The joint East African Community (EAC) and Southern African Development Community (SADC) Heads of State and Government meeting is taking place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with the main agenda item being the security situation in eastern DR Congo.

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A related ministerial meeting was held on Friday ahead of the heads of state session.

A number of regional leaders including the host, President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania, President Paul Kagame, President William Ruto of Kenya, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia, President Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe who is also the current SADC chairperson, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of Somalia, and Amb. Moussa Faki Mahamat, the African Union Commission (AUC) Chairperson, and Veronica Nduva, the EAC Secretary General, were in in Dar es Salaam for the meeting, on Saturday.

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The government of Burundi was represented by Gervais Ndirakobuca, the Prime Minister of Burundi.

Congolese president Félix Tshisekedi attended the meeting virtually.

During the official opening ceremony, Tanzanian President Hassan said the impact of the eastern DR Congo conflict has transcended borders, creating far reaching effects in neighbouring countries.

She said: "As regional leaders, history will judge us harshly if we remain still and watch the situation worsen day by day. And in line with the principle of African solutions to African problems, our countries have a collective responsibility to ensure that we urgently address the existing insecurity challenges that have heavily impacted the wellbeing of innocent civilians.”

Despite the woven complexity of the matter they are dealing with, the Tanzanian president urged her colleagues to remain resolute in their quest to address the existing security challenges in eastern DR Congo.

After the official opening ceremony concluded, the leaders started closed-door deliberations.

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The EAC deployed troops to eastern DR Congo in November 2022 to support regional efforts to restore peace in the troubled region. At the time, M23 rebels had made large gains, capturing swathes of territory in areas bordering Rwanda and Uganda in North Kivu Province. M23 is now a member of a larger rebel coalition, Alliance fleuve Congo (AFC), created in December 2023 in Kenya’s capital Nairobi.

The AFC says it is fighting for governance that supports basic human rights, secures all citizens, and addresses the root causes of conflict. Its leaders have vowed to uproot tribalism, nepotism, corruption, and genocide ideology, among other vices, widespread in DR Congo.

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The East African Community regional force (EACRF), with troops from Kenya, Burundi, Uganda, and South Sudan, was able to create a conducive environment for peace to prevail by having M23 withdraw to designated areas and maintain a ceasefire between the rebels and the Congolese army until its breach in October 2023, something that reversed the gains that had so far been realised.

Soon after deployment, however, Tshisekedi was critical, threatening to expel the regional force from his country. The EAC regional force which derived its mandate from Chapter 23 of the EAC Treaty and the EAC Protocol on Peace and Security, had a hard time in eastern DR Congo, ever since its deployment. After EACRF’s exit, Tshisekedi welcomed troops from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), or SAMIDRC, to battle the rebels. From then on, instead of getting better, the security situation in eastern DR Congo, worsened.

Reports that the latter actually collaborated not only with the Congolese army but also with militias like FDLR, a DR Congo-based terrorist militia founded by remnants of the masterminds of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and European mercenaries in fighting the AFC/M23 rebels further complicated the situation.

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Kinshasa wanted the EAC regional force to battle the M23, which was not part of the latter&039;s operational mandate. EAC’s troops begun withdrawing from DR Congo, in early December 2023, just over a year after they were deployed to support peace efforts for the country’s conflict-ridden eastern DR Congo.

The EAC-led Nairobi process takes in the fact that the insecurity in eastern DR Congo pre-dates 1994, when a genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda claimed more than one million innocent lives, and was exacerbated by the retreat of defeated genocidal forces into eastern DR Congo where they regrouped to cause instability in the region.