00:00The signing of a historic peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Rwanda.
00:08The Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda on Friday signed a peace deal aimed at ending a decades-long blood conflict between the two Central African neighbours.
00:33The peace deal brokered by the United States was signed by the DRC's Foreign Minister Theresa Wagner and her Rwandan counterpart Oliver Nduhun-ki-Rehe at the U.S. State Department's Treaty Room in the presence of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
00:53Overseeing the agreement was Donald Trump who later hosted the concerned parties at his Oval Office for a media interaction.
01:08In his own unabashed style, Trump called the agreement a glorious triumph to bring an end to the conflict in a region which had a lot of war, a lot of fighting and a lot of debt.
01:21So we're here today to celebrate a glorious triumph and that's what it is for the cause of peace.
01:28And this is a long time waiting.
01:31The signing of a historic peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Rwanda.
01:40The conflict has continued and it's been going on for many, many years.
01:46It's been going from, I guess, they say 30 years, the Great Lakes region of Africa for a long time and maybe even a time before that.
01:56How is the Great Lakes region? It must be beautiful, right? Beautiful.
01:59Beautiful region, but they had a lot of war, a lot of fighting, a lot of death.
02:04It's displaced countless people and claimed the lives of thousands and thousands.
02:09But today the violence and destruction comes to an end and the entire region begins a new chapter of hope and opportunity, harmony, prosperity and peace.
02:20Now, exactly a week before this treaty was signed on June 20th, Trump, who touts himself as a peacemaker, had posted on Social Truth,
02:30I won't get a Nobel Prize for this.
02:34Critiques, however, point out to the possibility that the U.S. could leverage this deal for gaining a greater access to crucial minerals found in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
02:50Now, while the signed peace agreement does not specifically forfeit any mineral rights to the U.S.,
02:56the document does include a framework to expand foreign trade and investment derived from regional critical mineral supply chains to link both countries with the U.S. government and U.S. investors.
03:11Now, analysts say that the U.S. government's commitment to ensuring the implementation of the peace deal might depend on how much access it has to the minerals being discussed
03:29and the separate negotiations between the American and the Congolese governments.
03:34Critiques also warn that such a scenario could cause a replay of the violence of the past decades when Congo's minerals have been a major draw for interfering of the foreign governments.
03:49There are also fears that the peace deal may completely fail in bringing peace to the war-torn region after all.
03:57Now, this is because the Rwandan-backed M23 rebel group, which is the most prominent armed group in the conflict, has said that the agreement is not binding on them.
04:08More than 7,000 people have been killed and another 1 million displaced since January of this year when the M23 militia waged a fresh offensive against the Congolese army seizing control of the two largest cities in the country's east.
04:33Now, there are also big question marks over the credibility of the governance and justice system in Congo, a country which has historically seen corrupt officials and perpetrators of injustice go scot-free.
04:54Tensions also surround the discrimination that Congolese Tutsis say they face in Congo in the form of ethnic killings and workplace discrimination.
05:06The Tutsis group is largely associated with the Rwanda and the M23 group claims to be fighting for the Tutsis, although critiques say that it is just a pretext to justify its own violence.
05:19Now, there is still hope, even though little, that this peace deal brokered by the US could bring to the Congo-Rwanda conflict to the end, which dates back to the Rwandan genocides of the Tutsis and the centrist Hutus from 1994, i.e. more than three decades.
05:46That's what we have been given.
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