President Trump will host the leaders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Thursday to sign a peace deal to end years of fighting between the two nations.
The meeting comes after the foreign ministers of the two African nations signed a U.S.-brokered preliminary peace deal and an economic pact at the White House in June.
After that event, talks continued for months, and both sides met in Qatar last month to sign a framework deal with the ultimate goal of ending the conflict.
Both DRC President Felix Tshisekedi and Rwanda President Paul Kagame will attend the event and sign the economic and peace agreement.
The war between the two nations has raged for decades. It’s one of the eight wars that Mr. Trump claims he has ended.
“For 35 years, it was a vicious war. Nine million people were killed with machetes. I stopped it. … I got it stopped and saved a lot of lives,” he said in August.
Mr. Trump has received multiple nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. During his Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, he noted all the wars he’s ended and mocked the Norwegian Nobel Committee for its shifting standards.
“Every time I end a war, they say, ‘If President Trump ends that war, he’s going to get the Nobel Prize.’ If I end that war, ‘Well, he won’t get it for that war, but if he ever gets it, [it will be] for the next war.’
“Now they’re saying, ‘If he ever ends the war with Russia and Ukraine, he’s going to get the Nobel Prize.’ What about the other eight wars? India, Pakistan, think of all the wars I ended. I should get the Nobel Prize for every war, but I don’t want to get greedy.”
M23, established by members of a former Rwanda-backed rebel group, has fought the DRC government in North Kivu province for over a decade. The group, which has roots in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, is among the more than 100 groups in eastern DRC that were targeted by the Hutu in Rwanda.
M23 resurged in 2021 with the alleged support of Rwanda, a claim the country has denied. Instead, Rwanda insists it has acted in self-defense against the DR’s military and ethnic fighters in the region.
Thousands of people, many of them civilians, have been killed in the violence, which surged at the beginning of this year as M23 seized two of the DRC’s largest cities.
Fighting has continued sporadically during the peace talk process. At least 319 civilians were killed in the DRC by M23 fighters aided by the Rwanda Defense Force in July, shortly after the initial White House deal, according to the United Nations.
