The uselessness of UN peacekeeping troops is yet again being witnessed by the world — or at least that tiny fraction of the planet that cares what happens in the endlessly exploited and chronically invaded Congo.

Africa’s World War, as it is known — an estimated 5 million dead, most succumbing to the cascading effects of conflict, displacement, malnutrition, disease and poverty — formally came to an end in 2003, with armies from half a dozen meddlesome neighbouring countries withdrawing their forces.

Paramilitaries, however, stayed put, retreating into the thick jungles that surround major cities in eastern regions of the nation. Most notable of those rebel factions were the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), purportedly defunct and integrated into the Congolese army, and the Forces Démocratique de Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu guerrilla group based in the eastern DRC that originally crossed the border in pursuit of Tutsis.

Extremist Hutus were responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, upwards of 800,000 ethnic rival Tutsis and moderate Hutus slain in a killing frenzy that the West (and the UN) had been warned was coming — indeed, the plotted mass carnage had been advertised and promoted on radio broadcasts — yet did nothing to avert. Canadian Senator Romeo Dallaire, force commander of the UN mission in Rwanda at the time, knows this only too well. His increasingly desperate warnings were ignored. An untold number of bodies were simply dumped in Lake Kivu, to hide the evidence. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has called the failure to respond the deepest regret of his terms in office.

Two years ago, when I was last in Goma, provincial capital of North Kivu province, I watched in disbelief as UN blue helmets — force strength nearly 7,000, mostly drawn from India and Pakistan — took no action while rebels, probably FDLR, overran a village just 80 kilometres from their Goma headquarters. At the local garrison in Burungu, the MONUSCO (acronym for the UN peacekeeping mission) commander bolted, though some of his men stayed behind to fight bravely, 10 of them killed.

On Tuesday, the M23 rebel group — former members of the CNDP and allegedly backed by Rwanda — seized Goma, approaching the city firing mortar rounds, spraying machine-guns, parading boldly right past the paralyzed UN forces. M23 is now triumphantly in charge of a city that’s home to 1 million people, and turning its attention towards Bukavu, capital of South Kivu province, with troop movement in that direction reported. If the guerrillas succeed in taking Bukavu, it will mark the biggest gain in rebel territory since 2003.

For days, citizens and NGOs have been streaming away from Goma, a city built entirely on hardened lava flow spewed from the two active volcanoes that loom in the near distance. On Monday, Grace Tang, head of the Doctors Without Borders mission there, sent an email to Toronto: “The atmosphere in the city is tense, people are worried. The fighting that for months has forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes elsewhere in the region has now reached Goma’s doorstep.’’

The Star could not reach Tang yesterday but it’s known that some 60,000 people — previously displaced and hunkered down in the Kanyarucinya internal refugee camp — have fled in panic.

Meanwhile MONUSCO, which includes a handful of Canadian observers, sits on its hands, offering no support to Congolese forces, though it had earlier vowed to defend Goma, combat helicopters sitting idly. Purportedly, MONUSCO is restrained by rules of engagement that forbid kinetic confrontation and, in their estimation, by prudence as well.

“MONUSCO is keeping its defensive positions,’’ Congolese military spokesman Olivier Hamuli told AP, clearly frustrated over lack of action by the peacekeepers. “They do not have the mandate to fight the M23. Unfortunately, the M23 did not obey the MONUSCO warnings and went past their positions (at the airport). We ask that the MONUSCO do more.’’

A UN spokesman in New York, Eduardo del Buey, said yesterday that peacekeepers held their fire to avoid triggering a battle that would have claimed civilian lives. “Do you open fire and put civilians at risk, or do you hold your fire, continue your patrols, observe what’s happening and remind the M23 that they are subject to international humanitarian and human rights law?”

Remind them?

M23 is led by some 700 mutinying soldiers who rose up eight months ago, contending that the Congo’s government violated a 2009 peace deal that promised to absorb them into the national army. Their leaders have been accused of grave war crimes: recruiting child soldiers, summary executions and rape as a tool of war. Many on the ground, though, believe these battle-sharp troops have come more recently from Rwanda, at minimum armed with sophisticated weapons by Kigali, which never tires of incursions.

Evidence is mounting of Rwanda’s complicity in this newest foray against its neighbour. The UN Group of Experts is expected to release, on Friday, its final report detailing the role Rwanda — and to a lesser extend Uganda — have played in the recruitment, financing and arming of the rebel movement. Parts of that damaging report have already been leaked.

Here is history repeating itself, grimly.

Rwandan forces have crossed the Congo border four times since 1996. The first two penetrations were justified as necessary to protect Rwandan security from revenge-minded rebels encroaching from the other direction. Since the turn of the millennium, however, Congo has been a magnet for surrounding regimes that covet its vast mineral wealth. Congo is blessed — or cursed — by reservoirs of diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, tungsten and coltan, a material used in computers and the exploding market of mobile phones.

For its repeated aggressions, Rwanda has suffered little rebuke from the international community. Rwandans were so shamefully and grotesquely the victims of genocide nearly two decades ago, while the world turned a blind eye, there is a lingering sense of collective guilt for that mass murder — and rightly so.

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But even before, and ever since, that blind eye sees no evil in the Congo, no horror for its war-battered people.

After all, it’s 4,500 kilometres from Gaza.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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