Word: kivu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...combination of things. There is a huge amount of genuine frustration. Then there's the recent outbreak of fresh hostilities. Sometimes the popular frustration is manipulated by political forces to advance their own agenda. The problem is simply practical. There are 10 million people in North and South Kivu, and we have less than 10,000 soldiers there. In Liberia I had the same amount of troops as I have for Congo, and [Liberia] is less than one-hundredth of the size. Congo is the size of Western Europe, without roads. That's the scale of the problem. We cannot...
TIME: Why are 11,000 of MONUC's 17,000 soldiers outside the area where the fighting is? Doss: We are redeploying. As we speak, there are units being moved into the area. But we really are stretched to the limit. We are robbing Peter to pay Paul. South Kivu [a province of Congo] is tense. So is Ituri [another province in the country], and we have the LRA [Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group that originated in northern Uganda] in the northeast. We are doing short-term reinforcements, but we simply do not have an effective rapid-reaction...
...irrelevance in their lives. I would agree with that. We would like to be more present. You have situations where there is a population of 60,000, and we have 120 soldiers in a base. In those circumstances, they might well say that they have not seen us. North Kivu is twice the size of Belgium, and a third of our forces are there, though for obvious reasons, they are mostly in and around Goma. I can understand the frustration. But you can see the scale of the problem, and we're just trying to manage these realities and these...
...much is MONUC feeling its way here? Is MONUC an experiment? R2P is a huge step forward ... But the question remains: How do we actually do it? We have come up against the sharp end of R2P. We can claim that responsibility, but actually doing that in North Kivu, with a collapsing army, a resurgence of ethnic groups - well, that raises fundamental questions. When we make these statements, we have to be careful that we have the means to match our mandate...
...developed world. Nkunda, for example, is widely believed to be profiting from the transit of minerals through areas he controls (he claims he is only policing the area to protect ethnic Tutsis). Global Witness, a London based NGO, sent researchers to the the provinces of North and South Kivu this summer and reported back that Hutu armed groups as well as members of the country's armed forces were profiting from the trade in cassiterite, or iron ore. The group wants to exert more pressure on Western governments and companies to prevent profits from ending up in the pockets...