Tag: war

The Ignored War

Silence=Rape
the Congoy is six years into a brutal conflict, in which up to 4.7 million people have died–the highest number of fatalities in any conflict since World War II. Or that six countries–Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia–have been fighting proxy wars in the DRC, and helping to plunder the country’s tremendous mineral wealth to fill their coffers.

The commerce in these “blood” minerals, such as coltan, used in cell phones and laptops, cobalt, copper, gold, diamonds and uranium (Congolese uranium was used in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), drives the conflict. The brutality of the militias–the sexual slavery, transmission of HIV/AIDS through rape, cannibalism, slaughter and starvation, forced recruitment of child soldiers–has routinely been employed to secure access to mining sites or insure a supply of captive labor.

Today’s conflict profiteers are not the first to sponsor a campaign to ransack, rape, pillage and plunder in the Congo. A century ago, Belgium’s King Leopold II amassed a fabulous fortune this way. During the monarch’s genocidal reign of terror, when villagers couldn’t meet his impossibly high quotas harvesting rubber or mining ore, their hands were amputated and women were taken as slaves. By the time he was finished, an estimated 10 million Congolese, half the population, were dead. Thanks to Randy Marks -warning the article is graphic.

Blame The Middle East Mess On the Brits & the French?

The Middle East Is Born Again – Forbes.com

“The peace settlements that followed World War I have recently come back into focus as one of the dominant factors shaping the modern world. The Balkans, the Middle East, Iraq, Turkey, and parts of Africa all owe their present-day problems, in part, to these negotiations.” —Ambassador Richard Holbrooke
The French and the British, beginning in 1919 Paris, sought to replace Arab political structures with their own European designs, creating nations in their own Western image. It was hardly a model for peace and prosperity. This template had, after all, led to a succession of bloody wars in Europe over the previous millennium. Still, Europe became the central power in the Middle East. The Western model of nations appeared to the peacemakers in Paris to be more akin to convenient political organizations with which to negotiate and do business than a host of feuding tribes.

The result is a legacy that continues to plague the region. Today, the United States is the region’s dominant power. But do the Iraqi people really want America’s Western-style democracy, or like the British and French before, does the U.S. simply want to create nations that resemble itself? In any case, it’s probably too late. The ethnic amalgams created in Paris in 1919 make any democratic nation as now constituted in a region like the Middle East problematic, as the West has already discovered in Yugoslavia. Continue reading “Blame The Middle East Mess On the Brits & the French?”