samedi 9 août 2014

Obama's Double Standards For Dictators

8/05/2014



Obama is toasting some of Africa’s biggest thugs this week.

He is trumpeting the largest-ever gathering of African leaders on U.S. soil, at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit. Most are welcome. Some should not be– the ones who have written their rule in their people’s blood.

Take Congo President Joseph Kabila, who swanned into Andrews Air Force base on Sunday with military pomp.

Talk about misplaced honor. Try to find a human right that hasn’t been trampled in Kabila’s 13-year rule.

Sure, Kabila is the first Democratic Republic of the Congo president to be democratically elected since the former Belgian colony became independent in 1960. But dissidents fault both his 2006 and 2012 elections. Phantom votes in pro-Kabila districts, no ballots in opposition areas, they say, put him into office. The police habitually beat pro-democracy demonstrators. Cell phone photos show dissidents bleeding on the ground, their arms feebly trying to block the blows of police truncheons.

It wasn’t an election that first brought Kabila to power. It was his father’s death. So he essentially inherited his office—like a feudal lord.

Kabila didn’t have much training for democracy. His college education was a military academy in communist China. He led the infamous “Kagodos,” a band of perhaps 10,000 child soldiers tied to atrocities in Congo and neighboring Rwanda. Some of child-conscripts were as young as seven.

When the State department listed Congo for violating the “Child Soldiers Protection Act,” Obama issued a presidential exemption from sanctions in 2009. He said engagement was better than confrontation. That bet hasn’t worked out well.

The “war on women” isn’t a metaphor there. It is “the rape capital of the world,” U.N. special representative Margot Wallstrom told the Security Council in 2010. There are believed to be 48 rapes per hour in the Congo– and Kabila’s forces are the main culprits. Under Kabila, only some 300 soldiers have been jailed for rape. That is not enough, Kabila told CNN. There are more than 200,000 cases of rape reported. Rape reports surge every place that Kabila’s “army or police forces are deployed,” one U.N. report notes. Many girls and women are kidnapped, raped or mutilated, other U.N. reports say, with the aim of denying their tribe the next generation. Some mutilated girls in South Kivu province are as young as 18 months.

Then there are the alleged death squads. A Kabila ally, Gabriel Amisi Kumba was the chief of staff for the Land Forces of Congolese Army. He is linked to roving killers terrorizing North Kivu province, according to the Congo Independent.

A culture of brazen corruption permeates Kabila’s nation. A South African billionaire bragged to South Africa’s Sunday World that he received “a Chopard watch from André Kimbuta, governor of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. On giving him the present, Kimbuta announced: ‘This could feed 5,000 of the people here.’” Watches for billionaires, starvation for citizens? Maybe Obama should dust off his speeches about the 1%.

Kimbuta was also accused of ordering the 2008 killing of an opposition leader, allegedly paying the killers $1,200. He denied the charges. Life is cheap is Congo, death is even cheaper.

Kabila and his cronies are accused of pocketing billions in U.S. and European aid payments. Some estimates put the alleged ill-gotten gains at $15 billion.

Now Kabila is mulling staying in office when his term expires in 2016. His pending defiance of the Congo constitution will bring chaos to his country. President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. envoy Russ Feingold have pleaded with Kabila to leave on schedule. The Obama’s position was once clear: “Africa needs strong institutions, not strong men.”

If Obama stood firmly on this principle, Africa’s leaders would be prodded toward progress. Instead, he has softened.

Kabila replies with arrogant relativism. His nation’s pre-summit statement, posted on the White House website, declares: “Because of its complexity, the democratic process requires [sic] to take in account certain sociocultural parameters that are not transposable from one continent to another or from one country to another. Patterns borrowed or imposed from abroad have revealed their limitations on the continent.” So freedom is a shoddy foreign import?

Then Congo throws Obama’s words back in his face. “In this context, it makes sense to adhere to the realistic remarks of President Barack Obama pronounced during a press conference at the White House on July 14, 2012 when he said: ‘Africans must forge
sustainable solutions to their problems and build their own model of democracy.’”

Obama’s own words are turned against him because relativism opens doors for tyrants. They snatch any thread to hold onto power. Barring Kabila would have signaled that the U.S. is serious about removing strongmen in Africa.

Why was Kabila even invited? National Security Council spokesman Edward Price told the Daily Mail that “all African nations in good standing with the AU [African Union] and the United States were invited to the summit.” This isn’t even true.

Egypt and Guinea-Bissau were both invited—and each is poor standing with the African Union and the U.S. Others African nations were not invited.

When Obama is afraid to say no, he says yes to every outrage.



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