countdown till Bush gets blamed for this......
Yeah, let's blame Bush!
Because blaming those who actually perpetrated these atrocities would be construed as racism.
You guys certainly have a short memory for the 8 years the Republican leadership and the right wing NeoCons promoted blaming Clinton for anything and everything.
Bush is not to blame for this tragedy which has been going on for decades, but he did contribute to making it worse and did nothing to make it better. And before you brush off everything else I post, Bill Clinton did almost no better in this particular region of the world, though one has to note he did send troops to Somalia and the public back home said, "no, bring the soldiers back".
When there were starving children in Somalia on the American TV news, there was sort of a public outcry to do something. Then in trying to help, our soldiers were attacked. Americans had this idea we were going to go in and assist with food deliveries. Instead we found ourselves in the middle of a cruel and violent culture. That wasn't what the public expected when they urged Clinton to go ahead and take action. And the resulting BlackHawk downed was too much to take.
Of course the Republican leadership acted in their own best interest instead of the country's and promoted their usual blame Clinton for anything and everything but that's a side track. It did, however, result in the public focusing almost entirely on Clinton's actions instead of the humanitarian crisis which preceded it. I'm sure the Somalia mess is one reason you see almost no public push for action in Darfur.
It is no secret we have intervened a lot less in preventing humanitarian crises in areas of the world where the victims are black. However, I'm less inclined to say it's because the victims are black and more inclined to say, we simply don't identify with them. We don't have the same empathetic response to people who don't look like or live like anything we picture ourselves living and looking like.
Of course none of this means we haven't been interfering. Believe it or not, we have been involved including Bush and it wasn't in some trivial way.
The history of the Congalese trajedy can be found here:
Behind the Scenes: Warlords’ Deadly Battle in Congo
To discuss the involvement of foreign companies, governments, and people as well as discussing which corrupt officials and leaders within the country are behind this atrocity should not be brushed off by claiming it is some over broad attack on Bush or it is blaming America. The history of foreign involvement is what it is. And the US has been complicit including specific actions by GW Bush.
...the plunder of the Congo was advanced by Belgian colonial interests from 1908 to "independence" on June 30, 1960.
Following a coup d’etat orchestrated in part by Israeli American Maurice Tempelsman and his corporate allies, the country emerged from the first Congo crises (1960-1967) with U.S.-backed Colonel Joseph Mobutu installed as President.(1) Mobutu and his corporate partners plundered Congo from 1965 to 1996, and many of the same "untouchables" of the Mobutu era—Maurice Tempelsman, Etienne Davignon, George Forrest, the Blattners—are plundering Congo today.(2)
The Pentagon backed the overthrow of Mobutu in 1996-1997. This invasion was led by Rwanda and Uganda, backed by the U.S., Canada, U.K., Belgium and Israel. Washington’s support of the overthrow had to do with corporate interests in the region. International businesses wanted to reorganize the power structure in the region to better exploit the Congo's riches and displace deeply entrenched competitors. By July 1996, Mobutu was negotiating with George H.W. Bush over Barrick Gold interests in Zaire's Kilo Moto goldfields and for Adolph Lundin interests in copper/cobalt in Katanga. The invasion of Zaire swung into action after Paul Kagame visited the Pentagon in August 1996.(3)...
We need to look at the facts and not ignore them simply because Bush gets named. We should use the facts to help determine the best course of action, if any, that we might do which would help end the violence. As it is now, these people have been raised on violence since they were children. The task of changing such a culture is overwhelming. I do think we at least owe the Congolese people a re-examination of how our own corporate interests are supporting the corrupt warlords that are responsible for the torture and cruelty going on.
And in this particular case, I am especially disturbed by the horrendous use of rape as a weapon. Women are only rarely ever the perpetrators of violence. It is disgusting to see men attack women instead of even fighting each other. We saw it in Bosnia and there is an epidemic of it in the Congo and neighboring countries. Attacking women and kidnapping and forcing children to become soldiers really is something we should be trying to stop.
I'm reluctant to link to a Christian Missionary web site since they also have their share of contributing to world violence (along with a lot of good in some cases) but this web site had the information I was looking for:
Corporate Complicity in Congo's War
Since 1996, nearly four million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from a conflict that has involved several rebel armies, the militaries of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Namibia, Angola, and their proxy militias. These armed groups and the official Congolese army have shifted alliances, split apart and regrouped under other names, but they all have important aspects in common: they target civilians and they all use rape as a weapon of war. Rape as a Weapon of War
[snip]
The director of a woman's organization in Goma told us that if we wanted Westerners to understand the roots of violence in Congo, we ought to publicize how Western countries are facilitating and profiting from Congo's misery by dumping weapons into the country. "We are treated like the wastebasket of the world," she said. A representative of the human rights organization COHDO spoke to our delegation of an "Anglophone conspiracy" by the United States, United Kingdom, and South Africa to keep distributing arms to militias and armies. By doing so, he said, they keep the region destabilized, and thus open to the exploitation of its resources.
According to most of the people we spoke to, these resources are perhaps the key ingredient to understanding Congo's misery. The country has rich deposits of diamonds, gold, cobalt, timber, and other natural resources. It also contains 85 percent of the world's coltan ore. Tantalum, an element derived from this ore, is essential to the manufacture of laptop computers and cell phones.
[snip]
A 2003 follow-up report by the [UN] panel listed eighty-five multinational companies that had profited from the war in Congo, including six U.S.-owned companies: Cabot Corporation, Eagle Wings Resources International (a subsidiary of Trinitech International), Kemet Electronics Corporation, OM Group, and Vishay Sprague. With the exception of Belgium, few governments in countries where these corporations are based have made an attempt to hold these corporations accountable for the contributions they made to the violence in Congo.
And from Common Dreams:
Global Businesses Profit from Congo War, Groups Charge
It's hard to boycott the products of these companies because they make things that go into other products before reaching the retail market. There are some people moving to not give up their proxy votes or to get proxy votes of others from the stock shares they hold in these corporations.
I think if we are ever going to affect change it is going to be by convincing corporate decision makers their goal is not simply to make the most money, it is to do so in a humanitarian way.
