Spotted on one of my of my favourite websites/blogs on European and left politics, Spectrezine (I just love that name), is a piece from Tony Iltis, originally written for Green Left Weekly, on the ongoing conflict in the Congo and some of the causative factors for the decades long conflict in the region.
Fair play to Iain, he managed to get over 2,200 people voting in his poll for the top Northern Irish blogs this year… We (just, I imagine) retained our top spot, with Splintered coming straight in at number 2, no doubt his pet subject du jour will have garnered him a lot of fans… I’ve [...] read our review »
World by Storm has a nice piece up on the IRA’s role in helping MK, the armed wing of the ANC, in the 1980s. In particular he sees a strange alchemy at work there: …if one can think of a clearly legitimate contemporary struggle it was that against apartheid and it is to the credit [...] read our review »
Somehow I escaped reading this essential school text, with its story of racism in 1930s American South. Living in Northern Ireland, I draw parallels with sectarianism, with its similar bigotry and prejudice. To Kill a Mockingbird was part of a Unite Against Hate campaign event at Parliament Buildings in Northern Ireland, which I’ve written [...] read our review »
It’s been a long time since I have read such drivel.
According to Iltis, even though Che, the Cubans and Malcolm X did their best to help, the US is responsible for all of the current problems in Congo.
What a pathetic fantasy.
Mark,
I have considerable sympathy for some of that analysis. However, there have always been ethnic tensions there so I suspect some of all of this cannot be laid at the door of the West. Also France has traditionally supported the Francophone Hutus rather than the Anglophone Tutsis. As such one needs to be a little cautious when quoting French sources: though clearly Anglo Saxon ones are also biased.
The current UN forces are African and are completely overwhelmed. They have indeed committed acts of rape, violence etc. which is utterly to be condemned. However, if they were not there the situation might be even worse. One of their problems seems to be that they are relatively few in number and poorly equipped. They may also lack adequate training I do not know.
Some of the local population seem to be calling for Western intervention. Western intervention would bring weapons, training and equipment which would almost certainly prevent direct attacks on them and areas they held. There would, however, be the possibility of creating a guerilla war.
It is an extremely difficult situation and which option is the least worse is difficult to be sure. However, harking back to the imperial past, accurate as it is does not necessarily mean that western intervention is inherently wrong. Had there been proper western intervention in Rwanda in 1994 there would have been a lot less deaths tahn there were.
François Mitterand attended a rally in the capital of Rwanda with “Papamadit” and the crowd was chanting “Tues les Tutsis” which someone its meaning was lost in translation and people actually thought that it meant that the Hutus aimed to harm to the Tutsis.