Report: U.N.-Backed Congo Troops Killing Civilians

A U.N.-backed Congolese military operation to oust rebels from eastern Congo has caused more civilian casualties than damage to rebels, with more than 1,400 people deliberately killed over a nine-month period, human rights groups said Monday.'

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Merchants of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa

War in Congo has again been splashed across world headlines and the same old clichés about violence and suffering are repackaged and rebroadcast as "news". Meanwhile, early indications out of America are that President-elect Barack Obama will assemble a foreign policy-team primed for business as usual.

How will Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State compromise the Obama Administration’s capacity to honestly redress the untold suffering, massive theft of resources and millions of deaths in Africa?

And Tom Daschle? Behind the media smokescreens are people whose involvement has been documented and exposed, but there is always some African fall guy—the ‘embraceable’ black subordinate or ‘rebel’ commander—charged with war crimes and used to deflect attention from the leaders of organized white-collar crime networks.

Blacked out are the corporate executives, government officials and expatriate personnel of Western enterprises whose success amidst chaos implicates them in the deracination and death of millions of black people.

What’s behind the recent hostilities and media posturing in Central Africa?

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U.S./U.K. Allies Grab Congo Riches and Millions Die

Once again, the suffering of African people caught up in a war that makes little sense to non-Africans has made the front pages in western media, as more than a million people have been displaced in the past week by re-newed fighting in the Eastern Congo. For most Americans who don’t pay much attention to the details of African history and politics, the humanitarian disaster in the Congo has exploded into public consciousness, as if the 25-year war to control Central Africa began only yesterday.

But, in fact, the human rights disaster that the people of the world are watching on our TV screens is just the most recent human tragedy in a 25 year struggle for economic and political dominance in Central Africa that has been raging since the decline and eventual collapse of the Soviet influence in Africa in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. A sad fact of the 20th Century is that, even after the end of formal "colonialism" in the mid-20th Century, ruling African elites in virtually every African nation have looked to one or more powerful "sponsors" in the developed world to gain or retain power. And, to grab the personal wealth that goes with political/military power in Africa.

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From Goma to Gaza, Mr Miliband

While the foreign secretary is keen to be seen in Congo, another invisible humanitarian crisis receives none of his attention.

David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner were quick to fly to Kinshasa and Kigali this weekend to be seen to be responding to the sudden visibility of the long-running horrible humanitarian crisis of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Whether they achieve much more than another temporary truce among the assorted warlords whose troops have been living by rape and pillage in the area for more than a decade, is of course another question.

But Mr Miliband and Mr Kouchner have another invisible humanitarian crisis on their hands in which some highly publicised flying around could have a dramatic effect on the ground. They should announce visits to Jerusalem to speak to Israel's leaders, and then arrive by helicopter (the airport is destroyed) in Gaza City, breaking the Israel military's 17-month siege of Gaza.
They would be able to do it with ease, unlike the handful of people who made the trip recently in two boat trips from Cyprus, bringing medicines, hearing aids for the deaf, and hope that the world could hear the horror of what is happening to them.

The two European leaders could see for themselves in Gaza how Israel's collective punishment of 1.5 million people has crippled Gaza's economy, cut fuel and electricity, leaving its desperate people hungry, deprived of medicines, with hundreds barred from travelling for operations or healthcare, or for education. Only last week, camps in Gaza City and Khan Yunis saw waist-high water flood homes and roads after heavy rains because the pumping system was not working.

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Regional War Fear As 50,000 Homeless In Congo In Two Days

Congolese government forces are fleeing the eastern capital of Goma as Rwandan-backed rebels press towards the town, threatening a lethal confrontation with United Nations peacekeepers and the prospect of all out regional war.
Western aid workers in Goma, with a population of 600,000, described scenes of mayhem in the streets as columns of government tanks and military vehicles streamed out of the city and panicking civilians fled for cover, fearing an imminent rebel onslaught.

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