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14-03-2025
LUANDA/ BRAZZAVILLE/ KIGALI: The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels will hold talks next week, mediator Angola has announced.
A statement from President Joao Lourenco’s office on Wednesday said the two parties would begin “direct peace negotiations” in the Angolan capital Luanda on March 18.
Angola has previously acted as a mediator in the eastern DRC conflict that escalated in late January when the M23 took control of the strategic eastern Congo city of Goma. In February, M23 seized Bukavu, eastern Congo’s second-biggest city.
Rwanda denies backing the M23 armed group in the conflict, which is rooted in the spread of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide into DRC, and the struggle for control of DRC’s vast mineral resources.
DRC President Felix Tshisekedi was in Angola on Tuesday to discuss the possibility of talks and his spokesperson Tina Salama told the Reuters news agency on Wednesday that the government had received an invitation from Angola but did not say whether it would participate in the talks.
M23 leader Bertrand Bisimwa wrote on X that the rebels had forced Tshisekedi to the negotiating table, calling it “the only civilized option to resolve the current crisis that has lasted for decades.”
The government has said at least 7,000 people have died in the conflict since January.
Last week, the United Nations refugee agency reported that nearly 80,000 people have fled the country due to the armed conflict. Since January, 61,000 have arrived in neighboring Burundi, the agency’s deputy director of international protection, Patrick Eba, said.
M23 is one of about 100 armed groups vying to control resources in eastern Congo, home to vast reserves of strategic minerals such as coltan, cobalt, copper and lithium.
DRC’s neighbors, including South Africa, Burundi, and Uganda, have troops stationed in east Congo, increasing fears of an all-out regional war that could resemble the Congo wars of the 1990s and early 2000s that killed millions of people.
The M23 armed group has pushed deeper into the Democratic Republic of Congo’s mineral-rich region after capturing the key cities of Goma and Bukavu, the capitals of North and South Kivu provinces, respectively in recent weeks.
Security sources have told media that the Rwanda-backed rebels had entered Nyabiondo village, about 100km (62 miles) north of Goma and located on the road leading to the strategic town of Walikale in North Kivu.
“Walikale is very important for the government as it is the only place where the government has the industrial mine from which they are getting millions of tax payments,” said journalist Alain Uaykani, reporting from Goma.
In a major setback to government forces, one of the government’s allied armed groups, known as the Group Kabido, announced it had joined fighters from M23. The Group Kabido has been active in eastern DRC for decades, and fighting with the army for the last three years. Its leaders announced this weekend that it is officially joining the M23 to fight what they call the “mismanagement of the Kinshasa government”.
“This is showing the disorganization within the DRC army, and the M23 is taking advantage of this situation on the ground,” Uaykani said, adding that a second group defected soon afterwards. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
