Recent rebel pullbacks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have inspired some tepid hope that full-scale chaos is avoidable. But while we all want good news to emerge from the beleaguered Congo, the reality is that good news usually ends up being fleeting. Anneke van Woudenberg, a senior researcher on the DRC for Human Rights Watch has a column in The Boston Globe taking a decidedly non-optimistic view and calling for western action to forestall more death and carnage, including another regional cataclysm, which Congolese crises tend to foment.
