Gambiaj.com – (JOHANNESBURG, South Africa) – Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame has lashed out at President Cyril Ramaphosa, the President of South Africa. He accuses him of lies, deliberate attacks, and distorting their conversation on the DRC conflict.
Thirteen SANDF troops died while battling M23 rebels in eastern DRC. But Kagame claims Ramaphosa confirmed to him they were killed by the DRC armed forces.
In a strongly worded statement on X, Kagame says South Africa is in no position to play a peacemaker or mediator role.
Kagame brands SADC’s peacekeepers as belligerent forces engaging in offensive combat to help the DRC government.
Kagame is warning that if South Africa wants confrontation, Kigali will respond accordingly.
I held two conversations this week with President Ramaphosa on the situation in Eastern DRC, including earlier today. What has been said about these conversations in the media by South African officials and President Ramaphosa himself contains a lot of distortion, deliberate… https://t.co/i78aqtVjpr
— Paul Kagame (@PaulKagame) January 29, 2025
Rwanda is facing an international backlash over its actions in eastern Congo, where it has repeatedly intervened either directly or through allied militias over the past 30 years in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.
But the chorus of condemnation, which has included Germany canceling aid talks with Rwanda and Britain threatening to withhold $40 million of annual bilateral assistance, was having no apparent effect on the ground.
After seizing Goma, a lakeside city of nearly 2 million and a major hub for displaced people and aid groups, M23 fighters were advancing south from the town of Minova, along the western side of Lake Kivu.
Kagame accused South African forces of working alongside a militia in Congo with ties to perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and “threatening to take the war to Rwanda itself.”
“If South Africa wants to contribute to peaceful solutions, that is well and good, but South Africa is in no position to take on the role of a peacemaker or mediator,” Kagame wrote.
“And if South Africa prefers confrontation, Rwanda will deal with the matter in that context any day.”
Since the fall of Goma, Rwanda has also reacted angrily to calls for restraint from Western nations, accusing its critics of “victim-blaming” and turning a blind eye to what it says is Congo’s complicity in the slaughter of Tutsis.
Congo rejects Rwanda’s accusations, saying Kigali’s true motive for involvement in its eastern provinces is to use its proxy militias to control lucrative mineral mines. U.N. experts have documented the export of large quantities of looted Congolese minerals via Rwanda.
M23 is the latest ethnic Tutsi-led insurgency backed by Rwanda to fight in Congo since the 1994 genocide, when extremist Hutus killed about a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, and were then toppled by Tutsi forces led by Kagame, who has been Rwanda’s president ever since.
