One of the testiest issues that ever crosses the desks of United Nations officials is the question of why they don’t step up to the plate to enforce peace. Not just to hector everyone about it, or to plead for it, or to pray for it - but to actually enforce it.

Well, of course, they can’t because they don’t have an armed forces division. And that has naturally led to a lot of debate about why they don’t. Sure, they do have some history of putting troops volunteered by member nations in between fighting parties to act as a buffer – Canada used to do a lot of that – but not to actually force the two (or more) factions to drop their weapons and play nice.

But it should be pretty obvious to even the most casual observer that the countries really running the UN (that is, the five permanent Security Council members) don’t want it. It isn’t that they are necessarily opposed to peace (although that’s a legitimate question for at least one of them), but they readily recognize that trying to enforce civility in some of the world’s hotspots will usually be against the interests of at least one permanent member, possibly more. And they recognize that a UN armed force might be needed in some place where there are competing local interests who are equally evil, or equally at fault, so that picking a side to support might be impossible.

One of the worst examples of the UN failing to bring about peace was Rwanda in 1994. Despite the desperate pleas of UN officials already on site in the country, they were ordered by New York to let 800,000 people die in tribal warfare. It’s debatable how much the few thousand UN troops could have done to stop such a mindless slaughter, largely conducted with farming implements (machetes), but they would have tried – except they were told to stand down, and that no additional forces were coming.

So it came as a bit of a surprise earlier this year when the famous blue hats put together a fighting force and decided to give it a try in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In true UN fashion, they’ve chosen just about the worst hellhole on earth to give this a whirl so you’ve gotta ask, ‘Why here?’ and ‘Why now?’

Just to refresh your minds, DRC has been in turmoil since 1960. Well, really since Europeans first arrived in the Congo basin, but let’s keep it to our lifetimes. Gaining independence from Belgium in 1960 did little to improve the lives of those living in what was known for a while as Zaire. A brief civil war, followed by a transitional government, gave way in 1965 to Joseph Mobuto’s United States-backed leadership and he ruled for the next 32 years in a display of corruption it would be hard to overstate. His departure in 1997 lead to another US-backed leader, Laurent Kabila — a curious choice for the Americans given his Marxist roots — who quickly fell out of favour with the US and, in trying to go it alone, found himself in the midst of a civil war in 1998. It raged for almost five years and eventually earned the dubious distinction of being the deadliest conflict since World War II.

The war raged for almost five years and only reached what appeared to be a solid truce in April 2003, largely because of the persistence of President Joseph Kabila, adopted son of Laurent, who had been assassinated in 2001. This war has cost an uncertain number of deaths and has left DRC on the brink of total collapse. The best estimates for fatalities is somewhere between 3.3 and 5 million people.

A transitional government, which formally took office July 17, 2003, was formed out of the official DRC government and several of the major rebel forces. Nationwide free elections returned Kabila in 2005, and again since, but there has been nothing approaching peace in the country.

For as long as the civil war and its aftershocks have lasted, there have been calls for UN intervention – or anyone’s intervention – which have consistently fallen on deaf ears. Yet in August, while the world was watching the US saber rattling at Syria, the UN quietly shipped 3,000 peacemakers into DRC. There were already about 19,000 UN troops stationed in DRC, but their mandate was strictly passive. Their only real jobs were to try to keep themselves alive and, if at all possible, protect the local citizens.

So these new troops are peacemakers with a difference – they’re peace enforcers. These troops are the first-ever UN peacekeeping force with an offensive combat mandate, and they are tasked with ‘neutralizing’ and disarming rebel forces in one of the world's most intractable conflicts.

I guess the good news is that they’ve had some initial success in dislodging one of the most troublesome rebel groups (known as M23 for 23 mars (or March 23rd in English)). But M23 is only one of several rebel groups, some based in nearby Rwanda, and the UN has decided that only the government of DRC has sufficient legitimacy to deserve its support. They’re probably right, but this area is so confused that they could just as easily be wrong.

But again the questions: Why here, and why now.

I’m not sure we’re going to see an easy answer to the second question, but the first is pretty obvious: DRC is a nation endowed with vast potential wealth (gold, diamonds, rubber, copper, cobalt, oil, timber, and coltan along with a wide variety of agricultural produce). It is often said to be the most resource-rich piece of real estate on the planet. So the desire of outsiders to put an end to the strife is almost certainly coloured by intent to get their hands on all those riches.

This mess is clearly not over, but it’s gratifying to see that after 15 continuous years of fighting, brutal rape, and murder the DRC has finally gotten the attention of the world’s premier ‘peacemaking’ body. It’s hard to understand, however, why it took so long for anyone to notice all the riches that would await whomever could get this mess under control.

To be clear here, I’m not merely suggesting the search for riches might be the only reason behind the UN finally waking up; I’m stating it as an obvious fact.

Paul Richard Harris is an Axis of Logic editor and columnist, based in Canada. He can be reached at paul@axisoflogic.com.

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