drc: as the troops land

The sending of French and British soldiers to the DRC, where the most modest estimates suggest that around three and a half million people have died as a result of war in the last five years, has received little comment. Yet the question remains: has the problem of the Congo been too much intervention, or too little? The Congolese state has been bankrupted by the costs of war. The people survive in conditions of desperate poverty. Successive outside players have done nothing to encourage self-government or even the conditions in which democracy could grow. The arrival of the French troops has been met therefore with cynicism.