Swiss President Alain Berset, whose country will chair the UN Security Council in May, pledged Thursday in Kinshasa to work for the civilian populations victims of the conflicts in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Alain Berset has been visiting the DRC since Wednesday evening where, following the capital Kinshasa, he plans to go to the East, which has been plagued by violence from armed groups for nearly 30 years.
“We want to draw attention to those who are the first victims” of insecurity, declared the president of the Swiss confederation during a joint press conference with his Congolese counterpart Félix Tshisekedi.
He will go in particular to IDP camps in Goma, capital of the province of North Kivu, where the M23 rebellion has caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people since the end of 2021. In Bukavu, in the neighboring province of South Kivu, he will meet the famous doctor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Denis Mukwege.
Having joined the United Nations only twenty years ago, Switzerland has been a non-permanent member of the Security Council since January, of which it will assume the presidency for a month in May.
She sits “with this approach that we know, commitment to peace, peace processes, mediation, dialogue”, said Mr. Berset. The confederation has also “rules to preserve its neutrality” but, he added, “neutrality does not mean indifference”.
Regarding eastern Congo, he said that it was “not acceptable for a country to intervene on the territory of a sovereign country”. However, he did not mention the name of Rwanda, which UN experts have established supports the M23 rebellion. He also considered that the solution to the conflict should “come from the region, from the countries” concerned themselves.
Felix Tshisekedi meanwhile once once more denounced “aggression” of which the DRC considers itself a victim at the hands of Rwanda. While hoping that the ongoing de-escalation process would accelerate on the ground, the Congolese president also reaffirmed that there was “no question of political dialogue” with the M23. “It will never be questioned”, he hammered.