My guilt over the way we abandoned the unluckiest country in the world

The media don't often go to Congo and have never really told the full story of the country's epic tragedy

At the start of the Iraq war a report came out of the Democratic Republic of Congo which should have dominated the world headlines. The fact that it didn't is something I will return to later, but the facts were that hundreds of villagers had been slaughtered in what was described as "ethnic" violence. The killings took place in the Ituri region and were carried out by members of one tribal militia against the civilians of another ethnic group. Numerous women and children were killed by gun, machete and club. It happened in a place that was, by Western standards at least, very remote. Yet news did leak out and some reports were carried on the BBC and in the national press.

There was no international response. When I use the word "response" I don't mean ritualistic statements issued by government press offices. Nor do I include the statements demanding attention that come from international groups such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. I am talking about personal engagement by the main world leaders. I am also talking about action. The killings around Ituri, like those taking place around the town of Bunia (in the same area) just now, might have been happening on Mars for all the human connection we made with them.

According to the latest reports, the withdrawal of Ugandan occupying forces in the area has been accompanied by slaughter, rape and pillage. Groups of men armed with guns and machetes are patrolling the streets of Bunia, corpses are lying out in the open. This, it has to be said, is par for the course in the Congo of the past few years. According to the UN, since the middle of the last decade an estimated 2 million people have been killed in the wars that accompanied and followed the defeat of President Mobutu Sese Seko.

All manner of killers have been floating around the torpid waters of post-Mobutu Congo. There have been Serbian mercenaries fresh from the killing fields of Bosnia, profiteering army officers from Rwanda and Uganda, rebel warlords sponsored by Kampala and Kigali, genocidal militia fleeing justice in Rwanda, soldiers from Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola, not to mention the forces of Laurent Kabila, and now his son, Joseph.

It must be the country with the worst luck in the world. In recent history the Congolese have had to put up with invasion and conquest by European powers, the madness and mass slaughter carried out by King Leopold of Belgium, a subsequent Belgian colonial occupation, the civil wars of the independence era and then the age of Mobutu who turned corruption into a high art form. I visited Congo under Mobutu and his successor Laurent Kabila. The latter was a corpulent lump of greed and viciousness who won Western backing despite his notorious venality.

The case for backing Mobutu was firmly rooted in Cold War politics. The man spoke the right language (i.e. he nominally opposed communism and allowed the CIA free rein to undermine Marxist Angola from his territory). A thoroughgoing bastard all right, but our bastard. Mobutu came to power after the West had conspired to murder his leftist predecessor, Patrice Lumumba.

When I first went to Congo it was called Zaire. Mobutu had changed the name during his period of authenticité: the great gangster decided to "Africanise" his country. It was a clever way of seizing any profitable foreign-owned businesses and handing them out to party hacks and personal cronies.

Did we see all of this going on? You bet. But we kept supporting him. We knew that billions were being sent out of the country to foreign bank accounts and said nothing. The Congolese kept turning up at international conferences and Joseph Mobutu was feted as a friend by Ronald Reagan among others. The French kept him in power by sending their army in to restore order when unpaid soldiers mutinied back at the start of the 1990s.

Then the Cold War ended and Western support for Mobutu evaporated. The French did keep meddling and snooping around but even they began to be embarrassed by Mobutu. His drunken troops even shot their ambassador to Kinshasa. Then an event occurred far from Kinshasa, in neighbouring Rwanda, that would speed the downfall of Mobutu. An extremist clique killed nearly a million people in Rwanda and then fled across the border into President Mobutu's domain. The clique began organising attacks back across the border into Rwanda.

The Rwandans decided to invade Congo to sort out the problem. They defeated the extremists but became party to a Congolese civil war. To the north, the Ugandans attacked to destroy a rebel group dedicated to the overthrow of Yoweri Museveni. Mobutu was overthrown and replaced by Kabila. Then Kabila turned on his Rwandan and Ugandan supporters and the war erupted again.

Factions split and re-aligned and other African armies joined in. The foreign armies, especially Uganda, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, took a quick look at Congo's wealth and did what every invader before had done: they grabbed as much of the loot, minerals and precious metals as they could, and sent it home. The slaughter went on in the bush and the villages, far from the eyes of the international community but not entirely unnoticed. Aid agencies, church groups and the UN itself issued numerous statements denouncing the slaughter. We did nothing.

We are still doing nothing. There is a sort of peace process but, as ever in the Congo, the writ of central government doesn't reach much beyond the city limits of Kinshasa. The UN struggles to monitor the "peace process" but does so knowing that the people who really matter these days – the Americans – are too preoccupied with terrorism and Iraq to care much.

The media don't often go to Congo and have never really told the full story of the country's epic tragedy – it's very dangerous, physically hard to get at and we've all been preoccupied with Afghanistan, Iraq and everywhere else. I feel a personal guilt about this and I know some other Africa hands do as well. But it should not take media exposure to prompt the powerful nations on the UN Security Council into action, or to get the US to intervene unilaterally in the name of those values of decency and human dignity which President George Bush has so boldly pledged to uphold. The West's intelligence agencies, and thus governments, are well aware of what is happening.

With the Ugandans withdrawing, and the Rwandans and most of the other foreign armies gone, one part of the problem has disappeared. But a new and lethal vacuum is opening up. The killings around Bunia in the past few days are a warning: if Congo is left to the mercies of warlords and tribalists the 2 million dead already will have been but a signal of a much greater catastrophe. Could we act now, organise and dispatch an international force with African leadership? Of course we could if there were the will. Would such a force make any difference or would it become sucked into the mire of an endless conflict? It could make a big difference, and by not taking the risk we will be complicit in the unfolding horror.

The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent