Congo’s Kabila in Rwanda as Rebel Attacks Roil Mineral Region

(Bloomberg) -- The leaders of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda pledged greater intelligence cooperation amid an upsurge in rebel attacks in the east of Africa’s biggest copper producer.

Conglese President Joseph Kabila met his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kagame, in the western Rwandan town of Rubavu on Friday. Both sides “hailed the progress made in line with eradicating negative forces” and discussed the “timely sharing of intelligence,” Rwanda’s presidency said in a statement on its Twitter account. The talks also covered plans to extract methane gas in Lake Kivu, with a joint technical team due to begin work before the end of the month, it said.

Congo, almost the size of Western Europe, is the world’s largest source of cobalt. For two decades it has struggled to defeat dozens of local and foreign militias in the east, which has deposits of tin, gold and coltan. One group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, some of whose leaders are linked to the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, has staged cross-border raids, including in April.

Kabila earlier this month visited Uganda and met President Yoweri Museveni, discussing a plan to share security intelligence to fight the Allied Democratic Forces, an insurgent group originally based in Uganda that has operated along Congo’s border since the late 1990s.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ignatius Ssuuna in Rubavu at issuuna@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Paul Richardson at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net, Michael Gunn, Karl Maier