Bwana and Sambo explain why Congo can't escape its scars

I can’t figure out why this story appears in the “Insight” section of today’s Toronto Star. It is a story long on sensationalism but utterly bereft of insight.

First the sensationalism. Heads roll again and again. They are lopped off with reckless abandon and carried about in gunny sacks. Child soldiers have their fingers chopped off and drink the blood of their enemies. Vaginas are violated, not just with machetes, but with machetes heated in a fire!…

Oh!

My!

God!

They don’t call it the “dark continent for nothing,” do they!?

Lucky for us, Star editor-in-chief Micheal Cooke steps in with some background. It’s not all the fault of the Congolese. The Belgian colonizers were not good people. No, they murdered ten million Congolese and then, at independence, left the fledgling state with a mere three PhDs.

Well, no wonder the place went to hell! How was the nascent state to bootstrap itself into the modern era with only three PhDs in the entire land?

Then, after the CIA, with the connivance of the Belgians, Brits, and UN, killed Congo’s first democratically elected president, “the Congolese immediately turned on themselves…” and that’s been the story ever since.

And this is what passes for “journalism?”

Shame!

I’m not a journalist, but I’m not brain dead either, and I’d like to make a couple of suggestions that might have upped the insight quotient for this story.

First of all, it’s a pity we only meet one Canadian, the saintly world president of Doctors without Borders. Cooke comes tantalizingly close to unmasking a few more when he refers to corrupt practices in the mining industry which has caused tens of millions (billions with a “b” would be more accurate) of dollars to be diverted into the accounts of government officials and various shady middlemen. Canadian mining companies have a massive presence in the Congo. Why not name names, Mr. Cooke?

Rwanda gets barely a passing mention in the story. Paul Kagame’s name does not come up at all. Cooke makes it sound like a few observers think the Kagame regime may be up to nefarious hanky-panky in the neighbourhood. In fact, virtually all independent observers agree Rwanda has been neck-deep in fomenting strife in the Congo. The reason we don’t talk about it is because his interference comes with the connivance of his enablers in the West.

Dictator?

What dictator?

Justin “Sunny Daze” Trudeau’s feel-good feminist government sent Kagame heart-felt congrats on winning  the last “election” with 99% of the vote! Who are we kidding?

After more than fifty years of “independence” there are sound reasons why Congo can’t escape its scars, but Cooke and Badylon Kawanda have done their best to avoid addressing them.

Doing so might require a little soul searching around how we continue to contribute to the ongoing tragedy that is the Congo.