Damned nations greed, guns, armies, and aid

Summary: When war returned to Bukavu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo along the Rwandan border, I dismissed the gunfire as nothing more than a minor skirmish. A peace accord had been signed eighteen months earlier by most of the fractured parties to this hellish conflict. Had no one read it? Maybe, I reasoned, it was just a group of boys not quite satisfied with the terms of their severance from one of the ever-shifting rebel groups. This isn't serious. It will pass. During my previous mission to the region a few months earlier, there had been hushed chatter among aid workers of a "third revolution," but war zones are full of such stories -- of final chapters in battle not yet written. And, by all accounts, the rumours predated the peace process, so there was no need for concern. There were 10,000 United Nations peacekeepers in the region, and I was confident it wouldn't take them long to identify the problem and contain it.