It was in the middle of the morning of Saturday May 06, 2023 that the President of the Republic Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo arrived in Bujumbura to participate in the 11th summit of Heads of State signatories of the Framework Agreement for Peace, Security and cooperation for the DRC and the region.
A total of 13 Heads of State or their representatives, the UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres as well as the representatives of the AU, the CIRGL and the SADC have confirmed their participation in this meeting which opened on Saturday morning in Bujumbura.
Convened by the incoming president of this regional mechanism, the President of Burundi Evariste Ndayishimiye, the Burundi summit set itself, among other objectives, to revitalize this agreement which had raised a lot of hope for the return of peace in the DRC in that t is the first peace initiative aimed at ending the deadliest conflict since the Second World War and addressing the root causes of violence and repeated wars in eastern DRC.
It is clear that 10 years later, the situation has worsened with the proven aggression of the DRC by Rwanda under cover of the terrorist group M23.
The 11th meeting of the Framework Agreement coincides with the 10th anniversary of the signing of this document, on February 24, 2013 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The speech of President Félix Tshisekedi from the top of this rostrum is eagerly awaited by the fact that the DRC has assumed the outgoing presidency of this mechanism and also by what the DRC intends to demonstrate before the 13 countries, the UN, the AU, CIRGL and SADEC how Rwanda torpedoed this process through the proven aggression of Congolese territory.
There is no doubt, on the DRC side, that the revitalization must be preceded by an evaluation of the Framework Peace Agreement.
In good faith, the DRC has carried out the commitments assigned to it in the Framework Agreement while others have not played fair.
The work of this summit will end at the beginning of the evening of this same Saturday with a final press release.
Writing /Celcom-Presidency