Dara - HRI

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

“The Democratic Republic of Congo is now in a good momentum”

Ross Mountain is the deputy special representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In this capacity, he also serves as Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator. Almost a year after the first elections in 45 years, he believes that things are moving ahead in the DRC and that there are prospects of “a new tomorrow.”

Last year with the electoral process, many thought that there was a window of opportunity for the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nevertheless, one year later, the country remains unstable and the humanitarian situation still seems critical. What is happening to the DRC?

Yes, I agree with you when you say that the situation remains critical. Look where we come from and where we are, and look at what is happening around us in other countries. And if you look at the elections and what we watch every day on television about Kenya, it is what could normally be expected here. I think that there’s a real chance of delivering peace dividends, but the media is too focused on North Kivu in the east, of course, where the fighting and the IDPs are. There are two, maximum four, conflict “territories” in North Kivu, out of the country’s 169 territories. I’m not trying to minimise it, but, you know, the rest of the country is not in flames and there has been an agreement. The details still need to be defined, but I think that quite a lot of progress has been made and there is a momentum for moving forward. Certainly, one would have to be very naive to expect that everything would work out perfectly after 40 years of null administration and corruption, half a dozen years of having six armies in your country, and a civil war. Well, nobody is. We know it is not perfect, but I think that this country is in the right direction. We have a Parliament that is working remarkably well; there are two Chambers, and we have a law that defines the status of the opposition in the DRC; one of the rarest laws on the continent. The Parliament is exercising a degree of independence from the government that was quite unexpected by many. So there are very positive aspects, but there is still an enormous amount to do and, unfortunately, in humanitarian terms, the country remains a major catastrophe. The International Rescue Committee has released a report that you will obviously have seen. It says that there are 45,000 deaths per month, 1,500 per day, which is terrible. And very few of these, for what it is worth, are directly from the conflict. In my job we deal with momentum. And I think there is a positive momentum now.

OCHA’s 2008 Humanitarian Action Plan underlines the existing humanitarian needs in the east, but also the chronic ones in the rest of the country. Humanitarian needs remain huge. How do you maintain donor interest in the DRC?

It’s an increasing challenge. In order to maintain donor interest, you need to retain the media’s attention to the country. It is a sad fact. And if you don’t have the media, you don’t have donor support. I worked for OCHA in Geneva and we used to compare which were the best designed country assistance programmes, on the one hand, with those that had the most publicity, on the other hand. You can have a great programme and no money, and you can have a lousy programme and publicity and you get money. In order to succeed, we need to show that we are having an impact. But you also have to show “need.” The need side is, certainly in the humanitarian dimension, probably as important as anything. We think we’ve been able to show some degree of efficiency, in terms of the way we use the Pool Fund, the donors working together, the regional approach. If you look back at it, it’s the concentration of our efforts that has made the difference. We used the cluster system not because that’s what somebody else defined as being a good thing, but because we felt that bringing people together, focusing on objectives and then seeing how everybody can work towards it, and seeing those in very precise terms, was a good thing. We were then able to fund, through the Pool Funds, some of these approaches, which come together and would appear to have at least encouraged others. The Pool Fund, for example, started off with basically the UK and Sweden on a very small scale. We thought it would remain rather small, but now it is the principal channel for humanitarian assistance and an increasing number of donors have now joined in. I put great store in the regional reaction. This is far too big a country to believe that you can only do sort of bits and pieces with it. You can have a lot of great projects, but no impact. You can build a little school, and go and show people that “I’ve helped these 40 or 200 people.” This is great for photo-albums, but in terms of dealing with the huge dynamics of this country’s problems, we need really to try and match the resources with the magnitude of the problem. In a sense, we’ve moved away from projects; we have to break things down, into programmes focusing on particularly geographical or thematic areas that are identified by people on the ground. We now have some resources to put into that. We’ve tried to clean up, to strengthen the projects that we support; qualitative evaluation. And, you know, we’re always looking for ways to improve. Even now we’re looking at other modalities, but I think the fact that we are working together and with the main players, NGOs , donors, agencies and the local government in particular, has allowed us to have more impact and, in a way, to give a bit more confidence to the donor community.

The DRC is a pilot country for the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative. Operational tools like the Pool Fund, the RRM or the cluster approach have been developed. The Pool Fund is now a key instrument. But within the NGO community, there are some concerns about the fact that UN agencies are the main recipients and small international NGOs feel excluded from this mechanism. Do you accept this analysis? And what do you think could be done to improve the Pool Fund?

The Pool Fund is not there for either NGOs or agencies. It’s there for producing results for the population. And once you decide what it is you are focusing on, you should be working backwards from that point towards how this is going to be delivered. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the key actors are the NGOs. The idea is not to make sure that every NGO gets a little piece of the action, or the UN agency for that matter. It’s not to support the players, it’s to support the people and the extent to which the people are able to deliver priority services to the players, and there are certain players that have to be there at a certain time and give certain assistance to the people. Last year, about 42% of the fund went through NGOs, either directly or indirectly. You can throw a billion dollars into this country and have zero impact. You can have nice little boutique projects, but they have to have an impact on the lives of people, and this is the challenge that many of us have to face. It’s not just another nice project. It’s actually something that, if combined with other things that are going on, will really have an impact. That’s what we aim to achieve.

The constant violation of human rights in the DRC is critical. Do you consider that there have been substantial advances in this field and that the international community, that donors, are advocating enough on this issue?

I think so. We have made some quite interesting advances in this whole protection of civilians area. And it has sort of become my “pet topic” but what we’ve been able to do is use the fact that the military is number one, the Chapter 7 mandate is the protection of civilians, which has actually just been further reinforced by the latest extension of the mandate. And, of course, humanitarians are particularly concerned with protecting civilians. Some people think that it is making the military do humanitarian work. But, not at all. It’s making the military do military work, which is protecting civilians with their military capacities and doing that, for example, in North Kivu. We have now 24 mobile operating bases, some of which are being placed for military reasons. But most of these were placed at the request of humanitarians to provide protection to the internally displaced and it’s become a major tool of the humanitarian community in the protection against human rights violations, particularly attacks and rapes on women, even though more needs to be done – and is being done – on this particular dimension. We are obviously concerned about human rights violations. Unfortunately, in this country there is so much violence: sexual violence, murder, land mines, forced recruitment of children. You asked whether enough pressure is being exercised. There is certainly a lot of interest in this within the international community and there’s regular reporting. There have been a number of incidents which have caused concern. One of the major areas of concern is, of course, the whole issue of sexual violence, which started as a war weapon. Militias, but also the national army and even the police forces, have been involved in cases and there is now a major effort to focus on how these can be reduced and eliminated. We have to deal with the whole question of impunity. The law on sexual violence adopted by the Parliament is good and now it remains to be applied. We now see signs of serious government leadership in terms of moving ahead on this regard, and I see our role, as the international community, in working with them and giving them the mechanisms to be able really to deal with that in practical terms. So again, there is still a lot more work to be done. But you are also aware of the three cases that the International Criminal Court is dealing with. Warlords have been picked up and taken to The Hague.

The MONUC mandate has been reinforced on several occasions. Still, what straightforward decision is needed to reinforce the impact of the mission? What would be the top priority?

The MONUC has just had its mandate reinforced. The first issue was to maintain the number of troops and police officers that we have had. There is still a lot of volatility in the country. Elections were held, a new government came, and new structures are being established. In the past, we have seen in so many countries how peacekeepers were pulled out prematurely, and the result has been that they have had to go back in a few years later. So we are very pleased that the troops have been kept here. Again, this is, at the moment, the largest UN peacekeeping force, but if you compare it in terms of territory, or population ratio, it is, in fact, the smallest. And indeed, we have here roughly the same number of troops that we had in Sierra Leone and Liberia. But still, it’s been an important part of the mandate. The other dimension of that is indeed the protection of civilians. The two main thrusts of the mandate now are first, the provision and consolidation of security and the protection of civilians; and second, the extension of the authority of the state. But what I think peacekeepers and the UN have increasingly come to recognise is that it’s not the military and politics alone that will bring stability to the country. You need, of course, to extend the rule of law. You need to give a peace dividend to the population. You need to deal with basic humanitarian needs. And if you’re trying to bring stability, then you need the full range of UN actors to contribute in areas within their own mandates and measures. I repeat, the amount of money available is infinitesimal compared to the needs. Traditionally, in a post-conflict situation, the UN carries out needs-assessments on behalf of the international community. We could have spent tens of millions of dollars on needs-assessments and we would have had reports that would fill this room and with probably as many zeros behind the numbers. And where would that get us? So what we have endeavoured is to bring everybody together, working with the government on the priority action plan; to look at the priority areas identified by the country, by the population of the country, and then see how we could work together to have an impact on a number of areas that will show real results: health, education, corruption, security sector reform, improving the administration, HIV/AIDS. In some of these areas, by working together you can actually have impact on the population in the field. Otherwise, it’s as the French say, saupoudrage, so that’s what we try to do.

In such a complex situation, with so many players, how do you personally maintain the necessary energy, enthusiasm and beliefs to impulse changes in the country?

There is so much that needs to be done and you can either be dispirited and think you can’t make an impact, or you can work with the talented people and resources that you have around you to try and see if you can make a dent in it. What I am saying is that you have to try to see what we have achieved with the different “bits.” It is certainly encouraging, but there is plenty that can go wrong. For example, I was responsible for the international coordination of and support for the elections and I think that not only “Murphy’s Law” applies, but also Murphy himself is a constant member of my committee. Therefore, everything that can go wrong usually does, but we find a way to move forward. The last thing I can say about working in this country is that you certainly don’t get bored.