Hmmm... That's unusual.
From positions on three hills, tribal fighters unleashed a surprise attack at sunset, their bullets smacking into the high sand ramparts around the U.N. checkpoint below. Then the peacekeepers did what the United Nations all too often is accused of failing to do: They fought back. Helicopter gunships, armored personnel carriers and infantry sent the assailants fleeing. Quiet returned, and people in this dusty gold-mining town of 15,000 breathed easier, knowing they had probably been spared another round of rape, murder and cannibalism.
| They can probably expect a stern reprimand from Amnesia Internationl. Gunships and infantry are so... so... violent! |
Peacekeeping has changed dramatically since the troops from more than two dozen nations arrived in eastern Congo in 2001 to protect U.N. installations and unarmed military observers monitoring the cease-fire lines that separate government and rebel armies. Nowadays, with a stronger U.N. Security Council mandate to pacify a volatile chunk of Congo twice the size of Colorado, the peacekeepers talk — and act — tough. "We need to intervene very forcefully and very quickly," said Dominique AitOuyahia-McAdams, the Frenchwoman who heads the U.N. mission in northeastern Ituri province and is headquartered in Bunia, the provincial capital 16 miles south of Iga-Barriere. The strategy may be risky, "but we all have to take risks because the price for the population is too high not to take any risk," she said. Backed by a fleet of 52 helicopters and transport planes and a $600 million budget, the 10,500 peacekeepers are helping the transitional government regain control of Africa's third-largest nation, curb armed groups and prepare for elections that could be held in less than two years. "U.N. troops first entered as peacekeepers and have been transformed into peace enforcers," said Taylor Seybolt of the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent, federally financed think tank in Washington.
| What a remarkably original idea. Wonder why nobody ever thought of it before? |
"The U.N. is responding to events on the ground in a way they have not done in the past in other countries and other times," said Seybolt, who studies peacekeeping and ethnic conflict. |