We read today, 11 Dec 2008, about UN peacekeeping forces meeting only an hour from the site of yet another massacre in Congo, bloody brutality rampaging without restraint from any quarter. They were reportedly there to evacuate foreign aid workers and to locate a missing journalist, and trying to “understand the situation”, while people were being slaughtered wholesale nearby. Is the colossal military might of the West really unable to try for victory over bayonets and rape squads? Or are they just getting busy elsewhere? http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/world/africa/11congo.html?hp
We have heard Nicholas Kristof rage on about Darfur in editorials and articles all last year, heard Bush yammer about ‘having to do something about that genocide there in Darfur’, yet the situation only worsens, left in the hapless hands of unfunded humanitarians and powerless volunteers. Zimbabweans die by the second of starvation, cholera and murder, but world leaders are busy, very busy, with something quite different, something much more important to them.
This is the Business of War that Eisenhower warned against, the Military Industrial Complex becoming the business of America. To continue to say that Saddam Hussein was “toppled” in order to aid the Iraqi people is an obscenity. To call Pakistan a democracy and an ‘important ally in the war on terror’ is Orwellian.
“The world has long declared its revulsion at the atrocities committed by Sudan’s government and its proxy militias in Darfur and done almost nothing to stop it. It took years of political wrangling to get the Security Council to approve a strengthened peacekeeping force with deployment set for Jan. 1. More than 11 months later, the Security Council has managed to send only 10,000 of the promised 26,000 peacekeepers. Large-scale military attacks against populated areas continue.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/opinion/11thu1.html
But why should there have been ‘years of political wrangling’, when the decision to terminate Saddam Hussein happened behind closed doors over the space of a few dark nights? And who is “the world” spoken of here? Obviously, it does not include our oil enemies, it does not include those affluent nations who have decided to ‘make money, not peace’. We must begin to express our outrage, that we are being represented only by those who have financial interests in our own or other countries’ governments. We must express our outrage at being impotent to lead, when we are the world’s biggest consumers of resources.
Otherwise, we must admit to being complicit and content with our role as pirates, plunderers who rob wealth from anyone too weak to defend it, no matter what the human cost.
I have been asked on this site, « what can we do? » You have a voice. Write to your Congresspeople – if they haven’t already been indicted themselves, that is.