The desperate plight of civilians caught between warring militias in the Democratic Republic of Congo was underscored last week by three Congolese church leaders who visited Baltimore to deliver an urgent appeal for help. The two bishops, accompanied by a nun, spoke at the Catholic Relief Services headquarters in downtown Baltimore, where they related the havoc wrought by militia groups and bandits who have raped and massacred thousands of innocent civilians and driven a quarter-million refuges from their homes since fighting flared up again in August. Over the last decade, more than 5 million people have been killed in Congo's civil war. No other conflict since World War II has been as deadly.
The Congolese church leaders want the United Nations to end the fighting, though they're under no illusion that the 17,000 U.N. peacekeepers stationed there are up to the task. This year, peacekeepers in Congo were implicated in atrocities rivaling those of the warring factions. In eastern Congo, where the fighting has been most intense, the poorly trained U.N. troops refused to fight either the Tutsi rebels backed by neighboring Rwanda or the Hutu militias responsible for the Rwandan genocide who fled into Congo after their defeat in 1994.
