Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Good afternoon, everyone. All protocols observed. Thank you for having me today. In addition to the introduction, I'm also a Canadian-based colour and policy analyst, and I will be a visiting assistant professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washingto

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It's difficult to tell. I get the numbers from ISS and the UN. The country is big. People will return home. I think you should take that as an average of the number of people who end up moving, who are displaced from one place to another, and who go back home. However, what oft

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  You would find there are more people than places in countries like Rwanda and Burundi, where land is very scarce. However, in the case of eastern Congo, you do have land conflicts. If you are gone for a couple of years, in some cases people will leave a male behind to continue wi

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It's quite different. What you have is communities trying to gain control of territory, and I wish I had a map. I can share that with the committee at a later time. There's a wonderful map that has been put together by the Congo Research Group. What they show is control of territ

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It is for some of these groups—a group like the FDLR, for instance, which originates from Rwanda. The FDLR's origins and dynamics and size are quite disputed, but they are perceived as a foreign force. They will try to integrate and gain control over certain communities. They've

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  You often talk about death in excess of violence. You have people who fall victim to massacres or who are killed in crossfire. But when you talk about in excess or conflict-related causes, you often talk about the fact that you're displaced, meaning that you're malnourished and y

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Absolutely. Actually, since Kabila's refusal to leave office, it's gone from approximately 70 armed groups all the way to about 120. If you want a good source, there's the Kivu security tracker, an organization that is monitoring the security situation in the Kivus. I agree with

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Okay.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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 problem

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I could go on and on.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  If you put together this idea that countries in the region are not hallmarks of democracy and good governance—accepting that Rwanda is a slightly different space—you have an opportunity to gain economically out of the chaos. That's what happened in the early 2000s with Uganda and

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Because the elections are a national exercise, the government and the international community have to be involved in the process to make sure that people trust it. There's very little trust between Kinshasa and the regions or among political elites. Surveys show that people are v

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  In an ideal world, yes. A lot of these resources are not only used by government or people in power but also the informal mining, for instance, is both used by ordinary people to feed their families but it's also used by armed groups who gain control over mining sites to gain res

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Absolutely. I wouldn't have the know-how to tell you exactly which regions are difficult and which ones aren't. I remember in 2017, at the height of the violence in Kasai region, people couldn't get in to get water and food to the displaced people because the situation was so ten

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes, with some groups, absolutely.