Africa's Other Holocaust.(International Edition; WORLD AFFAIRS)

Byline: Rod Nordland

The story is depressingly familiar. Once again, war pushes an African nation to the verge of catastrophe, calls go out for foreign military intervention, and the proposed solution is unlikely to help. It could even make things worse, broadening the fight and distracting attention from more-promising solutions.

Congo has been at civil war for 12 years, leaving some 5 million dead and this year alone displacing about 1.5 million. In the past month, new battles in North Kivu province between government troops and rebels led by Laurent Nkunda, an ethnic Tutsi, have sent an estimated 250,000 civilians fleeing their homes and threatened relief efforts. This is despite the fact that Congo is already host to the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission in the world. The U.N.'s 17,000 troops lack air support and robust rules of engagement and have proved unable to halt the rebels or rampages by government soldiers.

In recent weeks the U.N. Security Council has authorized 3,000 more troops and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for an additional interim European Union force. Even if the U.N. troops can be found, it will take months to deploy them. An EU force could faster, but many European leaders oppose sending it. Moreover, adding more troops--or promising to--could actually do more harm than good. Those already there haven't proved effective. Even proponents of increased military intervention admit that beefing up MONUC (as the U.N. mission is known) won't solve much. Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch, who has publicly called for more troops, concedes that "there will be no solution to the eastern Congo through the barrel of a gun."

That's especially true if Congo's neighbors get involved. The Southern African Development Community has also offered to send troops. Congo has been down this road before, with disastrous consequences. Between 1998 and 2003, eight other African countries sent their armies into the war zone, undermining the Congolese government and setting up militias, some of which remain active. Now both Angola and Rwanda are rumored to have dispatched military advisers once more. Open participation by these countries this time around could spark a "regional conflagration and possibly genocide," says Knox Chitiyo, head of the Africa program at the Royal United Services Institute, a respected London think tank.

Foreign troops have proved successful in ending certain African crises before (such as Sierra Leone's in 2002). But Congo's problems are more daunting. The country is vast--the capital, Kinshasa, is more than 1,600 kilometers from Goma--and the conflict is extremely complex, involving some 20 militias and ethnic (Hutu vs. Tutsi) hostilities. "You would need a minimum of 100,000 soldiers to have a credible peacekeeping force," says Chitiyo. "Nineteen or twenty thousand just doesn't cut it."

A better approach would recognize the sources of the conflict and address them. "This is a resource war," says Muzong Kodi of Chatham House, another British think tank. ...