Three Fronts in One Morning: As the Doha Process Prepares to Move to Switzerland, the Ground War Expands

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The morning of March 31 opened with three simultaneous offensives in eastern DRC. Kinshasa's coalition struck Minembwe in South Kivu, Kalehe to its south, and Lubero in North Kivu at the same time — heavy artillery and combat drones were deployed concurrently across hundreds of kilometres along the eastern fault line. The bombardments were still active by mid-morning. This was not a series of isolated incidents but a coordinated military operation.

The targets were populated. In Minembwe's highlands, the villages of Rugezi, Kalingi, Gakenke, and Bidegu came under fire. In Kalehe, Lubimbishi and surrounding localities were attacked. In Lubero, the villages of Kabesebese and Mutondi were struck. The geography matters: the three theatres do not share a contiguous front. Operating across all of them simultaneously requires a command structure and logistics capacity that go well beyond what is normally attributed to a fragmented armed coalition. What Tuesday's offensive reveals, above all, is the degree of military integration now operating between the FARDC, the FDLR, Wazalendo militias, mercenaries, and the Burundian National Defence Forces.

The FDN's presence alongside FARDC and FDLR units in the eastern DRC has been reported multiple times but the international community pretends to ignore these facts.

The village of Gakenke, in the Minembwe highlands, offers a ground-level measure of what this operation means in practice. At 08:30 on Tuesday morning, a combat drone struck the Banyamulenge community there. Pacy, a 14-year-old boy tending his family's cattle, was among those hit. Five cows were killed on impact; around sixty others were injured. The destruction of livestock is not incidental to the military strategy in Minembwe — it appears to be part of it. The Burundian army's deployment in the area serves a complementary function: enforcing a de facto humanitarian blockade that cuts civilian populations off from supply lines and markets. The combination of drone strikes on herds and an imposed blockade points to a deliberate strategy of food insecurity — a form of pressure on a community that has few other means of sustaining itself.

This comes two weeks after ministerial talks in Washington. On March 17–18, those talks produced explicit commitments from Kinshasa to move against the FDLR. Those commitments have produced no observable action. The FDLR currently operating in Minembwe and Kalehe is the same organisation whose former combatants were, on Tuesday morning, completing a demobilisation and reintegration ceremony at Rwanda's Mutobo centre — a process Kigali has sustained as part of its declared obligations under the peace framework. The parallel is not symbolic. It is a precise illustration of where each party's implementation record currently stands.

The broader peace architecture is under strain. The Doha process — the direct negotiating track between the AFC/M23 and the Congolese government — is reported to be relocating to Switzerland in April, a move that follows months of fits and starts and suggests the Qatari format has reached its limits. The AFC/M23 has not used Tuesday's offensive as a pretext for abandoning the table. Its position remains that Kinshasa has made a deliberate choice to pursue a military solution — and that the international community's continued silence in the face of documented violations is what makes that choice sustainable for Kinshasa.

As of publication, no public response has been issued by the United Nations, the United States, the African Union, or any of the signatories to the Washington Accords of December 2025. The MRDP-Twirwaneho has formally called for an independent investigation into the crimes committed against civilian populations in the Minembwe highlands. Whether that call will receive a hearing — or be absorbed into the same silence that followed the executions in Shanji the day before — is the question that now hangs over the entire eastern DRC peace process.