Rwanda sent hundreds of its soldiers into eastern Congo on Tuesday in what the neighbours have described as a joint operation against Hutu rebels who have been at the heart of 15 years of conflict. Details are still somewhat sketchy, with Rwanda saying its soldiers are under Congolese command but Kinshasa saying Kigali’s men have come as observers.

Evidence on the ground suggests something more serious. United Nations peacekeepers and diplomats have said up to 2,000 Rwandan soldiers crossed into Congo. A Reuters reporter saw hundreds of heavily armed troops wearing Rwandan flag patches moving into Congo north of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province. The world’s largest U.N. peacekeeping mission is, for now, being kept out of the loop.

Foreign soldiers in Congo are nothing new. Rwanda first invaded in 1996. A 1998-2003 war in Congo sucked in six neighbouring armies. But after years of diplomacy and billions of dollars spent on peacekeeping and Congo’s 2006 elections, analysts are frantically trying to work out what is going on.

The current joint operation stems from an agreement signed in December between Rwanda and Congo to cooperate more closely after weeks of heavy fighting in North Kivu province. Although the fighting was officially between Congolese government forces and Tutsi rebels, most analysts saw it as an escalation of a proxy war between Rwanda and Congo that has continued despite 2003 peace deals.

U.N. experts have accused Rwanda of supporting the Tutsi CNDP rebels, formed in 2004 out of previous Rwandan-backed movements that fought against the government in Kinshasa. As on many occasions in the past, Congo was, in turn, accused of arming and using Rwandan Hutu FDLR rebels to boost the effectiveness of its fragile and chaotic army.

The fighting underlined the weakness of President Joseph Kabila’s army, which looted and raped civilians as they fled the CNDP. But it also refocused attention on the Hutu rebels, many of whom crossed into Congo when they were routed after taking part in the 1994 genocide of Tutsis and have long since been used by both Rwandan and Congolese Tutsi forces as justification for military operations in the mineral-rich east.

Rwanda and Congo have frequently agreed to resolve the FDLR problem. With talk of normalising relations, does Tuesday’s intervention by the Rwandan army mark the first concrete step in new a new relationship between the two countries?

How will Kabila sell a Rwandan military intervention in Congo that is likely to be unpopular amongst many ordinary Congolese, who have long-accused Rwanda of entering their country to loot resources rather than remove rebel threats? How will a handful of Rwandans help Congo’s notoriously weak forces disarm the FDLR in 10-15 days after Kigali’s army failed to do the job during several years of occupation?

What is the international community’s role in all this? The U.N. has some 17,000 peacekeepers on the ground but they have largely been kept at a distance. What about the threat of reprisals on civilians? Over 600 people have been killed in recent weeks after another of Congo’s neighbours, Uganda, led an assault on its rebels in a another remote corner of the country.

Previous foreign occupations of Congo’s mineral-rich east have been justified by hunts for rebels. Is there a danger of history repeating itself?

The withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Somalia has left a nation beset by conflict for nearly two decades at a crossroads.

Ethiopia invaded to oust Islamists from the capital, but insurgents still control much of southern Somalia and more hardline groups that worry Washington have flourished during the two-year intervention.

The United Nations is unlikely to send peacekeepers to replace the Ethiopians. Africa is struggling to send more troops to help the 3,500 soldiers from Uganda and Burundi protecting key sites in the capital.

Some analysts say sending an international force would be counterproductive anyway as it would simply replace the Ethiopians as the hated foreign invader and maintain support for the most militant insurgents.

But without more African peacekeepers deploying soon, it seems unlikely the small and largely ineffectual existing force will remain with a weak mandate to face attacks from insurgents.

While a power vacuum may result in even more violence, some Western diplomats in the region hope it will spur the feuding Islamist opposition groups to settle their differences and work towards forming a broad-based, inclusive government.

They also hope the departure of the Ethiopians will deflate the insurgency and marginalise hardline groups imposing a strict version of Islamic law traditionally shunned by many Somalis.

African diplomats pushing hard for some sort of political reconciliation say there are more and more signs of "war fatigue" among the various camps and clans.

They are consistently upbeat about Somalia's prospects, even more so since President Abdullahi Yusuf resigned, and are reaching out to some of the hardline Islamist groups.

Western opposition to some hue of Islamist administration in Somalia -- precisely what Ethiopia invaded to quash -- seems to be waning as diplomats take a more pragmatic approach to the political and military reality on the ground.

Is there any reason for optimism after 17 years of violence?

(Picture: Somali al-Shabaab insurgents arrive in capital Mogadishu, Decemcer 27, 2008. REUTERS/Omar Faruk)

In 1994 the U.N. Security Council failed to prevent the slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. U.N. officials often refer to that period as the darkest chapter in the 60-year history of U.N. peacekeeping.

In 2000 the council accepted responsibility for dragging its heels and failing to prevent the Rwandan genocide. Members of the 15-nation body vowed to take lessons from the tragedy.

But human rights activists, aid workers and U.N. officials say the Security Council is once again flirting with disaster by delaying action on an urgent U.N. request for more peacekeepers to help avert war in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo — right on the border with Rwanda.

“The Security Council needs to move fast to increase the number of peacekeepers and save lives,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher on the Congo for Human Rights Watch. “The calls from the secretary-general (Ban Ki-moon) and the cries of distress from the Congolese people should not continue to fall on deaf ears.”

The New York Times said in an editorial that the council was “shamefully failing to act”.

“The international community failed to stop Rwanda’s genocide and promised not to let it happen again,” the Times noted. “Has the world forgotten so quickly?”

An estimated 250,000 civilians have fled their homes since August to escape a resurgence of fighting between Tutsi rebels, Congolese government troops and Rwandan Hutu rebels suspected of participating in the 1994 genocide, all eager to gain control of the region’s ample mineral wealth.

According to Congolese President Joseph Kabila, Rwanda is among those causing mischief in North Kivu by backing Congolese Tutsi rebel chief Gen. Laurent Nkunda, who in turn accuses Kinshasa of supporting the Rwandan “genocidaire” rebels.

Making matters worse, U.N. officials say the Congolese armed forces have been guilty of looting and raping in Goma, the capital of Congo’s eastern North Kivu province.

Aid officials say all this has produced a “catastrophic” security and humanitarian situation, and the risk of a repeat of the kind of human devastation caused by a 1998-2003 war that killed several million in the former Belgian colony.

With Nkunda’s forces poised to take Goma, U.N. peacekeepers in Congo, known by their French acronym MONUC, have begged the Security Council to send 3,000 more forces to avoid a new war.

MONUC has 17,000 troops and police, making it the biggest U.N. force on the planet. But MONUC officials have repeatedly warned the council that the is force stretched too thinly to adequately protect the 10 million civilians in eastern Congo.

While aid workers struggle to feed and shelter the starving and terrified masses in eastern Congo, the 15-nation council has sat on MONUC’s pleas for reinforcements for over a month.

U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy, however, said that members of the Security Council are finally beginning to realize that reinforcements might be necessary.

On Thursday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown broke the ice by becoming the first leader of a permanent Security Council member to explicitly back a troop “surge” for MONUC.

Activists, aid officials and diplomats hope similar statements will follow and lead to swift council action so another Rwanda can be avoided.

It should all be music to the ears of top military brass in Brussels, Washington and at the United Nations, who have long been struggling to fill gaps in under-resourced peacekeeping missions from Africa to Afghanistan.

Although the total number of mission-fit French forces will fall to 30,000 from 50,000 under the plans, the idea is that they will be better equipped, more mobile and better able to respond to everything from terrorism to cyber-attacks.

That is what defence wonks mean when they talk about “transformation” of the world’s large but mostly lumbering standing armies built up during the Cold War.

Paris promises a win-win deal for NATO and the EU. Not only will it play a bigger role in the transatlantic alliance whose military structures it quit four decades ago, but it also sees scope for more pooling of Europe’s scarce defence resources.

Too good to be true? Perhaps.

Who gets priority if both NATO and the EU come knocking on France’s door for soldiers? Will the British agree to a French call for the EU to have its own military planning cell?

It is all very well for Sarkozy to revive an nine-year-old dream of the EU to have a 60,000-strong reaction force on call for crises around the world. But that came to nought the first time because nations didn’t cough up the troops — who is to say they will be any keener to do so this time around. Britain’s The Times newspaper has its doubts.

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