Kinshasa/Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo
The Democratic Republic of Congo's government and the Rwanda-backed AFC/M23 rebel alliance emerged from five days of talks in Switzerland last week with something they have struggled to produce throughout more than two years of war in the country's east: a sequenced roadmap, with actual timelines, for negotiating a comprehensive peace agreement. But the diplomatic breakthrough arrived alongside renewed clashes in South Kivu province and a simultaneous public-health catastrophe — the deadliest Ebola outbreak in Congolese history — that together illustrate how far the eastern DRC remains from the stability the roadmap is meant to deliver.
Representatives of the Congolese government and the Alliance Fleuve Congo/March 23 Movement, joined by officials from Qatar, the United States, Togo — acting as the African Union's mediator — the African Union Commission and Switzerland, met from August 17 to August 21 to take stock of the stalled Doha Framework process and chart a way forward. In a joint statement released through the U.S. State Department, the parties said they had developed "a roadmap setting out sequenced steps and timelines for negotiations" and had agreed that the order in which protocols are negotiated will not necessarily dictate the order in which they are implemented — a technical-sounding provision aimed at unlocking a process that had previously bogged down over disputes about sequencing. The framework covers protocols on humanitarian access, security arrangements, governance, the return of refugees and internally displaced people, and economic recovery. Crucially, the parties also agreed on a standardized method for reporting alleged ceasefire violations and on establishing a dedicated mechanism to review implementation of existing commitments — both described by mediators as confidence-building measures necessary after months of mutual accusations that neither side has honored prior agreements.
A ceasefire monitored, and violated, in the same week
The practical test of that confidence-building mechanism began almost immediately. A day after the Switzerland roadmap was announced, a ceasefire verification mission — comprising representatives of the Congolese government, AFC/M23, and observers from member states of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region — deployed to South Kivu province on Monday, August 24, traveling toward Uvira, the town from which M23 withdrew in January, and toward Kalehe, where fighting has persisted in recent weeks. Yet even as monitors arrived, the Critical Threats Project reported that M23 had launched a counteroffensive amid heavy clashes with pro-government forces in Kalehe, and that fighting had broken out in the Walungu and Mwenga districts of South Kivu for the first time since May 2026 — a geographic expansion of combat that undercuts the narrative of a de-escalating conflict. The Congolese government, in a statement issued around the same time, accused M23 of committing "crimes and serious human rights violations" in areas under its control, alleging the group killed more than 300 people in June and July alone. M23 and its allies have made their own, unverified counter-accusations against government-aligned forces, a pattern of dueling claims that has defined the conflict since M23's renewed offensive began in 2022 and that the new reporting mechanism is specifically intended to help adjudicate.
The war has its roots in longstanding disputes over land, ethnicity and control of eastern Congo's vast mineral wealth — including coltan, tin and gold deposits that have made the region a persistent flashpoint since the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide sent militias and refugees across the border. M23, whose fighters are predominantly ethnic Tutsi, has accused Kinshasa of failing to protect Congolese Tutsi communities and of reneging on past integration agreements; the Congolese government and independent UN experts have long accused Rwanda of arming, training and at times directly deploying troops alongside M23, an allegation Kigali has consistently denied while acknowledging what it describes as security concerns along its border. The 2026 iteration of the conflict saw M23 seize significant territory in North and South Kivu, including brief control of parts of Goma and Bukavu, before international pressure — led by the Doha and, later, Washington-brokered diplomatic tracks — produced a series of ceasefires that have proven fragile in implementation even as they have periodically slowed the pace of fighting.
A health emergency compounding a security crisis
Layered on top of the military and diplomatic story is a public-health emergency that has made humanitarian access, one of the five protocols under negotiation in the Doha framework, a matter of daily urgency rather than long-term planning. The World Health Organization confirmed in May that an outbreak of Bundibugyo virus disease — a species of Ebola — had emerged in the Mongbwalu health zone of Ituri Province, just five months after the country's previous Ebola outbreak had been declared over. It has since become the worst Ebola epidemic in the DRC's history. According to the latest situation report cited by health authorities, as of data through August 26 the outbreak had reached 5,794 confirmed cases and 2,786 deaths, with 843 patients currently hospitalized in isolation and 60 of the country's 151 health zones affected across six provinces — Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu, Haut-Uélé and Tshopo among them, placing the epidemic's geography in close overlap with the active conflict zone. The Congolese Ministry of Public Health launched a vaccination campaign for frontline health workers using the ERVEBO vaccine in Kisangani on August 27, part of an effort to contain a virus that aid groups say has spread faster than health workers have been able to track it, in significant part because fighting and access restrictions imposed by armed groups have repeatedly obstructed outbreak-response teams from reaching affected communities.
That overlap is not coincidental, according to humanitarian officials who have described the eastern DRC as a case study in how armed conflict actively degrades public-health response: contact tracing requires access to communities that may be contested or controlled by armed groups; vaccine and treatment supply chains depend on roads and corridors that are sometimes closed by fighting; and displaced populations moving to escape violence can carry the virus into new areas faster than surveillance systems can adapt. The result is a feedback loop in which the war worsens the epidemic and the epidemic complicates the war's resolution, since any lasting peace agreement will need to guarantee the kind of humanitarian access that active combat currently prevents.
Named stakeholders and what they want
Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi has staked significant political capital on ending the conflict, having faced sustained domestic criticism over the army's battlefield performance against M23 and over corruption allegations within the military procurement system. His government has pushed for a deal that guarantees Congolese sovereignty over the mineral-rich east and includes robust provisions for the return of the displaced; the DRC's total internally displaced population stood at roughly 5.8 million people in 2026, with more than 5 million of them concentrated in the eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri, according to displacement-tracking figures — a decline from over 7 million in 2025 that aid officials attribute to an estimated 1.9 million returnees rather than to any broad resolution of the underlying insecurity driving displacement. M23's political leadership, operating under the AFC banner led by Corneille Nangaa, a former Congolese electoral commission chief who defected to lead the political wing of the rebellion, has pushed for guarantees on governance and security-sector integration that would give the movement durable influence in the territories it has captured — a demand Kinshasa has resisted as tantamount to rewarding armed rebellion with formal political power. The United States, under the current administration's Africa policy, has positioned itself as a lead broker alongside Qatar, motivated in part by American mining companies' interest in securing access to Congolese critical minerals as an alternative to Chinese-dominated supply chains, a dynamic that has added a geopolitical and commercial dimension to what began as a regional security negotiation.
What to watch next
The ceasefire verification mission's findings from Uvira and Kalehe, expected in the coming weeks, will offer the first concrete test of whether the new reporting mechanism can produce an agreed factual record of violations rather than the dueling, unverifiable accusations that have characterized the conflict to date. Diplomats involved in the Doha process have cautioned that the Switzerland roadmap sets a sequence for negotiations, not a resolution of the underlying disputes over territory, security arrangements and Rwanda's role — meaning the coming months of talks, rather than the roadmap's signing, will determine whether the process produces a durable settlement or simply another paused ceasefire. Meanwhile, the trajectory of the Ebola outbreak — whether the newly launched vaccination campaign can outpace a virus that has been spreading faster than health teams can trace it — will shape how much humanitarian bandwidth the international community has left to invest in the political process, and will serve as an early indicator of whether the "humanitarian access" protocol at the center of the Doha framework can be made real on the ground rather than remaining a clause on paper in Geneva.
