Chapter 1

Introduction

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) lies at the heart of Africa. The third largest country on the continent and third largest diamond exporter in the world, it has suffered the curse of misrule and exploitation since the founding of the Congolese state a little more than a century ago. The country is now the victim of a series of new and shifting alliances, because the lack of Congolese state control over its territory has allowed others free rein to engage in domestic and interstate conflicts across its borders. These conflicts include the civil war in Angola, the conflicts between Uganda and Sudan, and the complex problems in the Great Lakes area involving Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania. Ongoing instability in the neighbouring Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and others also impact upon the DRC. At times, the war in the DRC has engaged troops from all these countries on its soil, as well as forces from a number of other non-contiguous countries such as Chad, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

The DRC’s problems are thus deeply enmeshed in those of the region. This is evident in the number of countries engaged in the pursuit of various external national and sectional interests in the country, either covertly or overtly. However, as in so many African conflicts, the ethnic and racial characteristics that appear to provide the key motivational content to the wars in the DRC obscure the fact that the conflicts are essentially about the abuse of power and bad governance. The subsequent ethnic divisions and the violence they create are merely a result. The primary issues at stake in the DRC relate to democratisation, governance and human rights. A peace process that does not embed these ingredients in a post-conflict political and national culture simply will not last. The common wisdom on the need for the United Nations (UN) to take a long-term view of peacemaking and peacebuilding is therefore both relevant and necessary.

Ideally, the process of making a decision to intervene, the formulation of the mandate for the intervening agent (or combination of agents), and the allocation of structures and means for its implementation should be interrelated. However, many of the post-Cold War UN peace operations have been launched in response to requests to verify and monitor the political goals of previously belligerent parties — as expressed in a mutual ceasefire or more comprehensive peace agreement. In the process of signing a peace agreement that will allow for international supervision and monitoring, warring parties have frequently created structures and guidelines that are very fragile. They have also drafted roles for intervening forces that the latter have clearly been unable to fulfil.

There has thus been a general tendency for political negotiators to introduce a self-defeating dynamic by ignoring the finer details of an envisaged peace process. In most peace negotiations, the major concern is to address and contain a proliferation of interests. This, it is believed, can be achieved only when regional consensus is high, and belligerent parties have been put under pressure to negotiate. The time for action is therefore perceived as short, and the need for impetus as all important. Under such circumstances, negotiators do not wish to wrangle over details, but prefer an approach that minimises problems.1

The Brahimi Report takes issue with such tendencies, noting that:

"the United Nations Secretariat has, in recent years, found itself required to execute mandates that were developed elsewhere and delivered to it via the Security Council with but minor changes."2

The seeds of destruction become obvious, however, when agreements translate into mandates and action, and the unresolved obstacles become the operational problems of the military and civilian intervening agents.

Efforts to address the conflict in the DRC provide a prime example of the tendency to gloss over detail during peacemaking processes. In the wake of various regional peacemaking initiatives, the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement was signed on 10 July 1999 by the six states that were party to the conflict.3 It sought to place a heavy burden of responsibility on a UN peacekeeping force, whose presence was deemed an essential component, not only providing for ‘standard’ monitoring and verification tasks, but also for carrying out a number of ‘peace enforcement’ tasks. The latter included the tracking down and disarming of armed groups;4 the screening for mass killers, perpetrators of crimes against humanity and other war criminals; and the handing over of suspected genocidaires to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. It was assumed that these tasks would have to be carried out by UN peacekeepers.

Within a year of the first shots fired in the most recent war in the DRC in August 1998, this complex ceasefire agreement was reached, and the UN authorised a peace operation to support it. Two years have passed, and the Mission de l’organisation des Nations Unies au Congo (MONUC) is beginning to make some promising advances, despite the discrepancy between its minuscule size and the magnitude of the tasks at hand. However, untangling the web of conflict and creating relative stability and order in the DRC will require a commitment from the international community over an extended period to stay a course that is going to be rough, slow and very laborious. Sustainable peace will require an extensive peacebuilding programme and ongoing development assistance, lasting decades rather than years. What is at stake in the DRC is not really ‘peace’, but the (re)creation of a state often described by foreigners as ‘Europe without roads’. In this sense, MONUC is merely the start of a process — the first piece in a very large puzzle.

This monograph is the fruit of a short but intensive research visit made by the authors to the UN mission during early August 2001. Its aim is to enhance understanding of the complex array of actors and actions that underpin the Congolese ‘peace process’ — discussing the key protagonists and their interests in the DRC and the deployment of MONUC, and the attempts that have been made to initiate the Inter-Congolese Dialogue. It is hoped that this relatively brief reflection on the progress, problems and prospects of and for the peace process will help make some sense of what, with fairly modest resources, is arguably the most complicated and ambitious post-Cold War experiment in the creation of peace from chaos.