Sobering Reality
November 5, 2007
From Tim Panagos, some sobering reality:
You won’t find this in your world history text.
Events in Congo trouble at so many levels. Reports in The New York Times and other places document unspeakable violence: 27,000 sexual assaults in South Kivu Province in 2006, just a fraction of the total number across the nation of 66 million people. The assaults are brutal. Women assaulted are often left so badly injured internally, they may never heal…
Genocide you say? Many assaults appear to be spillover from the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in next-door Rwanda. But assaults by husbands on wives also are epidemic…
The facts cry out for action…
Nightly rapes of women and girls. The violence appears to be a problem across the nation…
The oldest rape victim recorded by one Congo physician is 75; the youngest, 3…
Congo hosts the largest single peacekeeping mission of the United Nations right now, with 17,000 troops…
Americans looking for a quick resolution to the situation in Iraq might do well to study Congo. At Congo’s independence in the 1960s, there was hope of prosperity and greater peace. Foreign intervention, including meddling from the U.S., regional civil wars, bad government and long international neglect, ate up the hope. Achieving what a nation could be is difficult, when so many forces align to prevent it from being anything other than a violent backwater. Pandora’s box resists attempts to shut it. Quick resolution is unlikely.
So the violence in Congo continues. In this world, when is the “never” in “never again?”
November 5, 2007 at 7:25 am
[...] Photo from geobloggers, by a4gpa. Read more about Tim Panogos here. Sample writings here. [...]
November 5, 2007 at 11:48 pm
Each one who questions the value of Civilization and of the values that make Civilization possible,let him contemplate this small room from Hell. Let him taste the poverty, smell the disease, feel the despair that puts one beyond any fear save the fear of tomorrow. Let him look us in the face and tell us in the public square that we have no business preserving civilization, so that we make plainly call him by his right name: Liar, Deceiver, Spoiler, Satan.