Jeffrey Gettleman’s article in today’s NYT is a modest improvement over his failure yesterday. He has stopped hero-worshipping the Rwandan-supported M23 armed force that seized the regional capital of Goma, even noting that the group “has a long history of killing civilians.”
He also finally reported that the Rwandan/M23 attack is triggering a humanitarian disaster that will certainly add to the 5 million death toll in the region, a point he left out of yesterday’s dispatch. He briefly quotes an official with the relief agency Oxfam who warns that the renewed fighting will spread cholera and other diseases.
On the other hand, he neglects to mention that Rwanda is supporting and quite probably commanding the M23, and that the United States has so far refused to come out and condemn Rwandan involvement.
Easily the most valuable part of the article is the heartbreaking photograph that accompanies it, which shows thousands of Congolese refugees fleeing the fighting. You can make out people in the front ranks of the crowd who are carrying their mattresses on their heads and backs.
Gettleman did not interview any of these people. Only a single Congolese is quoted in the article: the prime minister, who is presumably in the far-off capital, Kinshasa. Isn’t Gettleman interested in listening to people who are so poor they can’t bear to leave their mattresses behind?
(My own view of the latest tragedy in Congo is here.)
I see striking parallels between Rwanda and Israel. The Rwandan leaders also exploit the sympathy that many people feel for them in connection with the past genocide of their people (in this case the Tutsis) to justify their aggression against a neighboring country. While the real reasons for the incursions into eastern Congo are those you explain in your article (especially the valuable metals there), the official reason has been the need to hunt down the Hutu Interahamwe forces that supposedly threaten renewal of the genocide.
What does the US Congress Black Caucus say about this subject?
This lack of attention to one of the worst of the worst of current (or is that ever) genocides is one of the biggest reasons to solve the Palestine-Israel conflict. At least it’s one that I use, conversationally to respond to the “Why should I care about I/P?” shrug.
Instead of the State Department spending all (literally) of its time trying to thwart the Palestinians at the UN and everywhere else, it could be spending those considerable and potent resources solving this ongoing catastrophe. Same with all the other departments and/or branches of the USG. Same with other mass killing around the globe.
Thanks for bringing this up, here, JN. It’s an important part of the I/P context. So much tragic waste of humanity occurs as the I/P conflict is allowed to, and in fact is designed to, fester.
Herman’s “The Politics of Genocide”
also Andre Vltchek
“In the Heart of the DR Congo
The Most Brutal Genocide Money Can Buy
by ANDRE VLTCHEK
The camp for Congolese refugees in Kisoro is overcrowded, and people keep flowing in. The border between Uganda and DR Congo is just a few kilometers away, and right behind the border the vicious fighting goes on; there is true bloodshed and carnage.
The border is called Bunagana. I drive there, I film, and I talk to a few people. There is tension, everybody is edgy – locals and refugees. One cannot tell who is who. Both Ugandans and Congolese know, but, the outsider cannot tell the difference; it is one region, one area. People were coming back and forth for years and decades, people were mixing, staying at both sides of the border legally and illegally.
But now, there is almost nothing left to go back to at the other side of the border. Murderous militia M23 recently went on the rampage – killing, raping and looting with no mercy, and with absolute impunity.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/14/the-most-brutal-genocide-money-can-buy/
I like the grading of the NYTimes reporting, when supported by facts with its own ideological underpinnings “unconcealed.” I’d be interested to know how many readers Mondoweiss gets – I really have no idea. As people tune into the second-rate nature of the journalistic product, and to the bankrupt “thinking” that underlies it, it is only a matter of time before it falls or corrects itself as the so-called newspaper of record.