Great Lakes Militaries Eye Joint Action to Secure the DRC

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Senior military officers from five African Great Lakes countries met to discuss strategies to respond to violence plaguing the region.

Senior officers from Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda gathered in the eastern town of Goma, in the DRC’s North Kivu province. DRC Armed Forces spokesman Gen. Leon-Richard Kasonga said the meeting was meant to compare strategy and discuss “sharing efforts” to promote peace.

Eastern DRC and its borders have been an area of conflict for nearly a quarter century. The region is troubled by militia groups that evolved from the two wars that decimated the area in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The DRC’s chief of staff of the armed forces, Gen. Celestin Mbala, has suggested joint military operations to “eradicate armed groups,” both domestic and foreign, in the troubled east. However, the United Nations ruled out supporting any foreign military that intervenes in the DRC.

Among the militias troubling the Kivu region are the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamist-rooted Ugandan armed group, and the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda.