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Democratic Republic of Congo

: The point about these terrible stories of rape and the atrocities that one encounters somewhere like the DRC is that, time after time, when one asks local people what they really want, the answer is very simple: they want to end the culture of impunity. That culture of impunity in the DRC started with the infamous article 15 of an earlier Kasai constitution, which encouraged people to débrouiller, or manage for themselves. That was a kind of licence for people to look after themselves, whatever it involved. It continued through the Mobutu kleptocracy and has now spread like a cancer beyond looting and extortion to rape and murder. The international community has been generous in financial terms, but ultimately ineffective. Shamed by the blind eye that we turned to what happened under Mobutu because of the cold war, and doubly shamed by our inaction in the Rwandan genocide, we have since showered money on the DRC. Some $1.2 billion is spent annually financing the 17,000 UN troops in what is the most ambitious peacekeeping force in the UN's history. The DRC is now the top African recipient of UK aid. Soldiers from the Pakistani UN contingent, whom we met on the trip, were decent and brave, but they have a very limited mandate, and they often end up simply chasing the militia from one part of the country to another. That is a particularly sensitive issue in the Kivu region, where the Rwandan Hutu Interahamwe militia are being chased inland, further away from the border areas and, significantly, further away from Rwanda, to which everyone agrees they must return. The most that can be said of MONUC is that it has succeeded in stabilising the situation and has made elections possible. That should not be underestimated, but what happens after the elections will be crucial. The model has to be what happened in Sierra Leone, where the UN was prepared to stay for three years after the election and where it made a commitment to train the local army for a full 10 years. Sierra Leone is a tiny country compared with the DRC, so the price will be huge, but if we want to stop the rapes, the extortion and the regional instability that affects not just the DRC but Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, we have no alternative.