M23’s lightning advance into east DRC being supported by up to 4,000 Rwandan troops, say UN officials
UN officials said as many as 4,000 Rwandan troops were escorting the M23 rebels. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, on Sunday called on “the Rwandan defence forces to stop supporting the M23 and to withdraw from the territory of the DRC”. It was his clearest statement of Rwandan responsibility for much of the violence.
The French ambassador at the UN, Nicolas de Rivière, urged the UN security council to say Rwanda’s actions were a grave threat to regional peace and security. He said “it was time to call a cat a cat”, a reference to the way in which the international community for different reasons had skirted around the issue of Rwanda’s role in arming the M23. Britain and the US in their interventions at the UN on Sunday also named Rwanda and urged Kagame to pull back.
William Ruto, the president of Kenya, is seeking to fill the diplomatic vacuum by calling an extraordinary summit of the East African Community, which he chairs, within 48 hours on Monday. He insisted that the DRC president, Félix Tshisekedi, and Kagame would attend, but there has been no confirmation of this.
In speaking to the security council, the DRC foreign minister, Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, rejected any history lessons, instead favouring the UN imposing sweeping economic and political sanctions on Kagame, including on all Rwandan-labelled minerals. She accused Rwanda of a “declaration of war, and no longer hiding behind diplomatic manoeuvres”, adding that it was “clear that this crisis is directly linked to the economic plunder of our country by Rwanda”.
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