WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump will bring together the leaders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Washington on Thursday to sign a peace agreement, months after an earlier US-brokered deal failed to stop violence.
“President Trump will host the presidents of the Republic of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to sign the historic peace and economic agreement that he brokered,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday.
Trump had met in June at the White House with the two countries’ foreign ministers as they signed an earlier deal, and has since boasted that DR Congo is one of a number of countries where he has ended war.
But violence has continued, with both sides blaming each other. It was not immediately clear how different the presidential-level agreement will be from the June deal.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame last week publicly accused the Congolese government of delaying the signing of a peace deal.
The region — rich in minerals vital to new technologies — has endured three decades of armed conflict, costing hundreds of thousands of lives.
Violence intensified in January when the Rwandan-backed M23 armed group captured swathes of territory, including the cities of Goma and Bukavu.
Rwanda has made the end of its “defensive measures” contingent on Kinshasa neutralizing the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), an ethnic Hutu group with links to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Trump has voiced hope for securing minerals from the eastern DRC, giving a boost to the United States over China.
In talks last month in Washington, Rwanda and the DRC “recognized lagging progress” in implementation of the June agreement but agreed to work on easing tensions.
White House says DR Congo, Rwanda to sign deal Thursday
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White House says DR Congo, Rwanda to sign deal Thursday
- The region has endured three decades of armed conflict, costing hundreds of thousands of lives
- The peace agreement comes months after an earlier US-brokered deal failed to stop violence
X briefly hit by 'international outages': monitors
- The breakdown was "not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering," Netblocks said
- Spokespeople for X did not respond to request for comment on the outage before service was restored
Service was restored to Elon Musk-owned social network X Monday afternoon after it had failed to show posts to users in many countries.
The site was displaying content, allowing users to post and otherwise functioning normally again around 1530 GMT, after the Down Detector tracking website reported a spike in outage reports around two hours before.
X had appeared to be suffering "international outages," connectivity monitor Netblocks posted on the open-source social network Mastodon during the disruption.
The breakdown was "not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering", added Netblocks, which regularly flags technical issues with popular online services and sites as well as interference by national governments.
Its most recent posts about similar outages for X came on February 9, the day after the Super Bowl in the US, and February 1.
AFP journalists in countries including France and Thailand had also been unable to access X on Monday afternoon.
Spokespeople for X did not respond to AFP's request for comment on the outage before service was restored.
Musk laid off thousands of people at the former Twitter and changed its name after buying the service in 2022.
He has since merged it with his xAI company, which develops the Grok chatbot.
xAI is set to in turn be absorbed by Musk's rocket firm SpaceX, with that merged entity expected to go public as early as summer this year.
