There is a blindness and weakness in US foreign policy when it comes to developing, articulating and executing missions of intervention. The rationales developed and used for public consumption simply do not add up. They lack any coherent moral or policy theme or values that could support a sensible organizing principle other than themes based upon hegemony and racism. One would like to think that the US is somehow better than such amoral behavior, but read on.
Reports currently coming in from the Democratic Republic of Congo about cruel massacres that took place over this Christmas have trouble gaining attention in the media. So much attention is paid to the Israeli attacks on Palestinians that the deaths in the Congo go seemingly unnoticed, or at least unremarked in the US press. Yet over 400 villagers have been brutally murdered and thousands displaced while the world sits by with hands folded. And the US, who claims the lead in eradicating such attacks through a “war on terror” is embarrassingly silent.
Consider the following report posted by the BBC:
News of the attacks in north-eastern DR Congo began to come out after the weekend when the Ugandan army accused the LRA of hacking to death 45 civilians in a Catholic church near Doruma.
Bruno Mitewo, head of the Catholic aid agency, says that from information they have collated from their parishes on the ground, more than 400 civilians have died in the attacks. He said that in Faradje 150 civilians had died, almost 75 people in Duru and 215 in Doruma. The victims had been hacked to death and forced into fires, he said.
"All villages were burned by rebels... we don't know where exactly the population is because all the villages are empty," he told the BBC. "We have almost 6,500 displaced who are refugees in the parishes of the Catholic Church around the city of Dungu, more than 20,000 people displaced are running to the mountains," he said. Those who were hiding in the bush and forest were mainly the young, as the LRA tends to kidnap children and recruit them as fighters, he said.
A fair question would be to ask why the international community would sit by mutely as such brutal destruction of human life repeatedly unfolds. The LRA has been terrorizing these Congolese villagers for more than a decade and its forces are said to number less than 700. Yet the armies of Uganda, Sudan and DR Congo cannot control them. Where are the “technical support” personnel and the weapons aid contributions from the West? They can be sent to the Middle East, to Georgia and to Columbia but not to the Congo. If the US can waste billions of dollars on Blackwater agents that seem to thrive on the type of violence inflicted by the LRA rebels, could the US not lend these primitive mercenaries to be used by DR Congo military to hunt down LRA forces in the jungles of the Congo and help protect the innocent villagers? While the behavior of Blackwater agents in Iraq is unsupportable, placing them in an environment better suited to their talents and expertise would seem a more useful deployment since the US cannot spare any Ranger or Special Forces details because of the quagmire in Iraq.
When ethnic cleansing was occurring in Caucasian populated Bosnia, international forces were sent in to halt the war crimes and “crimes against humanity.” Are the people of the Congo less deserving of protection under those international standards? Could the reason be that their skin color does not warrant the same intervention? Are the Congolese villagers less equal than other people on behalf of whom humanitarian intervention has been invoked? Where is the “war on terror?”
A follow up question would be the following: If the people in the Congo who are regularly and repeatedly being subjected to terrorism by the LRA were white or Jewish, would the US be responding in the same way? If the villages were located on proven oil reserves, would the US response be the same? The questions are more than rhetorical, but the answers to them are quite obvious. In that regard, the old policy of “separate but equal” seems to have continuing vitality. The US publicly espouses policies against global terrorism and violations of human rights to defeat democratic governments. However, when it comes to taking action to carry out those policies, some world citizens are apparently more deserving of protection than others. If the victims are Black Africans, it is okay to sit by and watch the massacres.
To paraphrase what the US Supreme Court stated in the Dred Scott Decision, the Black man has no rights worth protecting or with which white men need be concerned. That is the separate but equal philosophy that the US has been following to date, publicly denounce terrorism and human rights violations generally, but provide resources only to situations where perceived interests of whites are involved. But now that an African American will assume the Oval Office, careful scrutiny should be applied to see whether such attitudes that were perhaps to be expected from George W. Bush will be carried forward by Obama’s administration. Change should be expected not because Obama is of African descent, but rather because he claims a more intelligent, balanced and humane platform than Bush. We should aspire to examine the problems of the world through human eyes, and not just white eyes.
Perhaps when flagrant violations of human rights, open terrorism and genocide are taking place, some action is appropriate. Perhaps the size of one’s wallet or natural resources to be exploited, strength of a religious lobby or color of skin should not be the factors that determine whether international intervention on behalf of declared minimum standards of international law and decency will occur. Perhaps...
[See source BBC article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7804470.stm]
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