DR Congo that killed about 3 million people.
DR Congo cut off diplomatic relations with Rwanda over its support of a rebel movement whose mission was to hunt the Rwandan Hutu fighters in eastern Congo after the genocide.
Kagame disputed claims that Rwanda intervened in DR Congo to exploit its rich natural resources, using the hunt for perpetrators of the genocide as a pretext.
“Rwanda does not have capacity to exploit our own mineral resources,” he said, so “how can we take advantage of those in the DRC?”
The UN established a peacekeeping force in DR Congo in November 1999 that Kagame said was very costly and did not achieve “corresponding results,” because fighting continued and the Hutu rebels were not disarmed.
Rwanda and DR Congo normalized relations in 2007, and in January, both armies teamed up and conducted a successful joint offensive in volatile eastern Congo.
“The situation has now changed fundamentally because Rwanda and the DRC both now recognize that we must work together to find answers to peace for Congo,” Kagame said.
“On the political and diplomatic front, we have now exchanged ambassadors with the DRC, paving the way for further efforts in the more important realms of economic growth and development including joint projects in energy, environment, trade and investment,” he said.
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