Crisis Caused 5.4 Million Deaths in Congo, Report Says
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An estimated 5.4 million people were killed by conflict and its fallout in Congo from 1998 until April 2007, says a report released Tuesday by the International Rescue Committee.
Most of the deaths were due to the humanitarian crisis caused by the war, which badly eroded health-care services and caused famine, says the report by the internationally recognized non-governmental aid organization. The report found that outbreaks of easily treated diseases such as malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia, malnutrition, measles and whooping cough have been major killers in Congo, especially among children.
Nearly half of the fatalities were among children under the age of five, even though they make up only 19 per cent of the total population.
The report was released the same day UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children report was released, naming Sub-Saharan Africa as the region with the highest child mortality rates in the world.
The International Rescue Committee study found that roughly 45,000 Congolese continue to die each month, even though a peace accord formally ended the war in 2002. Fighting among various factions has continued but in 2006, Congo, which has a population of 66 million people, had its first democratic election in more than four decades.
“The conflict and its aftermath, in terms of fatalities, surpass any other since World War II,” said the aid group’s president, George Rupp.
Congo’s monthly death rate of 2.2 for each 1,000 people is essentially unchanged from the last survey, released in 2004. The death rate is nearly 60 per cent higher than the average for sub-Saharan Africa, according to the study.
The eastern and most tumultuous region of Congo was one of the few areas in the country where mortality rates decreased since the last survey. The eastern part of the country has seen some 800,000 people flee their homes in the past year.
The change may be related to the increased UN presence and funding from humanitarian agencies in the region, speculated Richard Brennan, one of the study’s lead authors.
“These small but statistically important declines coincided with improvements in security, a more robust peacekeeping effort and an increase in humanitarian aid,” Brennan said. “Unfortunately, the gains in the east have been threatened by the violence in North Kivu.”
The study period ended just a few months after violence began to escalate in the province of North Kivu in December 2006.
Ceasefire being negotiated
The report was released just a day after Congolese government and representatives from armed groups active in eastern Congo agreed, at least in principle, to end decades of conflict in the region. Details of the ceasefire agreement are still being negotiated.
“This is the best chance for peace that I have seen for the people of eastern Congo,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a Human Rights Watch researcher who has followed issues in Congo for about a decade.
But the International Rescue Committee’s report on mortality rates in the country points to a tough road ahead.
“It’s going to require years of engagement from the Congolese people, the Congolese government and the international community” to reduce deaths, said Brennan.
(Posted on January 29, 2008)
Comments
Trends that can’t go on forever don’t go on forever. When too few Whites remain to keep industrial civilization running smoothly enough to generate large surpluses, the current parasitic relationship between Blacks—whether they dwell here in America or in the mega-slums of Africa—will come to an abrupt and spectacularly gruesome end. No more free food, no more free mosquito nets, no more free inoculations. Current demographic trends will reverse themselves faster than you can say “Malthusian crisis.”
Posted by Kudzu Bob at 6:54 PM on January 29
Why should I care?
Posted by flyingtiger at 7:47 PM on January 29
War=African birth control.
Posted by Jacqui in AZ at 11:01 PM on January 29
gee…and blacks wonder why we don’t want to live around them or have them in control of our nations?
Posted by at 11:48 PM on January 29
I used to feel bad about things like this. No longer. I dont care one whit about it. And the fact that I no longer care only bothers me a little bit….
5.4 Million? Jesse and Al dont seem to be upset with it either. Arent these their brothas and sistas? Oh, thats right…. its black on black, no blue eyed devils to blame/shakedown for this disaster. Blacks are indeed their own worst enemies.
Posted by at 12:38 AM on January 30
Just as though you had a bunch of rats in your house, if you keep feeding them, they will eat you out of house and home. In this case, they (the 3rd world) will eat us out of country and world.
I say for every dollar spent for humanitarian aid, match another dollar to have the women sterilized so the troubled tribes will eventually die out. This is the only humane way to reduce the population of the undesirables throughout the world.
One last thought; implement the same action upon the males of the tribes in question. This will curtail rape and make the men a bit more docile with a less warring nature.
~Rande
Posted by Rande at 12:48 AM on January 30
I caught that clown Bono along with Bill Gates and Michael Dell asking whites to pour more money into Africa. Gates and Dell were getting almost priceless publicity from the lastest scam to stop AIDS in Africa. Bono said “just 2 pills a day will make Africans with AIDS as healthy as magic Johnson. Bono may know music but he is obviously no expert on the problem of AIDS and how to deal with it. Anti-AIDS drugs will just be confiscated by the country’s dictator and sold back to Pharmaceutical companies. AIDS education is hopeless in a continent where the most”civilized” country’s (South Africa) President doesn’t believe AIDS is transmitted by sexual contact. When “Where is my machine gun” Zuma replaces the current president things will only get worse.Bono (the clown)should stick to music.
Posted by Joe Hamilton at 1:24 AM on January 30
Yeah why should my taxes go to support other people in other countries? Can’t we just help our own in America why take my money and not even help my neighbor? Why should I feel any responsibility to a country 2000 miles away from me that seems to have constantly slaughtered its own people for all of its history?
I think if we deported all the people back to their home countries their own goverments would have to respond to their demands.
This illeagle alien problem seems to me to allow the corrupt politicians who allow this slaughter to get away with it because its easier to leave than to fight for justice in their home country.
Posted by pat at 4:01 AM on January 30
I do wish these deluded liberals would stop trying to “lift” Africans out of they call “poverty”.
What Africans are trying to do is go back to living in harmony with nature in small tribe based units. Shame on these people who do not understand nature or love planet earth.
Posted by Tree Hugger at 4:32 AM on January 30
Western food aid is mostly to blame. Free from the burden of having to produce food, these people pick up a gun and start murdering their neighbors. And they are pretty smug about it.
Posted by at 6:07 AM on January 30
“We are our brother’s keepers” is the curse that keeps our taxes at a neverending spiral; I say STOP caring and save your money for your OWN.
Posted by at 9:22 AM on January 30
We will eventually see this in what is left of the United States when it begins to collapse. For those of you who don’t think the end is coming, I can assure you it is just around the corner. As the number of minorities increases so woll the amount of corruption and chaos. The country will then break apart along ethnic and linguistic lines much like the Balkans.
This may not be such a bad thing, white Americans would once again be able to have a country of their own. White Americans would no longer have to support a low IQ criminal underclass and would be able to enjoy the fruits of their own labor and productivity without having it stolen from them. We have an increasingly corrupt and illegitimate government that is more like the old feudal systems of medieval europe than the republic our forefathers bequeathed to us.
Posted by tacitus at 10:10 AM on January 30
“Bono the clown”
That’s pretty funny! Well, at least we still have his music.
Posted by Mr Pibb at 11:51 AM on January 30
I disagree with joe Halilton. Bono’s music stinks, along with his politics. Bono should take a long walk off a short pier.
Posted by flyingtiger at 2:26 PM on January 30
Let’s see:
5.4 million deaths in the Congo and American blacks and the mainstream media don’t care.
Don Imus making a negative comment about a handful of black women and the blacks and media are up in arms.
Posted by Dennis at 3:12 PM on January 30
The root of the problem lies in the fact that these people can not grasp the concept of deferred satisfaction, and that growing food in that part of the world is hard to the point of being impossible.
Add to that the conviction that shows itself in blacks everywhere, the belief that just getting into college and graduating with a degree in some silly discipline entitles you to big bucks, no matter what you can or can’t do. Farms in Zimbae and South Africa are in the hands of blacks who think that the ownership of the land makes it worth money, no matter how much or how little work might be done by the owners.
But the biggest single factor at operation here is that eveywhere in Africa, war is both a recreational activity and a means of earning a living. Theft and extortion are easier than plowing and planting, and require only little skill.
To remain humane we must help these people; most of them are innocent of the savagary that makes Africa what it is. But only after we have demanded that arms be confiscated from all but a western-sanctioned police force, and after every tin-pot dictator has been handed over or liquidated.
Posted by Ric Blair at 7:38 PM on January 30
The problem is when our government and various do-gooder groups bring them here and dump them in OUR communities. (And surprise surprise, the violence and other pathologies follows them.)
Posted by at 9:17 PM on January 30
A friend of mine is a filmmaker who recently released the feature length documentary “The Greatest Silence” on one aspect of the conflict in the Congo: sexual brutality against women. (I believe the film is going to be aired by HBO in April.) I recently viewed the film and I was deeply disturbed by it and even nauseated. The brutality involves not only gang rape, but horrific sexual mutilation and torture. And it is taking place with total impunity on a vast scale.
There are several interviews with the rapists in the film. Their demeanor is exactly like that of young black men in any black community in the US. You can see them briefly in the trailer at
http://www.thegreatestsilence.org/
The filmmaker herself was raped in Washington, DC by a gang of blacks. She is a very liberal woman and has never seen a racial connection between her own experience and what’s going on in the Congo. To her, it’s only evidence that American society suffers from some of the same evils as the Congo.
Posted by at 2:54 AM on January 31
The filmmaker herself was raped in Washington, DC by a gang of blacks. She is a very liberal woman and has never seen a racial connection between her own experience and what’s going on in the Congo. To her, it’s only evidence that American society suffers from some of the same evils as the Congo.
Posted by at 2:54 AM on January 31
Typical white liberal woman. You got plenty of those in US, S. Africa, & Europe. They always make excuses for black criminals. I just don’t get it.
Posted by Violet at 6:39 PM on January 31
Isn’t Bono’s main hit “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”? That’s a great summation of liberaldumb — ever “searching” for, uh, well, something but making sure never to actually find it, giving one the freedom to mess everything and everybody over in the process out of the purest “good intentions”. Bono and the Gateses got “People of the Year” cover honors in Time rag because (1) they’re hyper-celebrities, ever in the public eye and (2) they epitomize the New Soviet Amerikan, i.e. their every thought (beyond aggrandizing and enriching themselves) is devoted to getting white countries to commit hara-kiri for the alleged benefit of nonwhite ones. The whiter the former and the blacker the latter, the better for purposes of do-gooder mass hypnosis. Whites’ lachrymose sacrificing of billions of shekels so nonwhites can breed themselves further out of all proportion to their territories and the resources in them, that’s a kind of travesty the devil himself must have thought up. Everybody loses with this kind of charity!
Posted by Fillard Millmore at 3:59 PM on February 1