Editor,As President Kagame rightly underlines, at the heart of efforts to bring a real, lasting solution to the long standing insecurity and instability, which the Democratic Republic of Congo has ever known "must be the rights, interests and aspirations of the afflicted populations, caught up in the recurring waves of violence”. However, what we continue to hear from the UN Secretary General and his senior colleagues as well as the bellicose pronouncements of such African leaders as President Jacob Zuma of South Africa does not fill us with optimism that those rights, interests and aspirations will not continue to be sacrificed "in favour of remote and self-serving international political agendas masquerading as justice or human rights.” The underlying cause of this unfortunate situation is that illegitimate interlopers have managed to co-opt international mercenaries to manage inter-state (and sometimes internal state) relations in order to bend them into tools to serve their own interests that have little to do with the interests of afflicted populations. In this manner, we have a UN bureaucracy pushing the interests of the likes of Human Rights Watch and those who fund and control them rather than the interests of the Congolese people and citizens of the countries of the sub-region. You will therefore understand the reasons I am not as thrilled as some about this so-called framework agreement that has failed to take account of the fundamental causes of persistent insecurity in the DRC and its fallout on its neighbours.Mwene Kalinda, Kigali