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.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
RSS