The foreign ministers of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, with the mediation of their Ugandan counterpart, agreed this weekend to accelerate as much as possible the agreement to ease bilateral tension over the activity of the M23 rebel group in northeastern Congo, which Kinshasa claims is supported by Rwanda.
Rwanda has denied the accusations and pointed against the Congolese government for assisting the rebel movement of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), in a crisis fueled by a major advance of the M23 in the territories of North Kivu that culminated last week with the expulsion of the Rwandan ambassador to the DRC, Vincent Karenga.
In a joint communiqué reported by the Rwandan daily ‘The New Times’, the DRC Foreign Ministers Christophe Lutundula, Téte António of Angola and Vincent Biruta of Rwanda agreed this past Saturday to continue the dialogue «as a priority way to resolve the political crisis between the two brotherly countries» and to define «a timetable to accelerate» the de-escalation roadmap signed in July.
Tension, however, still persists. This past Saturday, Congolese Army spokesman, General Sylvain Ekenge, assured that more than 2,000 young people had heeded the call for «total mobilization» made the day before by the country’s president, Felix Tshisekedi.
The new recruits will be trained in military centers of the country as possible reinforcement to the operations against the M23 in North Kivu, added the spokesman in comments picked up by Radio Okapi, and at a moment when Kenyan troops have moved to the east of the DRC to control the multiple fronts of violence both of the M23 and of other groups such as the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) – which swore allegiance to the Islamic State – or the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda itself.
The president gave this mobilization order after noting the lack of diplomatic advances such as the one that finally occurred this weekend. «No one but us will come to save our nation. The war imposed on us by our neighbors demands sacrifices from each one of us and it is time to silence our political differences to defend our homeland together», he proclaimed in his speech, reported by the Congolese news portal Actualité.
