Rwanda can and will strike Rwandan rebels in Congo if little is done to disarm them, but Kigali is not spoiling for a fight, President Paul Kagame said on Saturday after meeting his Congolese counterpart. "Our country still retains flexibility to defend itself ... depending on circumstances," Kagame told reporters on return from a summit in West Africa where he met Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) President Joseph Kabila on Friday. "The international community and the Congo are doing very little about it," he said. Rebels have been based in the jungles of Africa's third-largest country since they fled there after taking part in Rwanda's 1994 genocide. "Trust me we will take action, appropriate action, to defend our people," he said, adding however that Rwanda was not rushing to start military action. "We don't rush into things and we study the situation carefully. I am not impatient." In Kinshasa, a Congolese presidential source said Kagame had presented Kabila with a number of options, including being allowed to carry out strikes in Congo, but that "nothing really came of the meeting." "Kagame proposed three possibilities. That Rwanda could act alone in the DRC. That Rwanda could intervene in a joint operation with the Congolese government. Or that Rwanda could intervene with Congolese supervision, or permission," he said. --More 2355 Local Time 2055 GMT
