THE CONGO TEST.(effectiveness of the United Nations)

"There is but one solution--to restore the unity of the international community,"Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, announced last week on French radio just hours before the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1483, rescinding economic sanctions against Iraq. Given France's steadfast opposition to the invasion of Iraq, de Villepin insisted that the U.N. vote should not be understood as bestowing retroactive legitimacy on the American-led war. But, by granting the Anglo-American occupying forces a virtually unfettered dispensation over Iraq--and its oil wells--for the foreseeable future, that is exactly what the resolution does. For the Bush Administration, then, the resolution was a diplomatic triumph, and de Villepin was at pains to argue that his government's accession to it was not, by the same token, an admission of defeat. "What's really at stake here is to see to it that the U.N. is restored,"he said. To be sure, he added, "There are two visions of the world”--the multilateralist, U.N.-centered vision of collective security under international law touted by France, and the unilateralist, imperial vision represented by the United States--"but we need to work together."So one hand washes the other, and, de Villepin said, "The U.N. is back.”

Not so fast, Monsieur. Certainly the cessation of hostilities at the Security Council and the patching up of the ruptured transatlantic alliance merits a brief international sigh of relief. But the measure of the U.N.'s vitality will not be taken in Iraq. The true test lies in those vexed areas of the world that hold no compelling strategic or economic interest for the United States or for any of the other veto-wielding members of the Security Council. Most immediately, the U.N. is facing that test in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where seven hundred poorly armed U.N. peacekeepers in the northeastern Ituri region have watched helplessly over the past few weeks as massacres by tribal militias have filled graves with fresh corpses at about the same clip that the dead of Saddam Hussein's reign of terror have been exhumed in Iraq.

Accounts of the horror in Ituri have the quality of Hieronymus Bosch's grotesque tableaux of apocalypse: torched villages; macheted babies in the streets; stoned child warriors indulging in cannibalism and draping themselves with the entrails of their victims; peacekeepers--mostly Uruguayans--using their guns only to drive off waves of frantic civilians seeking refuge in their already overflowing compound; a quarter of a million people in frenzied flight from their homes. For nearly five years, such suffering has plagued much of the eastern Congo along the tangled battle lines of warring political and tribal factions, stirred up and spurred on by the occupying armies of neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. Hundreds of thousands of Congolese have been killed in the fighting, and many more have died as a consequence of the displacement, disease, and hunger that attend it. By any measure, Congo is one of the most hellish places on earth, and of all the hells within that hell Ituri province has come to be known as the most infernal.

The trouble in Ituri was fostered during five years of occupation by the Ugandan Army, which sought to assert control over the mineral-rich region by recklessly arming proxy militias of rival tribal groups. When massacres began in and around the provincial capital of Bunia, in the summer of 1999, Uganda restored a semblance of order. As this pattern repeated itself, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, and Human Rights Watch described the Ugandans as arsonists masquerading as firemen. Last December, when Congo's latest peace deal set a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces, everyone in Ituri predicted a bloodbath. Toward the end of April, the U.N. sent in the Uruguayans, but without the capacity to protect civilians, or even themselves. (Uganda's President, Yoweri Museveni, mocked the peacekeepers as "dangerous tourists.”) The pullout came on May 6th, and, sure enough, the killing ...