Africa leaders urge pullout of armed groups in east DRC by March 30

African leaders called on Friday for all armed groups to withdraw from occupied territory in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by the end of next month, the regional EAC bloc said.

It was the latest bid by the seven-nation East African Community to silence the guns in the mineral-rich region, where fierce fighting has driven vast numbers of Congolese from their homes and exacerbated regional tensions.

The EAC deployed troops late last year in the east, which has been struggling with the rise of militias including the rebel March 23 Movement (M23) and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) -- which the Islamic State group describes as its regional affiliate.

At a mini-summit in Addis Ababa on Friday, regional leaders "directed withdrawal of all armed groups by 30th March 2023 from occupied areas", the EAC said on Twitter.

They also called for an "immediate ceasefire" by all armed groups and the resettlement of people displaced by the violence, it added.

"We cannot walk away from the people of DRC, history will be very harsh on us. We must do what we have to do," Kenya's President William Ruto told the meeting.

The DRC accuses its smaller central African neighbour Rwanda of backing the M23, a charge that Rwanda denies. UN experts, the United States and several other Western states agree with the DRC, however.

Both DRC President Felix Tshisekedi and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame were among those at the meeting, which took place on the eve of a two-day African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital.

"We agreed that the M23 had not respected its commitments," Congolese government spokesman Patrick Muyaya Katembwe told AFP. "Even Paul Kagame acknowledged it."

The M23 re-emerged from dormancy in late 2021, claiming that the government in Kinshasa had ignored a pledge to integrate them into the army. 

The Tutsi-led group subsequently won a series of victories against the army and has occupied swathes of territory in the province of North Kivu, including much of the region north of its capital Goma.

And despite the international efforts to defuse the conflict, M23 forces have continued advancing, and threaten to encircle Goma, a city of over one million people on the Rwandan border. 

'Protracted' humanitarian crisis

At Friday's meeting, the regional heads of state also called for the repatriation of Congolese refugees in Rwanda and Uganda, and recommended the creation of an EAC "monitoring & evaluation mechanism" in the east of the DRC.

The EAC had issued similar calls for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of all armed groups, including foreign entities, at an extraordinary summit in Burundi on February 4.

The United Nations said Friday that more than $600 million was needed this year to help one million people who have fled DR Congo and the African countries where they have sought refuge.

The humanitarian crisis gripping the giant central African country is "one of the most complex and protracted" in the world, the UN refugee agency said.

Militias have plagued the eastern DRC for decades, many of them a legacy of regional wars that flared during the 1990s and the early 2000s.

Some 5.5 million people were displaced within the country as of last November, according to the UN agency.

In addition, more than one million had left for a neighbouring country, with more than 500,000 seeking shelter in Uganda alone.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International said in a report Friday that M23 rebels raped more than 60 women and girls during attacks in eastern DRC in November.

The rights group said it had gathered testimonies from 35 victims and eyewitnesses and described the acts as "war crimes".

They "could constitute crimes against humanity", it added in a statement.

The DRC is one of the poorest countries in the world, where two thirds of the population of about 100 million people live on under $2.15 a day, according to the World Bank.