Will the NDP/Liberal Coalition's Foreign Policy have Canadian Troop deployed to the Congo?

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Cueball Cueball's picture


I am always happy.

Where did you get the picture from?


I am missing point of view on post #104.

Cueball Cueball's picture

That is because it is a parry of view not a point of view.


Webgear wrote:

I find Dostum is a misunderstood person. He would be an effective party organizer, and would bring a large amount of leadership to any party he belongs to.

He does have experience working in the unions; maybe the CAW will take him. He could get them those government contacts that they always wanted.

Dostum is a war criminal. He commanded a transfer of Taliban prisoners to U.S. positions in cargo containers in 2001. Many of the prisoners died of suffocation, heat exhaustion, dehydration, etc. Some were summarily executed by being shot at point blank range with automatic weapons. The bodies were buried in mass graves out in the barren desert. The incident is under investigation and there are questions of CIA involvement.

Yeah, Dostum is definitely "misunderstood".

M. Spector M. Spector's picture

Webgear wrote:

Whatever happened to 'responsibility to protect'?

One of the original architects of the so-called "responsibility to protect" doctrine, and a "human rights" apologist for the Iraq war, Iggy demonstrates he has learned nothing in the past 15 years.

He still maintains the NATO attack on Serbia was a "humanitarian" war, and sees western meddling in Georgia as an other example of humanitarianism.

His latest screed lays bare the fundamental cowardice underlying the whole idea: "humanitarian" war can only be made on small countries that don't have any powerful allies like Russia or China. 

M. Spector M. Spector's picture

Keith Harmon Snow wrote:

Recent massive human suffering and the escalation of hostilities by the Nkunda army in eastern Congo have provoked a spate of high-visibility policy statements where some powerful Western interests are calling on the "international community" to strengthen the MONUC military occupation of Congo, while other powerful interests from the new humanitarian order are calling for the European Union to send in a rapid reaction force.

Congolese sources everywhere confirm the widespread involvement of MONUC soldiers in guns-for-minerals swaps and sexual violence; sources repeatedly accuse MONUC troops of delivering weapons back to militias to justify MONUC's one billion dollar a year occupation of Congo.

"MONUC was giving weapons to the militias," says yet one more Congolese official. "MONUC had their own ambitions. It was about gold. The peace that was achieved in Orientale around 2006 was not achieved by MONUC; the National Police Force from Kinshasa and the integrated FARDC brigades achieved it. MONUC was frustrating the peace."

In the new Congo war documentary by Dutch filmmaker Renzo Martens, ENJOY POVERTY, we see South African mining staff of AngloGold Ashanti confirming MONUC's pivotal role in securing the company's access to gold in Orientale. The entire "humanitarian" enterprise must be properly situated in the political economy of profit-based charity, resource control and racial injustice.

MONUC doesn't need more guns, it needs fewer guns (but arms dealers keep shipping them in), and Congo doesn't need more foreign mercenary forces posing as "peacekeepers" but secretly serving narrow, undisclosed interventionist agendas on behalf of multinational corporations.

Ditto for Darfur. In an "explosive" new book by progressive activists that mildly exposes some of the hypocrisies of the Save Darfur movement we find the authors calling for greater military intervention and sneering at others who have criticized and rejected military intervention for being what we might call the new, old humanitarian warfare in Africa.

The book, Scramble For Africa: Darfur-Intervention and the USA, cites ad nauseam all the usual propagandists that are monopolizing the English language mass media, publications from the far right to progressive left, on Darfur. These experts include Alex De Waal and Eric Reeves - and the International Crisis Group - but there are plenty of citations and references to journalists who peddle the establishment inventions and thereby black out the forces of Western control.

By page xvii of the preface, the authors - who have no experience anywhere near Sudan - have become the prosecution, judges and jury of their own private international court: "That [President Omar al-Bashir] is a major war criminal is beyond doubt," they wrote, "as is the fact that he should face trial for his substantial violations of international human rights law." The American authors, it seems, are also in the business of overthrowing governments: "Given the litany of abuses for which [the Government of Sudan] is guilty," they wrote, "there would be little to mourn in Bashir's overthrow, and such a move-depending, of course, on the actors involved, and its prospects for success-could be cautiously supported."

In other words, it's fine for white people from the United States to organize the overthrow of sovereign governments, as long as we selectively chose the "right" people for the job. The authors never similarly condemn "leaders" from the United States, Canada, Israel or Europe, and they never suggest that President Bush should be overthrown, or that Donald Rumsfeld, or Henry Kissinger, or General Norman Schwarzkopf, or Maurice Tempelsman, should be prosecuted for war crimes. The book makes no mention of covert operations or private military companies operating in South Sudan or Darfur, and while it illuminates the Bush Administration's collaboration with the Khartoum government, it is nothing more than a cheerleading tool for the opposing power blocks, including the massive so-called "humanitarian relief" operations. Such is the racial obliviousness of the new humanitarian disorder.

But Darfur's cheerleaders and Khartoum's enemies are not so neutral as they appear....


M. Spector M. Spector's picture

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon must be grinding his teeth this morning as word filters out of Eastern Congo that once again his peacekeepers stayed in their barracks while fighting raged just down the road and precious resources were wasted looking for a foreign journalist rather than saving the women and children who were being murdered in the cross-fire between rebels and government militia. 

The key indicators of the UNs ineptness in Eastern Congo came from the resignation of Vicente Díaz de Villegas y Herrería, the Spanish General who only was in-country for three weeks before jumping a plane back to Madrid. The official U.N. response was that the resignation resulted from ‘personal reasons’ but the U.N. is a very leaky ship and the real story seems that the Iberian Commandante was upset that he was a given a mission with ‘no mandate, no strategy and no resources.’ (One wonders why he didn’t inquire about these things before he took the assignment, but who knows what the career ‘wishful-thinkers’ in New York promised him. Remember how they bamboozled General Dallaire during the Rwanda Crisis.) 

The war in the Congo is essentially an international conflict, a world-war involving many nations that has lasted longer than any other modern conflict and has resulted in the deaths of over 5 million people, the vast majority being innocent civilians. Having said that, how many people, even well-informed ones, would recognize the name Nkunda, the head of the main rebel faction? Despite its ferocity this has been an invisible conflict and is likely to remain so since aside from a few mining companies it will be hard to find anybody’s strategic interests at stake and the Security Council has been resting easy because its peacekeepers are on the ground. The problem is that the 17,000 strong peacekeeping mission, code- named MONUC, is in shambles and seemingly unable to protect itself, not to mention the hundreds of thousands now fleeing, whose safety they were sent to guarantee. 

It is becoming increasingly clear that U.N. peacekeepers should stay out of areas where there is no peace. In a country like Liberia, the U.N. does a credible job of keeping the lid on a disarmed and developing country. The experiences in Rwanda, Bosnia and now the Congo suggest that a toothless U.N. presence, backed up by an ambivalent Security Council mandate, is more to be pitied than supported.

[url=http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/the-uns-latest-disgrace-in-eastern... Keating, December 12th, 2008[/url]

M. Spector M. Spector's picture

The Bish wrote:

I also don't think that just because an idea has been misused means we have to throw out the entire idea.  Virtually every idea can be used to justify horrific things, that doesn't mean we should abandon them, it means we need to be careful and judicious about the ways in which we use them.

Why would you trust the same people who used "humanitarianism" as a cover for imperialist aggression to use the same "idea" again? If people misuse an idea you don't throw out the idea, but you do throw out the people.

Fool me twice, shame on me.




That is your opinion of what "good" members of the CAW are like?


UN to Canada - We need your help in the Congo

UN official uses GG's visit to issue direct appeal to Ottawa


"GOMA, CONGO-The United Nations issued a direct, public appeal to Canada Tuesday, asking for the country's help with the international peacekeeping operation in the troubled Democratic Republic of the Congo."

Maysie Maysie's picture

Sorry, I need to close this. Long thread.


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