Rwanda’s president has once again warned his Congolese counterpart, who last year threatened to invade the neighboring Rwanda, that he and his people were not afraid of death while fighting “for our rights and our country.”
During his address to the parliament in Kigali earlier this week, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame told the lawmakers that he is “here with others who fought for our rights and our country”. He then added, in a thinly wailed warning to the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Felix Tshisekedi, that “for us who are not even afraid of death, if you dare us you will not survive”.
Last year, Tshisekedi threatened to invade Rwanda whom he accuses of supporting the M23 rebels with soldiers and logistics to destabilize eastern DRC, a claim Kigali denies.
“Those comments … that they wanted to attack Rwanda; because Rwanda is a small country and we don’t argue with anyone on that, it’s true,” said Kagame, who recently won a fourth term in office. “We are a small country but our rights are as huge as those of these big countries,” he told the lawmakers.
Addressing the issue of the M23 rebellion, Kagame said that his country now has 130,000 “people who were persecuted, from eastern Congo,” in an indirect reference to the M23’s accusations that the DRC authorities have long been discriminating against and persecuting Congolese of Tutsi ancestry. In an interview with Jeune Afrique in March, Kagame admitted that he ‘takes seriously’ Tshisekedi’s threats to invade Rwanda.