As the campaign for justice for war victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo intensifies, fresh tensions with neighbouring Rwanda and its leader Paul Kagame whose troops took part in two invasions in the 1990s might just be inevitable.
In an interview with AFP, monitored by Africa Today News, New York, DRC leader Felix Tshisekedi reiterated his commitment to calls for accountability for the more than two decades of devastating violence in the east of the country that has left millions either dead or missing.
But he said he did not wish to ‘pick a dispute’ with Kagame.
Tshisekedi urged the international community to build on the findings of a landmark UN investigation in 2010, known as the Mapping Report, which concluded that atrocities had been committed in his vast, resource-rich country.
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“The Mapping (Report) was produced by the international community, they must continue it because we need justice to be delivered to our victims,” Tshisekedi said in Paris on Wednesday after a summit on post-pandemic financing for Africa.
The report, carried out by international investigators for the UN Human Rights Commissioner, described 617 serious crimes between 1993-2003 that could amount to war crimes and possibly genocide.
The report recommended further investigation and the prosecution of the perpetrators by an international war crimes court.
Rwanda, whose troops were identified as being responsible for massacres during two invasions in 1996 and again in 1998, along with rebels they backed, has categorically rejected the report.
Tshisekedi said that if there were Rwandan war criminals “it’s in the interest of President Kagame to deliver them to justice because it is a question of honour for his country too.”
Kagame caused anger this week in the DR Congo following an interview he gave on the sidelines of the same African financing conference attended by Tshisekedi.
Asked about the Mapping Report, he rejected it as “extremely politicised” and “highly disputed by people’.
‘There were no crimes,’ he told journalists from France 24 television and RFI radio which Africa Today News, New York can confirm.
In response, Congolese politicians and public figures have accused him of “negationism” and insulting the memory of the victims.
“Paul Kagame has never gone so far in his taunting of Congolese people,” Juvenal Munubo, a close ally of Tshisekedi and head of the parliamentary defence and security commission, told AFP.
“Dignity, justice and reparations are the only appropriate responses faced with the negationism of Kagame,” 60 Congolese public figures including artists and scientists wrote in a joint statement published this week.
AFRICA TODAY NEWS, NEW YORK