Rwanda’s president said on Monday his country and the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC or DR Congo) were making “very good progress” in restoring peace to war-torn central Africa.
Paul Kagame said a January offensive by forces from the two countries aimed at disarming Rwandan Hutu fighters in DR Congo achieved a “major breakthrough” by drastically decreasing fighting and seriously weakening the command of the Hutu rebels.
However, Kagame said both countries recognize “that there is still a lot of work to be done.”
“We’re making very good progress,” he said in a speech to the International Peace Institute. “The major problems have been resolved. That’s the starting point.”
Central Africa’s Great Lakes region has been a hotbed of political instability and fighting since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda saw more than 500,000 people, most of them from the country’s Tutsi minority, slaughtered by a regime of extremists from its Hutu majority.
After Tutsi rebels led by Kagame ended the genocide, the extremist Hutus fled into neighboring eastern Congo.
Since then, Rwanda has, together with neighbor Uganda, twice invaded DR Congo — in 1994 and 1998. During each invasion Rwanda has said it was chasing down the Rwandan militias. The second invasion sparked a five-year, six-nation war in DR Congo that killed about 3 million people.
DR Congo cut off diplomatic relations with Rwanda over its support of a rebel movement whose mission was to hunt the Rwandan Hutu fighters in eastern Congo after the genocide.
Kagame disputed claims that Rwanda intervened in DR Congo to exploit its rich natural resources, using the hunt for perpetrators of the genocide as a pretext.
“Rwanda does not have capacity to exploit our own mineral resources,” he said, so “how can we take advantage of those in the DRC?”
The UN established a peacekeeping force in DR Congo in November 1999 that Kagame said was very costly and did not achieve “corresponding results,” because fighting continued and the Hutu rebels were not disarmed.
Rwanda and DR Congo normalized relations in 2007, and in January, both armies teamed up and conducted a successful joint offensive in volatile eastern Congo.
“The situation has now changed fundamentally because Rwanda and the DRC both now recognize that we must work together to find answers to peace for Congo,” Kagame said.
“On the political and diplomatic front, we have now exchanged ambassadors with the DRC, paving the way for further efforts in the more important realms of economic growth and development including joint projects in energy, environment, trade and investment,” he said.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS