News from the Ituri region of the misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo in recent weeks has been so grim as to make one want to turn the page or flip the TV channel in despair: tens of thousands of refugees in flight, ethnically based mass murder, killers jubilantly draping themselves in the entrails of their victims, animals eating dead bodies in the streets, 10- and 11-year-old child soldiers bearing AK-47s and hand grenades. Such horrors are but the latest in a civil war whose death toll, in less than five years, is estimated by the International Rescue Committee to be at least 3.3 million. This is the greatest such bloodshed anywhere on earth since the end of World War II. There is no end in sight.

The conflict's origins are many. A hundred years ago, under King Leopold II of Belgium, Congo was the scene of one of the most brutal chapters in the European colonization of Africa. The king's private colony--and to a lesser extent the early Belgian Congo that succeeded it--was based on a draconian system of forced labor that over a forty-year period slashed the territory's population roughly in half, an estimated drop of about 10 million people. But colonialism can't be blamed for everything. The formation of a modern nation-state is a slow, complicated business, which in most of Western Europe was accompanied by much war and violence and took several centuries. To survive in the modern world, Africa doesn't have those centuries to spend.

One trigger for Congo's current war came in 1994, when the world did nothing to stop the Rwanda genocide. When the Hutu regime that carried out those killings was overthrown, its leaders and roughly a million other Hutu fled next door to Congo. Angry at continuing attacks mounted from there, the army of the new government in Rwanda occupied part of northeastern Congo.

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