Congo’s Election, the U.N.’s Massacre
 

These are excerpts from the NYTimes today.




http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/28/op...28hartley.html



Laikipia, Kenya


THE Democratic Republic of the Congo will hold its first legitimate elections in four decades on Sunday. The United Nations peacekeeping mission there has played the role of electoral midwife, so if the vote is free and fair it will be among the global body’s greatest successes on the continent.
But in eastern Congo, many people will be unable to vote because the fighting that has killed millions in the past decade continues unabated, despite peace overtures by rebels in recent days. And in this, the United Nations is largely at fault. Not only has it failed to stop the killing, its troops have even been party to some of the violence against civilians whom they were to deployed to protect.


As mortars fired by the United Nations troops began to fall on the village that morning, we could see families fleeing. The mortar barrage continued for seven hours. Blue-helmeted troops also pumped heavy machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades into the hamlet.

One Monuc officer estimated that 25 people died — mainly by his own forces’ mortars. Refugees told of rape and torture at the hands of Congolese troops. Monuc, which is supposed to oversee humanitarian relief for war victims, was nowhere to be found. What happened in Kazana violates Monuc’s mandate, and this in a region where memories remain fresh of the United Nations’ utter failure to protect civilians during the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. But the United Nations officers in the field that day were carrying out clear orders: to support the Congolese troops in counterinsurgency efforts.

With 16,000 troops, this is the biggest United Nations force in the world, but it is spread very thinly in a nation half the size of Europe. Its troops have been involved in the child-prostitution scandals that have rocked the United Nations. And it is still struggling with the hangover of the disastrous American-led mission to Somalia in 1993, after which Western nations handed the task of most peacekeeping in Africa to Africans and other developing nations

The week after the massacre at Kazana we interviewed United Nations military and civilian officials in Ituri and told them what we had seen. They promised to investigate our reports on the ground and to “ask a lot of questions.” One official, however, told us that the violence being perpetrated against civilians across the region was a “temporary phenomenon” that would cease when security was restored. I wondered what outrage would have greeted this comment had it come from an American official, and had this been an American-led military operation.
After I wrote an account of the massacre at Kazana for The Observer of London last month, the United Nations announced it would look into the events. But if any investigation took place, it was a well-kept secret. Certainly United Nations investigators never asked to see the many hours of footage we took.

-Rudey
--Do as I say, not as I do...