Can Someone Explain This to Me?
Posted by Ginny on April 15, 2008
Assalamu alaikum, I heard this story on the BBC World Service, perhaps last Thursday or Friday, and it’s disturbed/haunted me ever since.
The first time I heard it, I’d woke up during the night and as the radio usually is turned to the World Service, I’ll normally end up listening until I fall back to sleep. I happened to catch the part of the interview where the woman talks of being forced by the soldiers to kill her own baby. Now, I’d like for some to explain to me why, I mean, what is the goal of this? To engage in rape, murder and other acts of violence that are so appalling, most of us can barely get our minds around it?
In Darfur, it’s ethnic tentions, in Sierra leone, it was the diamonds wasn’t it? But what is it about the Democratic Republic of the Congo? I know some of this has to do with at least some of the soliders being the very onces who perpetrated the Rwandan genocide, and I guess they’re hiding in the forests because they don’t want to be caught. But why not just hide in the forests? Why continue the violence from your new place of hiding?
I guess I just never will understand murder, or rape, or torture or violence just for the sake of it. Reminds me of how my husband was trying to explain to me how many of the conflicts in West Africa, in Sierra Leone and Liberia, in particular, were started (perhaps indirectly) by Gadafi who would have training camps in Libya to train people to go back to their countries and started wars there. Ostensibly, the goal was to create puppet states that could be indirectly ruled by Gadafi, by overthrowing the regimes/Presidencies of the people who were there at the itme.
This has been explained to me more than once and I still don’t get it. OK, so you have puppet regimes and for what? What was your goal in starting wars, and hopefully by “winning the wars” then your puppets could be put into power, and then what? For control? I think that’s what the reason was, but control of what? Natural resources I guess. Maybe I’m just hopelessly naive or something because I just don’t get it!
So I guess we’ll just go on fussing about what kinda beverage Barack is drinking (and whether or not that makes him an elitist), or whether or not Beyonce and Jay-Z really got married, or talking about what happened on the latest Big Brother, or whatever’s the “in” reality show. Meantime, women and girls as young as 5 in the DRC are at risk of being raped (but I guess ’cause it ain’t the A-rabs or “Mozlems” doing it, then we don’t care).
Or, more closer to home, our health-care system’s a mess, our economy is well, awful, not to talk of all the other issues that are, well, truly important!
I’m just tired, just really, really tired! And to think I was upset because my computer wasn’t working right, or I had to wait too long on hold while trying to contact customer service for something, or any other number of inane reasons why I was frustrated, upset, worried, huffy, or whatever else. And I thought I had real problems! You wanna see/hear about problems? Just listen to this story and the woman telling it.
Yusuf Smith said
As-Salaamu ‘alaikum,
As far as I can tell, the situation in the DRC is mainly about the circumstances surrounding the fall of the Mobutu regime in the 1990s, which was brought about by people from the east of the country next to the border with Rwanda, so the fall of Mobutu was related to the Rwanda situation. The DRC has a generally awful history, as the Belgians did not bother to educate the population when it was the colonial power, using the place as little more than a big slave labour camp, and the Mobutu regime (which was supported by the west because the previous government had Marxist tendencies) was kleptocratic and let the country slide into ruin. There are also a lot of guns floating around and people with guns who are not used to living with a proper state and with axes to grind (literally in some cases), particularly in the east where there is a big Banyarwanda (i.e. Hutu and Tutsi) population. And then you have foreign mining companies who want to exploit the place and take advantage of the lack of regulation because there is not much of a state there.