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Genocide and Chaos in the Congo

November 18th, 2008
By MICHAEL STICKINGS, Assistant Editor

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Please check out Michael Kavanagh’s “Five Million Dead and Counting” at Slate, a reporter’s account of the ongoing civil war and atrocities in North Kivu, an eastern province of the Congo:

There are now more than 1 million displaced people scattered throughout the province. In the last 10 years of fighting, more than 5 million people have died in the Congolese conflict — mostly civilians who haven’t had access to enough food or health care because of the fighting. And let’s be clear: That’s 5 million and counting.

Essentially, the civil war in the Congo is an extension of the civil war and genocide in Rwanda, with — if I may simplify — Congolese Tutsi rebels, led by Laurent Nkunda and backed by Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government, in battle against the Congolese government and Rwandan Hutus in the Congo: “And the early returns look like displacement, starvation, rape, murder, and terror.” (According to the International Rescue Committee, “[c]onflict and humanitarian crisis in [the Congo] have taken the lives of 5.4 million people since 1988 and continue to leave as many as 45,000 dead every month.”)

There is a good deal of blame to go around, with brutality on both sides, but Kavanagh rightly points to the failure of the international community — the U.N., the E.U., the U.S., and the A.U. — to respond in any meaningful way to the crisis.

Make sure to read the whole thing. We all need to pay more attention to Africa — and to what’s going on in the Congo (it’s not just Darfur that’s suffering). And not just when Bono or Bob Geldof or John le Carré tells us to.



This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Civil War (Other Than the US 1861-1865), Congo, Genocide, Africa. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 3 Comments

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    Well, plenty of us are adults and know that we aren't the killers in the Congo and obviously aren't to blame -- we're not mentally ill or developmentally retarded. That's why we already know we don't "have" to pay more attention to Africa than we have routinely been doing since World War II, and why we don't do what Bono or other playpen-lefty celebs "tell us to do." That's for Romper Room.

    Something far more important (and which merits much more time on this site, which strays so often not only into left-immoderation, but on specious topics) currently is this set of appeals mainly to lefties,

    http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/WSJ...

    http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/WSJ...

    http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/WSJ...

    http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/document...

    and an additional set of remarks that include alternative suggestions at its end,

    http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/WSJ...

    and welcome commentary here.

    http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/
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    DLS, stop channeling your inner fool for a moment. The subject here is the Congo, not the future of US auto manufacturing. The 5 million dead have nothing to do with left or right, and certainly not with your own pretensions to being an "adult".
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    It's always funny (hahafunny) to read commenters trying to guide the blog host on what is important. The canned response to DLS is: get your own blog and post all of those WSJ links, k?

    WRT Africa in general and the Congo specifically, I follow the ongoing troubles there, but don't blog about them as much as I should. My international students are much more interested in what happens in Africa than my fellow Americans. Thank you for this post. I did need a second reminder to return to the subject in my writings.

    Without the links to support my assertions, I think that the A.U. is stretched pretty thin with the addition of Somalia to its burden of both Sudan/Chad and the Congo. South Africa had had some success in that region in recent years, but their government has had its own problems, which, how can I say, distract from its role of continental peace maker.

    I remember when I was advocating for action by the U.S. in Sudan and speculating that the lack of it was because the Bush administration's hopes that the Sudanese would come up with some info, that right wingers accused me of advocating military action there -- but I wasn't. But for the last two days Hugh Hewitt has been advocating that the U.S. military blow up the oil tanker that the Somali pirates took over. Hugh says, "Just blow it up!" And he can, because 1)it's not his tanker and 2)it's not his kin on that boat.

    DLS, keep your head down, the world is coming . . .
 
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