Congo: International Crisis Group Report

Lord Anderson of Swansea Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the noble Lord will be aware that the problem with the LRA is partly that it operates across the borders of Uganda, the DRC, southern Sudan and the Central African Republic, and it has not always proved easy to ensure that the different UN operations in some of those countries manage to co-ordinate among themselves. The latest information I have is that the LRA is now well under 1,000 strong but that it continues to cause an enormous amount of damage as its members maraud across those borders.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

My Lords, the report describes the DRC as the “heart of darkness” and concludes that the conflict continues,

“without credible hope for an improvement”.

Government troops act with impunity, the United Nations troops are discredited, there is widespread rape, and yet the international community is intervention-weary. The African Union has a poor record in relation to Somalia. Are there any signs of hope at all? What can the European Union do that we are not doing at the moment?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

One obvious thing is that MONUSCO needs more helicopters, more support and more troops. At present, the majority of the troops in MONUSCO are from south Asia. The noble Lord may know that the African Union forces are now extremely stretched, given the various different peacekeeping operations under way in Africa. We have to recognise that this is going to be a very long haul. The UK, I repeat, is one of the largest donors under a number of different programmes to deal with the various problems that the DRC is currently facing.