Posted on 04/09/2003 12:30:22 AM PDT by FairOpinion
THE UN Security Council has asked the UN Human Rights Commission to investigate the massacre of nearly 1000 people in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The 15-member council asked the commissioner "to initiate an investigation on these events and report to the Council as soon as possible," said Mexican ambassador to the United Nations Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, whose country holds the rotating presidency.
"Members of the Council condemned the massacres ... and asked that the perpetrators be identified and brought to justice immediately."
The UN mission in the DRC, known by its French acronym MONUC, reported that nearly 1000 people were killed, mostly by machete, last Thursday in the north-eastern city of Ituri, near the DRC's border with Uganda.
The council today also "called on the Ugandan forces to withdraw from the territory of the DRC without delay".
It added: "So long as they are deployed on the ground, these forces have the responsibility to ensure the safety of the civilian population".
The DRC, formerly Zaire, has been mired in conflict since the mid-1990s.
The present conflict - which broke out in 1998 and has been the subject of numerous shaky peace accords - drew in seven other African countries at its height and has left at least 3.5 million people dead as a direct or indirect result of fighting.
A similar number of people have been displaced by the war.
Considering that this conflict has been going on for at least 5 years and 3.5 million people died, I would consider it a dismal failure of the UN.
Probably after the UN would take Iraq over, the faddayin could run wild, stopping humanitarian aid, then, after 3 million Iraqis died, then the UN would blame it all on the US for getting involved and would start an investigation of US war crimes. But I can just picture that is exactly what would happen, Iraq would decent into a civil war, just like Congo.
The same UNHRC whose members include the repressive communist dictatorships of Cuba, Vietnam and Venezuela, as well as the Sudan, where slavery thrives and Christians are slaughtered en masse, and Zimbabwe, another state eminently unqualified to investigate genocide.
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