# Rwanda quits Central African bloc after denied leadership role in DR Congo row
Rwanda has said it is withdrawing from the Economic Community of Central African States, or ECCAS, after a dispute over whether it should take the bloc’s rotating chairmanship while regional tensions over the war in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo continue to deepen.
The decision, announced on the same day as the dispute escalated, followed a summit in Equatorial Guinea where Rwanda was expected to take the chair role but was blocked from doing so. Kigali said ECCAS had ignored its right to lead the organisation and accused the bloc of bowing to pressure from Kinshasa. In its statement, Rwanda said there was no justification for remaining in an organisation whose current functioning no longer matched its founding purpose.
The row is inseparable from the conflict in eastern DR Congo, where Rwanda has repeatedly been accused of backing the M23 rebel movement. The group has seized important territory, including the cities of Goma and Bukavu, and the government in Kinshasa, along with the US and France, have identified Rwanda as a supporter of the rebels. A UN experts’ report last year said as many as 4,000 Rwandan troops were fighting alongside M23, an allegation Kigali denies.
Rwanda says its forces are deployed near the border to prevent the conflict from spilling into its own territory. The government has also rejected the accusation that it was destabilising the Congo, instead portraying itself as a state unfairly singled out by neighbours and outside powers.
The ECCAS dispute comes at a sensitive moment for regional diplomacy. The BBC reported that Rwanda and DR Congo are working on a draft peace plan expected later this month, after US mediation. That means the bloc rupture lands while negotiators are still trying to hold together a wider diplomatic track and prevent the fighting from spreading further.
ECCAS is designed to foster cooperation and regional integration among Central African states. Rwanda has been in and out of the organisation before: it previously left in 2007 and later returned. The latest departure, however, looks more politically charged because it follows open disagreement over the war, the bloc’s response to it, and the legitimacy of Rwanda’s role inside the institution.
For now, the move underlines how the eastern Congo conflict is reshaping the region’s politics beyond the battlefield. What might otherwise have been a routine handover of a rotating chairmanship became a public break, with Rwanda arguing it had been denied its place and ECCAS members effectively siding against it.
