24 Jul 2007: ISS Today: DRC: UN Official Urges Political Solution To Mitigate Tensions In East

24 July 2007: DR Congo: UN Official Urges Political Solution To Mitigate Tensions In East

 

The United Nations top peacekeeping official today appealed for a political – and not a military – solution to diffuse tensions in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). United Nations, 19 July 2007

 

Commentary

 

The democratic elections in the DRC at the end of 2006 were seen as yet another success story for two major reasons. First, these were the first democratic elections in the DRC in nearly four decades of the country’s troubled existence as a nation state. Second, according to the UN, these were the largest and most complex polls that the Organisation had ever helped organise, crowning a 7-year UN effort to bring about peace and democracy. This feat was all the more significant considering the vastness of the country and that it came in the wake of a brutal 6-year civil war that directly and indirectly cost four million lives -- possibly the most lethal conflict since World War II.

 

Even though one does not expect the DRC to achieve substantive post-conflict peace so soon after such an upheaval, the existence of serious threats to peace and stability, not only in the country but also within the region, serves to justify a serious examination of the peacekeeping and peacebuilding strategies employed in this and other violent armed conflicts elsewhere.

 

The sense of the instability in the DRC was captured in the UN’s newsflash of 19 July 2007, in which the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, in his report to the UN Security Council, characterised the situation as having the “potential to really jeopardise the enormous investment that the [UN and the] international community has made in the vast Central African nation”.

 

Mr Guéhenno told reporters that “the concentration of armed forces”—government and General Nkunda’s rebels—in a “very volatile area where there are a number of unresolved issues” has resulted in a “very dangerous situation.”
The question that needs to be asked is: why is the DRC still unstable after such investments dating back to the first UN Operation in the Congo, ONUC (1960-64), which numbered in excess of 19,000 peacekeepers, the current operation, which started with the ridiculous number of 500 observers, but now numbers more than 22,000 peacekeepers (18,357 total uniformed personnel, supported by 3,771 civilians) and cost more than US$1 billion (1 July 2006 - 30 June 2007)?

 

The question still needs to be asked why eastern DRC remains volatile following the EU International Emergency Multinational Force (IEMF), or Operation ARTEMIS, in 2003, and the recent EUFOR deployment in 2006, to backstop critical benchmarks in the peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts? If, as Mr Guéhenno argues, Nkunda’s forces pose “the single most serious threat to the stabilisation of the DRC at this stage” why have the UN’s strenuous efforts and interventions not dealt with the centre of gravity of DRC’s instability?

 

In general terms, therefore, one could argue that the strategies for the resolution of post-Cold War conflicts, particularly in Africa, have not always constituted a winning formula for sustainable peace, if those strategies focus more on artificial benchmarks, such as elections, without the removal or, better still, the destruction of the forces that play a key role in fomenting violent armed conflict, besides dealing with the root (structural) causes of conflict.

 

The destruction of such negative forces was demonstrated by the backstopping intervention of the UK task force in routing the West Side Boys in Sierra Leone at a time in 2000 when the UN peacekeeping mission (UNAMSIL) was in dire straits, following the onslaught of the rebels against Freetown, the capital. It is arguable that peace and stability prevail in Sierra Leone today partly as a result of the robust role of the UK hybrid operation against the most destabilising force in the conflict. Following this best practice, one wonders why the recent EU hybrid operations in the DRC failed to provide such robust backstopping capabilities to address the “…heightened tensions and the build-up of military forces [which] risks turning into humanitarian and human rights disaster.”

 

Rather than the ongoing expressions of regret about genocide and humanitarian emergencies, the international community should muster sufficient will to ‘do the right thing’ for humanity. The international community should not, as it is disposed to do, bemoan the “spiralling displacement and atrocities in eastern DRC” including the “pillaging, rape and other atrocities in North Kivu province in north-eastern DRC.”

 

The same lesson should also be applied to the projected deployment of the hybrid operation in Darfur. We should not be fooled into thinking that the hybrid operation by itself will solve the humanitarian problem in that region. The operation should be buttressed by credible backstopping capabilities that are deployed not with limited scope and duration and a huge CNN dividend, but are targeted to remove or destroy any and all forces—those of the Government of Sudan, the proxy Janjaweed militia and the rebel movements—that are undermining effective peace implementation. It is not be far-fetched to anticipate that such backstopping capabilities will at some time in the future become necessary and possible from the projected EU framework force in eastern Chad.

 

This also implies that the shaky Humanitarian Ceasefire Agreement (HCFA) of 2004 and the Darfur Peace Agreement of 2006 need to be replaced with more respectable peace instruments, capable of enforcement.

 

Festus Aboagye, Head, Peace Missions Programme, ISS Tshwane (Pretoria)