Should the United Nations Wage War to Keep Peace?

The French director brought the meeting to an end. The women clapped as Power and the others got up to leave. Outside, I turned away from the window through which I’d been watching this scene to find a crowd of refugees gathered on a hillock behind me.

Congo has been at war or something like it for a generation. It’s estimated that since 1997, when Mobutu left power, between four and six million Congolese have died in fighting or as a result of the upheaval of fighting, through disease, hunger, and other causes. If accurate, those numbers make its conflict the deadliest since World War II. The worst violence has afflicted the east, and in particular, recently, North Kivu and its sister province, South Kivu, where spillover from the civil war and genocide in Rwanda, rivalries over land and resources, ethnic clashes, and the neglect of President Joseph Kabila