Thursday, February 18, 2010
Eastern Congolese women are not only raped and tortured in the violent scramble for the region’s vast natural resources; their suffering is then manipulated to raise funds for the non-profit industrial complex, and to justify ongoing U.S. military engagement.
Sometimes I despair of ever seeing the truth come out about the imperial scamble for resources in D.R. Congo and the rest of Africa. Now even Link TV, generally considered to be a “progressive” outlet, is quoting the NY Times’s Nicholas Kristof on how much he’d like to see an earthquake, like Haiti’s, or a tsunami in Eastern Congo turn attention to the “barbaric civil war” in Eastern Congo:
“Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake.” – Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/opinion/31kristof.html
These barbaric African people, according to Kristof’s reasoning, just can’t stop killing each other, so we Western white folks just have to give them some more of our “attention.”
And heist all their natural resources in the process.
Since Kristof and the Pentagon are still waiting for their earthquake, violence against women in this “barbaric civil war” will have to do.
Stop Violence Against Women in Congo
http://www.linktv.org/womenincongo
Very hard to argue against this campaign, this “Run for Congo Women,” no? I’m against violence against women, in Congo and everywhere else.
But I also think Nicholas Kristof should be sold into slavery, or, at the very least fired, for promoting such a racist, imperial, ahistorical distortion of the Congo war and the pain of the Congolese people.
Any Western narrative about Congo should begin by looking back to, at least, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, in 1961, ordered by Dwight Eisenhower, which truncated the hopes and possibilities of the Congolese people, despite their hardwon, and still nominal, independence, in 1960.
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