MONUSCO

The Security Council's engagement with the DRC runs through MONUSCO, one of the UN's largest and longest-running peacekeeping operations, in place under one name or another since 1999 and, since 2010, mandated toward an eventual, benchmark-driven drawdown that Kenya's own statements track without it ever quite concluding.

Kenya's statements across this file, delivered first through the A3+1 coalition with Niger, Tunisia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and later, as the political map shifted, through the A3 with Gabon and Ghana, return to a consistent set of concerns: the humanitarian toll of displacement in the millions, the DRC's own natural-resource wealth as simultaneously a development opportunity and a driver of the conflict that has denied the country that development, and MONUSCO's own transition toward eventually handing responsibility to the Congolese state.

Two events reframe the file partway through Kenya's term. In May 2021, Mount Nyiragongo's eruption near Goma added a natural disaster on top of an active conflict zone, prompting an ad hoc Council briefing that Kenya, with France, specifically requested.

Far more consequentially, in March 2022 the DRC formally joined the East African Community, chaired at the time by Kenya's own President Uhuru Kenyatta, an accession that put a Kenyan head of state at the center of the region's principal new political initiative, the Nairobi peace process, and a parallel regional force, for the remainder of Kenya's Council term. Kenya's own statements after that point report directly on developments from a process its own president was convening, a degree of direct national stake in a Council file distinct from Kenya's role on any other file this term.

Underneath both the humanitarian and the political-process stories, one security threat recurs with rising urgency across 2022: the M23 rebel group, which the Force Intervention Brigade had driven out of eastern DRC in 2013, re-emerged in 2021 and by October 2022 had seized the town of Bunagana, a resurgence Kenya's statements track from cautious concern to open condemnation of "mass atrocities and grave human rights violations."

A parallel diplomatic track, the Luanda Roadmap, works alongside Kenya's Nairobi process toward the same goal: normalizing the increasingly tense relationship between the DRC and Rwanda, whose rivalry sits underneath the M23 crisis without ever being named as its direct cause in Kenya's own careful, A3-coordinated language.