Introduction
August 2009 will mark ten years since the signing of the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement that ended the second Congo war. It also marks the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC). Yet, the violence persists at an enormous cost, access to land in eastern DRC remains contested, and control over revenues from natural resources remains in the hands of a few. Armed groups, both foreign and domestic, continue to operate with impunity in the eastern DRC and are the source of much of the insecurity in the region. And state institutions remain weak and resource-starved.
Over the last decade, the Congo has witnessed an extraordinary number of attempts by regional and international actors - individuals, states and institutions - to resolve the largest conflict that Africa has seen since independence. The most that these attempts have achieved are several partially respected ceasefire agreements. They have failed to end the violence or to re-establish central government authority throughout the DRC.
Today, the DRC transition is at a crossroads. Despite elections two years ago that aimed to complete a peace process started in December 2002 during the Inter-Congolese Dialogue at Sun City, many Congolese feel disenfranchised by a government increasingly reliant on strong-handedness, as its authority rests on weak national and local institutions - a crisis of governance that the elections did not solve. In the last two years, little progress has been made on the disarmament and reintegration of Rwandan-backed rebel groups or Mai Mai militias, and efforts to dismantle and repatriate the Rwandan Hutu FDLR (Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda) militia have yielded few results.
Tensions between DRC and Rwanda re-emerged in the last year over Rwanda's continued support of rebel groups active in eastern Congo, in particular the Tutsi-led National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), and growing competition over access and control of key natural resources. By signing the Nairobi agreement in November 2007, Kinshasa pledged to disarm the FDLR. It has not done so, and even continued its collaboration with the Hutu rebel group over lucrative mining interests after signing the agreement.
The Goma agreement signed by the Kinshasa government, dissident CNDP General Laurent Nkunda, and Mai Mai militias on 23 January 2008 called for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of troops from key areas, and the disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration of combatants. But implementation of both the Goma agreement and the subsequent Amani disengagement process failed, and by August 2008 fighting had resumed. The failure of the controversial joint operations of government forces (FARDC) and MONUC against Nkunda's CNDP rebels, and the very public collapse of government forces in the face of CNDP advances, left an over-stretched and under-equipped MONUC as the only layer of protection against Nkunda's growing control over the region.
The story of the many efforts to mediate an end to violence in the DRC is long and complex and has been told in greater detail elsewhere. This paper briefly examines key lessons that can be drawn from those earlier efforts, and the missed opportunities that continue to challenge current efforts to achieve a durable peace in the Congo. The paper's key argument is that the DRC-Rwanda relationship is the critical factor to resolving the conflict, and that as long as efforts to build peace in the DRC neglect that relationship, these efforts will fail.