When Congo sneezes, Africa catches a cold. Not for nothing was the last big conflict here called “The Great War of Africa,” dragging in a half dozen of its neighbours during the devastating six-year war.

Even in the five years since that ended, eastern Congo has remained a crucible of misery, straining superlatives. More than five million dead. The worst sexual violence in the world. Congo does little to shrug the cliché of the “Dark Heart of Africa.”

In a gloomy hut in Goma last year as I interviewed two escaped child soldiers, the aid worker accompanying me got up and slipped away in tears, unable to listen to the horror anymore. Today, more likely than not, those boys are now back on the frontline, battling towards Goma in the army of the rebel Tutsi leader Laurent Nkunda.

General Nkunda’s offensive – small scale bush fighting by the standards of the region – has kicked off an unprecedented flurry of diplomatic activity as David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, and his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner, along with United Nations and United States African envoys all criss-cross from Kinshasa to Kigali in search of solution.

Declaring himself the protector of the beleaguered Tutsi minority, his troops have marched to the gates of Goma and now surround the lakeside city on all sides. That victory has exposed the haplessness not only of the Congolese government troops that fled the advance, but also the weakness of the United Nations peacekeeping forces there, who failed utterly to protect civilians from the brutality of retreating troops, who raped, looted and killed on their way.

The nightmare of eastern Congo was meant to be solved five years ago with a UN-brokered peace deal, followed two years ago by the most expensive foreign-backed elections in African history and the largest ever peacekeeping mission with 17,000 troops. While European powers mull whether to send their own troops into the chaos, it is clear that without a workable political settlement, eastern Congo will simply ignite again.

The area owes its lethal volatility to its vast mineral wealth and easily exploited ethnic tensions. General Nkunda claims to be protecting his Tutsi minority from hardcore Hutu militias who took sanctuary in the forests of eastern Congo fleeing retribution over their part in the Rwandan genocide.

The 2003 peace deal called for the disarming of all groups in the area and two subsequent agreements, most recently in January, called on the Government forcibly to disarm the Hutu militias. It has not, and there are credible reports that the army has armed and employed the militias against General Nkunda’s rebel army.

Negotiators will push for the enforcement of the January agreement when they bring together the presidents of Congo and Rwanda at an international summit as early as this week. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame will be told to stop supporting General Nkunda’s rebels, which could be tricky as long as he continues to deny he ever had.

The proximity of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, to eastern Congo’s rich mines, means it already benefits from the lucrative trade in gold, diamonds, copper, tin and coltan, which helps fund its own army. General Nkunda’s declaration at the gates of Goma that he wanted a Chinese mining contract with Kinshasa cancelled suggests that whatever else he wants — and he does want the Hutus disarmed — he is determined to keep the profits of Congo’s riches in Tutsi hands.

Congo’s exploitation by foreign forces is nothing new, going back to the Belgian colonial times. It is the lure of those riches that will make any settlement hard to stick. The disarming of the Hutu rebels is the first step, removing General Nkunda’s raison d’etre and Rwanda’s for backing him. But who will do it? The same government troops who fled General Nkunda’s forces, or the UN troops who stood by as they raped and plundered?

General Nkunda is at his most powerful to date. He fought to the gates of Goma, proving the Government and peace-keepers are weak. Then he stopped, showing he has discipline, while the marauding government troops did not and won leverage without taking on responsibility for the mess that Goma has become. Whether his ambitions will remain regional is far from certain. From the verdant hills around Goma, he can see a long way.

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