Last week, news came over the wire that all the countries of the Great Lakes region had agreed to send a neutral force to attack the M23 and FDLR rebels. Can it be? Are we entering into a new phase of the Congolese crisis?

Maybe, but we should reserve some healthy skepticism.

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This is a response by Séverine Autesserre to my previous reaction to her Op-Ed in The New York Times.

Jason, thanks for offering me a right of response. You and I have already had this debate at least a dozen times, in public and in private. But, as you have told me, it might be informative for the broader public to hear about it. So here is a brief answer.

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This is a guest post in response to my recent blog titled "So how do we help the Congo?" It is co-authored by Pieter Vanholder, the national director of the Life and Peace Institute in the Congo, along with Deo Buuma, the executive secretary of Action pour la Paix et la Concorde (APC).

Le travail en RD Congo du Life & Peace Institute (LPI) et de ses partenaires, tels qu'Action pour la Paix et la Concorde (APC), a été assez largement commenté à l'occasion de la publication d'un Op-Ed de la politiste Séverine Autesserreparu dans le New York Times et l'International Herald Tribune datés du 22 juin - chronique ensuite discutée par Jason Stearns sur Congo Siasa. Le débat lancé par ces deux prises de parole est important. Nous ...

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[Blogging will be slow this week, as I am teaching in Bujumbura.]

As readers will know, a lot has happened in recent days. M23 launched a major offensive, taking the strategic border town of Bunagana, as well as Rutshuru, the territorial capital. This advance was an embarrassment for the Congolese army, as 600 of their soldiers fled to Uganda and their commander of the military region, General Vainceur Mayala, reportedly sought refuge with the UN. A UN soldier also died due to an M23 mortar round, and the blue helmets engaged their attack helicopter against the mutineers.

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Over the past weeks, a lot of accusations have been thrown around regarding the conflict in the Kivus. Let's take a closer look at some of them:

The M23 rebellion is the result of the international community pressing for Bosco Ntaganda's arrest.

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The UN Group of Experts on the DR Congo submitted the celebrated addendum to its interim report yesterday. The addendum (apparently the correct terminology) is due to be published later today or tomorrow, but, Security Council politics being what they are, leaked copies are already circulating. I have obtained one; here is a summary and a brief analysis.

The report deals exclusively with Rwandan support to armed groups and sanctioned individuals in the eastern Congo, and the findings are extremely damning. The Group finds that Rwanda is providing extensive support not just to the M23 rebellion, but to six other armed groups in the eastern Congo. Some of the support allegedly dates back to last year, although most of Rwanda's early involvement was aimed at assassinating individual FDLR ...

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In her lucid opinion piece published in The New York Times last week, Séverine Autesserre argues that the international community has gotten it terribly wrong in the Congo. Drawing on an argument laid out in her popular 2010 book, The Trouble with the Congo, Autesserre says that this failure stems from our failure to understand the causes of violence. We have, she argues, for too long obsessed about the national and regional causes of the war, and neglected the local dynamics of conflict. She says about diplomats and UN officials:

They neglect to address the other main sources of violence: distinctively local conflicts over land, grassroots power, status and resources, like cattle, charcoal, timber, drugs and fees levied at checkpoints. Most violence in the Congo is not coordinated ...

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After a dramatic build-up, the UN Group of Experts report on the Congo was submitted to the Sanctions Committee of the Security Council yesterday. However, the bit that everyone was waiting for - an annex that addresses allegations of Rwandan involvement in the eastern Congo - has been separated from the report and has not yet been submitted.

Diplomats say that the reasons for the block are in part procedural - the annex was submitted after the bulk of the report, which has to be edited and translated into all UN languages, as the situation on the ground was evolving rapidly. But others suggest that the real reason for the block is that UN member states are worried that these allegations could further sour relations between Congo and Rwanda, and that they are best dealt with behind closed ...

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