Posted on 05/25/2003 5:13:35 AM PDT by microgood
Tony Blair is considering sending British soldiers to the Congo's ravaged war zone. Adrian Blomfield reports from Uvira on the horrific blood-letting they will encounter.
"That was close," said Khaled, the Egyptian major, fishing out a cigarette from his pyjama bottoms, after a huge explosion shook the United Nations building in Uvira, a rebel-held town in eastern Congo.
In the hills above the compound the shelling and machine-gun fire resumed with greater ferocity.
"Who's doing the fighting? Who knows?" he said. "We are five peacekeepers here: me, a Croatian, a Nigerian, a Malian and a Togolese. There are hundreds of thousands of people in this region. There are maybe six armies fighting each other. We have no guns. What are we supposed to do?"
He scanned the hills through camouflaged field-glasses, shrugged his shoulders and pattered back into the bare living room, where the huge Malian in sunglasses and a white robe was watching CNN on a tiny television set.
North of Uvira, beyond Rwandan-controlled territory and into Uganda's sphere of influence, lies Bunia, where Britain is considering sending several hundred troops to bolster a promised French mission under the auspices of the United Nations.
On Friday, Canada, Pakistan, Nigeria and South Africa all signalled that they, too, might send in forces following the appeal by the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, for a "coalition of the willing" to create a rapid reaction force for the Congo.
The British troops will be entering a chaotic maelstrom of a country torn by savage civil war, where around four million people have died in the conflict and UN authorities are investigating reports of cannibalism and other atrocities. Two UN peacekeepers, discovered hacked to death last week, may have been victims of cannibalism.
There is already a 750-strong UN peacekeeping force in Bunia but, not authorised to use force, they, like their colleagues in Uvira, have been trapped in their compound, powerless to intervene in the violence outside.
An orgy of brutal ethnic violence has gripped the town in recent weeks as Hema and Lendu tribes fight for supremacy.
High on drugs and lethal local brews, militias from both tribes have marauded through the town. Machete-wielding teenagers pinned babies to the ground and crushed their skulls underfoot before beheading their tiny victims. In recent days hundreds of bodies have been found in mass graves.
Tens of thousands fled; many to the peacekeepers' compound or the UN controlled airport. The militias attacked the compound, and the French commander of the Bunia mission was slashed across his chest with a machete as he remonstrated with the killers.
Outside the town, in the surrounding Ituri province, the situation could be even worse but it is too dangerous for aid workers to find out. The bodies of two UN soldiers, a Jordanian and a Malawian, operating 50 miles outside Bunia, were discovered last week. According to one of their colleagues they had been hacked to death and their hearts and livers eaten.
This savagery is by no means new. Mass graves are discovered on a regular basis in Ituri, where 50,000 people have been killed since Uganda and Rwanda invaded the Congo in 1998. Half-a-million more people are regularly displaced.
"We reckon that every family in Ituri, which has a population of just over four million people, has been forced to flee at one time or another in the last few years," said Gemma Swart of Oxfam.
Mr Annan is terrified of a repeat of the Rwanda's genocide in 1994, when he and the UN were accused of failing to prevent the massacre of up to one million people. On that occasion, Belgian troops scurried out of the country at the first sign of trouble.
Unlike the present ineffectual UN troops, British forces will have a mandate to shoot to kill if necessary. But even if they succeed in pacifying Ituri, this is unlikely to end the Congo's bloody and complex war. According to aid groups, between 3.1 million and 4.7 million people have died as a direct result of the war, making it the world's deadliest conflict since 1945.
When Rwanda invaded in 1998 it had a legitimate security concern. Perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide were sheltering in the Congo, lurking ominously near the border, where they were armed by the Kinshasa government.
Since then it has seized territory 15 times its own size, plundering the Congo's vast mineral wealth. Its troops have butchered tens of thousands of civilians, and its proxy rebel group, the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), has preyed on local villages, pillaging, raping and murdering and, in several cases, burying large groups of women alive.
Yet in the past few years Britain has become Rwanda's biggest donor and did little to pressure President Paul Kagame's government, diplomats in the region say.
Rwanda supposedly withdrew its troops from Congo last year but has repeatedly crossed the border to carry out raids. Last week Rwandan soldiers burnt down thousands of homes in villages across the Ruzizi plain, north of Uvira, and massacred possibly hundreds of people.
no comment
Who is supplying the ammunition?
Here's a quote from Dinesh D'Souza's web page at Hillsdale College.
Recently David Horowitz created a stir by attempting to place ads in college newspapers denouncing the idea of reparations for slavery -- that is, the disbursement of cash payments to blacks today as a way of repairing the injustice of historical slavery. This bizarre idea of reparations reminds me of a story related to the heavyweight fight in the mid-1970s between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Held in the African nation of Zaire, this famous fight was billed -- quite insensitively by contemporary standards -- as the "Rumble in the Jungle." In any case, after the fight was over and the victorious Ali returned to America, he was asked by a reporter what he thought of Africa. He replied, "Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat."
There are hundreds of thousands of people in this region. There are maybe six armies fighting each other. We have no guns. What are we supposed to do?"
High on drugs and lethal local brews, militias from both tribes have marauded through the town. Machete-wielding teenagers pinned babies to the ground and crushed their skulls underfoot before beheading their tiny victims. In recent days hundreds of bodies have been found in mass graves.
The bodies of two UN soldiers, a Jordanian and a Malawian, operating 50 miles outside Bunia, were discovered last week. According to one of their colleagues they had been hacked to death and their hearts and livers eaten.
This is truly the Heart of Darkness.
Solutions... Hmmm. A convential army bound by such cumbersome millstones as the Geneva Conventions and the ICC will not succeed here. What is needed is an army of mercenaries with no official oversight. A French Foreign Legion with an obscene budget. A free market solution in other words. The ultimate prize would be the country itself.
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Everest has been conquered by amateurs. The moon has been walked on. There is practically no frontier for the adventurous soul nowadays to conquer. Save one...
No white man has ever taken a pirogue (a Congolese canoe) down the Congo alone. It's never been done. It's been tried but to this point- it's been impossible. It's not even certain if any black man has ever done it. The Congo (the River) is truly the last frontier. It would take a "manly man" to accomplish this. A fellow failed to do it recently but still managed a book deal outlining his failure. The payoff for success should be lucrative and the bragging rights exclusive. You'd be the modern day equivalent to Tarzan. If any Freeper would accomplish this feat, I would gladly pay him $100.
What is needed is an army of mercenaries with no official oversight. A French Foreign Legion with an obscene budget. A free market solution in other words. The ultimate prize would be the country itself.
All of the following is theoretical and for information purposes only.
That idea may not be as remote as you think. There are many soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan who are about to leave the US military and have no jobs when they leave. Ditto the British Army. Also, some Israelis choose to leave the IDF after their minimum service. Odds are they've seen service in the Palestinian territories and/or Southern Lebanon. The Germans and several other European nations are cutting their defence budgets and releasing people. Also, a lot of Russian ex-soldiers with service in Afghanistan and/or Chechnya need work too. The same for Serbian troops who fought in Kosovo. Also, you can hire ex-FFL members. Hell, Croatian ex-FFL members made up the cadre of the Croatian Army during their war of independence from the Yugoslavs. Manpower, you have no problem.
Weapons: Eastern Europe is still one large arms bazaar. As is the case with Russia. ComBloc weapons are cheap and reliable for the mission at hand. Would I want to equip an army to take on the US with them, no. But they're good enough for pacifying Third World types. You can also acquire US surplus weapons and gear if you know where to look. Also, many Western European militaries are going through modernization so their old weapons can be found. Also, look at equipping in Africa.
Funding: I'm sure there are people who would be willing to put up the money to build this kind of force. After securing the country in question, you can use that nation's economy to fund your force, partially, and use the nation as a base of operations for the next mission.
I hope this force is one day created to pacify the Third World and give the people of those countries in question a chance to leave in peace and liberty.
Matt, I'm pinging you to this because you and I talked about something like this a few months back.
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