After more than two months of closure caused by an offensive by the politico-military group AFC/M23 on the strategic city of Uvira, the land border between DR Congo and Burundi reopened on Monday.
Published on: 02/23/2026 - 1:47 p.m.
The land border between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) and Burundi reopened on Monday February 23, after more than two months of closure caused by an offensive by the political-military group AFC/M23 in December, local Congolese authorities and a Burundian police official told AFP.
Vital for the region's economy, the Kavimvira border post, located on the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika, between Bujumbura and the Congolese city of Uvira, reopened Monday at 8 a.m. local time (6 a.m. GMT), according to these sources.
Eastern DR Congo, ravaged by thirty years of conflict, is in the grip of a new outbreak of violence since the resurgence of the anti-government armed group AFC/M23 in 2021, with the support of Kigali and its army.
The AFC/M23 group seized large swaths of territory in the east and launched an offensive in December on the strategic city of Uvira, located in the eastern province of South Kivu, arousing the ire of Washington, mediator of a fragile peace agreement between DR Congo and Rwanda.
This offensive at the gates of the Burundian economic capital Bujumbura, and according to specialists aimed at depriving Kinshasa of the support of the Burundian army, led Burundi to close its border.
Trade nevertheless continued between the two countries across Lake Tanganyika, which separates DR Congo and Burundi.
To seeBurundi-DR Congo border closed: the inhabitants of Uvira face inflation
“Many Congolese are returning home”
In January, the AFC/M23 group withdrew from Uvira, responding according to an American request, and the Congolese army announced that it would regain control of the lakeside city immediately.
“The border is reopened from this Monday morning, people are crossing,” the provincial governor of South Kivu, Jean-Jacques Purusi, told AFP on Monday.
The border "has been reopened since this morning at 8 a.m., we see a lot of Congolese returning home," an agent from the General Commission for Migration (CGM), the Burundian border police, told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The other border posts between DR Congo and Burundi, located along the Ruzizi plain, where the AFC/M23 group is still deployed after its withdrawal from Uvira in January, are still closed, according to these sources.
Tens of thousands of Congolese have fled to Burundi since the AFC/M23 group's offensive on Uvira, according to the United Nations.
The offensive of the politico-military group AFC/M23 on Uvira had caused a renewed tension between Rwanda and Burundi, ally of Kinshasa, which deployed thousands of soldiers alongside the Congolese army in the plateaus of South Kivu against the AFC/M23 group.
With AFP
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