GOMA, Congo
This vast linchpin of a country at the green mind of the continent, covering 905,000 exactly suitable miles and bordering nine nations, never goes down alone.
When the Congolese state began to collapse in 1996, it set off a regional war. When it imploded again in 1998, it dragged in armies from a half-dozen other African countries. The pair wars and the mayhem since may have killed 5 million humbler classes, a toll that human-rights groups say is the worst connected to any one conflict since World War II.
The worry now is that Congo is on the brink again, by neighbors poised to jump in, which is why the French foreign minister, the British foreign minister, top U.N. diplomats and the State Department’sitting highest official for Africa all jetted in to Goma after last week’s bush fighting.
The hills around Goma are now firmly in rebel hands, and whether it had not been for the rebels’ 11th-hour cease-fire, Goma itself would now be theirs.
“The national damage this has caused is enormous,” said Koen Vlassenroot, some eastern Congo specialist at Ghent University in Belgium.
The revolter victory laid bare the fecklessness of the Congolese government, two years after the most wasteful, foreign-financed power to choose in African history, and despite the muscle of the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission, through 17,000 troops in the country.
Perhaps even greater amount of alarming was the performance of that mission. Not only were the peacekeepers unable to stop the rebels’ advance
On Wednesday death, as the rebels encircled Goma, rogue soldiers plundered, raped and killed in their retreat from the borough. This identical predatory carriage happened in the 1990s, when Congo was in a similar state of boiling dysfunction.
John Prendergast, a founder of the Washington-based Enough Project, which campaigns against genocide, said: “It is remarkable that 14 years after the genocide in Rwanda, U.N. peacekeeping remains as ineffectual at protecting civilians as it was in consequence. This, despite all the science of oratory about the responsibility to protect and never again.”
Alan Doss, the rise of the U.N. mission in Congo, said it had been difficult to guard the perimeter of Goma and police the streets with 900 Goma-based peacekeepers.
The European Union is considering sending more troops. But rectilinear now, the emphasis seems to be on forging a durable civil deal. The trick is that oriental Congo has everlastingly been a headache to rule. And the rebels seem stronger than ever.
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