Examining the Role of Rwanda in the DRC Insurgency House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights

Testimony: Jason K. Stearns, Director, Usalama Project, Rift Valley Institute

Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Bass, and Members of the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights: Thank you for the invitation to testify.

I have been working on the eastern Congo for the past eleven years. In 2008, I was the coordinator of the United Nations Group of Experts on the Congo, and I have also worked on the country for the United Nations peacekeeping mission, as a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, and as journalist and writer.

I currently work for the Rift Valley Institute (RVI), a non-profit research organization working in Eastern and Central Africa. I am the director of the RVI's Usalama Project, whose team of researchers is in the middle of a fifteen-month investigation of armed groups in the eastern Congo as part of an effort to promote solutions to ongoing violence there.