Latest, from this morning:
M23 is a member of the political-military coalition of groups called the Alliance Fleuve Congo (River Congo Alliance), and the group said in a statement late Monday that it would implement a ceasefire from Tuesday "for humanitarian reasons," it said.
It added that it had "no intention of taking control of Bukavu or other localities", despite the M23 having said last week that it wanted to "continue the march" to the Congolese capital, Kinshasa.
The M23 started attacking Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu, last week, with the support of some Rwandan troops.
Fighting has now stopped in the city of more than a million but clashes have spread to the neighbouring province of South Kivu, raising fears of an M23 advance to its capital Bukavu.
Half a dozen ceasefires and truces have been declared in the past four years of fighting, all systematically broken.
Call for truce
Meanwhile, on Tuesday morning, a UN spokesperson announced that the DRC has requested an emergency session of the UN Human Rights Council to discuss the situation in Goma.
Congo requested the session to take place on 7 February in Geneva. It is still subject to approval.
In South Africa, one of DRC's allies, President Cyril Ramaphosa said "a ceasefire is a necessary precondition for peace talks that must include all parties to the conflict whether they are state or non-state actors, Congolese or non-Congolese."
He also vowed on Monday to continue providing support to the Tshisekedi.
Pretoria had sent troops to North Kivu, as part of an armed force sent to the eastern DRC in 2023 by the SADC bloc, but 14 South African soldiers were killed in the recent fighting.
"Diplomacy is the most sustainable pathway to achieving a lasting peace for the DRC and its people," Ramaphosa added.
"The fate of our population is being put to the test," the DRC's Communication Minister Patrick Muyaya said on Saturday.
"Every day, our brave soldiers fall on the front line defending the integrity of our territory. A humanitarian carnage is taking place, and we must not remain idle. Our compatriots expect a strong response from us," he added.
Difficulties setting talks
The Kenyan presidency announced on Monday that Tshisekedi and Kagame would attend a joint extraordinary summit of the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam on Saturday.
Amid fears of a regional conflagration, the 16 member countries of the southern African regional organisation had called for "a joint summit" with the eight countries of the EAC, of which Rwanda is a member.
Nairobi currently holds the presidency of the EAC, and hopes to get the authorities of the DRC to finally talk face to face to their counterparts in Rwanda, accused of supporting the M23 rebellion.
"Given the race against time following the verbal and military escalation, the fact that it has been announced so quickly is a positive sign," according to Onesphore Sematumba, an analyst for the Great Lakes region at the NGO International Crisis Group.
Disagreements
The goal of new talks is to try to "rekindle diplomacy and put an end to the cycle of clashes" in the east of the DRC, Sematumba added.
The participants are said to include regional leaders, including the presidents of Uganda and Somalia, plus the president of South Africa.
But the two groups have differing views on solutions to the conflict.
The EAC advocates direct negotiations between the Congolese government and the M23, a solution that Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi has so far refused to consider.
This event led him to replace the EAC’s peacekeeping force in the DRC with that of the SADC, which is calling on Rwanda to first withdraw from Congolese territory, as the government in Kinshasa wants.
"We should not have too high expectations," the analyst said, for whom simply holding this summit with all the announced participants would already be "a diplomatic success" in itself.
In Kigali, Paul Kagame’s participation has already been confirmed, so he will be present in Dar es Salaam on Saturday. However, a source close to the Congolese presidency has said that Felix Tshisekedi has not yet decided whether he will attend in person or join the meeting remotely.
A UN expert report said last year that Rwanda had up to 4,000 troops in the DRC, seeking to profit from the mining of minerals, and that Kigali has "de facto" control over the M23.
Eastern DRC has deposits of coltan, the metallic ore that is vital in making phones and laptops, as well as gold and other minerals.
Rwanda has however never admitted to military involvement in support of the M23 group. It alleges on the contrary that the DRC supports and shelters the FDLR, an armed group created by ethnic Hutus who massacred Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
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For more on the conflit, listen to my podcast episode from here:
DRC takes on Apple: can conflict mineral mining be stopped?
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