A spokesperson for the president of the DRC, Felix Tshisekedi, told the reuters news agency that they had received an invitation from Angola for the talks.
The Government of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the M23 rebels supported by Rwanda will hold talks next week, Angola Mediator announced.
On Wednesday, a declaration by President Joao Lourenco’s office said that the two parties would begin “direct peace negotiations” in the Angolan capital Luanda on March 18.
Angola previously acted as a mediator in the conflict of the eastern DRC which intensified at the end of January when the M23 took control of the strategic city of Goma from the eastern Congo. In February, M23 seized Bukavu, the second largest city in the eastern Congo.
Rwanda denies supporting the M23 armed group in the conflict, which is rooted in the propagation of the 1994 genocide of Rwanda in the DRC, and the struggle for the control of the vast mineral resources of the DRC.
The president of the DRC, Felix Tshisekedi, was in Angola on Tuesday to discuss the possibility of talks and that his spokesperson Tina Salama told the reuters news agency on Wednesday that the government had received an invitation from Angola but did not say if it would participate in talks.
The chief of M23, Bertrand Bisimwa, wrote on X that the rebels had forced Tshisekedi to the negotiating table, calling it “the only civilized option to resolve the current crisis that lasted decades”.
The government said that at least 7,000 people have died in the conflict since January.
Last week, the United Nations agency for the United Nations said that nearly 80,000 people fled the country due to the armed conflict. Since January, 61,000 have arrived in neighboring Burundi, said Deputy Director of International Protection of the Agency, Patrick EBA.
M23 is one of some 100 armed groups in the running to control resources in the east of the Congo, which houses large reserves of strategic minerals such as Coltan, Cobalt, Copper and lithium.
The neighbors of the DRC, notably South Africa, Burundi and Uganda, have troops stationed in eastern Congo, increase fears of a total regional war that could resemble the Congo wars in the 1990s and in the early 2000s who killed millions of people.
