The United Nations special envoy for the Great Lakes region told the Security Council on Tuesday that eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has a narrow opening for peace created by the closer alignment of two mediation tracks, even as the security and humanitarian situation on the ground keeps getting worse.
Huang Xia briefed the council on the Secretary-General’s biannual report on the 2013 Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework, which covers March 16 to September 15. He said the peace processes led by the United States and by Qatar have each achieved notable progress, but that sustained diplomacy has not yet changed conditions for civilians in a mineral-rich region scarred by decades of conflict.
ATN, New York has gathered that Huang framed the moment as urgent and perishable. “Such a window does not remain open indefinitely,” he said. He urged all parties to turn commitments into verifiable actions and to build trust through deeds rather than declarations, a pointed appeal in a process where signed texts have repeatedly outrun events on the ground.
The record of agreements is long. The Congolese government and the Rwanda-backed M23 armed group signed a commitment toward a ceasefire in Doha in July 2025, and a Qatari-led Ceasefire Oversight and Verification Mechanism was established in November 2025 as part of the Doha process. The two sides also signed a Doha framework for a comprehensive peace agreement that month, and later developed a roadmap with sequenced steps and timelines for negotiating its remaining protocols. In December, Congo and Rwanda formalized a US-brokered peace deal in Washington. New talks followed in August in Switzerland, with representatives of the United States, Qatar and the African Union.
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Fighting has continued through all of it. M23 and the Congolese army have clashed repeatedly in the east, and the council’s own forecasts for the month noted that the deteriorating security situation is raising tensions across the wider Great Lakes region. Tensions between Congo and Rwanda persist despite US mediation to normalize relations under the Washington process, and relations between Burundi and Rwanda have worsened, with the two countries trading accusations about support for armed groups and cross-border security threats.
That regional dimension is the focus of the next concrete step. Huang said the United Nations will facilitate a meeting on October 18 in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, among the defense ministers of Burundi, Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania. The gathering puts the ministers who command the region’s armies in one room, which diplomats have long treated as a precondition for reducing the risk that a Congolese conflict spills into a wider confrontation.
The African Union’s mediation team has also been active. It toured the region and visited Goma, the North Kivu capital, on October 5, a trip the envoy was expected to cite as evidence of growing alignment among mediators. The Security Council demanded in February 2025, in Resolution 2773, that M23 halt its offensives and reverse the creation of parallel state institutions, and that Rwanda end its support for the group and withdraw its forces from Congolese territory. Rwanda denies the allegations of backing M23, while Congo and the United Nations experts have documented its involvement.
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The humanitarian backdrop is bleak. Eastern Congo hosts one of the world’s largest displacement crises, and the country is also fighting what authorities have described as its worst recorded Ebola epidemic, with government figures reported earlier this autumn showing more than 7,500 confirmed cases and upward of 3,600 deaths. Reports this month said a Congolese official was beaten to death after defending the Ebola response, a sign of the mistrust that complicates aid delivery in conflict areas.
Competition for minerals sits beneath the fighting. The council’s briefing materials noted that illegal exploitation of natural resources remains a major issue and is drawing renewed attention as demand grows for the region’s vast reserves of critical minerals, which are central to both the US and Qatari efforts and to the interests of neighboring states.
Huang did not announce new negotiating dates beyond the Lusaka meeting. The security picture he described, in which diplomatic progress has coincided with deterioration, leaves the October 18 gathering as the next test of whether the alignment he cited can be turned into measurable change in the east.
