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Obama's Rwanda? The Slaughter In The Congo

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  • Obama's Rwanda? The Slaughter In The Congo

    OBAMA'S RWANDA? THE SLAUGHTER IN THE CONGO
    DAVID ROSEN

    CounterPunch
    http://www.counterpunch.org/ro sen04302010.html
    April 30 2010

    On a trip to Rwanda in March 1998, President Bill Clinton issued
    what has come to be known as the "Clinton apology." Speaking on the
    Kigali Airport tarmac, he (in)famously stated: "We come here today
    partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and
    the world community did not do as much as we could have and should
    have done to try to limit what occurred [in Rwanda]." He then added
    in true Clintonesque style:

    It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost
    members of your family, but all over the world there were people
    like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not
    fully appreciate [pause] the depth [pause] and the speed [pause]
    with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.

    By "unimaginable terror," Clinton was referring to the Rwandan
    Genocide of 1994 in which Hutus, in a campaign orchestrated by the
    Hutu-led government, slaughtered an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu
    political moderates. "We did not act quickly enough after the killing
    began," he apologized. "We should not have allowed the refugee camps
    to become safe havens for the killers. We did not immediately call
    these crimes by their rightful name: genocide."

    In this mea culpa, "Slick Willie" artfully dodged his and U.S.

    culpability in facilitating the genocide. As the old adage asks:
    What did he know and when did he know it? According to Samantha
    Power, the Harvard foreign policy scholar and now with the Obama
    National Security Council, Clinton woke up to the horrors of Rwanda
    while reading a "New Yorker" article by Philip Gourevitch. She reports
    that he forwarded the article to his national-security adviser, Sandy
    Berger, demanding: "'How did this happen?," adding, 'I want to get
    to the bottom of this.'"

    And getting to the bottom of it he surely didn't. As Power reminds us,
    "The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror
    in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in
    stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the
    death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands." [Power, "Bystanders
    to Genocide," Atlantic, September 2001]

    Clinton, secretary of state Madeleine Albright and others within his
    administration knew for years what was taking place in Rwanda and
    did little to halt the genocide. After the bloodletting ceased,
    Clinton awoke from a somnambulist stupor, saxophone in hand,
    and, being America's "first black president," flew to Kigali to
    apologize. His apology rang hollow to those who had suffered due to
    Clinton's inaction.

    The question before President Obama is whether he will, like Clinton
    and many other of his predecessor, awake from his presidential slumber
    in a few years and travel to Kinshasa to make yet another apology
    for his and his administration's failed policies with regard to the
    slaughter taking place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)?

    Standing aside in the face of horrendous slaughter, be it formally
    "genocide" or another form of mass killing, rape and pillage, is
    as American as apple pie. Sadly, Obama seems to be continuing this
    ignoble tradition.

    * * *

    The DRC has been in a state of war since 1994 when the Rwanda Genocide
    spilled across its eastern border. Civil struggle, ethnic conflicts,
    foreign invasions and battles over mineral wealth have repeatedly
    overwhelmed this fragile country. Estimates of those killed since the
    outbreak of the "First Congo War" in 1996 range from 3 million (Human
    Security Report) to 5.4 million (International Rescue Committee). No
    matter which estimate one accepts, the ongoing slaughter taking place
    in the DRC represents the greatest bloodletting since World War II.

    Oxfam International recently released a study, "Now, The World Is
    Without Me," assessing the growing horror of violence being inflicted
    on the noncombatant population in the DRC, especially the systematic
    campaign of rape of women and young girls. The Harvard Humanitarian
    Initiative conducted the study. More than 4,000 rape victims were
    interviewed from 2004 to 2008 in a hospital in the eastern city
    of Bukavu.

    Rape has long been an instrument of war, a tactic used to terrorize
    the noncombatant population. [See "'The Hard Hand of War': Rape as
    an Instrument of Total War," CounterPunch, April 4, 2008] In the DRC,
    members of the Congolese army, Rwandan militias and armed gangs have
    raped tens of thousands of women. According to the Oxfam report, there
    has been a 17-fold increase in civilian rape over the past few years.

    More than 9,000 people, including men and boys, were raped in 2009.

    The study's findings are deeply disturbing:

    # 60 percent of rape victims surveyed were gang raped by armed men;

    # 56 percent of assaults were carried out in the family home by
    armed men;

    # 16 percent took place in fields and almost 15 percent in the forest;

    # 57 percent of assaults were carried out at night.

    Sexual slavery was also reported, affecting 12 percent of the women
    with some being held captive and repeatedly raped for years.

    More revealing as to the spread of the "fog of war" to civil society is
    the finding that in 2008 civilians committed 38 percent of the rapes,
    compared to less than 1 percent in 2004. The study notes: "These
    findings imply a normalisation of rape among the civilian population,
    suggesting the erosion of all constructive social mechanisms that
    ought to protect civilians from sexual violence."

    Rape is an act of violation and, in a traditional or patriarchal
    society, a mark of shame often borne by the victim for years. The Oxfam
    study reports that female rape victims feel stigmatized by the act of
    violation, that they are somehow responsible for the crime perpetrated
    against them. They often are rejected by the their families and 9
    percent report being abandoned by their spouse. They often do not seek
    medical care for fear of being identified as a victim; only 12 percent
    come to the local hospital within a month of the assault and over half
    of the women waited more than a year before seeking treatment. Sadly,
    very few women came for treatment in time to prevent HIV infection.

    "Rape of this scale and brutality is scandalous," said Krista Riddley,
    director of Oxfam's humanitarian policy. "This is a wake-up call
    at a time when plans are being discussed for UN peacekeepers to
    leave the country. The situation is not secure if a woman can't even
    sleep safely in her own bed at night." Susan Bartels, Harvard's chief
    researcher, warns, "Sexual violence has become more normal in civilian
    life. ... The scale of rape over Congo's years of war has made this
    crime seem more acceptable."

    * * *

    America has a long history of denying immoral socio-political barbary.

    It starts with Thomas Jefferson, who not only wrote eloquently as to
    the rights of human subjects, but accepted the horrors of slavery as
    part of the fabric of the new nation and, as a slave-owner, fathered
    six children with a slave woman he clearly loved.

    Andrew Jackson, the valiant commander of the victorious forces in the
    Battle of New Orleans, waged a vicious war against America's native
    people, most notably his slaughter of the Seminole and Creek Indians
    in 1817. As he advised, "We are not only fighting hostile armies,
    but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor,
    feel the hard hand of war."

    The first modern genocidal war took place amidst World War I and the
    collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Between 1915-1916, Turkish troops
    slaughtered an estimated 1 to 1.5 million ethnic Albanians. Efforts
    by Woodrow Wilson to make Armenia an official U.S. protectorate were
    rejected by Congress in 1920; however, later that year, the Republic
    of Armenia was established.

    As the climate for America's entry into the 1940s European conflict
    intensified into what would become a second world war, it is now
    clear that Franklin Roosevelt and his closest advisors knew about Nazi
    anti-Semitism, concentration camps and the mass imprisonment of Jews.

    Whether they knew that Jews and others were being exterminated in
    gas chambers remains an open question.

    Nevertheless, Roosevelt approved Operation Thunderclap, the
    firebombing of Dresden in which tens of thousand of noncombatants were
    incinerated. He also seems to have known of mad-dog Curtis LeMay's
    plan to firebomb Tokyo and other Japanese cities and kill hundreds
    of thousand of noncombatants. More so, he approved the development of
    the nuclear weaponry that would incinerate noncombatants in Hiroshima
    and Nagasaki. FDR did not live long enough to give the final order
    to bomb Japan; this honor fell to his replacement, Harry Truman.

    In the half-century since the end of world war, mass slaughter has
    been institutionalized. China's politically-orchestrated famine
    of1958-1961 saw between 15 and 40 million people suffer and die. An
    estimated one million people were killed due to the partition of
    Pakistan; two million were exterminated in the Cambodian genocide of
    1975-1979. During this period, American's great conservative leader,
    Ronald Reagan, approved the killing of tens of thousands of populists
    in Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua and other parts of Latin America.

    Clinton's decision to have NATO undertake a 78-day bombing assault on
    Serbia in 1999 seems to be the lesson he learned from his failure to
    halt the Rwanda Genocide. However, the terrorization of noncombatants
    and the rape of the civilian female population taking place in the
    Congo signals a new, degenerate, stage in modern warfare.

    President Obama is not unaware of the horrors of that defile the
    Congo. As a Senator, he sponsored a bill approved in December 2006
    to provide relief and promote democracy in Congo. He also cited rape
    in the Congo as part of his Nobel Prize speech rationalizing just war:

    Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with
    increased pressure - and such pressure exists only when the world
    stands together as one. ... The same principle applies to those who
    violate international laws by brutalizing their own people. When there
    is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma -
    there must be consequences.

    So, what are the consequences for the continuing slaughter inflicted
    in the Congo?

    So far these consequences seem only cosmetic. In 2009, Hillary
    Clinton visited the Congo, only her non-diplomatic outburst due a
    translation error garnered headlines while the ongoing ware in the DRC
    was ignored. Obama appointed Howard Wolpe as a special advisor for
    the region. One only wonders whether he will be any more successful
    then his colleagues Sen. George Mitchell for Israel-Palestine and
    Richard Holbrooke for Afghanistan-Pakistan.

    Sadly, as DRC President Joseph Kabila is seeking to have the UN's
    20,000 peacekeeping mission withdrawn, the decision by Obama's UN
    representative Susan Rice to not participate in the Security Council's
    scheduled visit to the DRC helped scuttle the trip. This may signal
    the UN's capitulation to Kabila's demands.

    Having visited Rwanda in the wake of the 1994 slaughter, Rice remarked:
    "I saw hundreds, if not thousands, of decomposing corpses outside
    and inside a church. Corpses that had been hacked up. It was the most
    horrible thing I've ever seen." Apparently truly shocked, she added,
    "It makes you mad. It makes you determined. It makes you know that
    even if you're the last lone voice and you believe you're right,
    it is worth every bit of energy you can throw into it."

    One can only wonder where Rice's anger, along with that of Obama and
    Clinton, are with regard to the rape and murder taking place in eastern
    Congo? Most likely, if the UN peacekeepers are withdrawn, the slaughter
    will increase and more women will be victims of rape and abuse.

    David Rosen is the author of "Sex Scandals America: Politics &
    the Ritual of Public Shaming" (Key, 2009); he can be reached at
    [email protected].
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