WORLD BRIDGE BLOG

Hi folks, sorry for the delay in posts. We’ve been running all around the eastern Congo for the last several days and haven’t really had access to reliable internet. We’re now in Goma, where we’ll be staying for the next 6 days, so I’ll be posting with a bit more regularity.

Much has transpired since I last wrote you from Kinshasa. We finally made it out on the UN flight to Kisangani, and arrived there in the early afternoon on Wednesday. In Kisangani, we met with representatives from MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping mission, UN agencies (UNICEF, OCHA, and UNDP), and an NGO to discuss the latest changes to MONUSCO’s mandate and the future of the mission in DR Congo, and also to get a read on the current humanitarian and security conditions facing civilians in the area.

We also toured a U.S. military training site, where the United States African Command—known as AFRICOM, and a handful of contractors are working to properly train a light infantry battalion of approximately 750 Congolese soldiers. As I said in my last post, one of our priorities on this trip is to look for ways for the U.S. to strengthen its support for Congolese security and judicial institutions. One key element of these reforms will include some combination of training, equipping, and professionalizing the Congolese army (FARDC), which, according to the UN Secretary General is considered an “amalgamation of unvetted, untrained former militia groups and former armées zairoses personnel.” That’s obviously not an easy set of tasks for the international community or the DRC government. It seems clear that in the long-run, attempts to protect Congolese civilians and fight impunity in the DRC are doomed to fail without a cohesive, concentrated international and Congolese commitment to fundamentally reform the security and justice institutions in this country. This is an area that the U.S. is taking seriously (i.e., AFRICOM’s training program in Kisangani); however, it has the capacity, and I would argue a moral responsibility, to do much more. We’ll put some specific policy recommendations on paper when we return to Washington.

On Thursday, we hopped another early morning flight to Bunia, which is in the far east of Orientale Province, not far from the Ugandan border. In Bunia, we met with MONUSCO officials, UN agencies (OCHA, UNHCR, UNICEF), civil society representatives, and a number of NGOs to discuss and assess MONUSCO’s challenges and to get a better sense of the humanitarian and security situation in the surrounding districts. In one of our first meetings of the afternoon, we were informed of a new group of displaced people in the village of Bukiringi, about four hours south of Bunia, where over 400 people had fled since July 25, primarily due to insecurity caused by local militia activity. Erin and I decided to take a day trip out to interview this newly displaced population – to document their stories, to assess the security conditions in the camp and the nearby area, and to determine what types of assistance, if any, the men, women, and children at the site were receiving from the aid community.

A few observations from our trip so far:

• MUSIC.  For reasons I can’t explain, the Congolese seem to be a bit obsessed with Celion Dion, Bryan Adams, and Phil Collins. To the point where their music is played, on repeat, until the end of time. I actually had to ask our waitress if she could disable the “repeat” function on the hotel/restaurant CD player last week after we were forced to endure about 2 straight hours of one Phil Collins song on repeat. Over and over and over.
• ELECTRICITY. Unsurprisingly, electricity in this country is unreliable. I was mid-shave the other night when the power went off in my hotel room, leaving me cursing under my breath in the pitch black, fumbling around for my headlamp. I quickly loosened up when I realized that the music from the nearby outdoor concert – which had kept me up for three nights straight – had been completely silenced. I looked out the window to find the entire city of Bunia in the dark. We had 15 minutes of quiet. A Christmas miracle in the middle of summer, I guess.  
• ELECTRICITY II.  I nearly caught my hotel room on fire yesterday after plugging in a small heater (provided by the hotel) to dry off my wet, hand-washed clothes. Oh, the irony. There were actually flames about 2 centimeters from my curtains...thankfully disaster was avoided.
• ROADS.  The roads here are absolutely dreadful. There’s really no other way to explain them. If I had one immediate recommendation for the international community it would be to build new roads and to rehabilitate the existing ones (which actually look more like trails with small canyons running down the middle of them). The lack of roads in the DR Congo is actually key to many of the problems here. Without roads, peacekeepers, humanitarian aid workers, and other international actors are unable to reach the civilians whom they are mandated to protect and serve. Equally important – at least in terms of the long-term viability of the country – is the fact that these impenetrable roads are a severe hindrance to economic development. In most areas of the country, the Congolese are virtually inaccessible in their villages, so trade is limited and the transfer and delivery of services and supplies to remote areas is almost nil.

RI's Congressional / Peacekeeping Associate Matt Pennington will be blogging regularly, when he has internet, as he embarks on his first Refugees International assessment in DR Congo with Senior Advocate for Peacekeeping Erin Weir.  Follow Matt's posts and learn more about our work from the field.