Refugees International Advocate Anne Edgerton and Director of Special Projects Cliff Bernath are traveling to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) over the next three weeks to assess the performance of the United Nations Observer Mission to the Congo (MONUC). The RI team will visit Kinshasa, the capital, as well as major towns, including Kisangani, Bukavu, and Goma, in the eastern part of this vast war-torn country. The RI visits coincides with an important moment in the on-going DRC peace process. Foreign troops from Angola, Namibia, Uganda, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe have now largely withdrawn from the DRC in keeping with their obligations under the 1999 Lusaka Peace Accords. Their withdrawal, however, has created a power vacuum in the east and violence continues to plague this part of the country. MONUC should be moving to the next phase of its deployment, but this requires further commitment and resources from the United States and European countries that have been engaged in stewarding the peace process. RI’s primary objective on this mission is to assess MONUC’s performance to date and make recommendations for how its capacities might be strengthened. The mission is part of RI’s on-going commitment to advocating for improvements in the UN’s peacekeeping capabilities, and the MONUC experience will be explicitly compared to that of UNAMSIL in Sierra Leone, the subject of a recent RI report.

In addition, the RI team will review the overall humanitarian situation in the DRC, especially in the east, and maintain our contacts with the network of Congolese NGOs focusing on the plight of street