AA / Kinshasa / Pascal Mulegwa
Congolese President Felix-Antoine Tshisekedi left the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, without meeting the dozen armed groups that are expected to negotiate a ceasefire in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Announced for this Friday, April 22, the presidential consultation with the armed groups operating in the eastern provinces of the DRC, one of the resolutions of the quintipartite summit of Thursday, April 21, did not take place.
“The main reason remains the logistical difficulty in moving most of those concerned to Nairobi,” said the Congolese Presidency in a report received by the press.
The Presidency of the Republic of Kenya, which leads the political component of the process, is working “to facilitate the arrival of representatives of these groups in the Kenyan capital with a view to joining the two others who are staying there”, according to the same source. .
For his part, President Tshisekedi reaffirmed this Friday before his return to Kinshasa, “the materialization of this process of unconditional surrender”.
Tshisekedi considers this dialogue as a “last chance given to these local armed groups to immediately lay down their arms and engage in the process of social reintegration, failing which, the regional military option supported by all will force them to do so”, according to the Congolese Presidency.
For the Congolese president, “it is therefore clear that this outstretched hand towards his compatriots engaged in an armed struggle once morest their country is not a round table of negotiations or compromises”, adds the same report.
The Congolese head of state has left a working group of experts responsible for carrying out these consultations under the leadership of the President of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta.
To ensure the implementation of all the decisions, a technical secretariat has been set up, co-chaired by the Special Representative Serge Tshibangu, the Special Envoy of President Uhuru Kenyatta and the delegates of each member country of the Community of ‘East Africa.
The same ultimatum has also been issued to foreign armed groups, which must go to their respective States “if not subjected to the firepower of the regional military force”, according to one of the resolutions of the summit held on Thursday between President Tshisekedi, his counterparts Yoweri Museveni from Uganda, Evariste Ndayishimiye from Burundi, Uhuru Kenyatta from Kenya and the Rwandan Paul Kagame represented by his Minister of Foreign Affairs.
The eastern DRC, dotted with a hundred armed groups, is one of the most unstable and scarred regions on the planet. The process of dialogue with the armed groups raised an outcry, particularly from the opposition and from certain elected representatives of the presidential camp.
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