No Running Away: UN Peacekeeping’s Race Against Time in DR Congo

The idea of humanitarian intervention has an appealing moral clarity. In 2003, the Security Council was again confronted with the question in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For 4.5 million Congolese living in Ituri, the north-eastern corner of Congo, 2003 was the year when they came terribly close to a total breakdown, as violence spiked and the prospect of massive killings — if not genocide — became more and more real. As head of UN peacekeeping, as we also juggled crises in Côte d’Ivoire, Iraq, and Darfur, those fateful weeks of May 2003 were to be the longest in my life.

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