A fresh offensive has cast doubt on the durability of accords signed last week in Washington.
US President Donald Trump’s plans for peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo are rapidly unravelling amid recriminations from all sides after a further advance into new territory by M23 rebels in the east of the country.
In recent days, the rebels, who are allied with Rwanda, have been consolidating control of Uvira, a city positioned on a vital trade corridor along the shores of Lake Tanganyika neighbouring Burundi, and with a population of about 700,000 people.
The M23’s capture of the city on Tuesday came after days of heavy fighting scattered 200,000 people, according to the UN, claiming scores of civilian lives and routing the Congolese army, its allied Burundian soldiers and local militia.
Trump, who has been claiming for months to have drawn a line under 30 years of conflict in the border regions between DR Congo and Rwanda, hosted the leaders of both countries at the White House to sign a peace accord only last week.
The government in Kinshasa has since called on Washington to expand sanctions on Rwanda for its alleged role in the offensive and warned that the peace process is in danger of collapsing.
The US, UK and other European countries in the International Contact Group for the Great Lakes have also said that the latest flare-up in the conflict “risks destabilising the whole region”.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, they urged “the M23 and the Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) to immediately halt offensive operations in eastern DRC”, and called for Rwanda to withdraw its troops.
Kigali has hit back, denying accusations that it has contributed to the rebel campaign, and accusing DR Congo and its battlefield allies of persistently violating the terms of an earlier ceasefire.
Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame has also accused neighbouring Burundi of exacerbating the crisis by deploying 20,000 troops in support of Kinshasa and targeting civilians. America, he suggested at a ceremonial event in Rwanda, had ignored requests to prevent the Congolese army and its allies from repeatedly violating the ceasefire.
“Just recently, after the capture of Uvira, the international community was quick to blame Rwanda. We are now shouldering those burdens,” he said.
The Kinshasa government has long accused Rwanda of using the conflict in eastern Congo as a pretext to deploy troops and plunder minerals.
Kigali says its troops are in DR Congo as a “defensive measure” made necessary by Kinshasa’s use of Rwandan Hutu rebels, whose origins can be traced to the soldiers and militiamen who carried out the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
“Our strength is simply that we protect ourselves. But we do not have any extraordinary capacity to confront problems larger than us,” Kagame said.
The explosion of violence has focused attention on the shortcomings of the US-led peace process.
The Trump administration became involved in the DR Congo when Felix Tshisekedi’s government offered to trade access to critical minerals for US support in quelling the M23 rebellion.
At the time the rebels had captured the region’s two largest cities, Goma and Bukavu, and a swath of territory rich in gold, coltan and tin. Their lightning offensive was threatening the survival of Tshisekedi’s government.
The US approached the conflict by trying to separate the hostility between DR Congo and Rwanda from the related but complex issues fuelling the war inside DR Congo, which were then pushed into separate negotiations mediated by Qatar.
While Rwanda and DR Congo signed up to an agreement under US pressure, the Doha talks have made little progress, leaving the M23 rebels to argue that they are not yet signatory to any peace accords.
