Killings, Abductions, and Pillaging by Lord’s Resistance Army Continue
(New York, November 13, 2008) – The UN Security Council should urgently increase the number of peacekeepers to help protect civilians in northern Democratic Republic of Congo following renewed attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), four international and national human rights organizations said today.
Human Rights Watch, Enough, Resolve Uganda, and the Justice and Peace Commission of Dungu/Doruma also called on the United Nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, and governments in the region to develop and carry out an arrest strategy for LRA leaders wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
According to reports, LRA combatants have killed at least 10 civilians, abducted scores of children, and pillaged and burned untold numbers of homes and schools in northeastern Congo in the last two months alone. On November 1, 2008, LRA forces attacked Dungu, the capital of Haut-Uélé district, in Orientale province. According to local sources, after fighting in which three government soldiers were killed, LRA fighters abducted at least 36 boys and 21 girls.
“The LRA leader, Joseph Kony, is continuing his brutal and abusive tactics,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The US and UK, along with the UN and governments in the region, should actively work together to apprehend LRA leaders wanted by the ICC.”
UN peacekeepers are currently struggling to protect civilians in North Kivu province, in eastern Congo, where combat between the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda and government soldiers and their allied militias has led to the displacement of a quarter of a million people and the deaths of hundreds of civilians since late August.
The United Nations says it has too few peacekeepers and logistical resources to protect civilians. On October 3, Alan Doss, the special representative of the UN secretary-general in Congo, asked the Security Council for reinforcements, but it has not yet taken any action and no countries have offered reinforcements. Some governments argue that the UN already has enough troops in the DRC that could simply be deployed differently. The continuing abduction of children by the LRA in northeastern Congo over recent months demonstrates those peacekeepers are overextended and struggling to fulfill their mandate to protect civilians. Troops are desperately needed in both the Kivus and Orientale.
On October 19-20, LRA rebels killed at least six people and abducted 17 others to transport their looted goods. Local youths then formed a self-defense unit to try to fend off the LRA. On September 17-18, the LRA attacked several villages simultaneously, abducting at least 45 children from Kiliwa and Duru. The LRA forces killed local leaders, pillaged, and burned as they swept through the villages. Precise information of these attacks has been difficult because of problems of access and security.
The ICC has issued warrants for the arrest of Joseph Kony and other Lord’s Resistance Army leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“Our people live in fear,” said Abbé Benoît Kinalegu of the Dungu/Doruma Justice and Peace Commission. “Our children are preyed on by the LRA rebels.”
Abducted children are forced to become combatants and girls are forced to provide sexual services for more senior combatants.
“The LRA is committing new abductions of children with the clear purpose of restocking its ranks,” said Michael Poffenberger of Resolve Uganda. “This was the strategy in Uganda for two decades.”
In August, 150 peacekeepers of the UN force in Congo, MONUC, and Congolese army soldiers were sent to Orientale province to contain the LRA and help provide protection for civilians. On October 25 and 29, armed clashes between the Congolese army and the LRA resulted in the death of six Congolese army soldiers and three LRA combatants, according to local reports.
Some 25,000 persons fled their homes after attacks in September and October, and another 50,000 have been displaced by the attack in Dungu. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, virtually all of the people living in an area of more than 10,000 square kilometers of northeastern Congo fled because they feared future LRA attacks. Displaced people urgently require basic humanitarian support.
The government of Uganda and the LRA negotiated a peace deal in early 2008, but Kony failed to appear at a ceremony scheduled for signing the agreement on April 10. Since then he has occasionally promised to sign, but continues his attacks on civilians.
“For 20 years the international community has not had a comprehensive strategy to end the LRA insurgency,” said John Norris, executive director of the Enough Project. “Unless the world acts now to execute the ICC warrants, Joseph Kony’s war on civilians will continue and an already fragile region will be further destabilized.”
Peace and Justice Post 
A SATANIC GENOCIDAL ISRAEL
January 8, 2009by Khalid Amayeh | uruknet.info, Jan 7, 2009
For years, I have been warning that Israel is psychologically and morally capable of carrying out a holocaust or a genocide against the Palestinian people.
Needless to say, the horrible events of the past two weeks in Gaza seem to have enforced and vindicated my convictions in this regard.
Israel, government and people, seem to possess the psychological propensity that would make her embark on such a monstrosity. Yes, there is a minority of Israeli Jews and non-Israeli Jews who say “No” to all the evils and crimes Israel is doing in the name of their name.
However, let us be honest and realistic. These people are a small minority and have very little influence if any on the Israeli government and army.
Today, what many people had thought would be unthinkable or far-fetched in terms of the extent to which Israel would be willing to go in savaging the Palestinian people seems quite possible in light of the Jewish state’s Nazi-like behavior in the Gaza Strip.
Given the Israeli mindset, Israel may well be hoping the latest genocidal onslaught could have a certain desensitizing and de-mystifying effect on people’s perceptions and attitudes.
The logic is quite simple. If the world can be bullied or cajoled into silence and apathy when Gaza is ravaged and thousands of its inhabitants are slaughtered en mass in full view of humanity, the same world can likewise be manipulated in similar fashion to come to terms with a greater genocide.
On Tuesday, 6 January, one Israeli official, Eli Yeshai, called for the total extermination of Gaza. The leader of the ultra Orthodox Shas party argued that “extermination of the enemy is sanctioned by the Torah.”
Other Israeli political and religious leaders have lately spoken enthusiastically of the need for “wiping off Gaza from the face of earth” and “annihilating of every moving thing there.”
Interestingly, this is by no means a minority opinion in Israel. Indeed, one could safely argue that the “ideology of annihilation” now represents the mainstream in the Israeli society.
As we all know, Israel heavily employs mendacity, deception and disinformation to conceal, or at least blur, its criminality and barbarianism.
The Israeli hasbara machine’s main job has always been and continues to be to turn the black into white, the white into black and the big lie into a “truth” glorified by millions, especially in the west.
To effect these obscene lies and “virtual realities,” the Israeli government counts heavily on the Jewish-controlled or Jewish influenced media in the western world, especially in North America where telling the truth about Israel is the ultimate taboo.
In truth, what has been happening in Gaza is a huge massacre of genocidal proportions as many conscientious Jews have testified.
What else can be said of this wanton, deliberate and indiscriminate blanket bombing of densely-populated neighborhoods and refugee camps?
I believe terms such as “huge massacres” and “genocidal onslaught” used in reference to the Gaza nightmare cannot be dismissed by Israel and her supporters as merely overstatements or rhetorical exaggerations.
This is unless Israel views non-Jewish pain and suffering as disingenuous, probably because non-Jews or “goyem” are actually considered “human animals” by a large and growing class of fanatical rabbis, politicians and military leaders.
So far, more than 4000 Gazans have been mercilessly killed or badly mutilated or incinerated in less than two weeks of intensive indiscriminate aerial and artillery bombing targeting everyone and everything.
Mosques, homes, public buildings, shelters, schools, colleges, dormitories, factories, cultural institutions, businesses, even hospitals and drug stores as well as the entire civilian infrastructure have been bombed and reduced to rubble.
The rabid bombing from high altitudes has exterminated numerous whole families and destroyed entire neighborhoods. This is probably what Israeli leaders had in mind when they spoke earlier about a “shock and awe” campaign against Gaza.
On 6 January, Israeli tanks fired several artillery shells at a school at the Jabalya refugee camp, killing more than 40 civilians, mostly children and women, who had sought shelter at the UNRWA-run facility. Dozens others were injured, many critically.
Israeli army spokespersons, who are actually professional liars, claimed that Palestinian fighters were seen in the vicinity of the building and that some of these actually fired on Israeli troops from the school.
However, UN officials in Gaza strongly denied the Israeli account, with one UN official saying that he was “99.99%” that the Israeli army was lying.
Earlier, the Israeli air forces hit a mourning reception, killing 15 members of the same family.
The pornographic killing of civilians has no explanation other than the ostensible fact that Israel is adopting a no-holds-barred approach toward Gaza, which is still under effective Israeli occupation despite the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the coastal enclave more than three years ago.
Well, if we are to accept this logic, namely that everything is fair in war, then Jews should stop complaining about what the armies of Hitler did to them during World War II.
It is just unacceptable to apply two standards of morality, one for Jews and another for non-Jews. For if what Israel is doing in Gaza is right, as Israel and her supporters maintain, then what the Nazis did in Europe several decades ago must have been right as well. And vice versa.
After all, crime doesn’t become kosher when committed by Jewish hands.
Colossal crime
The enormity of the present holocaustic assault is undoubtedly a colossal crime against humanity.
In proportion to the size of population, the murder and maiming of 4000 Gazans (the number keeps rising) is like the US having at least a million of its citizens killed or badly injured as a result of a foreign aggression.
As to the utter destruction of Gaza, it is equally shocking. Some American expatriates here in occupied Palestine have spoken of a double holocaust in Gaza, one targeting humans, and another targeting civilization.
Facing their crimes, pornographic and outrageous as they are, many Israelis, probably the majority, are simply so gleeful that they think Israel is doing the right think and that God is standing on the side of Israel in this war and every war.
Some religious Israelis have become so euphoric, thanks to the Gaza blitz, that they think the Messiah’s coming imminent.
Other “religious” Israeli Jews, including rabbis, readily justify the wanton slaughter by quoting biblical verses justifying genocide.
One Israeli settler leader recently argued during a conversation with a visiting American peace activist that “if it was right to commit genocide during Biblical time, why can’t it be right to commit genocide now . Has God changed his mind,” the settler wondered sarcastically.
As to Israeli leaders and officials, they simply indulge in what they have always been indulging in, namely “denial” and “self-righteousness” or simply playing the role of victim.
Thus behaved Shimon Peres, the Israeli President, when he told al-Jazeera during a live interview on Monday, 5 January.
” We don’t kill and we have not killed any children in Gaza. We are the victim of Hamas aggression,” said the pathological liar and certified war criminal rather shamelessly.
Peres’s pornographic lies don’t need any further comment. They speak for themselves.
Zionist Jews may very well think that might is right, and that morality is unneeded and unnecessary as long as they possess overwhelming material strength.
They may think that the rivers of blood the “only democracy in the Middle East” has been shedding will strengthen Israel and terrorize its neighbors.
Well, it may in the short run. However, in the long run, Israeli criminality and evilness will make it sterile from within to the point of death.
Like evil people, evil states shall not prosper.
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Tags:civilians killed, colossal crime, Gaza, genocidal attack, Israel, Israeli government, Israeli peace activists, massacres, Nazis in Europe, Palestinians killed and injured, UN oficials in Gaza
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