I am experienced and world weary, and it takes a lot to leave me speechless. But once Jodi Rudoren’s Orientalist pop anthropology from Gaza had flabbergasted me, her New York Times colleague in east Africa finished the job.
Jeffrey Gettleman missed the actual breaking news in eastern Congo two days ago, when several thousand armed predators calling themselves the M23 Movement seized Goma, a major regional city. Once he did show up, he opens his article with a favorable portrait of the M23, describing them as “lean, young rebels in pressed fatigues.” Only right at the end, almost as an afterthought, does he note that those pesky scolds at Human Rights Watch have found M23 guilty of “ethnic massacres, recruitment of children, mass rape, killings, abductions and torture.”
To his credit, Gettleman does note that neighboring Rwanda is masterminding the M23, mainly so it can continue to steal minerals from the eastern Congo. And he also points out that human rights groups have blistered Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the U.N., for disregarding the crimes of Rwanda and its president, Paul Kagame, a master manipulator who has mesmerized Rice and other U.S. policymakers since the mid 1990s.
Gettleman did leave out the part of the Human Rights Watch report where the organization warned, “Rwandan officials may be complicit in war crimes through their continued military assistance to M23 forces.”
But Gettleman missed the most important part of the story. The resurgent violence is sweeping through a region in which more than 5 million people have died since the Second Congo War started in 1998. That figure is not a misprint, but the result of careful surveys. By launching the latest attacks, Rwanda and its M23 proxies have guaranteed that many thousands more among the newest refugees will die of hunger and disease.
(The Nation has just posted my own look at the crisis in eastern Congo.
Not pop anthropology even. On another thread, I said re/ another equation of Rudoren to an anthropologist:
oh james. this leaves me speechless. god, this world we live in.
Thank you for the great summary article in the Nation. I only disagree with your use of the world “failure” for USFP; these are seen as successes by those who matter, including Obama and Susan Rice.
JAMES NORTH- Have you also missed the story in the Congo by soft-pedaling US involvement in mass murder for profit? Glen Ford over at Black Agenda Report has a somewhat more harsh appraisal.
“Barack Obama, like his predecessors George Bush and Bill Clinton, has pulled the strings, paid the cash, and sent the weapons that Uganda and Rwanda have used to cause the deaths of six million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo since invading that country in 1996. Various organs of the United Nations have repeatedly found America’s two top allies in Black Africa complicit in the Congo genocide, and on every occasion, the U.S. and Great Britain have protected the mass murderers. And why not? The genocide in Congo is the deliberate result of American and British policy. Uganda and Rwanda are merely henchmen, who commit mass murder in return for a cut of Congo’s vast stores of mineral resources. Western businesses are the ultimate beneficiaries.” (Glen Ford)
http://blackagendareport.com/content/america-and-politics-genocide-africa
not so long ago the u.s. government was also involved in the blood baths that occurred in the former portuguese colonies of mozambique and angola (circa a half-million lives lost in each), where, after winning liberation struggles against portugal, the people of these new republics opted for the socialist road to freedom & equality. of course the u.s. government (ever in fear of that one good example) could no more allow socialism to blossom in africa than in the americas/europe/asia, & consequent to its involvement, the above mentioned slaughters. the armed forces that the u.s. (& other western nations) trained & supported during this period were notorious for their use of child warriors, whose initiation rites into the ranks of the counter-revolutionaries was sometimes the killing of their own relatives.