Context

Perspectives

The Congo is emerging from a difficult past: a long colonial period, followed by a birth and infancy in the midst of the cold war, then several decades of chronic instability, followed by two wars over a five-year period. Overall, it has suffered a history of some four decades of autocratic rule and economic mismanagement.

This tragic legacy is compounded by the vicious cycle of the illegal exploitation of natural resources on the one hand, often to fund the illegal importation of arms, on the other. The result has too often been egregious human rights abuses and widespread violence.

The DRC is one of the world’s greatest living tragedies: 3.8 million dead as a result of the war; a further 2.4 million internally displaced; 388,000 refugeed outside of the country; 17 million malnourished; 1.3 million stricken with HIV/AIDS; and more than 2000 victimized by landmines since 1998.

Yet, the DRC has the size, population, location and economic and political potential to provide added value to virtually the entire African continent.

The DRC is a potential economic powerhouse: It is 2.5 million sq km in size, endowed with 50 per cent of Africa’s forests and is home to one of the world’s mightiest river systems, one that could provide hydro-electric power to the entire continent. The country has some of the world’s richest deposits of copper, cobalt, gold, coltan, industrial diamonds and other minerals.

It is a bitter irony that one of Africa’s potentially richest countries is one of the world’s poorest; ranked 167 out of 177 countries in the 2005 UNDP human development index.

A peaceful sub-Saharan Africa is inconceivable without a peaceful Congo. The area from the Gulf of Guinea to the Great Lakes of Africa – from Yaounde to Kigali, Kinshasa to Kigoma; from Luanda and Libreville to Lubumbashi and Lusaka, and from Bangui, Berberati and Bangassou to Bukavu, Mbuji-Mayi and Bujumbura – is, arguably, the one sub-region in Africa which most lacks a center of political gravity and stability. Only the DRC, which borders nine countries, can be this political center of gravity.

Once stable, the DRC presents real opportunities for intra-regional economic cooperation, foreign investment, and sustained growth and development. However, a DRC in decay, vulnerable to plunder and susceptible to violence, is a threat to itself, and to the region with negative implications for the entire continent.

The DRC has made remarkable progress. All of the transitional institutions have been established – including a government of national unity mostly composed of former belligerent parties; a two-chamber parliament with more representatives of the society at large; and five civil commissions including an Independent Electoral Commission.

International legal frameworks exist, which move the process forward. There are several dozen UN Security Council Resolutions, Presidential Statements, and Secretary-General’s Reports on the DRC; as well as the Lusaka, Pretoria, Sun City, Luanda, and other peace agreements.

The international community has already invested heavily, demonstrated most prominently by: the first European Union military peace operation under the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy; the decision of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to examine human rights abuses in Ituri as the Court’s first case; the ongoing work of the International Committee to Support the Transition (ICST); as well as earlier instruments including the Joint Political Commission (JPC); and the Joint Military Commission (JMC).

Other initiatives include the International Conference on the Great Lakes (ICGL), and other regional (including African Union) meetings at the highest levels to discuss the peace process in the Congo, as well as the willingness of international financial institutions and foreign governments to virtually wipe out DRC’s foreign debt.

African institutions, greatly strengthened, are also playing a significant role, especially the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union (AU), together with the personal engagement of key African leaders. The transition in the DRC has been, is, and will remain a quintessentially African process.

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Introduction

Chronology of events

Key issues

Perspectives

Lack of funding