I think one of the reasons is that it's lasted for a while. Congo has been in the news for the past 25 years, almost. Pretty soon it will be almost 25 years.
There has been, I think, this resignation on the part of Western donors with regard to various initiatives and the lack of.... I go back to the region a lot. The neighbouring countries have made a huge difference, but there is often the sense that, if you send American diplomats or French diplomats, and you put a little bit of pressure and a little bit of threat of sanctions, you'll see a development, and if you don't, there is nothing you can do.
I think what has been very apparent in the past decade or so is the importance of putting pressure on the neighbours to do something. I will give you a brief example to illustrate that point. In the 1990s, when Burundi was in the middle of a civil war, what made a difference was not the European Union crying and saying, “Oh, you're going to have a genocide”, but it was Uganda compelling all the countries in the region to have a full blockade on Burundi, forcing the Tutsi elite to negotiate when their country was completely blockaded. Blockades work really well. If you follow the history of war, they work pretty well, particularly when you are landlocked.
I think there is this idea that, if you come and if you pay attention, things will get solved. I think the Western partners have not found a way to compel the region to assess and to address the DRC.
I think as well one of the reasons we don't see it so much is that, unlike Syria, you don't have long trails of migration that cut across all the way to Europe. Regional actors have been very, very good and very generous with regard to refugees. Tanzania has taken hundreds of thousands of refugees, and Malawi and Kenya have, too. The countries in the region are doing as much as they can in order to at least absorb the massive influx of people so that it doesn't become an emergency.
The dynamics now have shifted from the DR Congo to South Sudan and to Somalia with the global war on terror, and now the Sahel, Mali, and so forth. If it's relatively contained, people will go to it once it explodes. That's just the nature of politics and security, and DRC seems to be this country where we've had the same dynamics. Oftentimes people think it's the same dynamics, but they've evolved, and they're focusing on another part of the region. It's just limited resources and political imperatives.