UN peacekeepers to stay in conflict-torn eastern DRC to deter Rwanda

The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo will not want the UN peacekeepers to proceed with an agreed withdrawal from the country’s conflict-torn North Kivu province due to the presence of Rwandan forces and Rwanda-backed M23 rebels, the country’s foreign minister has said.

“The current situation with the presence of Rwandan troops, the aggression by Rwanda makes it very difficult to envisage such a situation right now,” Congolese Foreign Minister, Therese Kayikwamba Wagner, said in an interview over the weekend.

More than 1.7 million people have been displaced during the two-year insurgency by M23 militia, which has been backed — and its operations “de facto controlled” — by 3,000-4,000 Rwandan troops in the DRC, a UN report said last week. Though President Felix Tshisekedi last September demanded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers, now Bintou Keita, head of the MONUSCO peacekeeping mission said there is no timeline for the pull-out.

Meanwhile, experts have long pondered the question of how best to stop the carnage in eastern DRC. According to Robert Rotberg, the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, to stop the violence in the DRC, we need to end the black market for the minerals in our phones. After the UN peacekeepers, the Congolese army and the Kenya-led East African military force have all tried, President Tshisekedi has failed to find a path to peace, Rotberg writes. “What has not been tried in an enforceable manner is curtailing or banning mineral sales and preventing the onward transmission of the ores to Rwanda and the United Arab Emirates,” he said. This is because, as he stresses, “minerals fund the rebel movements.”