“The …Red Cross said Sunday that it has collected 137 bodies from …[the capital’s] streets,   victims of the fighting between rebels and government troops.”

These symbols have become as much of a part of Africa’s presentation to the West as lions chasing zebras on the savanna.

This particular quote comes from Chad, where last week a coup attempt in the capital city of N’Djamena was piled on top of the instability in this central African nation’s eastern boarder with war-torn Sudan. Yet this line could just as easily been written about Kenya, where rival ethnic   factions are disputing the recent   elections. Or maybe Nigeria, where chronic violence over the distribution of oil revenues has rocked the continent’s most populous nation.
An answer to these conflicts lies in fixing the United Nations peacekeeping system. To have a mission, a resolution must pass the United Nations Security Counsel, where any one of the five permanent member of the counsel (U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China) can give an incontestable veto. Even when missions do get approved, the U.N. does peacekeeping “ad hoc,” which means they must appeal to other nations for troops, guns, equipment and money every time a new mission emerges. The impacts can be seen in Darfur where peacekeeping has been delayed due to a lack of helicopters.

Even if the resources are found it is often too late to stop the escalation of violence. One need only look to the violence in Rwanda; this is what when you leave a nation in the cold.

In any discussion of Africa, China, and its negative influence on the continent, must be noted. China’s rapacious appetite for petroleum and other natural resource has lead to it support some not so savory regimes, including the Sudanese government, an otherwise international pariah. On top of that, Li Xenfeng of pro-government People’s Daily newspaper in China recently wrote an editorial linking the violence in Kenya to “Western style democracy,” which he views is not suitable for Africa. It’s actions like these that cause many to blame China for African instability.

This ultimately, though, is a dead end. While their economic investments have not been perfect, it does give China a financial incentive to seek stability on the continent, an incentive that has already led to positive actions.

Establishing a system that allowed for a quicker intervention into Africa’s conflicts would be the best way to prevent large scale outbreaks of violence and genocide. Advocates have called for the establishment of a U.N. Rapid Reaction Force, a group of international peacekeepers keep by the U.N. at a constant state of high readiness to be deployed when needed. America, with the world’s largest military budget, highest GDP, and biggest amount of unpaid U.N. dues, could do a great service for international stability (and its image) by funding and suppling the force. It should not, however, donate troops, which by American law can not be under foreign command and would likely be out of their element doing peacekeeping after being trained for combat.

This will no doubt draw the ire of conservatives, who will paint even a small RRF as a U.N. standing army and threat to U.S. sovereignty, but in the light of the numerous flash-points for conflict world-wide and especially in Africa, this seems to be political risk worth taking. It would send a clear message to any potentially perpetrators, one which echoes from the post-Holocaust cries of “never again” that have long since seemed to be forgotten: “This aggression will not stand.”