Must We?

Canada must officially do its utmost to help where it can, to ameliorate horrible living conditions for people living in third-world countries. Countries which have never been able to manage to govern themselves well and responsibly, countries dependent on aid from wealthy nations of the West, countries whose tribal traditions leading to suspicion and hatred of others and resulting in incessant warfare has ensured their conditions would never improve.

It's a holding pattern, nothing less. Transferring vast sums of money over the space of decades to countries within the African continent, some of which manages to trickle down usefully to modestly help those in need whose plight is ignored by their own government. But most of which aid funding goes directly into the pockets of corrupt rulers and their corrupt followers.

Funding that should be used for medications, for access to clean water, inoculations against dread illnesses.

The need to help those helpless people who live in unendurable poverty and endemic sickness - whose plight is never alleviated, and where children are unable to grow beyond infancy, their mothers languishing in ill health, if they survive maternity, all of them susceptible to malaria and dreadful water-borne illnesses, culminating in utter human misery - is dire.

Compounded by ongoing internal warfare and the resulting situation where women become prey for tribal vengeance through rape and children are often kidnapped to be trained as foot soldiers in militias who prey on the population. Where the country's own official military treats the vulnerable population in an equal manner to the militias they purportedly battle.

And the United Nations invites Canada to join it in Democratic Republic of Congo, as soon as Canada disengages from Afghanistan, as a peace force. Canadian military to go from battling the Taliban, to overseeing 'peace' in Congo by separating the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda from government forces, joining the UN's MONUC mission set up a decade ago to enforce a ceasefire in the wake of a multi-party civil war that has killed 4 million people.

Join the United Nations in one of their African peace-keeping missions. It is Rwandan Hutu militants primarily preying on Congolese, having fled Rwanda after the genocide they perpetrated there, upon the Tutsi Rwandans. During the genocide taking place in Rwanda, with the UN's mission headed by Lt.Gen. Romeo Dallaire, Rwanda's emissary to the UN was on the Security Council.

Reporting directly to the Hutu genocidaires what the United Nations and its peacekeeping forces in Rwanda were attempting to do, to maintain order, to desperately attempt to forestall ongoing mass murder, attempting to protect Tutsis huddling within the UN compounds with their children, fearful of imminent death. Lt.Gen. Romeo Dallaire, as head of the UN Rwandan mission was forced to stand by and witness the endless slaughter.

No help was forthcoming from anywhere in the world, much less the United Nations which had other, more pressing problems to attend to, elsewhere in the world. This is the same United Nations which implores Canada to become involved in Democratic Republic of Congo. And, in fact, also pleading with Canada to become involved there is none other than now-Senator Romeo Dallaire.

Can we not say thanks, but no thanks...? We've had those experiences. They've been utterly fruitless. We do desperately wish to save lives and save people from the misery of their dreadful existence. But will the additional sacrifice of more of our young men and women in uniform result in that kind of success?

Or is it finally necessary for the African continent to police itself, for the leaders of Africa to turn away from tribalism and vengeance and greed?