Regional leaders from the Great Lakes Region face the task of convincing the UN to support its proposed Neutral International Force when the leaders travel to the UN General Assembly next week.

The neutral force is supposed to eradicate the so-called “negative forces” in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and patrol border zones.

“You have to satisfy [them] that you have the concept right and that you supplement United Nations Stabilisation Mission in the DR Congo (Monusco) but do not duplicate its roles,” James Mugume, the Uganda national co-ordinator of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, told Rwanda Today.

“The regional Ministers for Defence need to fine tune that [concept] and then the Ministers for Foreign Affairs will sell it to the UN,” he added.

Uganda, as current chair of the ICGLR, has so far convened two major meetings of regional Heads of State to try and resolve the latest instability in eastern DRC after sections of the national army defected in April and formed the M23 rebel group.

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The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has picked up these efforts and proposed to convene a high-level meeting on the situation in the eastern DRC on September 27 on the sidelines of the General Assembly.

Mr Ki-moon’s mini summit, which will involve ICGLR leaders and possibly members of the UN Security Council, is intended to provide yet another “platform for further dialogue aimed at reinforcing regional efforts to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis in eastern DRC.”

Selling the neutral force, for which the ICGLR needs to secure a UN mandate stronger than Monusco’s before deployment, isn’t going to be any easy job.

For one, according to Roger Meece, Mr Ki-moon’s Special Representative for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the neutral force isn’t any different in its objectives from Monusco, which he heads.

“The UN mission is a billion dollar industry with many allies in the UN system. That, I believe, is the political and diplomatic challenge [regional leaders will face],” noted Angelo Izama, an Open Society Fellow studying security in eastern Africa region.

There has been a big debate about the achievements of Monusco, the UN’s largest mission in the world that it funds to the tune of $1.4 billion annually, ever since regional leaders started meeting over the crisis in eastern DRC.

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame has openly stated how the mission isn’t worth a penny, while senior officials in Uganda’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs have also questioned its achievements in the over 10 years it has been in the DR Congo.

“Why haven’t they been able to deal with these [“negative”] forces in all these years?” Okello Oryem, Uganda’s Minister for State for Foreign Affairs, rhetorically asked in an interview with Rwanda Today on the sidelines of the third regional Heads of State meeting in Kampala early this month.

A UN mandate is supposed, in some ways, to secure the neutral force funding, one of two major constraints observers pointed out would forestall it, the first time it was proposed at the first meeting of regional Heads of State held on the sidelines of the AU Summit in Addis Ababa in July.

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The other — where the 4,000 troops needed were going to come from — was partly solved in the latest meeting in Kampala on September 8 after Tanzania offered to contribute personnel, an announcement that took nearly everyone by surprise.

But the focus on the neutral force, both by the regional leaders and commentators, belies their ultimate interest to resolve the crisis outside military means, a point given more emphasis in their latest communiqué.

“The mission may be distant and eventually not relevant to the situation in DRC but they are making the argument that the commitment exists to [find] ‘African solutions’ to African problems,” opined Mr Izama of the “strong message” the regional leaders agreed to table in their mini summit with Mr Ki-moon.

“The truth is that these troops, if they materialise, will not be able to deal any more effectively with the armed groups that have been terrorising our communities for many years than any of the other soldiers who have tried, including UN and Congolese troops,” noted Nickson Kasola, the director of the Kinshasa-based Centre pour la Gouvernance, a non-profit organisation focused on democracy and governance, in a blog post he has published on several websites.

“Ideally, the Congolese army should be able to put down the M23 rebellion and to provide our communities with the security we need, but it hasn’t been able to. Our government should do more to make sure its army in the east is well-trained and properly provided for and ends its abuse of civilians,” he adds.

According to him, the ICGLR member countries should push the DRC government to be more responsive to its people; should immediately begin to improve relations between DRC and Rwanda; but above all, they “must be brave enough to speak to the real failures of Rwanda and DRC and seek practical solutions for the sake of ordinary people whose lives are again being needlessly ruined by conflict.”

In the same vein, the United Nations Under Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Hervé Ladsous, speaking in Kigali on Tuesday, castigated DRC for failing to exert its authority on all its territory and defended Monusco for working under severe constraints and with little help from Kinshasa.

He also cast doubt on the ICGLR’s neutral force, suggesting it needed in-depth study; and emphasised all efforts must be trained on finding peaceful means to resolve the matter.