Editor, Reference is made to Alice Rusaro Karekezi’s article, “Why we need to think about peace and security” (The New Times, June 24). Progress in implementing the PSCF for the DR Congo has not been rather slow. There is none. And given, as the author highlighted, the presence of the largest and most costly ever (and one of the longest-lived) UN missions, first as Monuc then Monusco, this zero progress is not due to lack of material means. No, it is the absence of will to do what is needed to implement the Framework. If anything, the indication is that the real will is in fact more that of ensuring there must be no progress, ensuring the DR Congo remains safe for the FDLR, continues to be pillaged by powerful Western corporations exploiting DR Congo’s abundant resources without having to provide a fair recompense to the people of the DR Congo (it is infinitely cheaper to pay off well-placed government officials than to have to pay the full amounts of royalties, taxes and dividends to the Congolese state for the prodigious extraction now underway in the DR Congo). In the meantime, you have huge career prospects for members of the UNs bloated bureaucracy and good pay and opportunities to taste what the locals have to offer for the members of the military (Monusco) providing security services under a Chapter VII mandate to use maximum force to secure that looting on the spurious pretext of protecting the population. There are just too many vested interests in the status quo for the powerful players involved in this charade to ever want any progress to be made. The only ones holding on to the short end of the stick are ordinary Congolese, particularly in the east, whose lives have become a permanent nightmare, especially since the influx (with French assistance and Mobutus connivance) in their areas of Rwandas defeated génocidaires. The other losers, though not to the same level as their Congolese brethren, are the people of the sub-region who have to face down the destabilizing situation of the insecurity on their borders while also incurring the opportunity costs an unstable DR Congo represents. If the conference fails to discuss these subterranean interests against progress candidly, no really concrete solution can emerge from this event. That is the only plausible conclusion from the series of actions and lack of action by various international actors, frequently on the basis of clearly spurious grounds. Mwene Kalinda
