Barack Obama will likely be remembered by history as the president that honed “humanitarian” intervention into a favored weapon of regime change. Samantha Power is the trigger. The U.S. Ambassador to the UN has set her sites on Burundian President Nkurunziza, five of whose high party members have already been assassinated.
Submitted by Ann Garrison
Black Agenda Report on Tue, 08/11/2015
“Powers has her sights set on the tiny, impoverished East African nation of Burundi.”
U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power is on a mission to save Africans from African savagery. She wants you to call 1-800-GENOCIDE so she can pressure the president to send in the Marines or US Special Forces, Her entire career is based on a historically inaccurate, decontextualized, and grossly over simplified account of the 1994 Rwandan massacres, during which the U.S. "stood by." From now on, she moralizes, US citizens must be "upstanders," not bystanders. "Never again" can we fail in our moral duty to stop the world's dark-skinned, backward peoples from massacring one another over ethnic difference. She wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book calling this
The Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, which was based on her 2001 Atlantic Monthly essay “Bystanders to Genocide."
Power fails to note that the US "stood by" intentionally, not indifferently, in Rwanda, until Pentagon protegé General Paul Kagame won a war of aggression begun four years earlier. She blames U.S. officials who successfully pushed for reducing the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda to a skeletal staff as Rwanda descended into hell, but says, in “Bystanders to Genocide,” that this was "not a story of willful complicity with evil."
”All but a few African nations now have soldiers serving under AFRICOM, the US Africa Command.”
She fails to mention that General Paul Kagame threatened to fire on UN troops if they came between his troops and those of the Rwandan army, as Reuters reported on May 18, 1994.
Now, having successfully advocated for US-led NATO wars in Libya and Syria "to stop the next Rwanda," Powers has her sights set on the tiny, impoverished East African nation of Burundi. Burundi shares the Hutu/Tutsi/Twa ethnic divisions with neighboring Rwanda and a highly geostrategic border with the resource rich Democratic Republic of the Congo.
US troops typically appear only as "advisors" south of the Sahara Desert, although the Pentagon/Harvard collaboration Mass Atrocity Response Operations; A Military Planning Handbook, which Power helped to produce, describes the swift, surgical deployment of U.S. Special Forces as a blueprint at the ready. For now there are plenty of African troops serving under U.S. military command and grateful to receive the salaries that boost their class status in Africa, though they'd be considered poverty wages in the U.S. All but a few African nations now have soldiers serving under AFRICOM, the US Africa Command, and Burundi's belligerent neighbor Rwanda is one of the greatest troop contributors. One complication of the Burundian situation is that Burundian troops serve alongside Ugandans in AMISON, the Pentagon-led UN Mission to Somalia.
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http://www.blackagendareport.com/africa_problem_from_hell_samantha_power
Gee. Peace sure sounds complicated. With all the factions that have to be satisfied, it's easy to see how the people get killed in the process.
Thank you for the pointing it out, GeorgeGist. For some reason, the continent of Africa is not represented by
any of its nations holding a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
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