(Adnkronos) – Donald Trump claims to have “ended” – since his return to the White House – six (or seven) conflicts, including one of the bloodiest on the planet, “resolved” with an agreement signed last June between the foreign ministers of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The reality in the east of the African country, however, tells a different story: according to CNN, the region continues to see daily clashes, millions of displaced people and accusations of massacres and crimes against humanity.
In Goma, the epicenter of the crisis, the rebels of the Alliance of the Congo River (Afc), which includes the M23 group, continue to fight against the regular army and promise to march towards the capital. “We must liberate our country and remove this corrupt regime,” Corneille Nangaa, former head of the electoral commission and now political leader of the rebels, told CNN. Neither the Afc nor the M23 took part in the US-sponsored peace process.
Trump, for his part, called the treaty “wonderful” and at a press conference in London claimed: “We resolved the Congo conflict with Rwanda. It was a machete war, a horrible war, almost ten million dead. We fixed it.” A statement that, however, clashes with the data provided by the United Nations: since January alone, over 7,000 people have been killed in the fighting, while the number of internally displaced persons has reached a record 7.8 million.
A report released by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights documented summary executions, torture, enforced disappearances and a massacre of hundreds of civilians in Rutshuru, attributed to M23 militiamen and Rwandan soldiers, which occurred a few weeks after the signing of the agreement in Washington. “My team has confirmed that the M23 has committed widespread torture, including sexual violence,” said Commissioner Volker Turk. Nangaa, however, rejects all accusations: “It’s Kinshasa propaganda, lies invented to raise funds.”
Meanwhile, the civilian population in the eastern regions of Bukavu and North Kivu lives under constant threat. Markets and neighborhoods of Goma seem to be coming back to life, but behind the apparent normality, fear prevails. “We have already suffered enough,” says a woman who sells fish at the market, without wanting to reveal her name. The closure of banks and Goma’s international airport has worsened the economic crisis, while the World Food Program warns that 28 million Congolese need urgent aid: “We are facing a humanitarian catastrophe,” said Country Director Cynthia Jones.
The conflict is also weighed down by the struggle for control of the immense Congolese mineral resources, from cobalt to coltan, essential for global technology. Trump admitted to seeing the agreement as an opportunity to obtain “many mining rights in Congo,” but the rebels retort: “The minerals belong to the people, not to (Congolese President Felix) Tshisekedi or the Americans,” says Nangaa. The war, according to him, is not about the riches of the subsoil, but about “bad governance, political and identity problems.” And he concludes: “If they sign a treaty in Washington, nothing changes here. We stay, we are Congolese and we stay in our home.”
