allAfrica.com: Congo-Kinshasa: Exploring the U.S. Role in Consolidating Peace and Security in the Great Lakes Region (Page 1 of 4)

Congo-Kinshasa: Exploring the U.S. Role in Consolidating Peace and Security in the Great Lakes Region

The following is the testimony of Gayle Smith, a Senior Fellow at the Center of American Progress and Co-Chair of the Enough Project before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs on October 24, 2007:

Senator Feingold and Members of the Committee:

Thank you for this opportunity to testify. For the purposes of this hearing, I would like to focus my remarks on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC demands our urgent and sustained attention because it is poised to make progress toward ending a long-running crisis–or fall victim to its recurrence.

There are concrete steps that can and must be taken today. As militia forces are pressed to disarm in the east, we must put in place the programs needed to support and sustain disarmament and ensure that civilians are protected. In the wake of elections, we must redouble our support for security sector reform. To consolidate newfound peace and security, we must increase our investments in the ground-breaking program led by the Wilson Center’s Howard Wolpe and designed to overcome mistrust and rebuild the cohesion of the state by training officials in collaborative decision-making–in communications, negotiations, group-problem-solving, and the analysis of conflict. There are countless other steps we must take, many of them outlined in “Averting the Nightmare Scenario in Eastern Congo,” a recent ENOUGH Project report that I am submitting for the record and for the Subcommittee’s consideration.

But while immediate action is needed to consolidate progress in the DRC, what may be most pressing is our need to start responding structurally and with an eye to the long term. I say this because with perhaps only a few changes to detail, the recommendations that I offer today are little different than those I would have provided 10 years ago. And this, Mr. Chairman, gets to the heart of the problem.

Ten years ago I was living in Africa, then as Senior Advisor to the Administrator and Chief of Staff of USAID, just prior to assuming the position of Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council. The issue of the day in the DRC was militia violence in the East, where we faced a crisis borne of the spillover of the Rwandan genocide into a region beset by weak governance, poverty, local conflict, the availability of arms and the presence of valuable natural resources. Today, though some of the names have changed and many battles have been waged and ended, we are facing what are fundamentally the same challenges.

The successful legislation introduced by Sens. Obama (D-IL) and Brownback (R-KS) represents an important step in the right direction, as it calls for a comprehensive bilateral strategy coupled with increased multilateral engagement. I believe we must build on this foundation and do much more.

Let me be clear–that we have not seen a greater return on our investments of diplomatic and development capital is in part due to circumstances beyond our control. But it is also, in large measure, the result of our own limitations.

Let us pretend for a moment that we had in hand the strategies, tools, and resources necessary to have a real and lasting impact on developments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Let us pretend for a moment that we had concluded that our interests in Africa required sweeping reform and the introduction of new and innovative policies and programs. Let us pretend for a moment that our policy inputs matched our desired policy outcomes.

If the scenario I describe was real, I would testify today that our 10-year plan for U.S. engagement with the DRC had been approved by the interagency in an exercise led by the joint NSC/NEC Directorate for International Development. I would tell you that our regional diplomatic cell in Nairobi had surged to ensure that we had ample diplomatic coverage in eastern Congo and could align our diplomatic efforts in DRC with those throughout the Great Lakes Region.

I would report that with its recently reconstituted professional staff, our reformed foreign assistance agency had launched programs designed, on site, to address DRC’s vulnerabilities and build its capacities, focusing in particular on security sector reform, institution-building, the creation of jobs and small-scale enterprises able to deliver an urgently-needed “peace dividend,” and the development of a low-cost renewable energy sector. I would add that we were coordinating our efforts with those of other donors in order to ensure that all of the development bases were covered. I would testify that now that our internal policies had been harmonized, DRC was on the path to accessing expanded AGOA benefits, domestic trade support, and a new post-crisis debt relief facility.

I would tell you that our efforts to collaborate with private philanthropy and leverage the engagement of the private sector were paying off–that our new “Post-Crisis Jobs Creation Program” had just launched in the DRC, and that the Europeans had responded positively to our invitation to participate. I would tell you that the New Mines Program, built on Liberia’s successful effort to negotiate new, safer, and more equitable terms for the extractive industries, was off the ground in Kinshasa.

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