Uganda and Rwanda sign peace agreement in Angola to end hostility

The President of Uganda Yoweri Museveni and the President of Rwanda Paul Kagame have signed a peace agreement to end the hostility between the two countries and increase regional cooperation and security, according to local media reports.

The agreement was signed during the quadripartite summit hosted by President Joao Lourenco of Angola in Luanda and was witnessed by Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

The top agenda of the summit was to normalize the frosty relations between Kampala and Kigali. "The summit is part of the continuation of the dialoguing process aimed at finding a lasting solution to the different regional issues, " the Ugandan presidency tweeted early today.

President Kagame said, " I see no problem in Rwanda working with President Lourenço, President Tshisekedi and more specifically with President Museveni to address what we have agreed to address. I think it is not very difficult to address many of the problems we have had, it may take a bit of time to understand each other but I think we have come a long way."

"When you have an open border, you have goods and people. When you create a problem for people to move across the border from one side to another, then you have closed the border to people and goods. The MoU addresses all these matters very clearly and I don't think we should be picking and choosing what we implement and what we don't. We are going to address all these problems. By doing that indiscriminately, we will get where we want to be," he further added.

The August 21 event is a followup of the July 12 summit also held in Angola's Luanda which brought together the heads of state of the four countries cited above.

The July meeting convened by the Angolan president was devoted to regional security, cooperation and strengthening of ties among the four countries.

At the height of the tensions in February, Rwanda closed the main border crossing point with Uganda at Katuna, saying it was to complete construction of a one-stop border post.

Observers, however, said it was a culmination of accusations and counter-accusations of espionage and security breaches between the two states.

Previous efforts by Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta to bring President Kagame and President Museveni to the negotiating table bore no fruit.