PRETORIA: On Tuesday, hundreds of Congolese citizens protested at EU headquarters in South Africa to require restrictions against Rwanda for supporting separatists in the troubled eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
M23, backed by Rwanda, seized the largest city of Goma last week during a lightning strike and has vowed to move across the country to Kinshasa.
Conflicts have ended in Goma, a city of more than a million people, but they have spread to the neighboring province of South Kivu, putting a strain on an already dire humanitarian crises in the mineral-rich place.
About 2, 000 activists, wearing the blue, yellow and red of the DRC, chanted outside the EU ambassador in the West African money Pretoria.
They praised the South African national defense force ( SANDF) and the Congolese armed forces, who are attempting to pacify the area, by waving placards with the slogan” Free Congo.”
” The situation in Congo is similar to that of Ukraine”, said 49-year-old Elie Kalonji Ikasereka, who was protesting with his community.
The merchant, who has lived in South Africa for 20 years, has asked the European Union to take the same steps as they did for Rwanda and its chairman Paul Kagame.
” We want punishment”.
The protest accused Brussels of fostering the fight and plundering their state by denouncing a nutrients deal between the EU and Rwanda.
The deal, signed in February next month, gives the EU access to raw materials options including iron, titanium, gold, niobium and rare earth elements.
If the EU needs anything in Congo, “it may appear in through the main wall, it should stop buying vitamins through Rwanda”, charged 50-year-old Monique Mbiya Nkolombo.
The Europe-Central Africa network ( EurAC ), which brings together about thirty European NGOs specialised in the Great Lakes, including Secours Catholique and Terre Solidaire, also denounced the agreement, saying that the EU “has fuelled the escalation of regional tensions”.
There is no message that speaks in a way that threatens Kagame.” We Congolese are suffering”, said Chriss Zas’s, a 32-year-old African advocate.
Coltan, the silver ore essential to the manufacture of phones and laptops, is found in eastern DRC, along with golden and other minerals.
Rwanda claims that the DRC helps and homes the FDLR, an ethnic Hutus party that massacred Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan holocaust. It has never acknowledged military presence in the M23 team.
Before a planned crisis conference between Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi and Kagame, the M23 on Tuesday declared a charitable peace.
