Just two months ago today, this blog reported on a massacre in Congo which took place as ‘a contingent of 100 U.N. peacekeepers’ were less than a mile away, supposedly unaware of the execution-style killings that claimed over 150 lives in one day. “The peacekeepers were short of equipment and men, United Nations officials said… Already overwhelmed… they had no intelligence capabilities or even an interpreter who could speak the necessary languages. The peacekeepers said they had no idea that the killings were taking place until it was all over….’Kiwanja was a disaster for everyone …The people were betrayed not just by rebels who committed terrible war crimes against them but by the international community that failed to protect them.’”
Yesterday, hidden in the Saturday NY Times, we read of a new and even more brutal attack – the Lord’s Resistance Army had made its way into Congo, ‘hiding out’ in a national park.
“The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on [the] notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians…But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack town after town in northeastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way.”
“The United States has been training Ugandan troops in counterterrorism for several years, but its role in the operation has not been widely known. …[Senior US Military Officials] described a team of 17 advisers and analysts from the Pentagon’s new Africa Command working closely with Ugandan officers on the mission, providing satellite phones, intelligence and $1 million in fuel.”
“The troops did not seal off the rebels’ escape routes or deploy soldiers to many of the nearby towns where the rebels slaughtered people in churches and even tried to twist off toddlers’ heads….American officials conceded that the operation did not go as well as intended, and that villagers had been left exposed. ‘We provided insights and alternatives for them to consider, but their choices were their choices,” said one American military official who was briefed on the operation, referring to the African forces on the ground. ‘In the end, it was not our operation.’”
IS ANYONE SERIOUSLY TRYING TO DEFEND THESE PEOPLE? The buck-passing is so shameless, the efforts so lame and useless, I cannot believe the object of any US or UN troops in Africa is to defend the people themselves. So what is their purpose?
“The Ugandan government has tried coaxing Mr. Kony [the rebel leader] out. But the International Criminal Court in The Hague has indicted him on charges of crimes against humanity, and he has long insisted the charges be dropped. In November, as he has many times before, Mr. Kony refused to sign a peace treaty.”
Refused to sign, did he? Well, you can’t force the man after all, he did ‘insist’ the charges be dropped, and they had ‘tried coaxing’ him.
This looks to me like a situation I have seen more than once over the last ten years. I have seen it in Israel, I have seen it in Tora Bora, I have seen it on the Pakistan border, and other places where it is in somebody’s interest to have people being massacred without consequences, the ‘small wars’ of the type conspiracy theorists everywhere consider business as usual for the CIA. What is really going on here? Is it as simple as it looks, that this is being ‘allowed’ to happen?
“Thick fog delayed the attack by several hours, Ugandan officials said, and they lost the element of surprise. By the time Ugandan helicopters bombed Mr. Kony’s hut, it was empty. Ugandan foot soldiers, hiking many miles through the bush, arrived several days later and recovered a few satellite phones and some guns.”
We have read this story too many times before, as in the weeks after Sept 2001 for one example. But not in today’s papers: except for this one article in the NYTimes (which I almost couldn’t find again today, buried in the archives already as it was), I saw no reporting on this incident in any of the major international news sources.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/world/africa/11congo.html?ref=africa