Posts

Posted on

Congo’s looming genocide

Over the last couple of weeks, tensions in the Northeastern province of the Democratic Republic of Congo have been escalating, as 29 people were clubbed or hacked to death in remote villages of Kivo. The perpetrators are Rwandan Hutus who fled to the Congo after the 1994 genocide.

Even though the Congolese army has been conducting operations to root out the Hutu extremists, they’ve only managed to push them further north where they’ve managed to gain allies and increase their organization.

The United Nations Observer Mission in Congo (MONUC) investigators, trying to reach the affected villages, have been met by stone-throwing crowds. A faction of a Rwandan rebel group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), carried out the killings in retaliation over Congolese army operations against them. The faction, known as ‘the Rastas’, vowed to return to punish civilians.

This incident is a picturesque reminder of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda where the extremist Hutu, known as the Interahamwe and former fighters of Rwandan Armed Forces (Ex-FAR) clubbed, macheted and shot to death an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderates Hutus in 100 days.

In Congo, the extremists Rwandan Hutus, operating under the umbrella of FDLR, have continued to kill indigenous Congolese civilians, but threats to flush them out have not materialised. Yet FDLR has continued to grow in strength and experience. Conservative estimates by the International Crisis Group has estimated their strength at 8,000 to 10,000. Their dream is to return to Rwanda.

MONUC website has pointed to Walungu, Kanyola, Kyalubeze, Chikamba territory in south Kivu province as being controlled by the Rwandan Hutu extremists.

In North Kivu province, the Hutu extremists are equally active and control villages in Rutshuru territory. They use bases inside Virunga and Maiko national parks to raid neighbouring villages. In these camps, women are trained as soldiers, and children are born and brought up as soldiers.

Ishasha and Nyamirima, along the Uganda borderline, are operation zones for these militias, who are closely associated with the Mai Mai group of Vasaka Sikuli Kakule alias La Fontaine.

All of this fueled the formation of a new anti-Tutsi group known as PAROCO-FAP, who claims that their goals are to reach a solution with the Kigali government. The propaganda and rhetoric of this new Hutu extremist group echoes the messages that launched the Rwandan genocide.

Clearly, greater efforts need to be taken in this region, as the conflict, which has roots in Rwanda, has been spreading from the Congo to Uganda and has the potential to destabilize the entire Central African region. Even if the violence is contained, the increased influence that we’re seeing from the anti-Tutsi groups could easily lead to a spread of violence, and possibly another rolling genocide.

Posted on

Ukrainian mass grave uncovered

A mass grave was recently unearthed near the southern Ukrainian town of Odessa. The grave contained thousands of Holocaust victims, in a region that is believed to have exterminated an average of 500 people per day.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the finding was no surprise: “It underscores the enormous scope of the plans of annihilation of the Nazis and their collaborators in eastern Europe.”

“The scope is enormous, the number of places where murders were carried out is very large and that is why even now at this point, so late after the events, graves are still being discovered,” he added.

It’s believed that 1.5 million Jews were killed during the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine, leaving behind between 250-350 mass graves.

Posted on

Two sites mapping genocide

A month or so ago, Rich sent me a link for the US Holocaust Museum’s partnership with Google (entitled: USHMM + Google). I’ve been meaning to add it to the blogroll for weeks now but haven’t gotten around to it.

This morning, I found a link in my Google Alerts for Amnesty International’s newest feature — Eyes On Darfur — which is attempting to provide photographic evidence (largely satellite based) of what’s unfolding on the ground. Since they seem to be fairly complimentary websites, I thought I’d take a moment and plug both at the same time.

Posted on

Cambodia awaits genocide trials

The judges in the long-delayed Cambodian genocide trials began meeting on Monday to see if they could resolve issues that have been plaguing the court for the last six months. With constant problems arising from almost every meeting, it seems less and less likely that the suspects will ever be tried.

Speaking on behalf of her U.N.-appointed colleagues, Judge Sylvia Cartwright from New Zealand expressed optimism that the rules can be adopted.

“We know that if the internal rules are adopted in their present draft form, we have a foundation from which it may be possible to ensure a free, fair and transparent trial,” she said.

She and Kong Srim are co-chairing the plenary session.

As I’ve written about in the past, the biggest problem with these constant delays is the aging defendants, many of whom are dying.

Posted on

Save Darfur restructuring

Save Darfur, the organization that has been hugely successfully in rallying support for the crisis in Darfur, has recently fired their executive director and is in the process of reorganizing their board of directors. Even though the Sudan Tribune goes through a laundry list of complaints about a few of the practices of the organization, John Prendergast who serves on the board, said:

…the changes that the board decided to make were part of an effort to reorganize and re-energize the movement along the lines of its earliest conception: to be a broad, permanent alliance of many different types of organizations working together to prevent atrocities and genocide.

“The growth was so fast in the coalition, as was interest in the issue of Darfur and in the budget, that it was hard to kind of manage the difference between an organization and a coalition,” Mr. Prendergast said. “People felt that the time had some to go back to the roots of the coalition of groups that is so rich and so diverse.”

Having worked for non-profits for years, I can say that it’s often healthy for these organizations to restructure themselves. I might also add that non-profits have a tendency to create themselves with a certain agenda in mind and then wind up having to change directions because whatever issue they’re attempting to address winds up evolving.