Kigali said on Monday March 3 that London is required to pay it the balance of a controversial deal on the expulsion of migrants to Rwanda

Rémy RUGIRA

Article de This World

After retaining £240m of abandoned migrant deal, Kigali is demanding the remaining £50m from London! Kigali said on Monday 3 March that London was required to pay it the balance of a controversial deal to deport migrants to Rwanda. Abandoned by the UK last year, diplomatic relations between the two countries are increasingly strained.

The United Kingdom announced last week the suspension of the majority of its financial aid to Rwanda, citing the violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the DR Congo due to the offensive of the armed group M23 allied with Rwandan forces in the east of the country.

A “punitive” measure for Kigali, which has reversed the abandonment, in July 2024, of the controversial project to expel migrants who arrived illegally in the United Kingdom to Rwanda, launched in 2022 by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson but never materialized.

When Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer came to power in July 2024, he said it was “dead and buried” before it had even begun. Rwanda warned that the controversial deal did not provide for the restitution of the funds already paid by London to Kigali (£240m, or €280m).

“The UK had asked Rwanda to quietly waive the payment, based on the trust and good faith that exists between our two nations,” Rwandan government spokesperson Yolande Makolo told X. “However, the UK has betrayed that trust by taking unjustified punitive measures to force Rwanda to compromise our national security,” she added. “We are therefore going after these funds, to which the UK is legally obliged,” she concluded.

The M23, which took up arms again at the end of 2021 and is supported by more than 4,000 Rwandan soldiers deployed in the region, according to UN experts, seized Bukavu, capital of the province of South Kivu, in mid-February, after taking control of Goma, the capital of North Kivu, at the end of January.

The international community and the Democratic Republic of Congo say that the M23 is Rwanda! Rwanda denies this, saying that it only has sympathy for them.