SA troops still fighting in eastern DRC after peace summit fails

A scheduled peace summit on Sunday between presidents Felix Tshisekedi of Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Paul Kagame of Rwanda was cancelled at the last minute, leaving South African troops to begin their second year of deployment in the perilous instability of the eastern DRC.

Tshisekedi and Kagame had been expected to meet in Luanda under the auspices of Angolan President Joao Lourenço to endorse a peace plan drafted by their officials. But Kagame pulled out, imposing conditions on DRC which analysts said had not been in the draft agreement.

The two presidents would have met on 15 December, the first anniversary of the deployment of South African troops to eastern DRC as part of the Southern African Development Community Mission in DRC (SAMIDRC) with a mandate to forcefully engage the armed groups which have been terrorising Congolese for many years. Several soldiers of SAMIDRC, which also includes Tanzanian and Malawian troops, have been killed or injured during the past year.

Read more: Two more SANDF soldiers killed in eastern DRC, death toll rises to five

SAMIDRC’s main aim is to try to help Congolese troops neutralise the M23, an armed rebel group of ethnic Tutsi Congolese substantially supported by Rwanda. With Rwandan military backing — including 3,000 to 4,000 troops, according to the UN — the M23 has taken over large areas of territory in North Kivu province on the Rwandan border and has killed civilians while displacing many more, provoking a humanitarian crisis.

Peace negotiations

Lourenço, the African Union’s special envoy for securing a peace deal in eastern DRC, has been very busy. On 30 July, the DRC and Rwanda signed a ceasefire agreement in Luanda, which took effect on 4 August and will be monitored by an ad hoc verification mechanism.

On 25 November, the foreign ministers of DRC and Rwanda met in Luanda and approved a “concept of operations” which provided for Rwanda to disengage from eastern DRC while DRC neutralised the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR) — an armed group active in eastern DRC that was established by ethnic Hutus who fled Rwanda after being involved in the 1994 genocide against Tutsis.

Rwanda has in the past used the presence of the FDLR in eastern DRC as a pretext for deploying its troops across the border to hunt down the FDLR. At the same time, though, Rwanda denied a recent report by a UN group of experts on DRC that Rwanda had deployed between 3,000 and 4,000 troops in eastern DRC in support of the M23. Kigali says the real cause of the conflict is that the ethnic Tutsis are being persecuted in eastern DRC.

Read more: Can the DRC peace mission be spared the fate of previous operations? Here’s how it can fix its problems

DRC Foreign Minister Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner blamed Rwanda squarely for the failure of the summit, saying that a foreign ministers’ meeting on Saturday, 14 December in Luanda was intended to finalise the “concept of operations” report prepared by officials from both sides before the two presidents endorsed it on Sunday. Then the Rwandan delegation made its participation conditional on agreement by the DRC government to hold direct talks with the M23 rebels — rather than with Kigali, she said.

“For us, it is unacceptable, and I do not think that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a global exception, to negotiate directly with an armed group which bombs camps of displaced people, which kills and massacres civilians, which pillages natural resources and which is also guilty of attacks against army soldiers,” she said at a press conference in Luanda.

“Every country that respects itself and respects its sovereignty would never agree to dialogue with an armed group.”

However, Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe insisted to Radio France Internationale that Lourenço had invited Rwanda to the summit in a letter dated November 30 “which indicated that the Congolese side had agreed to dialogue with the M23 …”.

The spokesperson for the Congolese presidency, Tina Salama, retorted: “Since the start of the process, there has never been any question of making the signing of the agreement conditional on any dialogue with the M23, which constitutes a red line.”

Rwanda’s ‘outrageous’ behaviour

Stephanie Wolters, senior research fellow and Great Lakes expert at the SA Institute of International Affairs, agreed, saying: “The reason that we understand the meeting in Luanda didn’t happen this weekend is essentially that, relatively last minute, Kigali put a whole new issue on the table and said that as long as Kinshasa refuses to negotiate with the M23, it wouldn’t be signing the Luanda accords, the new peace deal that’s on the table.

“And this is a completely new condition that they’re imposing,” she said, adding that it was not in the concept of operations or elsewhere in the discussions so far.

For Kigali to say that a condition of  Rwanda signing the peace deal “is that the Kinshasa government negotiate with a rebel group that it [Rwanda] is massively supporting … really pushes every single boundary of reasonable engagement.

“So we have an aggressor nation scuppering a peace deal while we have an ongoing massive humanitarian crisis in eastern DRC and just a total collapse of the economy and of the fabric of local society there… There is no more time… Every day is a day where there are more tragedies.

“And the Rwandan behaviour in this context is really outrageous.”

Chrispin Phiri, the spokesperson for SA Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Ronald Lamola, said the SA government could not yet comment on the failed peace summit and would first have to consult, as its troops were in eastern DRC as part of SAMIDRC as well as of the UN peacekeeping mission Monusco.

Meanwhile, this week after the failure of the Luanda summit, the M23 drove DRC forces out of Matembe, a town in North Kivu province located on the road to the key commercial hub of Butembo, according to a Voice of America report. DM