What a mess

News from East and Central Africa generally concentrates on Southern Sudan, Somalia and Rwanda; the some 300,000 who have died in the Dafur region, the pirates off of the Somalian coast and the Rwandan genocide, which saw the deaths of up to a million Tutsi are well known. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, where some six million people have died in the last ten years, and Uganda, however, receive scant coverage. Today, for instance, I was lucky enough to find a current article in the 'Guardian', which reports on how the situation in North and South Kivu, after "completion" of the joint DRC/Rwandan operations, has not improved.(1) The article goes on to explain how, following the Rwandan army's withdrawal from DRC in February, the FDLR Hutu forces are now returning to their former positions and one local is reported as saying, ""What good did it do to provoke the FDLR if you were not able to finish them off once and for all?"(2) We could also view the joint operations against Joseph Kony's 'Lord Resistence Army' in a similar vain; the quite mad Joseph, is still on the rampage, no closer to being captured, and now he really has got a bee in his bonnet and in the meantime the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame is no closer to handing his "protege" Nkunda over to Kinshasa for the crimes he commited in the DRC. It is one bloody mess down in Central and East Africa and we are confronted with a reality where "Uncle Sam's" stooges, Museveni in Uganda, Kagame in Uganda and Mayardit in the South Sudan, stir up the hornet's nest at will but are exonerated of any responsibility for their actions. Indeed, they are portrayed in the western media as genuine leaders and, for a time at least, in Museveni's case, and to some extent, in Kagame's case, statesmen. We are not told that Museveni is ethnically cleansing the Acholi, Kony's tribe, in Northern Uganda and that Kagame is pursuing a little genocide of his own in North and South Kivu and in Rwanda itself. Now, why should we be told that? After all, these are the guys who wear the white stetsons, "our men in Africa", the "goodies". Moreover, the media, by keeping mum on "Uncle Sam's" sychophants, allows that very efficient divide and rule policy that facilitates the bigger rape of the region; the rape of some of the richest mineral resources in the planet. Half the truth covers up the big lie, the lie of a democratic, freedom loving, humanitarian, altruistic, US of A.
1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/10/congo-united-nations-aid
2 ibid