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Democratic Republic of Congo

: I thank my hon. Friend for that very valuable contribution. I was not going to mention the LRA, but I shall now that he has mentioned it. It is crucial to recognise that some of these groups are still operating. There has been some progress in that bordering countries have, officially at least, withdrawn their military forces from the DRC. Rwanda has certainly done so. President Museveni, who has recently been recently elected in Uganda—one can say good things about his time in government, but it is harder to find good things to say about his more recent comments—spoke of the possibility of making an incursion into the DRC to deal with the problem of the Lord's Resistance Army. It would clearly be far better for the international community to deal with that problem than for Uganda or any other country to make incursions. MONUC is the UN body in the DRC and to give it some credit, it is doing very good work. Although it is a very large force, comprising between 16,500 and 17,000 personnel, that is a limited number when dealing with 10,000 or so members of the Interahamwe and various other militias, which are only semi-organised in any case. In time, the problem will be a matter for the international community, and the DRC forces, when they have the capacity to deal with it themselves. In the meantime, there is very much a patching-up mentality. MONUC does its best to keep areas safe—it is deployed, it moves those people around and it catches and kills the odd one—but until we have a proper democracy in a post-election context and a big effort is made by the international community after that election, the LRA will remain a problem. The LRA is a major problem for the whole region and it is time that the international community focused on it more. I am sometimes concerned, however, that President Museveni uses the LRA as a way of pursuing other political objectives.