Rwandan President Paul Kagame has accused his counterpart in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Felix Tshisekedi, of having «dishonored» several of the agreements signed to tackle the diplomatic crisis between the two countries in relation to the armed conflict in eastern DRC and criticized the international community for looking the other way.
«This person has dishonored dozens of agreements», said Kagame during a meeting with ambassadors and diplomatic representatives in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, in which he criticized the «hypocrisy» and the «double standards» of the international community in this matter, according to the newspaper ‘The New Times’.
Tensions between the two continue to rise. The DRC accuses its neighbor of collaborating with the rebels of the March 23 Movement (M23), a group formed mainly by Congolese Tutsis operating in the province of North Kivu – which has recently restarted hostilities -, while Rwanda maintains that the DRC supports the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), made up of Hutus responsible for the 1994 genocide in that country.
«What I have learned over the years is that politics and diplomacy are very strange things (…) I don’t know whether it is because of the world order we are in now, or whether it has always been or will always be like this, but both tend to lack or rather people tend not to engage with the truth,» KAgame criticized.
In that sense, he has wondered if diplomacy and politics have achieved nothing in this conflict that goes back almost three decades, «why should there be tens of thousands of peacekeepers in one place for over 20 years costing tens of billions of dollars?»
Faced with claims that Rwanda would be participating in the DRC’s internal conflict, Kagame has questioned what interest they could have in that and accused the other side of boycotting all regional efforts to pacify the region.
Thus, he assured, the DRC has deliberately broken the agreements signed in the last two years, the last one, the one reached at the summit in Bujumbura, Burundi. «We discuss things openly, we write a communiqué on the way forward, and the next day something different is announced in Kinshasa,» he reproached.
On the other hand, Kagame stressed that they will continue to use all the means at their disposal to prevent the presence in the country of the «genocidal» FDLR, a group which, according to Rwanda, is allegedly supported by the DRC.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
