We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

The dilemma of the wars in the Kivus

Click here to access article by Gary K. Busch from Pambazuka News (So. Africa).

After spending a lot of time this morning doing research on this author, I am reasonably convinced that he is well informed and insightful regarding African affairs. I gathered the following biographic information from African Affairs website:
Dr Busch is a international trades unionist, an academic, a businessman and a political affairs and business consultant for 40 years.He has been Chairman and CEO of International Bulk Trade, Transport Logistics, Transport Africa and the North Pacific Lines. These companies have owned, chartered and operated marine dry cargo vessels and cargo aircraft worldwide.He speaks and reads 12 languages and has written six books and published 58 specialist studies.

Because Africa contains an abundance of valuable minerals and fossil fuels, the US has been engaged there in usually nefarious ways for quite some time. Many of these activities have been secret or not reported by mainstream media sources. This article provides a lot of details on the horrors happening in an eastern area of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Kivu region, that has surfaced in the news recently.
The reason this catalogue of horrors has continued unabated for the last six years is that the governments of Uganda and Rwanda are covered by the aegis of U.S. military initiatives in East and Central Africa. They provide, at great expense to the U.S. taxpayer and at a high level of reward to the Museveni and Kagame clans, the troops for the U.S. surrogate army. Their soldiers fight for the United States in Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa. The United States gives them arms, equipment, training, air support, cash and immunity for their gross violations of human rights of their neighbors. The U.S. AFRICOM command relies on Uganda and Rwanda to carry out its missions in East and Central Africa.