Washington touts 15-day Congo truce

washington — U.S. diplomats are working closely with African partners, the White House said Thursday, amid a fresh 15-day truce between the army and Rwanda-backed rebels in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Experts on the ground say they're holding their breath, citing the dire humanitarian consequences of spiraling violence in this fragile region.

The Biden administration believes this conflict in the northeast corner of the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa "poses a real threat to global peace and security," a National Security Council spokesperson told VOA on Thursday.

In Congo, more than 940,000 people have been displaced this year, the United Nations says. And 7.3 million Congolese people – more than half women – are currently displaced. Conflict is the culprit more than 80% of the time.

This new truce, set through August 3, aims to quiet the constant thrum of violence that has plagued this resource-rich corner of Congo since the late 1990s. That's when Hutu extremists with ties to Rwanda's genocide fled over the Congolese border and began to organize militias along the shores of the massive Lake Kivu. That violence snowballed into a bloodbath that left millions dead across Congo in one of the worst civil wars of the 20th century.

Several rounds of United Nations peacekeeping missions have failed to stop the cycle of violence, which picked up anew after Congo's violent elections in late 2023. Kinshasa accuses Kigali of backing one of the main combatant groups, M23, which is composed primarily of fighters from Rwanda's minority Tutsi ethnic group.

State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel emphasized Washington's diplomatic efforts.

"This is something that we are working closely on with the parties," he said. "We're going to work closely with the government of the DRC, Rwanda and Angola to support regional diplomatic efforts to reach a durable cessation of hostilities and set conditions for the voluntary return of displaced populations."

He did not provide details when asked by reporters how the Biden administration plans to work with Rwanda's government.

The last truce fell apart Monday, with an incident in the town of Bweremana that killed four children, according to media reports. White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson on Wednesday condemned those killings, while noting that "the parties to the conflict have largely respected the truce" – raising hopes that the children's deaths may not provoke a slide into violence.

Analysts and humanitarian officials say the situation in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province – a shambolic but dynamic town in the shadow of the ever-smoldering Mount Nyiragongo – is unusually dire.

Onesphore Sematumba, a Goma-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, spoke in stark terms about a town accustomed to fielding knockout punches from both nature and humanity. In the past two decades, Goma has weathered an Ebola outbreak and multiple volcanic eruptions, all while facing a stream of violent militant groups, including an increasingly powerful Islamic State group offshoot.

Sematumba spoke Wednesday on a podcast on the subject, saying that the streets, roundabouts, storefronts and bars of Goma were thronged with desperate displaced people, among them women with babies on their shoulders and backs, begging.

"This crisis is massive," he said in French. "This crisis is, I would say, gigantic, but as humanitarians rightly say, it is a forgotten crisis."

Patel, of the State Department, also noted that Washington allocated more than $620 million in humanitarian aid to the nation in fiscal 2023.

Sematumba cited fears that if diplomacy fails to keep the peace, conflict could draw in neighboring Rwanda and Uganda, nearby Burundi and Tanzania and even – clear on the other side of DRC, the smaller Republic of Congo as well. And he voiced concerns that the two major diplomatic efforts conducted in Luanda, Angola, and Nairobi, Kenya, "are struggling to materialize."

"We would be heading towards a catastrophe like we've never seen, even at the height of the 1996 war, which drained almost all African countries, all African armies, from the upper reaches of the continent and into Congo," he said. "So everyone is holding their breath, and everyone is trying to hang on to all the diplomatic goings-on to avoid such a nightmarish scenario."

Nike Ching contributed to this report from Washington; Isabella Dail provided translation assistance from Washington.