M23’s lightning advance into east DRC being supported by up to 4,000 Rwandan troops, say UN officials. France is seeking western support for a UN security council resolution that names Rwanda as being behind the M23 rebel group attacks inside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including the surprise weekend seizure of parts of Goma, the largest city in eastern DRC.
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.
But practical steps to isolate the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, are not yet being openly canvassed. Similar sanctions in the past, notably in 2012, forced Rwanda to pull back when aid was slashed. The UN statement drawn up at the end of an emergency security council meeting on Sunday called for the withdrawal of “external forces” without explicitly naming Rwanda. However, it did reference a report by UN experts that highlighted the systematic presence of Rwandan forces in the DRC.
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.
