NAIROBI, Kenya — After a long and tense debate with the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Nations has decided to withdraw 2,000 peacekeepers, far fewer than Congolese officials wanted, according to a draft resolution.
Congo is still haunted by countless armed groups, and a new rebellion recently erupted in the middle of the country. But the Congolese government has been demanding that the United Nations reduce its 20,000-plus peacekeeping force because Congolese officials see the United Nations presence as a violation of their sovereignty.
-From The New York Times 5.27.10
Reading this short note on the state of affairs in The Democratic Republic of Congo (a name that is perilously optimistic in its own right), I can't help but draw on the diverging parallels of human suffering and national rights to an obscure political concept named "sovereignty." This sovereignty should be a privilege allotted countries capable of functioning up to a bare minimum threshold of both form and protection for its citizens; a human index ladder onto which The Democratic Republic of Congo has not even climbed the first rung. This "nation" is failed in all but name; it offers nothing more to its citizens than marauding bands of drunken soldiers raping, looting, and killing with impunity alongside the various ethnic and tribal militias which have terrorized Congo since the fall of Mobutu; a corroded and inept government that acts as a vampire bat, sucking whatever life is to be had out of the free society already plunged into perpetual freefall. And thus, to have this "nation" demand the United Nations, in all of its brilliant incompetence, leave the country to its own will, should be a serious cause for concern for the international community. The peacekeeping force needs to be many thousands more, especially in the perilous east of the sprawling nation, where laws are a distant memory of a long completed colonial legacy and nothing more; the people of the Congo continue to suffer under an inept regime; the United Nations, far from perfect, providing the only means of stability for millions caught in a viscous cycle of violence; and the international community, doing nothing, not even tongue wagging, at the violence that rages. And yet this peculiar concept of sovereignty trumps all, in this forgotten land in the heart of Africa.
