Thursday, May 22, 2003

What's wrong with this picture?
UN troops wait behind razor-wire as Congo's streets run with blood
Dead bodies litter Bunia's empty streets. From some the blood still drips from machete slashes, spear thrusts and bullet wounds. Others are two weeks old and stinking, half-eaten by the packs of dogs flopping lazily about the once-prosperous north-eastern capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There are women's bodies scattered in Bunia's main mar ket place; a baby's body on its main road; two priests' bodies inside one church. Last week, a burning corpse was tossed on to the main UN compound's lawn, to show 700 Uruguayan peacekeepers what they were missing while they cowered under fire behind its razor-wire perimeter, unauthorised to intervene in the latest massacre of Congolese civilians.
Pygmies beg UN for aid to save them from Congo cannibals
PYGMY leaders have called on the UN to set up an international tribunal to put government and rebel fighters from the Democratic Republic of Congo on trial for acts of cannibalism against their people.

Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Mbuti pygmies, told the UN’s Indigenous People’s Forum that during the four-year civil war his people had been hunted down and eaten.
Ba'ath Party teacher accuses 'war crimes' British colonel of staging mock execution
The Ba'ath Party representative in the first town occupied by the Royal Irish Regiment is thought to be the source for four of the five allegations of "war crimes" made against Col Tim Collins.
...
But the Ministry of Defence has confirmed that he is being investigated by the Army's Special Investigations Branch over a series of allegations that he:

- Punched, kicked and threatened captured Iraqis to get information out of them
- Pistol-whipped an Iraqi town leader, badly gashing his head
- Fired on the ground to intimidate two Iraqi civilians
- Issued threats to local civic leaders to get them to comply with his demands
- Shot the tyres out on a car when there was no threat to allied life

All but the last of these fit allegations made by Mr Nasser to an SIB team that interviewed him and his family about two weeks ago.
You have to be sh*tting me!