Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

And across the country, Congolese wonder whether Tshisekedi will leave office quietly if he is not voted in today— as a report by Human Rights Watch put it , the threat of election-related violence threatens to undermine the democratic process. How could one even talk about ‘the democratic process’ in the Congo? Related An in-depth analysis:  Africa's Leaky Giant

The perpetrators are not Muslims and the victims are Westerners or Ukrainians . Therefore, the story – like broader conflict in Congo – will not be ‘hyped’, followed everyday and religion blamed, for ‘our values’ have not been attacked. According to the BBC , “ War has ravaged the east of the country for the past 20 years. Five million people have died as a result of conflict. Related Africa's Leaky Giant

Individual or institutional subscription is required to access the article. “The Tutsi notables, who had come to believe in the superiority the Belgians attributed to them, became tools of the colonial administration, responsible for assigning forced labour and punishments. Only Tutsi children had access to education. The colonisers and missionaries unpicked the fabric of the Rwandan nation, even issuing identity cards that recorded the bearer’s ‘ethnicity’. A revolt by smallholder farmers, directed not against the Belgian colonial administration but against Tutsi notables and officials. This ‘social revolution’ was supported by the colonial regime’s top-ranking official. Independence, declared in 1962, was presented as a victory for ordinary people. The Tutsis’ huts were burned, and 300,000 fled into exile. Until 1990 the Belgians supported the Hutus, in the belief that the ethnic majority was also the political majority.  When war broke out on the Ugandan border in October 1990, ...

"At the end of the genocide of the Tutsi, the militia was 30,000 strong. The Interahamwe broke the world’s most atrocious records for the speed of the killing of human beings, estimated at five times that of the Nazis." The Violence of Denial—Rwanda and the Lived Memory of Genocide

France was a close ally of the Hutu-led government prior to the massacres and has been accused of ignoring warning signs and training the militias who carried out the attacks. Little was done internationally to stop the killings. The UN and Belgium had forces in Rwanda but the UN mission was not given a mandate to act. The Belgians and most UN peacekeepers pulled out." — The BBC Even John Mearsheimer, a scholar of the now defunct but still predominant neorealist-International Relations theory, acknowledged this in 2002: "Despite claims that American policy is infused with moralism, Somalia is the only instance during the past hundred years in which US soldiers were killed in action on a humanitarian mission’—and ‘in that case, the loss of a mere eighteen soldiers so traumatized American policymakers’ that ‘they refused to intervene in Rwanda in the spring of 1994’, although ‘stopping that genocide would have been relatively easy and would have had virtually no effect on...