Endemic DRC war: need for a bottom-up approach

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is again creating attention to the International community. And once again, it is about a conflict /war in its east that seems to have no end. “Multifaceted” and “obdurate” these are the expressions over and over again linked with the conflicts, which stem largely from the past seventeen years of chronic instability in the country’s east. Those two descriptors, sadly, have been an excuse for people to mischaracterize the state of affairs and grossly oversimplifying the solutions in DRC.The international community has pumped billions of dollars in trying to soothe and build peace, but they recognize their hard work is hardly bearing any fruit. The United Nations has deployed a major peacekeeping force in the area for a decade. On the other hand, there has been no peace to keep-if war is the violent resolution of conflict, then peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather, the ability to resolve conflict without violence.On July 14, 2013, Fighting resumed between M23 rebels and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s army-FARDC. This is the first fight after two months of relative peace. Will DRC achieve peace with renewed fighting? I guess the answer is no. Neither will MONUSCO nor the ‘elite’ UN Intervention Brigade with troops from Tanzania, South Africa and Malawi, will bring peace to the people of DRC.Pieter Vanholder, DRC country director of the Life and Peace Institute in Bukavu, told Al Jazeera that the intervention brigade could have an effect, but “if some things go wrong, which is clear to, the brigade may be seen as a kind of occupation deterrent force.If the United Nations and other actors in DRC cannot identify the root causes of problems and the possible causes, they cannot hope to identify solutions to the entire DRC and the population in general. The only sustainable solution is to have a bottom-up dialogue that involves the government, its international partners and involve all ethnic groups in the DRC with the aim of creating peace and stability in the country. Just about last week, MONUSCO announced it will support an offensive against “negative forces” in the Goma-Sake region that will be carried out by FARDC alongside the mainly Tanzanian contingent of the Foreign Intervention Brigade. It is also widely known that the whole units of the FDLR have been absorbed into this new fighting force. (The FARDC and FDLR are nowadays barely distinguishable). The renewed fighting could drag back the peace process that had been initiated by the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region brokered by the government of Uganda. Although the Security Council underlined that the UN special brigade will not create a precedent for future peacekeeping, its deployment could be risky as Christoph Vogel the fellow on international affairs. Concentrating exclusively on M23 could harm ongoing peace efforts, and any focus on a single group places MONUSCO in a potentially politicized position vis-à-vis other rebels.Mary Robinson, the new UN special envoy to the Great Lakes region, also emphasized the importance of political and diplomatic avenues during her visit to Goma on 30 April. “There’s no doubt these armed groups have to be dealt with, but I think it’s important that this does not become a focus on a military solution, [and] that we’re implementing the political steps that have been committed to.So, let all the warring parties sit on a round table and collectively moot possible sustainable solutions to the problems, right from the roots. War destroys and leads to humanitarian catastrophe and at the same time destroying the existing infrastructure, which has only helped to keep people in the eastern DRC in a permanent cycle of poverty for almost two decades now. The writer is a researcher on policy issues