Sunday, August 15, 2004

NO MORE BLOOD FOR... whatever

I've decided to embark on a path that will leave the world a better place when I'm gone. I'm going to invent an antimatter bomb that leaves a U.N.-shaped hole in reality. Anyone with experience in physics, antimatter, or bombs is welcome to help. Anyone with experience in reality is already nowhere near the U.N.

Broken record warning: U.N. OUT OF CONGO NOW!

But my most specialest ire is reserved for the collaborationist lapdogs at CNN:

(CNN) -- Armed attackers have killed up to 150 people in a raid on a refugee camp in Burundi, according to the United Nations.
[...]
"It's devastation, you can hear people wailing and screaming," said David Short, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, describing the scene in Gatumba, near the capital Bujumbura.
[...]
The United Nations has been working to stem humanitarian violations in the war-torn central African country.

On Thursday, the top U.N. envoy to Burundi Carolyn McAskie blamed the human rights abuses -- which include summary executions, torture, sexual violence and arbitrary detentions -- on both sides "for political and military gain."

Thousands of Banyamulenge refugees have fled the Democratic Republic of Congo in recent months, taking shelter in camps in Burundi run by the U.N. refugee agency.

If you read the Guardian link, do you also have this nagging sensation, like some trifling detail is missing from this account? You know, something like "The people who were slaughtered were supposed to be in the U.N.'s care, but the U.N. failed miserably to protect these people AGAIN"? Do you think that trivial item might have gotten pared out of the first draft? How do you think that decision might happen?

Maybe it just wasn't deemed important that it was the U.N.'s camp that was attacked, or maybe there's some other reason that this fact was carefully skirted around. "Skirted around" is what it is though - it's hard to claim a mistake when so significant a detail appears so obliquely 2/3 of the way through the article.

Here's a tip to the CNN copy monkey, and their editor (my treat, the first one's always free): When the Guardian is markedly less sympathetic to the U.N. than you are, your objectivity is probably due for scrutiny. It's time to put up your feet and think about it.

1 Comments:

Blogger Doug said...

The U.N.'s involvement in and around Congo has been a string of victimizations (usually via negligence) studiously being ignored by most press. I was pleased to see the Guardian's account was pretty forthright about it, if not exactly accusatory, but... then came CNN. Nice one, guys.

1:40 PM  

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