Rwandan President Paul Kagame has called on his Congolese counterpart Félix Tshisekedi to respond to the grievances of the “Rwandophone Congolese Tutsi” community to establish lasting peace in the ongoing war in the east.
Kagame presented himself as a defender for the Congolese tutsi speaking people at the mini-summit held in Addis Ababa to find a solution to the security crisis in eastern DRC on the sidelines of the 37th ordinary session of the Conference of Heads of State and Government of the African Union.
To definitively resolve the security crisis in the east, President Kagame suggested that the involved parties “tackle the root causes of persistent insecurity in eastern DRC, in particular bad governance, ethnic discrimination (of the Tusti) and violence” .
Kagame reaffirmed his position in a letter that his government sent to the UN Security Council which indicated “this violence is particularly directed against the Congolese Tutsi, in particular the Banyamulenge in South Kivu and the Hema in Ituri, based on their ethnicity and perceived allegiance to neighboring countries.”
According to the Rwandan authorities, insecurity has persisted in the east because of “the refusal by the DRC government to address the real grievances of Rwandan-speaking Congolese, particularly Tutsis, and the refusal to repatriate hundreds of thousands of Congolese refugees living in the region.
“They have sworn to cleanse eastern DRC of Congolese Tutsis, whom they consider Rwandans, and are involved in horrific scenes of ethnic killings reminiscent of events leading up to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda” Kagame’s government stated.
The Kagame administration stressed that the hypermilitarization of the eastern region of DRC with the presence of ethnically motivated forces, both state and non-state, constitutes a major concern for Rwanda.
The mini-summit in Addis Ababa brought together four heads of state; Félix Tshisekedi of the DRC, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, João Lourenço of Angola, and the chairperson of the African Union commission, Moussa Faki.
