It was another of those moments that will come back to haunt the United Nations. Just as its forces stood by during the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and in Bosnia’s Srebrenica massacre of 2005, so rebels of the M23 were allowed to walk into the eastern Congolese town of Goma unopposed.
The Congo is the UN’s largest peacekeeping operation in the world, with 19,000 troops and a budget of $1,402,278,300. At the time the town fell, the UN had 1,500 soldiers in Goma, backed by helicopters, artillery and tanks.
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