Government responds to DRC claims

Rwanda has said that the claims by DRC that the country was bent on “secessionism and expansionism” in the DRC territory was “entirely imaginary and retrograde”. The country’s permanent representative to the UN, Anastase Gasana, in a letter dated 9 August addressed to the president of the UN Security Council, said that the Kinshasa authorities “extremely frustrated because they are now administering only one quarter of the country, the remaining three quarters being in the hands of various Congolese rebels, are trying as best as they can, with their dwindling reserves of energy to brainwash international public opinion”. It said that when DRC draws a distinction between “invited rebels” and “uninvited rebels”, the government was now engaging in a “risky” exercise of distinguishing between “good and bad” rebels. “For Kinshasa, the good ones are the Bunia and the Gbadolite rebels. The bad ones are the Goma rebels, which Kinshasa is constantly targeting, accusing them of being guilty of practically everything, in keeping with the simplistic invited and uninvited refrain,” the letter said. “This little game of hide-and-seek is so childish that the Congolese rebels of Goma, Bunia and Gbadolite will not fall into that trap, even once the inter-Congolese dialogue under preparation has begun,” it added. It accused the Kinshasa government of sounding “false alarms” since they did not have exclusive rights over a unitary and independence Congo, “in fact they have no special privileges in that connection”. “They have no monopoly over such a Congo, which is just as much a concern of the Congolese authorities of Goma, Bunia and Gbadolite. For the Kinshasa authorities to keep returning to that theme now is therefore nothing but demagoguery,” the letter said.