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Great Lakes region.......awww shit

  
 
Helmschmied
17:18 / 17.08.04
Ok, so we all know about the genocide in Rwanda. Hutu extremists killing Tutsis and moderate Hutus. When the killing ended many Hutu rebels fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This unfortunately left them free to cross the borders and kill Tutsis from time to time. Burundi and Rwanda have invaded DRC twice to try and root out Hutu militias. The second time in 1998 sparked a 5 year war that killed an estimated 3.5 million people (mostly due to war-induced disease and starvation). In 2002 Rwanda pulled all its troops from DRC and under the agreement Kinshasa was to disarm and repatriate all Hutu rebels in the country.

Well....shit's still been bad. Hutu rebels have still been launching attacks on Tutsis from DRC into Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda. Ethnic killings have occurred but not to any great extent (relatively speaking for the region). Things have been somewhat quiet aside from ongoing civil wars in Uganda and Burundi, but those have been going on for 18 and 11 years respectively so nothing is new.

Then, friday night some fuckheads from the National Liberation Forces (Hutus who want to overthrow the Burundian government), decided to cross the DRC border and go into a UN refugee camp in Burundi and massacre at least 160 Tutsis according to reports, mostly women and children.

So now we have the governments of Rwanda and Burundi threatening to cross into DRC to hunt down militiamen. This situation is almost identical to what happened before the two previous wars. The last one ended up involving six African nations.

Fuck

I'm sorry I just needed to bitch about this. It pisses me off to no extent. Maybe nothing will come of it, or maybe another war is about to begin which will claim another 3.5 million lives. And maybe the rest of the world still won't give a shit.
 
 
sleazenation
20:02 / 17.08.04
I would hope the international community would intervene, but somehow i doubt it will.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
07:17 / 18.08.04
Of course it won't. It's too busy invading places it doesn't need to to worry about going to places where it could actually be of some use.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
09:40 / 18.08.04
How? Central Europe in the last decade and Iraq have shown that Western Intelligence is shit and/or troops are barely useful even when it comes to peacekeeping. Action involving the UK or France is unlikely to be welcome, for obvious reasons. I'm not sure there's anything the UN can do.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
11:05 / 18.08.04
Well, they could have done a lot more good in Central Europe if they'd gone in earlier. And, of course, if they didn't have this annoying habit of just standing there scratching their arses while safe areas get overrun.
 
 
Helmschmied
20:24 / 18.08.04
Apparantly now, the DRC national army is taking up position to attack areas of north and south Kivu in the eastern part of the country. The Kinshasa government has vowed to unseat the former rebel group Rally for Congolese Democracy-Goma (RCD), from it's current positions. A Rwandan army spokesman has sait "Taking over Goma would necessitate us to rethink about our strategic security arrangements". When asked whether Rwanda was considering sending troops back into DRC he said "I would not entirely rule out that possibility".

People fear that if the RCD is forced out of Goma it will give Hutu rebels a strategic position from which to launch attacks. There's estimates of up to 16,000 Hutu rebels in the north and south Kivu regions.

AND...to top it all off, Rwanda is accusing DRC of using Interahamwe militia during clashes in June. In Kinyarwanda it means "those who attack together" and they were largely responsible for the killings during the Rwandan genocide.
 
 
Helmschmied
20:31 / 18.08.04
Oh...I almost forgot. This guy is really pissed off. He's a dissident leader from Goma, and he says he might try to overthrow the Kinshasa government but not just yet.
 
  
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