Lessons UNlearned: How the UN and Member States Must do More to End Resource-fuelled Conflict
Publisher: Global Witness
Date: 2010
Topics: Assessment, Conflict Causes, Renewable Resources
Countries: Colombia, Congo (DRC), Indonesia, Uganda
The will and the capacity of the United Nations (UN) and Member States to deal with natural resource-fuelled conflicts is weak. In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), civilians die on a daily basis because of a war that is stoked by the international trade in minerals. The conflict’s economic dimension and the identity of those fuelling it have been known for many years; yet increased awareness of the problem has not triggered effective action. When the UN Security Council passes resolutions concerning DRC – on targeted sanctions for example – Council members and other governments decline to implement them. Global Witness believes that these failings on the DRC reflect the lack of a coherent and committed international approach to tackling natural resource-fuelled conflicts. For two decades, the UN, other intergovernmental bodies and individual governments have been forced to respond to these kinds of self-financing wars in countries such as Angola, Cambodia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire. Different policies have been tried, with varying degrees of success, but no serious attempt has been made to distil from these experiences a common understanding of the problem and a strategy for dealing with it.