U.S. Questions $18.3B Spent on UN Peacekeeping in Democratic Republic of the Congo

"The murder in the Democratic Republic of Congo of two U.N. experts, one of whom was decapitated, has drawn renewed attention to a convoluted conflict that is estimated to have caused more than five million deaths from violence, disease and malnutrition since the late 1990s.

Over the same period, U.N. peacekeeping efforts in the DRC have cost more than $18.3 billion...

The discovery came on the eve of an annual U.N. Security Council vote on extending for another year the peacekeeping mission known as MONUSCO – the biggest and most expensive of the 16 current U.N. peacekeeping missions around the world.

It also came days before the United States assumes the rotating presidency of the council; Ambassador Nikki Haley said Wednesday reforming peacekeeping would be a major priority during her presidency in April.

MONUSCO (the U.N. Organization Stabilization Mission in the D.R. Congo) has cost some $9.62 billion since it was established in 2010, including a $1.23 billion budget for the year ending June 30, 2017. Its predecessor, MONUC, cost $8.73 billion between 1999 and 2010.

In FY 2016, U.S. taxpayers accounted for $440.6 million of the costs of the DRC mission, and the Obama administration last fall requested $440.0 million for FY 2017.

The United States currently pays 28.57 percent of the total U.N. peacekeeping budget, even though U.S. law signed by President Clinton in 1994 set a 25 percent cap on the U.S. contributions...

The Trump administration's proposed FY 2018 budget would reduce the U.S. funding of U.N. peacekeeping to a maximum of 25 percent...

Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday, Haley said the U.S. would take a different approach to the peacekeeping issue during its council presidency.

'We will lay out a comprehensive vision for how peacekeeping missions should be reviewed moving forward,' she said. 'We will go back to first principles and ask hard questions: What was the original intent of the mission? Is the mission achieving its objective? Are we lifting up the people in the region towards independence? What are the mission countries doing to help themselves? Do we have an exit plan? And is there accountability?'...

'We should never just stay somewhere just because we got there,' she said, adding that that was not fair to American taxpayers, to the governments of the countries concerned, or to the peacekeepers deployed there..."