Humanitarian agencies working in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo have been overwhelmed following a massive displacement triggered by fighting between the Congolese army (FARDC) and rebel movement M23 in North Kivu.

“The situation is truly precarious. There is no medicine, no food. Children could die. People are spending the night outside, each one beside their baggage, and it is very cold,” says Roger Manegabe, head of a family who managed to reach Bukavu from North Kivu.

“We’re missing school. We’re hungry, there’s no drinking water, there’s no electricity. I’m 16 years old and war is all I’ve known from the time I was born. What will become of us?” said Fiston, Manegabe’s son.

Since the start of the year, conflict in the two Kivu provinces — militias in South Kivu have also clashed — has exacerbated an already dire humanitarian situation and uprooted nearly 650,000 people, according to U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) spokesperson Adrian Edwards.

Manegaba’s family is among some 250,000 civilians newly displaced since April in North Kivu, and a further 339,000 in South Kivu. According to Edwards, during this period more than 40,000 people also fled to Uganda and 15,000 others to Rwanda. And since August, Burundi has received nearly 1,000 new Congolese refugees.

Rebel fighters captured Goma, the province’s largest city, on Nov. 20, and Sake the following day, before their advance stalled.

M23 was launched on Mar. 12 with a mutiny of Congolese army officers and soldiers. It is now putting forward a broad set of demands covering politics, social issues, human rights and governance. The movement is demanding direct talks with Congolese President Joseph Kabila as a precondition for retreating from Goma.

The group’s political spokesperson, Jean-Marie Runiga Lugerero, held a preliminary meeting on Sunday Nov. 25 with Kabila in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, following a regional summit on the crisis in eastern DRC.

More than 30,000 people who fled the Kanyaruchinya sector in North Kivu have found refuge at a camp in Mugunga, swelling the total numbers there to 40,000. They told the UNHCR representative in the province, Lazard-Etienne Kouassi, who visited the camp on Nov. 22, that they had not received food since their arrival and that they were eager to go back to their villages.

They asked UNHCR to make vehicles available to help the most vulnerable displaced people, such as children and the elderly, in order to quickly return home. Kouassi promised to respond to the request in line with the agency’s capabilities.

Conditions are similarly precarious at Sake, some 27 kilometres south of Goma. Here, some displaced persons are living in classrooms or churches, while others are forced to sleep in the open. Due to a lack of humanitarian assistance, they have had to beg or work for residents of the town in order to survive.

World Vision estimates that there are 200,000 children at risk from Goma alone. According to the international charity’s reports from partners on the ground, many children have been separated from their parents in the confusion surrounding the fall of the town that began as M23 approached Goma on Nov. 12.

Many of these children are now being exploited by families in Goma, according to Junior Alimasi, head of cooperation at the children’s parliament of North Kivu. “They have gone to work for these families in exchange for food and shelter. In November, we’ve already recorded complaints of abuse from two dozen children,” he told IPS.

“We have opened the doors to several thousand refugees, mostly women and children,” Father Piero Gavioli, director of the Don Bosco Centre, which shelters children at risk, told IPS by phone from Goma.

“We’re carrying out a head count, which suggests there are around 2,500 households, with an average of two children per household, which means 6,000 or 7,000 refugees.”

The ad hoc camps for displaced people fell short of what’s needed even before the latest advance by M23, according to a report published in October by the European Union’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in South Kivu.

OCHA said the province has been affected by a deteriorating security situation which threatens thousands of civilians and has caused the reduction or even suspension of humanitarian efforts in the region.

“The creation of ad hoc camps spreads cholera, measles… the overcrowded camps include many children who have not been vaccinated and are now exposed to brutal epidemics,” the report says.

Maxime Nama, information assistant for OCHA in South Kivu said: “Children are recruited against their will, used as porters or even as combatants, and in the case of girls, sexually exploited. The violence and the fighting put them at grave risk of being injured or killed.”

Father Piero said that Western countries were guilty of failing to help the thousands of people in danger. “Today,” he told journalists during a Nov. 22 videoconference, “I will repeat my accusation, even if it goes unheard.”

Plant diseases affecting bananas and cassava are gaining ground in two provinces in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to South Kivu’s provincial minister for agriculture, Gisèle Batembo.

The extent of the damage is visible across the province: the tell-tale withering of leaves is the sign of crops stricken by banana bacterial wilt, while many cassava fields are filled with stunted plants bearing deformed, spotted leaves that indicate the feared cassava mosaic virus.

Declining production has led to increased imports of both of these staple foods from neighbouring Rwanda, as well as a steep increase in prices over the past year, with the cost of a cluster of bananas (anywhere from 30-50 kilos) jumping from two to seven dollars in less than a year.

Three hundred thousand families grow bananas in South Kivu, and more than 900,000 households grow cassava for both their own consumption and to generate income.

Stressing the importance of these crops to food security, agronomist Daniel Rutegeza, who heads the Plant Production Unit at the provincial directorate for agriculture, said total production of bananas in South Kivu in 2009 amounted to 450,000 tonnes, from nearly 100,000 hectares of plantations. Cassava output from the 325,000 hectares under cultivation is estimated at four million tonnes.

To address the growing threat from diseases, smallholders are learning new techniques to reduce the impact, Batembo told participants at an Aug. 6 workshop in Katana, north of South Kivu’s provincial capital, Bukavu. The session was organised with the twin aims of raising awareness of and finding solutions to the rapid spread of diseases affecting the region’s two most important food crops.

At a press conference in June, the governor of South Kivu province, Marcellin Cishambo, confirmed the growing impact of disease on farmers. “Banana wilt has arrived in Kalehe, north of Bukavu, and is spreading rapidly. This illness threatens banana plantations in four of the province’s eight administrative territories,” he said.

“Kalehe Territory is the worst affected, with close to half of the plantations devastated. In Kabare – in its northern part – the incidence rate is around 25 percent, while Idjwi Territory has a rate of between 10 and 25 percent, and Walungu has a rate estimated at between 10 and 20 percent,” Cishambo said.

Batembo first raised the alarm a month earlier, in her May report on the first half of 2012. Both banana wilt and mosaic are believed to have entered the Kivu provinces from neighbouring Uganda, where farmers have been struggling to contain them for several years.

The signs of banana bacterial wilt are withered leaves and premature yellowing of the fruit, according to Professor Jean Walangululu, dean of the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences at the Catholic University of Bukavu.

The province’s cassava crops, the professor told IPS, are being attacked by the East African Cassava Mosaic Virus, whose main vector is a tiny white fly of the genus Bemisia, which is extremely difficult to control. Affected crops produce spotted and deformed leaves, and suffer stunted growth and poor harvests.

Mosaic can also spread along with cuttings of infected plants. Rutegeza said the exchange of plant material between smallholders is one of the major factors in the spread of both cassava virus and banana wilt.

The disease has not spared any part of the province, Cishambo said. He said the disease first appeared in the province in 2000, and strenuous efforts have been made to fight it, particularly by stressing the importance of using healthy cuttings to plant new crops.

But, according to Cishambo, this has not prevented the devastation from expanding steadily, to the point where it poses a serious threat to food security throughout the province. He said that another disease, known as cassava brown streak, has also been detected. But while the authorities are monitoring the presence of this disease – which is even more harmful than mosaic – its spread has not yet reached worrying proportions.

The governor of South Kivu has issued ten key regulations to stem the advance of these diseases, most importantly a ban on the circulation or introduction of banana or cassava cuttings into South Kivu from neighbouring Rwanda or Uganda, or from North Kivu, which is also struggling with the same problems.

Trade and transport of such plant material is only permitted when it’s accompanied by a phytosanitary certificate issued by the Inspector of Agriculture indicating it has been cleared as safe and healthy by the National Seed Certification Service (SENASEM).

The technicians at SENASEM recommend using fire or bleach to disinfect farm implements after each diseased cassava tuber is dug out of the soil. They also advise greater efforts to prevent stray animals from wandering around in banana plantations, and to make sure that any sale or exchange of cassava cuttings is done with the express authorisation of SENASEM and the National Institute for Agricultural Research.

FAO is experimenting with a new approach to containing banana wilt which has already been applied in Uganda. According to Rutegeza, this treatment requires producers to remove male buds from the banana plants every two days. In April, some 150 banana producers at Bweremana, in North Kivu’s Masisi Territory, were trained in this approach, he said.

Mike Robson, a specialist in plant diseases with FAO who has facilitated technical exchanges between Uganda and DRC, said that the first results from this trial are expected in October 2012, before their eventual introduction in South Kivu.

Nzanzu Kasuvita, provincial minister for agriculture in North Kivu, recognised that there is still work to do, particularly in educating all actors and partners in the struggle for food security.

The war between the DRC’s regular army and the mutinous soldiers belonging to Mouvement du 23 Mars (M23), which has affected some parts of North Kivu since April, risks hindering the resolution of the problem of plant diseases which could threaten food security, he said.

Just two years ago, rice farmers on the Ruzizi plain in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo were content to harvest 2.5 tonnes of rice per hectare. The adoption of new techniques has seen their output rise to between six and eight tonnes, with smallholder farmers also increasing their local market share.

Behind the startling transformation here, 100 kilometres south of Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu province, is the CATALIST programme of IFDC (the International Fertiliser Development Centre), a Dutch NGO which began training producers on protecting soil quality in 2007.

CATALIST – Catalyse Accelerated Agricultural Intensification for Social and Environmental Stability – promotes a set of techniques known as Integrated Soil Fertility Management [LINK: http://ifdc-catalist.org/drcongo.php]. ISFM is a sustainable solution for food security and higher incomes, according to Bernard Assumani, the provincial inspector for agriculture. Previously, he said, farmers were typically harvesting 2.5 tonnes of rice from a one hectare plot; with the adoption of ISFM, the same area can yield 7.5 tonnes.

Smallholder farmers who spoke to IPS confirmed the programme’s benefits. “The yield varies between six and eight tonnes per hectare,” said Louise Zawadi, a member of the Association of Women for Rural Development (AFEDER). “With rice selling for 80 cents U.S. per kilo, rice becomes profitable.”

Bigger harvests, growing market share

IFDC has spent two years working alongside eight local associations and two universities in Bukavu to roll out its programme to boost rice production on the Ruzizi plain.

Key to the ISFM approach is the use of mineral fertilisers, imported into eastern DRC from Tanzania. Two measures were introduced in 2010 to make the fertiliser more accessible: the government agreed to waive import duties while IFDC subsidised the cost of distribution. This lowered the cost of fertiliser from $1.80/kg to a dollar per kilo.

The subsidy has been discontinued, but it appears to have achieved its aims, as imported fertiliser is now more readily available in the region at a price that has settled at $1.25/kilo. Herman Mutabataba, who coordinates an association of distributors of staple foods and seeds, notes fertiliser is still more expensive on the Ruzizi plain than across the border in neighbouring Tanzania and Rwanda, where there is greater government support for farmers.

Some producers have set up associations to pool their efforts. One such smallholder cooperative, 315 members strong, harvested 86 tonnes of rice – worth 17,200 dollars – at Luberizi during the first growing season of 2011, according to coop member Mukeba wa Rusatiza. In addition to a share of these profits, producers also gained access to high quality seed varieties.

Locally-produced rice is gaining ground in a market previously dominated by rice from Tanzania and Pakistan. Large quantities of rice are being brought to market in and around Bukavu and Uvira, the province’s two biggest cities. Other farmers are now supplying the region’s only brewery.

The Bralima brewery, owned by international beverage giant Heineken, is an important partner in promoting increased rice production. In 2010, its Bukavu facility imported more than 60 percent of the 2,800 tonnes of rice it used for brewing beer. But Bralima committed to use only local rice, and within a year had replaced its imports with locally-grown rice – including a contract for 350 tonnes a year agreed directly with a smallholder farmers’ organisation.

Access to land

The Regional Council of Non-Governmental Organisations (CRONGD) has taken a leading role in the project. Delphin Zozo heads CRONGD’s involvement, and he notes that when the project started, more than half of the producers taking part were cultivating rice on small plots, often leased from their owners for a growing season.

Access to land is a continuing challenge for smallholders. AFEDER member Espérance Matumaini, from Luvungi, a village on the Ruzizi plain, complained that leasing land cost far too much.

“It costs 200 U.S. dollars to lease a hectare. As far as buying it outright, that depends on the quality of the site: that will set you back between 400 to 600 dollars,” she told IPS.

Jocelyn Matabaro, a specialist in land and natural resource issues and an independent consultant for IFDC, says that the CATALIST programme has made visible changes to land use. But, she told IPS, while waiting for an overhaul of DRC’s land rights system, temporary measures should be implemented at the local level to improve relations between farmers who rent land and big land owners.

Many smallholders have already invested profits from bumper harvests in purchasing farmland. Zozo said that out of a total of 15,000 producers on the plain, 12,500 have adopted IFDC’s methods. And more than half of those now practicing ISFM have bought their fields thanks to the encouraging returns. The typical size of plots has also increased, with many farmers expanding the size of their operations to plots of up to five hectares.

Smallholders have also learned how to better break down their production costs. Dieudonné Shukuru, one of the 350 members of a producers’ association – Organisation of Producers for Intensifying Agriculture and Development – in Luvungi, said the cost per kilo of rice had fallen from 45 to 20 cents.

According to CRONGD’s agronomist, Galilée Ibochwa, there are generally two harvests per year, but he stressed the problems that access to water poses in some locations. “Many dams are aging or have not been well maintained. At these sites, we have just one growing season,” he told IPS.

While ISFM has brought concrete benefits to the Ruzizi plain, farmers say there are still other obstacles to overcome: the lack of sophisticated threshers to process rice, as well as access to subsidised fertiliser and other support from the government, which allocated a meagre 0.6 percent of the national budget to agriculture in 2012.

Ranked fifth in the world in terms of animal and plant diversity, the Democratic Republic of Congo is considered to be a treasure chest of biodiversity and a vital regulator of global warming.

DRC is the African country with the greatest variety of mammals and birds, and its plant life ranks third on the continent. Credit: Chrissy Olson/CC by 2.0

DRC is the African country with the greatest variety of mammals and birds, and its plant life ranks third on the continent.

Analysts regard DRC as one of the most important countries for the future of the planet and in terms of safeguarding the environment. But the country needs a strong legal and institutional framework to ensure sustainable solutions for the conservation of these immense but threatened natural resources.

DRC is ranked dead last among the 187 countries on the Human Development Index. The 2011 HDI report, titled “Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All”, provides many reasons for the country’s low score: weaknesses in governance; recurring armed conflicts, particularly in the east; inadequate environmental services; and a lack of public investment.

The Congo and Nile river basins – which both have their headwaters in the Kivu region, in eastern DRC – need urgent attention if aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems are to be stabilised.

The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people by successive wars has placed a strain on forests and rivers, as the local population seeks refuge and a means of survival. Armed groups have directly contributed to environmental damage through poaching and unregulated mining and logging.

However, it is possible to reverse this tendency, according to the former Congolese environment minister, José Endundo, who says that DRC’s natural resource policy has come a long way.

Addressing a steering committee developing national policies for conservation, forest management and biodiversity in Kinshasa in March, Endundo said the country put a new forest code in place in August 2002, which incorporated modern principles for management of natural resources and international conventions on the environment.

Until 1982, when the government tabled a first draft to reform forest legislation, the sector was regulated by a colonial-era law of 1949 whose application was proving difficult in light of political, economic, social and cultural changes in the country.

The 2002 forest code is considered an ambitious one by some Congolese experts, who caution that it has not been followed up by implementation on the ground.

But Endundo insists the country has come a long way. 

According to the director of research and planning at the Environment Ministry, José Ilanga, many major reforms have been put into practice. For example, nearly 3,000 forestry agents were retired to make way for the recruitment of around 1,000 new, better qualified officials, increasing the number of university-trained officers capable of responding to the DRC’s modern environmental challenges by 10 percent.

New draft legislation has been tabled in parliament, covering management and protection of the environment, conservation of nature, and tourism. A new Water Act for the country is also expected soon.

On the ground, important projects have been successfully implemented by the ministry, including the DRC Satellite Monitoring of Forest Cover Programme, with support from Japan.

In a phone interview, Marc Kabunda, director of parks for ICCN (the Congolese Institute for Conservation of Nature), said several new conservation areas have been created.

According to Kabunda, the Protected Areas Rehabilitation Project was launched in 2005, covering 16 reserves, including five pilot zones: Salonga, Virunga, Garamba, Upemba and Maiko. It is jointly financed by the Global Environment Facility and the United Nations Development Programme.

In addition, planners, political decision-makers and other actors have been made aware of the importance of taking into account questions of climate change in policy and programmes for development.

Ilanga said the 125-million-hectare Congo Basin covers half of the country’s area, representing 47 percent of the continent’s tropical forest – six percent of the global total. The basin extends beyond DRC’s borders into Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon, Gabon, the Central African Republic and Angola.

But the environment in DRC remains seriously threatened by the expected growth in mining and oil exploitation in the years to come. The east of DRC, particularly the Kivu region, is blessed with an abundance of water and lakes, including the rich fisheries of Lake Tanganyika. The region also possesses a wealth of petrol, methane gas, coltan, gold and diamonds.

But the region has special needs for environmental protection due to the recurring armed conflicts. The wars have provided cover for unregulated exploitation by armed groups of valuable minerals and many types of timber.

The country is already feeling the effects of environmental destruction: the degradation of forests and erosion of the soil, aggravated by climate changes in the Congo basin, with strong heat waves and irregularities in the length of the rainy and dry seasons.

Patrick Nyamatomwa, an environmental activist in South Kivu, says that for the moment, the management of natural resources in DRC falls far short of meeting international standards for sustainable management of forests. He says forestry operators are only interested in financial gain, at the cost of ecological sustainability and taking into account the needs of forest communities.

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

Eleven soldiers found culpable in the rape of more than 50 women in the Congolese town of Fizi Centre in January, have begun serving lengthy sentences in the provincial capital, Bukavu. Their speedy trial and sentencing by a mobile court is a welcome sign of a new commitment to ending impunity for sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Poster in Goma, eastern DRC, warning of the penalties for rape. Credit: Roberto de Vido/IRIN

On the night of Jan. 1-2, a group of soldiers carried out a raid against the town of Fizi, 240 kilometres southwest of Bukavu, in retaliation for the killing of a soldier earlier. More than 50 women were raped, hundreds of people were injured.

But where tens of thousands of serious crimes are routinely left unaddressed in a country whose justice system has long ago been overwhelmed by years of civil war, the perpetrators were swiftly apprehended and investigations and a trial were concluded within two months.

This is thanks to a mobile gender justice court, created through the joint efforts of the Rule of Law Initiative of the American Bar Association and the Open Society’s Justice Initiative. According to Dr Kelly Askin, senior legal officer for International Justice in the Open Society Justice Initiative, the court handled 186 cases in 2010 – 115 of them dealing with rape – in remote areas of South Kivu where formal justice has been all but non-existent.

The convicted men will serve their sentences in the central prison in Bukavu, built during the colonial era. “Constructed to hold 300 inmates, this penal institution today houses more than 1,100,” says Dercy Muley, the executive secretary of the Network of Human Rights Association of South Kivu. The provincial justice minister, Sadock Biganza, told IPS that 40 percent of those inmates are soldiers.

The governor of South Kivu province, Marcellin Cishambo, was present for the sentencing. Interviewed by IPS, the governor called for a return to objective criteria for recruitment into the army, deploring the fact that the DRC had privileged the integration of militiamen from the former armed groups into the national army in the name of peace.

Cishambo confirmed the will of his administration to put an end to impunity and rape. “”It’s not the first time that the Congolese government has organised a trial to judge the authors of sexual violence,” he said. In October 2010, a military court sentenced 13 members of the Congolese army, the FARDC, in the Walungu area.

Muley congratulated the court for the speed with which it reached a verdict in Fizi. “We are now waiting for a repeat performance with the trials regarding the assassination of human rights defenders and journalists in Bukavu.”

Lieutenant Colonl Vianney Kazarama, army spokesperson for Operation Amani Leo (the military campaign against rebel groups with which the convicted soldiers were serving) in South Kivu, also welcomed the verdict. “This is an example that will spread. A policy of zero tolerance will be applied to all perpetrators.”   Writing in the International Justice Tribune, Open Society’s Askin said the trial demonstrates that cooperation between local government and justice systems, the U.N., NGOs and donors, prosecution of such crimes is possible even in a region racked by insecurity.

“With the ICC going after the highest level accused often out of reach of domestic jurisdictions – and the local courts, including mobile courts, going after lower level suspects – accountability can become the norm, and impunity the exception.” says Askin.

Rights defenders in the Democratic Republic of Congo are encouraged by the publication of a report detailing grave violations of human rights in the DRC. The report, covering more than 600 incidents in the ten years between March 1993 and June 2003, has drawn criticism from several governments in the region.

“Very few Congolese and foreign civilians living on the territory of the DRC managed to escape the violence, and were victims of murder, mutilation, rape, forced displacement, pillage, destruction of property or economic and social rights violations,” underlines the report.

“Aside from its historical contribution to documenting these serious violations and fact-finding during this period, the ultimate purpose of this inventory is to provide the Congolese authorities with the elements they need to help them decide on the best approach to adopt to achieve justice for the many victims and fight widespread impunity for these crimes.”

Charles-M. Mushizi, a Congolese legal expert who worked on the mapping exercise led by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, says its publication coincides with preparations for the DRC’s general elections in 2011, and the response from the Congolese authorities will be a measure of their future commitment to and engagement with human rights.

“This assumes that the Congolese authorities will accept [the need to] strengthen a national justice system that continues to bend to the will of parliament and the executive and which does not have the material resources to function properly and respond to the demands for justice by victims [of such crimes].”

Emmanuel Luzolo Bambi, the Congolese Minister for Justice and Human Rights, said, “the Congolese government will do everything possible to bring those responsible before the courts and to obtain compensation for the victims.”

Among those accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide in the report are Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, three countries whose armed forces were involved in the different wars that racked the DRC between 1995 and 2003.

Uganda rejected the report in an official communiqué released on Sep. 30, saying its findings are based simply on the statements by NGOs and that Kampala should have been consulted before publication.

Rwanda and Burundi have also rejected the report. Statements by their respective foreign affairs ministries said the United Nations was risking gains of integration and reconciliation in the heart of the Great Lakes region.

Several Rwandan students who cross the border each day to attend university in the Congolese city of Bukavu, unanimously expressed the view that the report was a conspiracy against their country.

Student Dusabu Muremi made no effort to hide his anger from IPS. “MONUSCO and the U.N. have failed DRC and the world. They should leave us alone to build our country instead of distracting us.”

The Rwandan government, which had threatened to withdraw its troops serving in U.N. peacekeeping missions in Sudan if the report was published, characterised the document as dangerous. According to the country’s foreign affairs minister, Louise Mushikiwabo told the press, the report is “a moral and intellectual failure, and an insult to history.”

Rwanda, which suffered a genocide in 1994, refuses to accept that its army could be accused of having committed acts of genocide in eastern DRC just a few years later. The report’s methodology, with human rights officers drawing on meetings with more than 1,200 witnesses from across the country, and excluding incidents that could not be corroborated by at least two independent sources, cannot be easily dismissed.

Alan Stam, a political science professor at the University of Michigan in the United States, who has done extensive research on the Rwanda’s civil war violence and its aftermath in the Great Lakes region, believes the report will change how the government of Paul Kagame is perceived.

“This is the largest, most systematic effort to catalogue the abuses that have taken place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and to link them back to people [connected to] the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front].”

The events documented by the Mapping Project are well known he says, but the report presents them in a systematic way that INDICTS the perpetrators.

Stam says that President Kagame has been praised internationally for his role in ending the 1994 genocide and stabilising Rwanda since the RPF took control in 1994; and for progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. In Stam’s view, Kagame and the RPF won the war rather than ending the genocide.

But human rights groups have accused his administration of suppressing independent media and his political opposition, most recently in elections held in August.

“History may look back at this as the tipping point in the international community’s perception of the Kagame government.”

Martin Nesirky, a spokesperson for U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, said the report is a preliminary exercise to help break the cycle of impunity.

“It’s for the DRC to take a look at those options. The U.N. and this report is simply trying to help with a process that obviously has not succeeded so far… The whole point is to help them break this cycle.”

*Additional reporting by Aprille Muscara at the United Nations.