Fleeing the fighting outside Goma, North Kivu province of Congo (Walter Astrada/AFP/Getty Images)

For decades, much of the Western world has gone about its affairs without giving much thought to Africa.
How many Americans know, much less care, that since 1988, wars and related famine in the Democratic Republic of Congo have taken the lives of 5.4 million people? And that as many as 45,000 people a month continue to perish because of the conflicts.

Since 2000, the United Nations has had a peacekeeping force on the ground Congo. Known by the French acronym MONUC, the peacekeeping force now numbers more than 17,400 soldiers from 50 nations. That’s not a lot of troops for a nation twice the size of Texas, even if the troops were motivated. And the MONUC forces aren’t.

The latest chapter in the Congo wars began unfolding in August along its eastern border with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. The region is known as North Kivu, and the regional capital is the city of Goma. Given the corruption of Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila, and particularly the rapaciousness of his army, it’s difficult to know who the villain is here, but the man behind the latest scourge is a rebel general named Laurent Nkunda.

His group, the National Congress for the Defense of the People, has been rampaging into North Kivu from bases in neighboring Rwanda. Congolese President Kabila accuses Mr. Nkunda’s forces of being proxies for Rwanda’s government, led by President Paul Kagame. In return, Mr. Kagame accuses Mr. Kabila of using an exiled Rwandan militia organization, the FLDR, as his proxy to stir up trouble with Rwanda.

Some 250,000 civilians have been forced from their homes in North Kivu since August; massacres, rape and pillaging have become everyday occurences as Mr. Nkunda’s forces have laid seige to the city of Goma.
These wars are as much tribal as national, a continuation of the genocidal slaughter of 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis by Hutu forces in 1994. The FLDR are the remnants of the old Rwandan Hutus. Mr. Nkunda is Tutsi, as is the Rwandan government of Mr. Kagame. Mr. Kabila, Congo’s president, also has Tutsi blood, but prefers to deal with Hutu rebels to hold onto power.

Compounding these ancient tribal issues is that Congo is rich in timber, gold, diamonds, cobalt, copper, tin and coltan, a rare metal essential to the functioning of cell phones and other electronics. The matter of a few hundred thousand deaths may be of less concern to some nations than access to Congo’s resources.
In short, this is the sort of intractable problem that the United Nations was created to deal with, and never quite does.

Nonetheless, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon called a summit meeting Friday in Nairobi, Kenya, of the seven nations involved in the Congo regions, warning them that “this crisis could engulf the broader sub-region. As leaders of Africa, you have a historic responsibility, it is a critical moment for the . . . region and for Africa as a whole. We must put the cycle of violence behind us.”

The United States, as a major supporter of Mr. Kagame’s government in Rwanda, can help by pressing for continuing talks among all parties. The United States also must press its European allies to contribute better-trained and equipped troops to the overmatched existing U.N. peacekeeping contingent. In colonial days, Belgium, France and even Great Britain exploited central Africa; exploitation shouldn’t be replaced with apathy.

President-elect Barack Obama has enough on his plate, but the first African-American president will be uniquely positioned to engage the world on the crisis in Congo and crises elsewhere on the continent. Such engagement is long overdue.