Officials from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda are set to reconvene in Geneva on September 16 and 17 for a seventh round of security talks aimed at implementing a peace agreement the two countries signed in Washington in June 2025, even as fighting between Congolese forces and the Rwanda-linked M23 rebel movement continues in the eastern DRC’s North and South Kivu provinces.
The two-day meeting of the Joint Security Coordination Mechanism will bring together DRC and Rwandan representatives alongside mediators from the United States, Qatar, Togo and the African Union Commission. A September assessment from Security Council Report found that two of the process’s central obligations — the DRC’s neutralization of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, known as the FDLR, and Rwanda’s disengagement of forces and lifting of defensive measures along the border — remain formally unfulfilled more than a year after the original agreement was signed.
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The FDLR dispute sits at the center of the impasse. The armed group traces its roots to Hutu militia fighters, including former Rwandan army soldiers and members of the Interahamwe, who fled into eastern DRC after the 1994 genocide against Rwanda’s Tutsi minority, and it has remained a persistent security concern for Kigali in the three decades since. The Congolese government announced on July 28 that a faction of the FDLR had signed a protocol covering disarmament, demobilization and cantonment, presenting the move as evidence it was meeting its obligations under the Washington framework. Rwanda rejected that characterization, arguing the agreement requires the FDLR to be neutralized outright rather than negotiated with, and has continued to accuse Kinshasa of supporting the group — an allegation the DRC denies. Because Rwanda’s own commitment to lift its defensive measures is explicitly tied to progress on the FDLR question, the disagreement has effectively stalled forward movement on both fronts simultaneously.
Kinshasa has leveled a parallel accusation against Kigali, alleging Rwanda backs the M23 rebel movement operating in the eastern provinces — a charge Rwanda denies, saying its security posture reflects legitimate concerns about armed groups based in Congolese territory. M23 first emerged as an active armed movement in 2012, largely dissolved after a period of dormancy, and then resurfaced in 2022 to launch a new offensive that made major territorial gains in 2025, including the capture of the North Kivu capital, Goma, and the South Kivu capital, Bukavu. Although M23 is not itself a party to the Washington Accords, the US-backed process requires both Rwanda and the DRC to support a parallel Qatar-mediated dialogue between Kinshasa and the group, which produced the Doha Framework for Peace signed by the Congolese government and the Congo River Alliance, M23’s political umbrella, in November 2025.
Modest procedural progress emerged from the sixth round of talks, held in Geneva on August 12 and 13. The two governments agreed at that session to advance two initiatives strengthening ground-level monitoring and verification of the Washington Accords and asked Washington to weigh in on both proposals at the upcoming meeting. The DRC also presented its formal disarmament, demobilization and reintegration plan for the FDLR and fielded questions from other participants in the mechanism, while the parties agreed to hold a trilateral planning conference in October intended to produce a revised operations order guiding coordinated security efforts going forward. A joint statement issued after the fifth round of talks in July had similarly described the Washington Accords as “an historic opportunity to unlock security and prosperity for people in the Great Lakes region,” language the parties have repeated at subsequent sessions even as implementation has lagged.
The State Department’s Geneva mission has framed the broader Washington process in ambitious terms, describing it as intended to achieve “a bold roadmap for peace, security, and unprecedented economic growth” tied to a Regional Economic Integration Framework spanning both countries. That framing has run up against the reality on the ground: continued clashes between the Congolese armed forces and M23 in the Kivus have persisted through the talks process without significant interruption, and neither side has offered a public timeline for when the FDLR neutralization or Rwandan force disengagement — the two obligations identified as furthest behind schedule — might actually be completed.
Wednesday and Thursday’s session will be the first opportunity for the two governments to respond formally to the monitoring initiatives raised in August, and mediators are expected to press both sides for concrete movement on the FDLR standoff specifically, given its position as the single issue on which the rest of the security framework’s sequencing depends. Neither the DRC nor Rwanda has publicly previewed what proposals, if any, it intends to bring to this week’s talks.
