A meeting of defence ministers from the Great Lakes Region is to be held in Khartoum, Sudan, on August 2 to review the progress and fast track the implementation of decisions made in a similar meeting nearly a year ago in Kigali on the situation in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

One of those decisions — the establishment of a Joint Intelligence Fusion Centre — has already been acted upon. The centre opened in June in the eastern DRC town of Goma.

Illegal mining has been cited as the chief source of funds that the different militias operating in the area use to purchase weaponry.

The meeting will also flesh out the details of how to establish a neutral international force that the region’s heads of state agreed to on July 15 in Addis Ababa on the sidelines of the African Union Summit.

The force will tackle M23, a newly formed group that emerged in April and which the UN and the DRC has accused Rwanda of backing, allegations the Rwandan administration in Kigali has denied.

The force will also tackle the FDLR — a predominantly Hutu militia that Rwanda accuses of being composed of remnants of the Interahamwe who carried out the 1994 genocide — and all other negative forces in eastern DRC, as well as patrol and secure border zones.

The Khartoum meeting is intended to inform the Extraordinary Summit of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region that Uganda, in its capacity as the current chair of the Conference, agreed to host in Kampala on August 6-7 to address the security situation in eastern Congo.

READ: Ugandan president to chair crisis meeting on DRC

These meetings are part of extended diplomatic efforts that Rwanda, DR Congo and Uganda — the countries most immediately affected by instability in eastern Congo — have engaged in to try to peacefully resolve the latest escalation, which has already displaced upwards of 50,000 people.

Sources who attended the latest meeting in Addis Ababa say Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and his DRC counterpart Joseph Kabila talked cordially for well over an hour.

According to information from the ICGLR Secretariat in Bujumbura, the Khartoum meeting, besides reviewing how far member countries have gone in implementing the Kigali decisions, will review the UN Mission in the DRC, which has existed since 1999 and recently had its mandate renewed for another year by the UN Security Council.

The Mission, as of June this year, comprised a total of 23,586 people — 17,054 military personnel, 715 military observers, 1,375 police, 954 international civilian personnel, 2,876 local civilian staff, and 612 UN volunteers — and is funded to the tune of $1.48 billion every year.

Its mandate, according to its website, includes “the protection of civilians, humanitarian personnel and human-rights defenders under imminent threat of physical violence and to support the government of the DRC in its stabilisation and peace consolidation efforts.”

But Rwanda has fiercely criticised its effectiveness, with President Kagame most recently noting it wasn’t “worth a penny.”

It is understood that its failure to demonstrate tangible results in large part informed the thinking behind a neutral international force.

“The UN force doesn’t quite understand the terrain in Congo and might also be faced with correctly identifying the negative forces,” noted a technical official at the ICGLR who was involved in the Regional Inter-Ministerial Committee meeting that preceded that of the heads of state in Addis Ababa.

“The UN force faces a peculiar challenge in that it is not participating in a manner that can clearly be perceived as neutral,” noted Simon Mulongo, a peace and security expert and a vice chair of the Committee on Defence and Internal Affairs in Uganda’s parliament.

“It is playing a double role of peacekeeping and governance for most of eastern Congo and so the contending forces look at it as part and parcel of the Kinshasa establishment and are unwilling to co-operate with it,” added the former director of the Eastern Africa Standby Force.

In whatever way the force is constituted, Mr Mulongo added that, ultimately, pacifying the DR Congo will require addressing its political questions, which have been ignored in the numerous accords and agreements the warring parties have signed on numerous occasions.