00:00Hello, everyone. I'm François Picard. Put aside that peace signing ceremony hosted by Donald Trump last week in Washington.
00:17On the ground, different story. Rwanda-backed M23 rebels have entered the strategic South Kivu town of Uvira.
00:24These are exclusive pictures you're seeing. If the city on the banks of Lake Tanganyika Falls, it would mark the biggest advance since Bukavu last February for the M23, opening a gateway to other mineral-rich parts of eastern Congo.
00:41The border with nearby Burundi right now is closed. For more, let's cross now to correspondent Edmund Livingston in Kinshasa.
00:50Edmund, what's the latest?
00:54The situation on the ground in Uvira still remains very confused. There's very few international actors on the ground, so it's very difficult to get any clarity about what's going on.
01:06What we do know is that yesterday, the M23, they were about 15 kilometers from Uvira, and according to security sources, they started entering the town yesterday evening.
01:15By the time they arrived there, Congolese forces had retreated, and most are now a couple dozen kilometers south of Uvira, according to these same security sources.
01:27This morning, the town was almost deserted, but there does appear to have been some resistance because local residents reported hearing gunfire.
01:34And M23 troops have taken control of at least the center. This afternoon, the M23 formally announced the capture of Uvira, but the Congolese government has yet to confirm the fall of the city.
01:48So much is unclear. Where the front line is at the moment isn't clear. What we do know, though, is that this latest fighting has been very, very intense.
01:56It started last week when the M23 started pushing south from a place called Camagnola, which is about 70 kilometers north of Uvira, and the combat involved artillery as well as suicide drones.
02:08There's also been a pretty large humanitarian impact. According to the UN, in this area, around 200,000 people have been forced to leave their homes.
02:16And that border closed with Burundi?
02:18Yes, according to reports, the border is closed with Burundi, which will have likely a very big economic impact on Burundi, which is already an extremely poor state.
02:32But what it does effectively as well is that it knocks the Burundian armed forces out of the conflict in eastern Congo.
02:40And the Burundians are allies of the Congolese, and they had at least 10,000 troops fighting alongside them.
02:47But now it's not going to be possible to maintain this deployment anymore.
02:51And again, this taking place, as you said last week, you were reporting just as they were signing that deal in Washington about the fighting in eastern Congo.
03:02Are people able to piece together the timing of all of this?
03:08It is a little bit unclear because the fighting started in fits and then it took on a momentum.
03:14But it seems as if the initial clashes started happening at around December 2nd.
03:20So a couple of days before the peace ceremony in Washington, which is on December 4th, there was heavy fighting.
03:27At that time, it really wasn't clear whether the M23 was going to push all the way to Vera.
03:33It sounded a little bit far-fetched, but their advance was extremely quick.
03:39Stay with us, Emmett, because we're going to cross to Cape Town.
03:41Jervan Naidu is political analyst at Oxford Economics Africa.
03:47Thank you for being with us here on France 24.
03:50Yeah, thank you.
03:51What do you make about the timing as pieced together while they were signing in Washington?
03:59There was clearly momentum building for this push on Uvira.
04:04Yeah, it's an interesting one.
04:07And I think if you think about it and the way I've been looking at it is that, you know, the deal signing in Washington, that's between Rwanda and the DRC.
04:13There's a separate process ongoing in Doha between the DRC government and M23.
04:18And earlier in this week, there were some big town hall gatherings in Bukavu and Goma, which are under M23 control, talking to local residents and talking to some outsourcers in country.
04:28And people have said, like, this peace deal sort of doesn't even include the Congolese who are under control or in the east.
04:36So, I think M23 is seeing a clear opportunity.
04:39And in some of the conversations I've had with some of our clients is that President Tsitsikeri is negotiating from a weak position.
04:45The army has taken successive hits, the loss of Goma, Bukavu, and now Uvira.
04:51It's quite the wiring.
04:52I think M23 probably just saw a great opportunity, thinking that the government's preoccupied with this deal with Rwanda, which, to be fair and to be honest, probably a correspondent as well knows this, is that it's more of an economics deal.
05:03It doesn't really solve the root causes of what's going on in the eastern DRC.
05:07Is it a mistake to distinguish?
05:10I know you say there are two different peace processes between the one in Washington and the one in Dubai, or Doha, excuse me, because seeing that the M23 is so heavily backed by Rwanda.
05:24Rwanda, which is openly stating that it's keeping some of its troops inside of the DRC for, quote, defensive purposes.
05:31Surely, if Paul Kagame wanted, the M23 could hold off or back off.
05:38Yeah, most definitely.
05:40So, I think the one key issue there is that, you know, Rwanda have been quite clear that the reason why they're maintaining their defensive posture,
05:48and it's been the same consistent issue is that they are worried about, or their main concern is the FTLR, the group they blame for the 1994 genocide,
05:58who they believe the DRC government are controlling, well, hiding or harboring, whichever way you want to look at it.
06:03So, he could easily do that, but also M23 are protecting some of his own interests.
06:08You know, ethnic Tutsi interests after the genocide are something that the Rwandans are really concerned about, and M23 protects that.
06:18So, you can understand why he's sort of, you know, moving around.
06:21And like you mentioned, also, it makes no sense.
06:23You know, in international forums, they keep denying, they support the rebels, but then why sign a peace agreement with the DRC if you don't have anything to hide?
06:31So, yeah, it's an interesting one, the way in which Rwanda are positioning themselves.
06:36How is it being interpreted, Emmett Livingston, where you are in Kinshasa?
06:46Simply getting on with their lives.
06:48It's one of the factors in DRC.
06:49It's a huge country, and the capital city is thousands of kilometers away from the front lines at the moment.
06:55But people who are paying attention are asking why the government hasn't responded yet.
07:02So, the Congolese government, it does this often when a city falls.
07:06It takes a while for the Congolese government to formulate a response.
07:09But so far, it hasn't responded at all.
07:12It's also worth remembering that there was a huge amount of domestic criticism in Congo before the signing of the peace deal.
07:18So, many observers in Congo were pointing out that what the Congolese state needed were very secure guarantees from the U.S. government that Rwanda would uphold its side of the bargain.
07:31What we're seeing is that days after the signing of the peace ceremony, there has been an M23 push supported by Rwanda in complete violation of the peace deal that was just signed.
07:42Everyone's just waiting to see what the reaction is.
07:45Certainly, many, many people will be hoping that the Congolese government will adopt a more striking tone and ask the Americans very directly to intervene.
07:54Yeah, because Jervin Neidu, as reported there by Emmett, with Burundi effectively shut out from providing support to Congolese government forces now with that push by the M23 southwards.
08:09If the city does fall, where next?
08:13How far could the M23 go?
08:18Well, that's a tricky one because we've been covering, I've been covering this with some clients who are interested.
08:24There are some concerns that they would push further south into the Copper Belt, and that's really concerning because the DRC generates a lot of its wealth.
08:32But the problem to get to the south is it's well guarded by private militaries, and there's lots of barriers in place.
08:38But there are concerns that the rebels would push further south.
08:42And the Burundians are also quite concerned because in 2015, there was an attempted coup in the DRC, which the Burundians blame on Red Tabara, which is also an ethnic Tutsi group.
08:53So there are some concerns that M23 might be supporting Red Tabara to try and overthrow the state in Bujambura.
08:59So it's very complicated for this Great Lake politics.
09:02Also, Uvaria is on the border with Lake Tanganyika, so it might affect trade for Uganda and Tanzania.
09:09So it's really, really, it's really a dangerous position.
09:12Also, with the way in which M23 is operating, also not just as an occupying power, but the governing power in Bukavu and Goma, they could be saying, OK, we're now in Uvaria.
09:23Let's set up revenue collections.
09:25Let's weaken the Congolese state even further.
09:28And this is already hurting the economy.
09:29You know, the DRC state is losing a lot of money from not being able to collect tax revenues from mining in the east.
09:36So, yeah, it's quite concerning.
09:38But, yeah, there's some concerns that the rebels might push all the way to the south.
09:41And as Emmett has mentioned, the government will then, I think, really react because the Copper Belt is really the main source of income for the government in the DRC.
09:50And who's going to step in?
09:53Is it the Americans?
09:55Is it the African Union?
09:57Is it some other party?
09:59Is it the South Africans?
10:00Who's going to get involved at this point in time?
10:05I think, as Emmett mentioned, probably is going to look at the Americans.
10:09The only friend that Titsikeri really has is the Angolans, and the Angolans are not too keen.
10:15South Africa, we had our hands burnt in the African Union mission, the SADAC mission, sorry, where we lost our own troops as well as Tanzanian and Malawian troops.
10:23So we're not too keen to get in there.
10:25And the African Union has not really been able to step up.
10:27So, as Emmett had mentioned, the best case here is to push the Americans to get support because America is really pushed for this peace deal, which brings mining rights.
10:37So I would say most likely it's the Americans looking at the European powers.
10:41But right now, I don't think any of the African countries really have the capacity or want to get involved.
10:45Also, Parawanans are well-equipped with the latest technology, which they're supplying to M23, which makes it very complicated for particularly the DRC Army, which is over-fatigued for fighting for years and lacks a lot of resources currently.
11:00One final question for you, Jervin Naidu.
11:04Isn't Eastern Congo, where there is the world's largest deployment of United Nations peacekeepers, what's their role?
11:12Yeah, so the UN mission has also been faced with lots of challenges and operational challenges.
11:20So in the beginning of this year, when the South African SADC mission took a lot of hit, it was working with the UN mission.
11:26But also, the UN mission had been slowly retreating.
11:30It had signed to leave the Congo, and it has left some troops there.
11:34There's just not enough people and organization in that UN mission to keep it going.
11:39So the UN mission there was almost over 30 years since the end of the genocide in Rwanda.
11:43So it's been there for a long time, and it hasn't been able to stabilize, given how complicated it is.
11:49So I think the key role is that the UN really needs to maybe re-engage in the process, because they were the one international organization that was able to get people to talk.
11:58Emmett was at the signing last week.
12:00You would have seen that President Kagame and President Tsitsukeri barely spoke to each other.
12:04They didn't even smile or shake hands.
12:05When the UN were involved, there was a bit more actual dialogue.
12:09So I think the UN really needs to step in, coupled with the US and maybe some of the other European interests to assist here, because right now we're heading into a really dangerous territory.
12:18And one of my sort of analysis and what I've been talking to clients is there's a real possibility that we could have the East seceding, or at least being run as its own territory, as you see in Libya and possibly in Sudan.
12:30So it's quite concerning.
12:31So the UN really needs to get its socks lifted up there and try and sort something out.
12:36And that sort of fragmentation of Congo, Emmett Livingston, it's not the first time we've been there where there's been this threat.
12:44Just has there been any reaction since he returned from Washington from President Tsitsukeri?
12:49There has.
12:53I mean, President Tsitsukeri himself very much tried to cast the signing of the deal in Washington as a great success for his own policy.
13:05He when he arrived in the airport, there were crowds that were lining the road and he was standing up in his car and smiling and waving.
13:14And then he gave a state of the nation address on Monday to the whole of Congo in the parliament.
13:21And he talked at length about the deal.
13:23However, I would say that he was very, how should I put it?
13:27He was very realistic about the prospects for peace.
13:29He said on Monday, so this was before the fall of Ivira, that Rwanda had already violated the agreement.
13:39And so he was being very clear eyed.
13:41And what he did say also, though, is that Congo has been through periods like this, so extremely difficult periods of foreign invasion, little bits of the country split off and so on before.
13:54And he said the Congolese people have always overcome them.
13:57And so he asked the Congolese nation to bear that in mind.
14:00Emmett Livingston in Kinshasa, Jervyn Neidu in Cape Town.
14:04Thank you so much for being with us here on France 24.
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