There will be a major crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) before the end of 2016, and nobody really knows what to do about it. This is neither an alarmist nor even a particularly contentious statement. Diplomats, United Nations officials and independent analysts agree that trouble is looming over the DRC’s presidential election, which is supposed to take place in November. The constitution bars the sitting president, Joseph Kabila, from running for a third term. However, almost all observers believe he intends to cling onto power, potentially unleashing serious violence.
Nobody can predict exactly how ugly this could get, but the crisis could signal the failure of one of the most ambitious international attempts at stabilization and state-building in the past two decades. The U.N. initially sent peacekeepers to the DRC in 1999 to help the country out of a civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands—by some estimates, millions—of lives. The force eventually expanded to over 20,000 troops and police, and is still the second-largest blue-helmet operation,behind the one in Darfur.
While the U.N. was simultaneously engaged in tricky peacekeeping missions elsewhere, the DRC became its de facto flagship project, similar to the way in which NATO staked its reputation on rebuilding Afghanistan after 2001. Although hardly as geopolitically significant as the Afghan project, rescuing the DRC was certainly internationally fashionable for a while. The European Union sent military missions to bolster the U.N. forces in 2003 and 2006. Donors pumped in funds, and there was a general sense of satisfaction when the U.N. oversaw acceptable national elections in 2006.
Yet, in the 10 years that have followed, many outsiders began to lose faith or interest in Congolese affairs. Well-intentioned advocacy groups turned their attention to the bloodshed in Darfur, even as repeated crises in the eastern DRC, often stoked by neighboring Rwanda, set back the stabilization process. A turning point came in late 2008, when a fresh rebel upsurge in the east coincided with the international financial meltdown. Leaders such as Britain’s then-prime minister, Gordon Brown, and France’s then-president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had to take time off from saving their countries’ economies to address—and deflect—calls for Western military intervention to bail out the U.N. force.
From then on, the DRC increasingly looked more like a burden than an opportunity. Just as NATO’s position in Afghanistan began to unravel, the U.N. found itself adrift in the DRC. Having won the 2006 elections fairly convincingly, Kabila grew both more avaricious for power and nervous about his position. He was widely accused of rigging the next presidential polls in 2011, but the U.N. and donors ultimately acquiesced to him remaining in office.
Since then, the U.N. has remained involved in a messy military struggle to secure the east of the country against Rwandan-backed militias, but has wielded little political leverage over Kinshasa. As DRC expert Jason Stearns argued in WPR last year, the Security Council and many analysts have focused too narrowly on the U.N.’s military operations, failing to understand that the real “battle for Congo’s future” would be fought in the political realm.
The lack of political clout has also rendered a lot of well-intentioned development efforts across the DRC pretty futile. Donors “built roads, administrative offices, and police stations,” Stearns has noted elsewhere, but after that “the roads were not maintained, the police only paid irregularly, and administrative offices deprived of regular budgets.”
The DRC has thus gone from being a burgeoning multilateral success story to an emblem of why international operations backfire. Jean-Marie Guehenno, the former U.N. peacekeeping chief who was closely involved in Congolese affairs, has recently admitted that, “to many, the failure of the United Nations in Congo is an indictment of the whole enterprise of peacekeeping, if not the very concept of intervention.”
If Kabila finds a way to stay in power after this year, or if his efforts to do so engender widespread chaos that the U.N. cannot control, it will only confirm the scale of this failure. As I warned last year, the U.N. risks becoming “entangled in fractious and arguably unethical relationships with national leaders who, driven by greed or fear, have little real interest in stable, open and inclusive political systems.”
But for now, the U.N. is caught in a trap. It could threaten to withdraw part or all of its forces in DRC if Kabila holds onto power. But the Congolese president has already argued for the peacekeepers to be cut back, presumably calculating it will be easier for him to stay in office if there are fewer international officials and troops to get in his way.
The Security Council has concluded that it is better to keep the peacekeepers in place, despite their limited political leverage. They might be able to contain a crisis, or at least save some lives, if violence escalates—just as the U.N. operation in South Sudan has been politically sidelined since the country collapsed into civil war in 2013, but continues to protect 200,000 civilians on its bases.
Outside actors are still trying to cajole Kabila to stand aside. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with him in Kinshasa last month to drive home that a peaceful transition would “cement his legacy.” U.S. President Barack Obama said something similar in a phone call with Kabila last year. Yet Kabila might be inclined to look eastward to Burundi. There, his counterpart, President Pierre Nkurunziza, has so far held onto power after rewriting the constitution to secure a third term despite vocal international opposition last year.
While Burundi has teetered on the edge of mass violence since then many fear that Kabila will now try to pull off a similar trick. He could simply look for ways to postpone the polls indefinitely. Whatever the consequences, a fresh crisis in the DRC threatens to act as a tragic postscript to a costly and once-promising experiment in state-building.
