Earlier today the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific held a hearing on US policy towards Burma. The hearing was held in the interest of exploring options for dialogue and engagement with the government of Burma, and was long-overdue in a Washington policy context that has been dominated by debate over sanctions. Today’s hearing will be followed up next week by a similar hearing in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and also echoes the recently-released State Department Burma policy review which makes engagement the policy of the day. 

On my recent trip to eastern DR Congo with my colleague Camilla Olson, we overlapped with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she visited Goma. The visit of such a senior U.S. official to a place people often say the world has forgotten about was encouraging. For those of us working on Congo issues, it was a rare source of hope that greater attention would be paid to the never-ending cycle of violence that has led to the deaths of millions of civilians and exhausted donors and aid workers.

I last visited Mwenga in February 2009. At the time, we went there to see how people would be impacted if the Rwandan and Congolese militaries expanded their operations against the FDLR rebel group into South Kivu.    

In February, people in Mwenga told us that they were very scared about these joint operations. There is a large presence of FDLR in Mwenga territory and people said that any operations against the rebel group would certainly jeopardize their own security. People were also scared of the Rwandan army returning to the area given its history of past abuses against the local population there. They told us, “if we flee, we don’t know where we’d go, because in the forest is the FDLR who have threatened to attack us, and in town will be the Rwandan military who have targeted us in the past.”

Earlier this week a decision from The Hague determined the boundary between north and south Sudan around the town of Abyei. This particular decision stems from an agreement signed last year, but it marks a part of the peace process occuring in Sudan. Benchmark goals like an election in April of next year and a referendum in 2011 are part of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) – a document that marked the end of 21 years of war.