With its stated mission end date of mid-December looming ever larger, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (SAMIDRC) is working with United Nations (UN) specialists to “train the trainers”.
A UN resolution approved assistance from MONUSCO to the regional bloc’s three-nation mission which started deploying on 15 December last year. The assistance includes medevac, information sharing and technical assistance as well as use of MONUSCO logistic assets.
The additional “train the trainers” assistance was made public this week in New York by Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. He said the two-week session would see “a comprehensive range of topics vital to peacekeeping” covered. They include human rights and international humanitarian law, protection of civilians (POC), human rights due diligence policy, child protection and conflict related sexual violence.
The two-week programme is linked to UNSC resolution 2746 mandating the 25-year-old DRC mission to “strengthen their SADC counterparts” in various ways.
The SADC mission to the eastern DRC has, unlike its earlier sister mission to Mozambique, been low profile on operational successes against rebel groups including the M23. Early in the deployment, it took fatalities from mortar attacks and at one stage an SADC statement had it there would be reprisals against the M23 for attacks on an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp. There was no follow-up statement from either the regional bloc or its mission command based in Goma.
Questions on the South African government funding of its contribution to SAMIDRC were effectively responded to by Defence and Military Veterans Minister Angie Motshekga when replying to a Parliamentary question and Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana in last week’s medium term budget policy statement (MTBPS).
Motshekga told uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) National Assembly (NA) public representative Edward Ntshingila the SANDF deployment to the SADC mission in DRC was “funded”. A more specific response came from Godongwana in hid MTBPS with him pointing out “an additional R2.1 billion” was approved to cover expenses of the South African component of the three-nation SADC DRC mission.
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