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Pygmies eaten by rebel soldiers in Congo

Hattie's Kitchen

10:06 / 09.01.03

Very grim story in today's Scotsman newspaper...

Rebel soldiers are massacring and eating pygmies in the forests of north-east Congo, UN investigators said yesterday. Fresh fighting has displaced around 150,000 people in the past month. The forest-dwelling pygmy tribes have been caught opposing pro-government and Ugandan-backed rebel groups in the last battles of Congo's four-year regional war. "The two Ugandan-backed movements routinely enslave pygmies to forage for food and prospects for minerals," said a UN official linked to the investigation. Any hunters returning empty-handed are killed and eaten. Cannibalism has re-emerged throughout eastern Congo. "Some groups eat in connection with their spiritual rituals and some of them just think it's good meat," the UN official said.

What, if anything, can the UN do to stop this situation, and do they have any right to intervene?

rizla mission

14:03 / 09.01.03

!!!

Pretty bad sign for the whole world when sentences like "Cannibalism has re-emerged throughout eastern Congo" start turning up in newspapers I think..

deja_vroom

14:13 / 09.01.03

We haven't changed an inch. That's all I can think of. We haven't chagend one miserable, fucking inch...

Hattie's Kitchen

14:19 / 09.01.03

I'm gonna try and get a link to this article but if anyone has any more info on this in the meantime, it would be appreciated.

grant

14:22 / 09.01.03

Links:

Google News.

Syndey Morning Herald.

Reuters.

From that last one:

"This is the first time they've had to flee out of the forest," Rodrigue told Reuters by satellite telephone. "It's a level of violence that hasn't happened before."

Residents have accused rebels of raping women in front of their families, roasting their victims alive and forcing prisoners to eat human flesh in a wave of atrocities accompanying the fighting, MSF workers say.

"The other thing we have heard is that some people have been forced to eat pieces of members of their family that were killed by the rebels," Rodrigue said.

It is unclear exactly why the rebels would want to eat pygmies, but residents speculate that they might consider them sub-human, and roast them like animals, or believe that eating their flesh might give them magic powers.

Linus Dunce

15:49 / 09.01.03

Given the magic is so far speculation, I'd hazard a guess this is more a spectacularly cruel form of psy-ops.

I don't know about the UN's legal rights, but surely there's a moral responsibility to intervene.

rizla mission

15:59 / 09.01.03

But then the next stage of the most obvious debate arising from this is that someone will take a position of "And if the West sends in a bunch of sensible folk to say 'now now, stop that', how is that not some kind of Liberal imperialism?"

(I say 'someone', rather than 'me', as for some reason I'm doing the devils advocate bit and that's not what I think at all..)

Linus Dunce

16:06 / 09.01.03

Rizla -- Well, we could answer them by strpping them down to their underwear, writing "pygmy" on their forehead, and dropping them by parachute into Congo.

my cockroach Gonzalez

18:06 / 10.01.03

see, this is what happens when a country doesn't have enough branches of macdonalds.

The Monkey

20:49 / 10.01.03

I doubt if this would classify as "psy-ops"...which implies are large, educated organizational structure setting up regimines for brutality, etc...it's more likely the soldiers simply don't have supply lines.

Given that the Ife pygmies do have a long-standing reputation amongst their taller neighbors as sorcerors and necromancers (and are deemed subhuman, too boot), I wouldn't rule out there being a superstitious aspect to this.

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