There are plenty of news ‘events’ that I do not care to have brought to my attention. At times, you wonder if the latest story on some over-hyped, worthless, soulless, trash covered in human skin is not the most important story needed to be relayed to the masses. Or, maybe that is what most of us want.
A Day That Will Live in Infamy.
(Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses Congress)Often, we find that such a small collection of words can effectively describe an event of great magnitude. If not describe, at least direct our minds to instantly force an adjustment to a particular time and place. Then we have ...
The Congo Massacre.Could there
be an easier way to diminish the value of such a powerful word as ‘massacre’ than by placing it beside ‘Congo’? What horror must exist on this good earth as to have such words not invoke terror, heartache and shame at every mention, but instead so often offer complacency to the listener? This is a world which is far too used to the violence that exists within it.
Even my own reactions have become rather placid at the repeated accounts of such similar events - and it disturbs me greatly.
Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army rebels killed more than 100 people in a village in Congo; an apparent reprisal for army operations against them. The massacre in Tora village in northeastern Orientale province brought the number of civilians killed by the rebels to 900 since the campaign began last month.
(28 Jan 2009)Attackers hacked to death scores of people who sought refuge at a Catholic church in remote eastern Congo the day after Christmas. The Ugandan army and a rebel group accused each other of carrying out the massacre. The United Nations said the rebels killed 189 people in three villages over two days. The rebels were likely retaliating against civilians for military attacks, including a 14 Dec air bombing on their main camp in Garamba National Park.
(26 Dec 2008)
In little more than 24 hours, at least 150 people were killed, most of them young men, summarily executed by the rebels as they tightened their grip over parts of eastern Congo, according to witnesses and human-rights investigators.
(11 Dec 2008)The Associated Press reports that 29 people are confirmed dead in a weekend massacre in the volatile South-Kivu region of eastern Congo. Assailants armed with machetes, hammers, and sticks targeted three villages near the towns of Walungu, but their motive for the attacks was unclear.
(29 May 2007)
More than thirty civilians were murdered in Ntulumamba, a village in the South Kivu region of the self-styled Democratic Republic of the Congo. Congolese women and children were deliberately murdered by armed men who forced the victims into buildings which were then burned. The bodies were buried in two mass graves.
(20 July 2005)A Congolese prosecutor has called for three former managers of the Perth-based Anvil Mining corporation to be indicted for “complicity in war crimes” — involvement in the massacre of up to 100 people in the village of Kilwa. The slaughter, committed by Congolese Armed Forces soldiers ferried to the scene by Anvil-chartered planes and company-owned trucks, took place 50 kilometers from the company’s Dikulushi silver and copper mine in the south-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
(Oct 2004)United Nations staff have been told that nearly 1,000 people were massacred in the Ituri region of north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo last Thursday. UN investigators saw mass graves with traces of fresh blood still visible. According to sources, 966 people died in three hours of blood-letting. Forty-nine survivors of the attack in Drodro hospital bore machete and bullet wounds.
(7 Apr 2003)
One of the main rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo was responsible for a massacre in the eastern town of Kisangani earlier this year, a report by the United Nations Human Rights Commission says. The report states that up to 180 people - the majority of them civilians - were killed in reprisal attacks by gunmen from the RCD Goma rebel faction after a mutiny.
(17 July 2002)...Three investigators will probe allegations that troops under the command of Congo President Laurent Kabila massacred thousands of unarmed refugees earlier this year, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced.
(9 Aug 1997)......
Rifles and Sten submachine guns rattling, they fired point-blank into the seated hostages. The gunners picked women and children as their first targets. Many flopped onto the pavement, pretending to be dead. Others need not pretend. One child was cut in half by a Sten-gun burst. Parents who flung themselves over their children were stitched by the wild bullets that sprayed the crowd. A woman sat open-mouthed as gunfire chopped down the people on either side of her. She somehow survived unhurt.
(4 Dec 1964)
By war, and subsequent famine and disease directly related, people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are dying at a rate of an estimated 45,000 per month. 2.7 million people have died since 2004.
Some things can not be controlled. People will treat each other (for better or worse) as they see fit, even in cities of the privileged. Hunger, however, and lack of medicine, are solvable causative elements which, if reversed, will help to greatly reduce and deter the appalling treatment, and improve the living conditions, of so many in the land from which all of human kind arose and subsequently spread about the globe.