And if that wasn't enough

Despite the bloodless recapture of the town of Bukavu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by government soldiers after a week-long occupation by Banyamulenge rebels, the humanitarian situation in the area has not gotten better. Instead,

"[t]here has been a marked deterioration since Bukavu fell and it has been spreading," [UN's emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland] told Reuters news agency....

"Access wise, it is even worse than Darfur in western Sudan, where aid groups recently were permitted to enter."

He said that 3.3 million civilians were out of reach of aid agencies, the largest number of any active conflict.

"The world has not understood how deep the crisis has become and what is at stake," he said.

The dissident army officers who seized Bukavu, Colonel Jules Mutebusi and General Laurent Nkunda, are members of the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), a former rebel group backed by Rwanda. As part of a peace deal reached in December, members of RCD were supposed to be integrated into a common national army, but progress is hard as tensions and ethnic divisions remain high.

That tension is no doubt increased by the fact that in Congo they're called Banyamulenge. But in Rwanda, they are called Tutsi. Tutsi. The ethnic group that suffered through 100 days of genocide in 1994 while the UN and the West, including the US, ignored warnings and did nothing, a horror that only now is being addressed in open courts. They are doubtless alert for the tiniest slight, the first suggestion of a threat, primed for "fight or flight." And not without cause, as there were some reprisal attacks in Bukavu after the rebel army fled.

Right now the fragile peace is holding, I think more because no one wants to be the one responsible for plunging the nation back into the swamp of blood and misery from which it's just beginning to emerge. At the same time, though, everyone seems to be waiting for, expecting, someone else to do just that.

As 3.3 million people sit in need of help that can't get to them.

Footnote: I can't help but think of something a friend said to me a good number of years ago in reaction to the general notion of "one world, one people" that floats around the Left. "I've come to think we need rather more borders than fewer," he wrote me. At the time I wasn't convinced but I have to admit I've pretty much come around to his way of thinking. Or at least maybe not more borders, but different borders. So many of our national borders are artificial: They are political, not natural, and they have no connection to ecology, ethnology, or even geography except where some river or some such makes a convenient marker. Most of the national boundaries in Africa are relics of colonialism, when they were drawn as the result either of power struggles among foreign nations or as administrative districts for overlords. It might have made for less conflict if they had been drawn on the basis of ethnicity instead of what was convenient for the exploiters.

I have no idea how to get from here to there or even if it's a good idea at this point. But I do think it's something to consider. Heck, we may even want to check out bioregionalism.