Thanks Karim for sharing. An eye-opening piece. And so the cycle of
unwarranted animus continues. To bring justice we declare. For forlorn crime.
Humanity's advance and growth therefore is punctuated. Life in other ecosystems
suffers hemorrhagic fever, and further threatens the contours of life in the
human ecosystem. Alas, beware the ides of the charlatan. The griot, the gnome,
and he who is infirm of speech and movement.
Haroun Rashid. Masoud. I trust school is going well. May God/Allah bless
yuns all. Darbo. MQDT.
In a message dated 9/28/2007 9:48:04 A.M. Mountain Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
The hierarchy of horrors Michela Wrong
Published 27 September 2007
1 comment
Print version
Listen
RSS
Ask an ordinary Brit for his image of Africa, and you will get a collage of
nightmarish visions of flyblown, skeletal children and vile diseases
festering in tropical forests
A friend recently returned from a visit to Panzi Hospital in South Kivu,
eastern Congo, in a state of agitation. Panzi has acquired a terrible notoriety,
for it is here that the female victims of Hutu militiamen, the Congolese
army and the forces of the renegade general Laurent Nkunda are treated. My
friend, a veteran journalist, has seen his share of horrors, but even he was
haunted by the cases he encountered. Gang rape is the least of it. Women raped in
front of their husbands and crowds of villagers, women raped so violently
their insides are left shredded, girls raped, tortured and thrown on to the fire
. . . The dreadful stories went on and on.
"Is this the Heart of Darkness?" he wondered aloud. Joseph Conrad's novel
may have been written originally as an indictment of western imperialism, but
these days it is used almost exclusively to refer to a savagery deemed
particular to Africa. "Is this behaviour - the systematic use of the penis as a
weapon of mass humiliation - peculiarly Congolese?"
John Holmes, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator my friend accompanied,
certainly thought something uniquely nasty was taking place. The prevalence and
intensity of sexual violence were "almost unimaginable", he told reporters, with
4,500 cases reported in the province since January. "The intensity and
frequency is worse than anywhere else in the world."
Holmes is not the first high-profile UN visitor to claim a form of ghastly
aristocracy for Africa's horrors. His predecessor Jan Egeland made a habit of
handing out superlatives. Darfur's refugee camps, he pronounced, represented
"the worst humanitarian crisis in the world". Northern Uganda, where the
Lord's Resistance Army was pitted against the army, was "the most forgotten
humanitarian crisis in the world".
I can understand why these men reach for the hyperbole. To galvanise UN
nations into contributing troops or funds, they must raise public awareness, and
the journalists who accompany them need memorable soundbites if they are to
win airtime. But I do wish they'd stop. Increasingly, it seems to me that
these claims of African exceptionalism do as much harm as good. I tire of the
notion - touted not only by UN officials but also by western novelists, poets
and artists - that Africa is a continent where things happen that would be
unimaginable elsewhere.
Let's take the use of rape as an in strument of systematic war. There is
nothing uniquely Congolese, or even African, about this practice. It has been
applied with enthusiasm in Europe, as Antony Beevor reminded us in his recent
account of the fall of Berlin. The Red Army's rape of German females in 1945
was so relentless and indiscriminate that women gathered by rivers as the
Soviets approached, held hands and drowned themselves rather than undergo the
ordeal.
One of Beevor's revelations was that Soviet troops raped not only German
women - something that could be explained, if not excused, by the impulse to
subjugate an enemy people - but also Russian women liberated from the
concentration camps, for whom they might have been expected to feel empathy. "Having
always in the past slightly pooh-poohed the idea that most men are potential
rapists, I had to come to the conclusion that if there is a lack of army
discipline, most men with a weapon, dehumanised by living through two or three
years of war, do become potential rapists," he concluded.
Not only has this method of mass humiliation been used frequently in Europe,
it has been applied in very recent history. It is only 12 years since the
blood-curdling accounts of mass rapes of Bosnian women and children by Serbian
soldiers, bent on degrading an entire community by sowing alien seed in
Bosnian wombs. And that happened a few hours' flight from Heathrow, in a
relatively sophisticated country many of us associated with holidays and student
exchanges.
There's nothing new under the sun, and that, sadly, includes acts of
breathtaking viciousness. It's a tad disingenuous for a western civilisation that
bore witness to the gas chambers of Ausch witz, the flattening of Dresden and
the bombing of Nagasaki to attribute any uniqueness to events in Darfur and
Congo. Mankind has proved capable of appalling behaviour regardless of
location, culture and skin colour.
The danger of the exceptionalism voiced by Holmes, Egeland and their ilk is
that it does more than stiffen backbones in UN chambers. It enforces an
incipient racism towards the con tinent, which so many people, in their hearts,
regard as somehow predestined for misery. Ask an ordinary Brit for his image of
Africa, and you will get a collage of nightmarish visions of flyblown,
skeletal children and vile diseases festering in tropical forests. Every time he
hears an African crisis has been crowned "worst in the world" or "most
neglected on the planet", the old Heart of Darkness cliché takes deeper hold. "Just
as I thought," he mutters. And the continent I write about just isn't like
that.
Post this article to
Digg
del.icio.us
newsvine
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L
Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html
To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to:
http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html
To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
|
