Geopolitical topics

[John]

Malleni - I've moved your latest posting to the "defensive interpretation" thread,
where it seems more appropriate.

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=52&p=765#p765

[John]

-- Humanitarian disaster in Democratic Republic of Congo

I'm having some trouble evaluating what's going on here. The
international press is talking about massive genocide, hundreds of
thousands of refugees, and attacks on refugee camps.

That has all the earmarks of a crisis war, but the problem is placing
it into a generational timeline.



The war is a follow-on to the 1994 Hutu genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda.
The Tutsis are now in control of Rwanda, and many of the Hutu armies
were forced into DRC (known as Zaire at the time), where they've
formed militias preparting to fight the Tutsis again.

Here are some excerpts from a story that describes the Hutu actions:

'We have to kill Tutsis wherever they are'

The boy with the shaved head and Kalashnikov slung across his legs
is uncertain about a lot of things, even his age. ...

What's over the hills? Rwanda, he says. Where are his parents? He
doesn't know. Dead, he thinks. He doesn't remember them, only
what some people told him.

And what was he told? He was very small when everyone ran away
from those they called the inyenzi - the cockroaches. ...

The boy, with his straightforward beliefs, sees no reason not to
say aloud that the path to a better life lies over the graves of
Tutsis. It is a philosophy based on the "Hutu 10 Commandments"
that underpinned the genocide. The commandments call any Hutu who
marries a Tutsi a traitor, and say that the Tutsis' "only goal is
ethnic superiority".

"Hutu must stop taking pity on the Tutsi," says the eighth
commandment.

"Hutu must stand firm and vigilant against their common enemy:
the Tutsi," says the ninth. ...

Fourteen-year-old Bahati Mugisha doesn't put it that way. He is a
young FDLR fighter who was captured by the group's principal
enemy inside Congo - a renegade Tutsi general, Laurent Nkunda, who
broke from the Congolese government army to battle the Hutu rebels
who were killing and ethnically cleansing Congo's own Tutsi
population of several hundred thousand.

"They gave me a gun and said we were going to fight the Tutsis,"
says the teenager. "They said these were our enemy and we must
kill as many as possible." Asked who told him these things, the
teenager says his commander - men such as Aloize Mbanza, a
53-year-old former Rwandan army corporal who found himself
indoctrinating a new Hutu generation in Congo. Mbanza fled back to
his homeland last year. "Most of the FDLR who are young came from
Rwanda when they were very small, so they grew up in Congo," he
says. "Now the FDLR is also recruiting Rwandan boys who were born
in Congo, in the refugee camps. They are 12 or 13 years old. They
are the ones who don't have fear. They are fighting with guns.
There are many of them. The only school they know is the army."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/ma ... ngo.rwanda

These Hutu militias apparently are generally supported by the DRC
government.

On the other side are the Tutsi militias in the DRC. These militias
are referred to as "anti-government rebels." Their leader is General
Laurent Nkunda, who fought the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994.

Here are some excerpts from an article about him:

Congo's maverick warlord who kills in the name of Christianity

General Laurent Nkunda is a contradiction. An urbane
jungle-dweller; an evangelical Christian warlord; a cerebral
military strategist who unleashes awful brutality; a tribal
protector and father of six who recruits children into his ranks;
a patriot who wages war and steals the resources of the Democratic
Republic of Congo.

As ever, General Nkunda, 41, has been justifying his assaults by
saying that he must protect minority ethnic Tutsis. This week his
4,000 well-trained, disciplined troops marched from their
mountain strongholds past the volcanoes and villages of North Kivu
before stopping a few miles from Goma, a dusty provincial town
bloated with refugees. The national army fled in disarray and UN
peacekeepers failed to halt his advance.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 058019.ece

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, there are several
different possibilities for what's going on here, and determining the
correct one will require a lot more research.

DRC's last crisis war appears to have occurred in the early 1960s,
but that took place around Kinshasa in western DRC.

Rwanda's crisis war took place in 1994. (Rwanda is shown as "RW" on
the map above.)

So, is the current war a Recovery Era war on the same timeline as the
Rwanda genocide? If so, then we would expect it to fizzle out, or
continue as low-level violence for many years.

Or, is the current war a Crisis War on a completely different
generational timeline? If so, then we would expect it to explode
into a full-scale civil war.

DRC is as big as all of Europe, so it's almost a certainty that this
huge country has multiple generational timelines. Furthermore,
according to the CIA World Factbook, "Ethnic groups: over 200 African
ethnic groups of which the majority are Bantu; the four largest
tribes - Mongo, Luba, Kongo (all Bantu), and the Mangbetu-Azande
(Hamitic) make up about 45% of the population"

So trying to get all this sorted out seems, right now, to be a huge
mountain for me to climb, especially since there's little history
except for some sources when it was a Belgian colony.

There's currently a humanitarian disaster unfolding, as Nkunda's
forces approach Goma, and hundreds of thousands of residents are
fleeing. Perhaps in the next few days, it will become clearer
whether this disaster is a crisis war genocide, or just a population
panicking during a Recovery Era.

Sincerely,

John

[Matt1989]

DRC's last crisis war appears to have occurred in the early 1960s,
but that took place around Kinshasa in western DRC.

Rwanda's crisis war took place in 1994. (Rwanda is shown as "RW" on
the map above.)

John, there is no way that the Congo Wars in the 1990s-2000s were not a Crisis War for the majority of the DRC. I happen to think that most of the country is unified along this timeline. The 1960s Political Crisis was a huge event for the country, but the epicenter was in Katanga and Kasai (east and southeast).

The most troubling exception to the saeculum that I've encountered is the 1959 genocide in Rwanda.

[Matt1989]

John, Imadinnerjacket said something more along the lines of, "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."

The media just ate the more provocative "translation" up.

[John]

Dear Matt,

> John, Imadinnerjacket said something more along the lines of, "The
> Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the
> page of time."

> The media just ate the more provocative "translation" up.

This posting looks like something is missing. I don't know who
Imadinnerjacket is, but I assume that you're referring to the
quotation attributed to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Israel must be wiped
off the map.

A web site reader complained about this to me a couple of years ago,
and the following is my response:

> No one who speaks Farsi, that I have spoken with, agree with
> these translations. No major Iranian press supports this
> interpretation.

Your Farsi-speaking friends are playing a little semantic joke on
you.

What Ahmadinejad said was, "This regime occupying Jerusalem must
vanish from the page of time." Quite frankly, I don't see much
difference between that and "must be wiped off the map." They sound
pretty much the same to me.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e16218.htm

But there's a much bigger issue: I don't think that Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad would agree with you. I think that he would say, "Yes, I
did mean that Israel must be wiped off the map."

The first time that Ahmadinejad made that remark, I thought that it
was probably a misstatement or mistranslation. But after that, he
made many more very inflammatory comments. So today there's little
doubt in my mind that he meant exactly what he said.
http://www.voanews.com/uspolicy/archive ... N=31698464

Furthermore, he's backed up his words with actions -- spending money
on terrorists in Hizbollah and Gaza.

If Ahmadinejad wanted, he could defuse the entire issue by saying,
"My remark was taken out of context, and I was misunderstood, but I
don't think that Israel should be wiped off the map."

So you should be directing your complaints to Ahmadinejad instead of
to me. Until Ahmadinejad himself says that the press has unfairly
translated his remarks, then there's no doubt in my mind that
Ahmadinejad would like Israel wiped off the map.

See also:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0104/p07s02-wome.html

Sincerely,

John

[Matt1989]

Dear Matt,

> John, Imadinnerjacket said something more along the lines of, "The
> Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the
> page of time."

> The media just ate the more provocative "translation" up.

This posting looks like something is missing. I don't know who
Imadinnerjacket is, but I assume that you're referring to the
quotation attributed to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Israel must be wiped
off the map.

A web site reader complained about this to me a couple of years ago,
and the following is my response:

> No one who speaks Farsi, that I have spoken with, agree with
> these translations. No major Iranian press supports this
> interpretation.

Your Farsi-speaking friends are playing a little semantic joke on
you.

What Ahmadinejad said was, "This regime occupying Jerusalem must
vanish from the page of time." Quite frankly, I don't see much
difference between that and "must be wiped off the map." They sound
pretty much the same to me.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e16218.htm

But there's a much bigger issue: I don't think that Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad would agree with you. I think that he would say, "Yes, I
did mean that Israel must be wiped off the map."

The first time that Ahmadinejad made that remark, I thought that it
was probably a misstatement or mistranslation. But after that, he
made many more very inflammatory comments. So today there's little
doubt in my mind that he meant exactly what he said.
http://www.voanews.com/uspolicy/archive ... N=31698464

Furthermore, he's backed up his words with actions -- spending money
on terrorists in Hizbollah and Gaza.

If Ahmadinejad wanted, he could defuse the entire issue by saying,
"My remark was taken out of context, and I was misunderstood, but I
don't think that Israel should be wiped off the map."

So you should be directing your complaints to Ahmadinejad instead of
to me. Until Ahmadinejad himself says that the press has unfairly
translated his remarks, then there's no doubt in my mind that
Ahmadinejad would like Israel wiped off the map.

See also:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0104/p07s02-wome.html

Sincerely,

John

I don't know John. Quoting someone who called for the Israeli government to be toppled (and presumably replaced by a Muslim regime) seems reasonably different than Western translation. When I first heard about the Ahmadinejad (Imadinnerjacket) line, I thought, "Wow. He's hinting at genocide!" Perhaps if CNN or someone who reported on this used the more accurate translation, the thought wouldn't have popped into my mind.

Ahmadinejad has continually played a coy little abstruse game with the world media, so I'd be careful about pinning him to a particular view -- especially on a subject as slippery as this. All I propose is that we should quote someone properly first, and then infer what they meant.

[John]

Ahmadinejad (Imadinnerjacket)

Hell, I should have caught that.

John

[John]

From a web site reader:

> I am very impressed with your site, especially when looking at
> some of your past predictions. I was trapped in Lebanon during
> the fighting in early May and everyone was in great fear that a
> civil war was in progress. You predicted that it would fizzle out,
> and it did.

Great to hear something from the field!!

Sincerely,

John

[ainsleyclare]

Regarding what's going on in the Congo and how it fits into the generational paradigm...in a society where children are taken from their families and put onto the front lines a a very young age, maybe the generation timeline is compressed (children growing up too fast) or extended (children not having the opportunity to learn from and conflict with the previous generation, so it falls to another generation to do that generational work)?

[Matt1989]

Regarding what's going on in the Congo and how it fits into the generational paradigm...in a society where children are taken from their families and put onto the front lines a a very young age, maybe the generation timeline is compressed (children growing up too fast) or extended (children not having the opportunity to learn from and conflict with the previous generation, so it falls to another generation to do that generational work)?

There is something fishy going on down there.

1959 Genocide in Rwanda
1960 Political Crisis Zaire

1994 Genocide in Rwanda
1995-2003 Congo Wars DRC