Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Saturday quoted a “source close to the discussions” who said representatives of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) met in Qatar with M23 insurgents last week to discuss a ceasefire.
According to AFP’s source, the outcome of the talks was sufficiently “positive” for them to continue.
“Further talks are now expected in Doha, again with the Qataris mediating, to sustain the momentum and explore constructive solutions to end the conflict peacefully,” the source said.
The alleged peace talks were held quietly, without any public announcement or press conference from either the DRC government or the rebels. Neither side was willing to confirm the details in AFP’s report as of Tuesday afternoon.
The government of Rwanda has also been meeting with the DRC in Qatar, and those meetings were announced to the media. On March 29, the Qatari government said a second round of talks took place. Qatari mediators met separately with members of M23, but there was no public comment about the DRC talking to M23 directly.
The insurgents withdrew from peace talks in Angola in mid-March because they said sanctions imposed by Western governments made it “impracticable” for them to negotiate.
M23 is among the largest of over a hundred armed factions that have been active in the eastern Congo for over a decade. It is part of an insurgent coalition called the Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC) or Congo River alliance. Both M23 and the AFC have been sanctioned by the U.S. government for destabilizing the Congo region.
M23 is largely composed of ethnic Tutsis, many of them survivors of the 1994 genocide, and is supported by the Tutsi-controlled government of Rwanda, which claims it had to intervene in the Congo chaos to control other insurgent groups that are hostile to Rwanda. The DRC’s other neighbor, Uganda, also has troops in the Congo, ostensibly to control an Islamist militia called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) that wishes to overthrow the Ugandan government.
M23 stands for “March 23 Movement,” a name chosen to deride the very notion of making peace with the DRC government, which M23 regards as corrupt and hostile to the Tutsi people. In January 2022, after years of fighting for turf against other insurgent groups, M23 and its allies began a major offensive to capture the provincial capital of Goma.
The rebels succeeded almost exactly three years later, then set their sights on the national capital of Kinshasa. The DRC army found itself struggling to hold M23 back and there were reports of DRC soldiers defecting to join the rebel forces.
Last month, M23 pushed out of Goma and launched a campaign to capture Walikale, a town about 250 miles from Kinshasa. After holding Walikale for about a week, the AFC alliance said it would “reposition its forces” and withdraw from Walikale as a gesture of good faith toward a peace agreement.
M23 pulled back from Walikale late last week, leaving over a dozen civilian corpses behind. Congolese civil society groups accused the rebels of perpetrating “extreme” violence against the townspeople and forcibly recruiting some of them as soldiers.
According to the United Nations, over a million civilians have been displaced since the beginning of the M23 offensive on Goma in 2022.
