IT’S A QUAGMIRE!

One week after the first French troops arrived the first rapid reaction intervention by the EU alone is in danger of being a toothless failure, observers say. If it is not allowed to leave Bunia it will hardly see the slaughter in the province, much less stop it. If unable to intervene in fighting it will not prevent the civilian massacres that invariably follow. . . .

During their brief visit to Bunia yesterday the security council’s 15 ambassadors must have regretted this. They were preceded by three Mirage-2000 fighters screaming low overhead, but the Hema gunmen were unbowed.

Their continued presence was felt at the UN compound, where 12 refugees fainted with fright, and in the town’s market, the scene of a stampede by several hundred terrified shoppers.

As a UN convoy passed along the main street under heavy French guard a mob of militiamen and civilians ran behind, waving submachine guns in the air and shouting: “The white men will run, we have the city”.

That’s a polite mistranslation. He was actually saying “the French will run.”