The United Nations (UN) is about to do something it has never done before. It is going to its first war.
The UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been on the ground since 1999 and over the years the maximum 19,815 personnel mission has seen next-door neighbor Rwanda’s genocide spillover to anarchy, has been silent witness to rebel forces’ taking over Goma, the country’s second-largest city and has recently seen the surging violence of murder and rape of innocent Congolese.
On 28 March 2013, frustrated and exasperated with recurrent waves of conflict, the UN Security Council (UNSC) decided by Resolution 2098, to create a specialized ‘intervention brigade’, with a mandate “of neutralizing armed groups and the objective of contributing to reducing the threat posed by armed groups to state authority and civilian security in eastern DRC and to make space for stabilization activities”, for which it is “authorized to use all necessary means to carry out its mandate.”
In other conflicts, the UN has allowed nations and regional alliances to go to war; however, in Congo, the UN itself and the ‘blue berets’ themselves, under the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO), will be responsible for the operational capacities, field operations and the inevitable casualties. The newly-appointed Force Commander Lt. Gen. Carlos Santos Cruz has explicitly indicated that the intervention “starts now!”
Getting There 