Do we want more African blood on our hands?

In Tony Blair's extraordinary 2001 Labour Party conference speech, he made one point in favour of liberal intervention in the affairs of other states with what seemed to me, sitting a few feet away, to be plain sincerity. "I tell you, if Rwanda happened again today as it did in 1993, when a million people were slaughtered in cold blood, we would have a moral duty to act," he said. That time has now come - sooner than anybody would have hoped. The UN are discussing Congo - and Blair must use all his persuasive skills to show cynics that his words were not hot air but something more.

Some New Labour sources I have spoken to have explained that it is politically very difficult for Blair to mobilise our troops again so soon after Iraq. Tough. Genocides do not happen punctually, nor do they pay attention to the political whims of the Westminster village. Blair must overrule these political worriers, and fast: remember, Rwanda flared up and produced its mass slaughter in just a few months. Given the humanitarian arguments Blair used (too late in the day, perhaps, after months of a misleading row about weapons of mass destruction) for action in Iraq, he must now re-deliver that script with more passion than ever before.

Genocide Watch, the public voice of the Brussels-based International Campaign to End Genocide, explained last week that "all the warning signs for genocide that were present in Rwanda are present in Ituri [in the cruelly named Democratic Republic of Congo]." Rival ethnic groups, organised into armed militias, have successfully dehumanised the other side and prepared the way for extermination to begin. We all happily watch Schindler's List and mumble "never, never again" - but do we mean it? Rwanda suggested that we don't, but now we have another chance. It will be a disgrace if anybody tries to block UN-led action; but if somebody does, then a coalition of the willing must proceed alone.

Yet there are two points which liberal interventionists like Blair must address. Firstly, anybody who defends "Empire Lite", as the writer Michael Ignatieff has called it - a temporary intervention to prevent genocide and try to secure a transition to something better - must admit that the problem we are now confronting in Congo is itself the product of another, older and more malign imperialism.

The warring factions in Congo are now re-enacting an event we may soon have to call "the First Congolese Genocide", perpetrated by the "civilised" Belgians against the "savage" indigenous peoples of Congo when they were handed it as a colony in 1885. The American historian Adam Hochschild documents in his superb book King Leopold's Ghost how 10 million Congolese - more even than were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust - were "exterminated" or worked to death by Leopold's private army. Anybody who has read Joseph Conrad's 1899 novel Heart of Darkness will find it easy to picture the inferno Leopold created. Although the novel undeniably has some racist overtones of its own, Conrad based his story very closely on the six months he spent in the colony in 1890. The sadistic psychopath Kurtz, at the heart of his novel - a man who displays the heads of black people on poles around his shack, and keeps starving slaves in chains - had several real-life counterparts who were given free rein by the Belgian ruling authorities. Belgium, by the way, has never officially acknowledged, apologised or paid reparations for its crimes.

Throughout the current debate about intervening, then, we must always remember that it is the West that introduced the virus of genocide to Congo. It has been kept alive now by Africans themselves - but it is not inherent to a tribal way of life. We did more than nudge them in that direction; we showed them how it was done. We should describe this not as "tribal warfare", as so many lazy commentators have, but as "following the European example". Some will derive from this fact a belief that we should never intervene there again, out of shame; I believe that it imbues us with a special responsibility to help redress some of the damage we have caused.

There is a second point that nobody should be allowed to forget: it is Western corporate greed that has been fuelling the civil war in Congo since 1998, and which has brought us to a situation where we may need to intervene. Congo is one of the world's greatest sources of the mineral coltan. You may not have heard of coltan, but you use the tantalum that is extracted from it every day. It is in your mobile phone and your laptop, your games console and your remote control. The rival groups in Congo have been buying weapons almost exclusively with the proceeds of coltan sales.

We could easily rectify this situation by declaring a moratorium on buying any coltan from the region until it is stable and ethnic tensions have cooled; in the meantime, we can get all we need from Australia and New Zealand, where coltan is plentiful, albeit slightly more expensive.

So, yes, we must intervene now, and I am confident that Tony Blair will stay true to his word and do so. But we should have acted years ago to stop our companies buying coltan from the region. Should it really take a genocide to jolt us into realising that we are contributing towards catastrophe in Africa?

j.hari@independent.co.uk