Spewing The Rage of Tribal Hatred
Roughly 17,000 UN peacekeepers are installed in one of the world's currently largest UN peacekeeping operations. The government in Kinshasa has agreed, through the intervention and negotiations sponsored by the United States, the European Union and the African union, to sign an agreement ending one of the world's most deadly war and humanitarian catastrophes.During which 13 rebel and militia groups, viciously warring against the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo and between themselves, managed to accomplish the deaths of 5.4-million people throughout the decade of warfare. In northeastern DRC genocidal tribal wars have seen almost a million people displaced.
This has been a war quite unlike those most historians write of. In this series of raids, counter-raids and battles reports of ritualistic cannibalism, mutilation and torture in a geography swollen with the pus of tribal and ethnic hatreds, history will write its detached account of inhuman vitriolic death-dealing on another scale entirely.
Where rape remains yet the order of the day and children who managed to survive malnutrition, starvation and health supports to reach the age of seven have been commandeered to serve in combat situations. In the wake of the devastating Rwandan genocide, an invasion of up to a million Hutus, post-Tutsis butchery, sought to repeat history in the Democratic Republic.
Every month roughly 45,000 people still die in the DRP, fifty percent of them under age five. Most die not as a direct result of violence now, but from its offshoots; starvation and endemic diseases, preventable under normal, stable conditions, but exacerbated exponentially by conditions of war. Malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia and malnutrition slice through the population.
The country's shattered health system and the disruption of normal lines of food supplies during a six-month period alone - January 2006 to April 2007, saw 727,000 people die as a result, according to research results released by the New York-based International Rescue Committee.
The peace deal signed on January 23 in Goma will result in the integration of the various armed militias into the country's national army. Areas occupied by the militias will require the immediate deployment of UN peacekeepers. And then there's the problem of how to deal with the ethnic Hutu militia out of Rwanda.
Where there's life and determination, hope remains. Any hope of excising from inherited memory tribal hatreds?
Good luck.
Labels: Traditions, Troublespots, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, January 24, 2008
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