PREVIEW
Aides to President Tshisekedi and Kagame blame each other’s governments for lack of progress on peace efforts in eastern Congo
After a bid failed to bring together Presidents Félix Tshisekedi and Paul Kagame at the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie in Villers-Cotterêts and Paris, President Emmanuel Macron met the two leaders separately. He had encouraged them both to conclude a peace agreement to end the war in Eastern Congo ‘as soon as possible’, he said.
Tshisekedi had earlier walked out of a plenary session in protest at President Macron’s silence on the presence of Rwanda’s military in eastern Congo-K. That got through to the Elysée. In his closing speech to the summit on 5 October, Macron demanded the withdrawal of the M23 and Rwandan troops from Congolese soil.
Kigali pushed back hard on Kinshasa’s briefing at the conference. Rwanda’s Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe told Reuters that a blueprint for a peace deal had been agreed in August and early September by delegates including Congo-K's head of military intelligence. The deal, he said, would have involved ‘neutralising the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR) and lifting Rwanda's defence measures’. But he claimed that Kinshasa’s ministers had nixed the agreement. Those negotiations, mediated by Angola, have now stalled.
Rwanda, which denies financing and supporting M23, says that the FDLR, a Hutu-led rebel group, is being supported by Kinshasa, and have insisted on its containment being part of any arrangement to remove Rwandan forces from eastern Congo-K. The UN has also documented evidence of Congolese military support for the group and for Rwandan arms shipments and training for the M23 militia (AC Vol 65 No 15, Kinshasa urges sanctions on Kigali citing damning UN report).
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