Rwanda's Kagame to meet Congo's Tshisekedi for talks over M23 rebels, DRC conflict

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame was due to meet his Congolese counterpart Felix Tshisekedi in Tanzania on Saturday (February 8), in a bid to find a resolution to the conflict caused by rapid advances by the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.

Regional leaders of eight East African Community (EAC) countries, and the 16-member South African Development Community (SADC) are assembling in the city of Dar-es-Salaam for a joint summit.

Potential for regional war

The summit is being held against the imposing backdrop of M23 armed group having taken over the key city of Goma in the mineral-rich North Kivu province of Democratic Republic of Congo, and installed their own mayor and local authorities there.

The group, which re-emerged in 2021, is now pushing into the neighbouring South Kivu province, a development that has caused panic.

It had vowed to go all the way to the national capital Kinshasa– nearly 1,600 kilometres away– before walking back on that announcement abruptly.

The military offensive has heightened fears of a wider regional conflict. This is because there are several African nations, including South Africa, Burundi, and Malawi, providing military support to the DRC.

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‘Golden opportunity’ to stop the conflict?

Regional foreign ministers gathered on Friday for the first day of the summit in Tanzania ahead of their leaders on Saturday.

According to Kenyan foreign secretary Musalia Mudavadi, the summit is a “golden opportunity” to find a solution to the latest phase of violence in the decades-long turmoil in the region. He called for the previous peace processes hosted by Angola and Kenya to be merged into one.

Since the M23’s re-emergence, Luanda and Nairobi have hosted several peace talks. So far, all have failed.

But recently, there was some progress towards attaining peace in the conflict-ht areas, as M23 announced a unilateral humanitarian “ceasefire” from Tuesday (February 4) onwards.

Rwanda denies providing military support to the M23, but a UN report from last year indicated that it had approximately 4,000 troops in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and was profiting from the smuggling of large quantities of gold and coltan– a mineral essential for manufacturing phones and laptops– out of the country.

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In response, Rwanda accuses the DRC of harboring the FDLR, an armed group formed by ethnic Hutus responsible for the massacre of Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

With inputs from agencies