U.S. President Donald Trump will host Felix Tshisekedi, the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, at the White House on Thursday in an effort to advance peace between the two countries. Rwanda has backed the M23 rebel group fighting against Congolese government forces in a war that has killed thousands of people this year. The two countries signed a peace agreement in June in Washington, but fighting in eastern Congo has continued. This latest agreement is supposed to build on the previous deal, and Trump has planned a signing ceremony at the former U.S. Institute of Peace, now renamed the Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace.
The fact that the war has raged on in the wake of the June agreement has “fueled skepticism among observers about whether these diplomatic breakthroughs will deliver on the ambitious promises made to the people of the region, or whether they are simply politically expedient transactional exchanges based on narrow security and economic interests,” Mohamed Keita wrote in a WPR in-depth piece in July. The June agreement favored Rwanda and–in the absence of any international verification mechanism–appeared to give it the ability to use the presence of a Hutu armed group in eastern Congo to “either delay its withdrawal or to once again intervene in eastern Congo in the future,” Keita wrote.
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