NO MORE Congos!" The forlorn cry rang out unmistakably across Africa in 1964. The United Nations (UN) was struggling with one of its earliest peacekeeping challenges in the former Belgian Congo. It was expressing its deep frustration at a four-year intervention: it had lost its Swedish secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, in a mysterious aircraft crash; the charismatic Congolese premier, Patrice Lumumba, had been killed under its nose; and it became bogged down in a protracted civil war in the shadow of an ideological Cold War in an emerging Africa. The UN’s credibility in Africa was badly damaged by its intervention in this civil war. Five decades later, the UN is struggling to keep peace in another protracted civil war in the same country, which is a symbol of the difficulties the UN has experienced in its peacekeeping efforts in Africa.Three decades of bad governance under the western-backed Mobutu Sese Seko dictatorship eventually resulted in a civil war in the Democratic Republ...
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