That's a really hard question to answer.
If you look at a lot of the reports issued by various organizations monitoring this situation, you will notice that they tell you there are various recommendations. There is an issue of governance and rule of law.
One the biggest problems in the DR Congo, I think, is this ongoing impunity. Now, you have impunity on a variety of levels. The first one, of course, was during the first and second Congo wars. People were not held accountable for the massacres they engaged in or for the humanitarian law violations they engaged in among themselves. Instead, in order to promote peace, what they ended up doing was integrating militias into a national army. That became almost a reward: you fight; you are willing to negotiate; we integrate you.
Within the very army of the DR Congo, you have thousands of people who are war criminals, who have been rewarded with government positions in order to maintain the peace. This is one of the challenges. What that does is it corrupts the professionalism of the army, even though it wasn't great to begin with following the fall of Mobutu.
It also brings a mentality in the minds of other armed groups that if maybe they engage in similar practices, they will also be rewarded in the same way.
The second part is that people don't trust the government to respond to their security and social needs, so they look to local authorities for the provision of these services, and that leads to a decentralization of authority. If it's done in order to develop a federal system, that's one thing. But the process is very ad hoc. They say, “Look, the federal government is not providing us with security. They're sending the military to Beni and they're not sending anyone here. We will then create our local militias to protect ourselves.”
A lot of times, these local groups are developed with the intent of protecting themselves and protecting their communities, but then you have to feed them, provide weapons for them. The illicit networks in which these people engage, in order to be able to protect themselves, then also bring in other dynamics of being involved with people who are not so benevolent in their intentions.
There's a regional context in which the DRC finds itself. Kasai and Kinshasa aside, the Kivu region is also a place where countries like Rwanda are benefiting from the instability for economic purposes. For a very long time, the Rwandan government was fomenting dissent in the region to enable them to go in and exploit mineral resources in the region. Now that they've been called out and have had some sanctions against them, they use other means to continue.
Just recently, there was a confrontation between the Rwandan government and Congolese forces in the Virunga region. If you follow the region, you'll know that Virunga park has become a place where people are getting kidnapped. Kidnapping is a great source of revenue for armed groups in trying to get control over the region. There's a dispute between the two countries.