Rwandan President Paul Kagame has threatened to release General Laurent Nkunda. This release is of concern to the region’s leaders since it implies the risk of an explosion of unrest in the DRC that could spillover across the region.
Rwanda is battling new accusations that it is protecting the former chief of staff, Bosco Ntaganda Nkunda, from the UN Stabilization Mission in the DRC and from the Congolese government.
Ntaganda is wanted by the International Criminal Court to answer for war crimes charges.
Last week on Wednesday during a two hours press conference in Kigali, President Kagame angrily accused the DRC President Joseph Kabila of having reneged on his promise to honor the process of integration.
The International Conference on the Great Lakes Region has been involved in trying to find a solution to the latest round of wrangles.
Rwanda detained Nkunda, a Congolese of Tutsi ethnic and former rebel leader of the National Congress for the Defence of the People, in January 22, 2009, when he had fled after clashes with the Congolese army.
President Kagame said that "if this nonsense continues," Rwanda would have no choice but to withdraw from all efforts to bring peace to eastern Congo, and, if necessary release General Laurent Nkunda.
Visibly angry Kagame said, "We are reaching a point where, if this nonsense continues - on the one hand you want Rwanda to be useful, on the other hand you put all the blame on our shoulders - we unload all these problems that have been placed on our shoulders and send them home".
"One way to do so is, we will reach a point of saying," Take this man Nkunda we have here, or he is told not to go where you want to go," President Kagame said.
Kagame was responding for the first time, to the charges by MONUSCO. He said that if the UN mission had not failed in its mission to address the first genocidal Interahamwe operating there, eastern Congo would have been a very different place today.
"A situation was created where Congo's problems are Rwanda’s problems and not only that, they were actually caused by Rwanda and when all else failed, Rwanda should be held responsible for Congo ' President Kagame said.
"But ultimately we will be forced into a situation where we just draw a line and say," Well, if you do not want us to be helpful, if you do not want us to participate in finding a solution and you are just looking for reasons to blackmail us, we do not respond to blackmail ", President Kagame warned.
Ethnicity
Since the arrest of Nkunda, which was hailed by everybody as a solution to one of the main obstacles to restoring normalcy in eastern Congo, he was confined in a place that the Rwandan government has been reluctant to reveal and no charges have been brought so far against him.
When the Congolese government issued an international arrest warrant against him over allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity and insurrection, Rwanda refused to hand him over. Kigali fears that he is unlikely to be judged fairly or at worst may be killed simply due to his ethnicity, a scenario clearly that Rwanda’s President Kagame will not be party to.
However, others have suggested that the real reason might be the fear of what would be revealed in a full trial, since Nkunda may have been a proxy of Rwanda in the Democratic Republic of Congo at the peak of unrest. With his costume rebel, formed in 2003 to protect Congolese Tutsis like himself, he took as his mission to fight against the same Hutu militias that the Rwandan government is implementing.