Refugees from DR Congo in Uganda
Refugees from North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, at a camp last year near Kisoro, Uganda. Photograph: James Akena/Reuters

African heads of state are due to gather in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, on Sunday to sign a "comprehensive framework agreement" intended to bring peace to the war-ravaged eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo.



Mostly comprising ethnic Tutsi deserters from the Congolese army, the M23 take their name from an earlier failed peace deal, signed on 23 March 2009, that was supposed to integrate them with the army.

The 2009 deal was itself the product of the shaky peace that ended the 1998-2003 second Congo war, also known as the great war of Africa, which involved eight African nations and 25 armed groups, and which killed an estimated 5.4 million people.


Between January and September last year, agencies say, 767,000 people fled their homes in the Kivus, while an additional 60,000 spilled over into Rwanda and Uganda. In all, 2.7 million people were internally displaced, up by a million on 2011.

To its abiding shame, the nearly 20,000-strong UN stabilisation mission in Congo (Monusco), the largest in the  world, failed to prevent this human  tragedy.



Jason Stearns, a noted Congo expert, said a key, but so far unanswered, question was how the agreement would "make sure neighbouring countries cease meddling in Congo".


In a report to the security council this month, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, complained of "external assistance, direct and indirect" given to M23. But far from preventing future interventions, the UN-backed framework provides for a new 2,000-strong or "enforcement" brigade, manned by troops from Tanzania and other neighbours, that will undertake the combat role Monusco mostly eschews.

Stearns said: "The other critical implement is a national oversight mechanism for institutional reforms in the Congo. There is a realisation that the decrepit army and police, weak local administration, and dysfunctional justice sector have aided in entrenching the conflict in the Kivus." But the framework's vague proposals have been watered down to the point where Joseph Kabila's DRC government "would be overseeing itself, an arrangement that doesn't exactly promise accountability and transparency".



