By Enyichukwu Enemanna
The President of Democratic Republic of Congo, Felix Tshisekedi has hit his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kagame with a verbal missile, comparing him to Adolf Hitler.
Tshisekedi said Kagame was behaving like Hitler, and added: “I promise he will end up like Hitler”.
DRC has repeatedly accused Rwanda of backing the M23 rebel group holding sway in eastern DRC, an allegation Kigali says is untrue.
Speaking during a rally in Bukavu, close to the Rwandan border ahead of presidential election in which he would seek a rerun, Tshisekedi told his supporters on Friday that he would tell Mr Kagame that “since he wanted to behave like Adolf Hitler by having expansionist aims, I promise he will end up like Adolf Hitler.
“However, he [has] met his match, someone who is determined to stop him and protect his country.”
Hitler, responsible for the deaths of millions, including six million Jewish people in the Holocaust, ended up taking his own life in a bunker in the German capital, Berlin, in 1945.
His efforts to expand German territory led to World War Two.
Mr Tshisekedi has previously described the Rwandan leader as “the enemy of the Democratic Republic of Congo”.
In a BBC interview last year, he said their relationship was “cold for lack of a better word. It is he who unfortunately decided to attack the Democratic Republic of Congo”.
Mr Kagame has always dismissed such allegations in the past, accusing Mr Tshisekedi of being a “war monger” and instead focussed on another rebel group in the east of DR Congo – the Hutu-led FDLR – which Rwanda sees as a threat.
In her message on X, formerly Twitter, responding to the Hitler remarks, Rwandan government spokesperson Yolande Makolo said it was “a loud and clear threat by the DRC president, in a context where the FDLR is more armed than ever”.
Kagame has been the dominant political figure in Rwanda since the end of the 1994 genocide, in which about 800,000 people were slaughtered by ethnic Hutu extremists targeting the Tutsi minority .
A multiplicity of armed groups have caused mayhem, including Tutsi-led M23 rebels, who Mr Tshisekedi has said are supported by Rwanda.
