12 Jan. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Army of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has denied the accusations of the rebel group March 23 Movement (M23) about the participation in the conflict of mercenaries from the Wagner Group.
“The Wagner Group does not operate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Army spokesman Major General Sylvain Ekenge has denied to the British BBC. A denial that in October of last year the president of the DRC, Félix Tshisekedi, already repeated. “We don’t need mercenaries,” he told ‘The Financial Times’.
Rumors have been growing in recent weeks that the mercenaries of the Russian group are collaborating with the DRC authorities to contain the M23 rebels, who in recent months have recaptured large areas in the east of the country, where since fighting has been taking place for years.
“It’s true, the Wagner Group is here. We have evidence that we will show in due time,” M23 spokesman Willy Ngoma told the same chain on Wednesday, who assured that last week they confronted a group made up of mercenaries from the group and DRC soldiers in the Rutshuru area, in North Kivu.
These accusations have also been picked up by Rwanda, a country that the DRC accuses of supporting the rebels. Its president, Paul Kagame, this week accused the Congolese government of resorting to the Wagner Group and warned of the “disaster” this maneuver entails. “Mercenaries are the most useless people to trust,” he said.
The presence of the Wagner Group is increasingly notorious in the conflicts that take place on the African continent, due to its already known participation on the side of the Government of the Central African Republic to fight the rebels, it is suspected that they are doing their own in several countries of the Sahel .
As regards the DRC, the M23 has been accused since November 2021 of carrying out attacks against Army positions in North Kivu, despite the fact that the Congolese authorities and the rebel group signed a peace agreement in December 2013 after combats registered since 2012.
The situation has led to an uptick in tensions between the DRC and Rwanda as Kinshasa accuses Kigali of supporting the rebels. Kigali, for its part, denounces Kinshasa’s support for the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), founded and made up mainly of Hutus responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
