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While Ukraine has stated that it will not accept a ceasefire with Russia and the United States and NATO won’t either, over in Africa, a ceasefire agreement was put in place between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo last week as tensions run high between the two countries with a long history of bloody conflicts.
Congo has accused Rwanda of backing rebel fighters in the eastern region of the country and launched a counteroffensive. About 170,000 people have been displaced over the past four months of the offensive by M23 in North Kivu province. The New Humanitarian reported that there are more than 100 armed groups in the region and about 700,000 people have been displaced in the past year.
Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, told France 24 he recently met with Congolese President Tshisekedi and said he saw the meeting as “another step forward.” He told the network that he was “surprised” that the U.S. accused Rwanda of placing troops in Congo. (See “U.S. CONDEMNS CONGO KILLINGS OF INNOCENTS.”)
Tshisekedi has said there is “absolutely no doubt Rwanda is backing the March 23rd Movement.” He said Congo wants peace “but if push comes to shove, we will take action,” the FT reported.
The ceasefire seems tenuous. Maj. Willy Ngoma, the spokesman of the M23 rebels, told the Saturday Monitor that the group was not party to the pact signed by presidents and therefore the agreement is not binding to them, made up of mainly of Tutsi fighters from Congo.
Troops from Congo have been accused of fighting with the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, which include Hutu militants, who were accused of slaughtering Tutsis during the Rwanda genocide in 1994.
“Those saying that we immediately withdraw from Bunagana, where do they want us to go? We are going nowhere because we are Congolese nationals. We can’t go to Uganda or America because we are not citizens of those countries. We shall not withdraw our forces because we are citizens of this country,” he told the paper.
Tshisekedi said Rwanda is fighting in his country under the guise of the rebel group with its sights on Congo’s vast mineral wealth. The FT pointed out that Congo is home to massive amounts of coltan, gold and metallic ore.
“Its latest emergence is due to the Rwandan Defense Force, which is hiding behind the M23,” he said, according to the FT.
TRENDPOST: On 17 January, 1961, the same day U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address warning the American people that the military industrial complex was in control of the country and robbing it of the genius of the scientists, the sweat of the laborers and the future of the children.
Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first elected president, was executed in a plot that was allegedly designed by the CIA and its Belgian cohorts.
Lumumba was seized, tortured, and executed in a coup supported by the Belgian gang, the CIA, Jacobin magazine reported. He was replaced by the US-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko who the magazine said “laid the foundation for the decades of internal strife, dictatorship, and economic decline that have marked postcolonial Congo.”
The killing occurred while the Cold War was playing out, and the U.S. and its allies could not imagine a world where the raw materials found in the country could somehow end up in the hands of the Soviets.
The Guardian, in a 2011 article, reported that Lumumba’s hope was to use the raw materials to improve the living conditions of its people.
“In Congo, Lumumba’s assassination is rightly viewed as the country’s original sin. Coming less than seven months after independence, it was a stumbling block to the ideals of national unity, economic independence, and pan-African solidarity that Lumumba had championed.”