The American military is stretched pretty thin these days. We're in two wars; we have lots of global commitments. On any given day, one third of our troops are actually involved in an operation, one third are getting ready to go and one third have just come back. Busy.

In January, there were two discussions in the United Nations Security Council that are important to Refugees International’s work.  The discussion on Somalia was particularlydisappointing, but we were pleased that the UN Security Council is finally looking at how to respond to the escalating violence in south Sudan.

In two weeks the existing mandate for the UN peacekeeping operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) will expire, and UN Security Council will make an important decision about the future of the mission, and the trajectory of UN involvement in this volatile country.

Refugees International wrote in a September 2009 field report that sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo had increased since the start of the government-led “Kimia II” military operations against the FDLR rebel group. When Refugees International Advocate Camilla Olson and I were in South Kivu in August carrying out research for the report, many displaced women described their experiences after they fled the fighting. One woman from Ziralo groupement told RI she escaped after hearing gunshots outside her house. In the chaos, her family was scattered and left home with nothing. She spent four nights in the forest before she could make it into town. She said women were raped by the FDLR while fleeing, and she didn’t want to go back home as long as they were still around.

Public statements made by the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the DR Congo, MONUC, have been the subject of much controversy in recent months. On October 28, a group of international agencies focusing on protection sent a letter to the top UN official in the country, Alan Doss. In the letter they criticized the tone of the last Secretary-General’s report on MONUC which they said minimized the humanitarian crisis ongoing in the east of the country. Although Refugees International was not involved in this letter, my colleague Erin Weir and I raised the issue of optimistic language with senior MONUC management on our recent trip to Congo last month.

On October 23rd the cause of protecting internally displaced people made a major advance. At the conclusion of a Special Summit in Kampala, Uganda, the African Union (AU) approved the Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa. The Convention, to be known as the Kampala Convention, will come into effect within 30 days of ratification by 15 of the AU’s 53 member states.

On October 13th, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to extend the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) for another year. Noting improvements made toward the stabilization of the country over recent months, the Council recognized a fragile security situation that “continues to constitute a threat to international peace and security in the region.” Yes, UN peacekeeping has helped to make real gains in security in Haiti, but stability there remains threatened by gang violence, drug trafficking, and civil unrest.

I am writing from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a country with incredible natural beauty, a bounty of mineral resources and site of a brutal and protracted conflict that has caused the death and displacement of millions of people since the mid 1990’s. MONUC, the UN Peacekeeping Mission in the DRC, was deployed here nearly ten years ago, and its current mandate – which includes over 40 separate and complicated tasks – places priority on the protection of civilians, mainly in the DRC’s unpredictable eastern region.  

After President Obama made his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly last Wednesday, the collective sigh of relief within the UN and UN missions was audible.  His speech embodied the spirit of optimism and hope contained in the UN Charter, rather than the hostility to the UN that characterized the US attitude over the previous eight years.  From my informal conversations with delegates, there was a sense that Obama had said all the right things.