The world is quick to "ignore" Africa even if there are famines, floods, wars and massacres going on in one of the countries making up the large continent. Then again, one rarely reads or sees any reports from Africa, good, bad or indifferent.
Things are grim in the Congo, as this report "In Congo, UN troops prove useless again" on star.com from Congo so painfully reveals.
"The uselessness of UN peacekeeping troops is yet again being witnessed by the world — or at least that tiny fraction of the planet that cares what happens in the endlessly exploited and chronically invaded Congo.
Africa’s World War, as it is known — an estimated 5 million dead, most succumbing to the cascading effects of conflict, displacement, malnutrition, disease and poverty — formally came to an end in 2003, with armies from half a dozen meddlesome neighbouring countries withdrawing their forces.
Paramilitaries, however, stayed put, retreating into the thick jungles that surround major cities in eastern regions of the nation. Most notable of those rebel factions were the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), purportedly defunct and integrated into the Congolese army, and the Forces Démocratique de Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu guerrilla group based in the eastern DRC that originally crossed the border in pursuit of Tutsis.
Extremist Hutus were responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, upwards of 800,000 ethnic rival Tutsis and moderate Hutus slain in a killing frenzy that the West (and the UN) had been warned was coming — indeed, the plotted mass carnage had been advertised and promoted on radio broadcasts — yet did nothing to avert. Canadian Senator Romeo Dallaire, force commander of the UN mission in Rwanda at the time, knows this only too well. His increasingly desperate warnings were ignored. An untold number of bodies were simply dumped in Lake Kivu, to hide the evidence. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has called the failure to respond the deepest regret of his terms in office."
Things are grim in the Congo, as this report "In Congo, UN troops prove useless again" on star.com from Congo so painfully reveals.
"The uselessness of UN peacekeeping troops is yet again being witnessed by the world — or at least that tiny fraction of the planet that cares what happens in the endlessly exploited and chronically invaded Congo.
Africa’s World War, as it is known — an estimated 5 million dead, most succumbing to the cascading effects of conflict, displacement, malnutrition, disease and poverty — formally came to an end in 2003, with armies from half a dozen meddlesome neighbouring countries withdrawing their forces.
Paramilitaries, however, stayed put, retreating into the thick jungles that surround major cities in eastern regions of the nation. Most notable of those rebel factions were the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), purportedly defunct and integrated into the Congolese army, and the Forces Démocratique de Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu guerrilla group based in the eastern DRC that originally crossed the border in pursuit of Tutsis.
Extremist Hutus were responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, upwards of 800,000 ethnic rival Tutsis and moderate Hutus slain in a killing frenzy that the West (and the UN) had been warned was coming — indeed, the plotted mass carnage had been advertised and promoted on radio broadcasts — yet did nothing to avert. Canadian Senator Romeo Dallaire, force commander of the UN mission in Rwanda at the time, knows this only too well. His increasingly desperate warnings were ignored. An untold number of bodies were simply dumped in Lake Kivu, to hide the evidence. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has called the failure to respond the deepest regret of his terms in office."
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