ReliefWeb

Introduction and context

The recent history of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been marked by conflict, misgovernment and a massive and sustained humanitarian crisis. Decades of misrule by President Mobutu Sese Seko finally came to an end in 1997, when rebels backed by Rwanda seized the capital, Kinshasa. The conflict that followed involved an array of Congolese groups and regional actors, including Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola. While it is very difficult to judge the human toll, a mortality survey by the International Rescue Committee estimates that, between August 1998 and April 2007, conflict and state collapse led to over 5 million excess deaths (Lilly and Bertram, 2008). A peace deal signed in 2002 led to the installation of a transitional government, a new constitution was agreed in 2005 and the DRC held its first free elections the following year. Fresh elections are due later in 2011, though preparations are behind schedule and the polls may be postponed (Lancaster et al., 2010).

This is the usual summary of the DRC, but such descriptions do little justice to its complexity. Although officially a ‘post-conflict’ context, fighting and displacement persist in eastern parts of the country. The situation in the eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu and Orientale remains dire, with an estimated 1.7m people displaced, and even in relatively stable areas the humanitarian situation is very poor, with indicators of health and wellbeing as bad as or worse than areas affected by conflict. Corruption is rampant, and the security sector is in desperate need of reform. Police and soldiers routinely prey on the population, who have little trust in their government. Widespread poverty and under-development going back decades is a problem throughout the country; according to one estimate, as things currently stand it will take the DRC 50 years to reach the level of per capita GDP it had at independence in 1960 (Lilly and Bertram, 2008).

Practitioners and policy-makers have been grappling with the problems posed by protracted crises like the DRC for a very long time, and arguably to little effect. Traditionally discussions around programming assistance in conflict and so-called ‘transitional’ settings have focused on the interface between relief and development. More recently, as concerns around international terrorism and the problems posed by weak states have come to the fore, the focus has shifted from linking relief and development to integrating aid and security in an effort to stabilise problem states and promote early recovery (Harmer and Macrae, 2004; Bailey et al., 2009). These conceptual changes have not been matched by developments in programming, for a variety of reasons: the aid architecture is bifurcated into humanitarian and development compartments, making it difficult to move between humanitarian assistance and other approaches as circumstances change; the choice of which aid mechanisms to use is a political decision related to how donor governments want to engage with the state; and there is a lack of programming strategies for shifting between shorter-term and longer-term assistance.1 More fundamentally, the expectation that outside assistance can have transformative effects in promoting stabilisation, security and early recovery rests on unrealistic assumptions about the impact of external interventions in conflict and post-conflict states.

This paper examines these challenges as they relate to the international response to the crisis in eastern DRC, with a particular focus on the relationship between humanitarian assistance, early recovery and stabilisation. It argues that supporting recovery in DRC requires flexible, risk-tolerant programming. All actors involved need to carefully consider the relationship between assistance, security and recovery, and move beyond simplistic assumptions about how peace and stability can be fostered and encouraged. For humanitarians, there is no time like the present to discuss how to pursue principled humanitarian action and advocate for the protection of civilians, amidst the complex interaction of aid, politics and security.

The study is based on a desk review and 48 key informant interviews with UN agencies, NGOs, the government, MONUSCO and donor officials in Goma, Bukavu and Kinshasa in April, July and October 2010. It is also informed by previous ODI research on early recovery (Bailey and Pavanello, 2009; Bailey et al., 2009).

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