- Posts tagged war
- Explore war on posterous
The deadliest war
By far the deadliest conflict was in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1998 to 2003. Eight African nations participated in the fighting on Congolese soil, many hoping to seize control of its vast mineral wealth. Some 4 million Congolese died during the conflict and nearly another 1 million have died in the lawless aftermath from starvation, conflict and preventable disease. Tens of thousands of children were forced to become soldiers, and as many as two out of three women were victimized by rape and other forms of sexual violence.
This is still happening today.
Perhaps the lack of attention toward these atrocities explains the disconnect in Washington between the compassion felt for the people of eastern Congo and the nominal advancement of specific policies to bring sustainable change to the region. Fortunately, that began to change this summer with passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, which required reporting the origin of potential conflict minerals from Congo. I hope that the incoming Congress will continue the bipartisan movement for sustainable peace and prosperity in that region.
Much remains to be done to help the Congolese people secure their region for the long term. In a defiant response to circumstances beyond their control, the resourceful and resilient Congolese people have flourished and begun to rebuild the foundation for effective government. This potential was evident in the national elections held four years ago and in the relative stability that has followed.
The potential can also be seen through local organizations such as Synergy of Women for Sexual Violence Victims in North Kivu. I am amazed how Synergy - despite regular threats - works to end gender-based violence and to provide survivors with critical support. This is just one of the many community-based solutions that bring about substantive change.
Through extensive time spent in Congo and my work with the Eastern Congo Initiative, I can attest to the authenticity of progress. But I can also speak to its fragility. Supporting Congolese efforts to move beyond their nation's violent past and ultimately stabilize civil society requires strong leadership and a more holistic approach from the United States.
To secure the peace, we must continue to support local leaders and trust their ability to manage their own destiny. At the same time, we cannot refuse to recognize that the reinforcing cycle of poverty and corruption still rules and that many crimes are still committed with impunity. We need to also acknowledge that achieving stability within Congo's borders requires understanding the dynamics outside those borders and throughout the Great Lakes region.
This isn't just altruism. The United States has security, economic and diplomatic interests in a peaceful and stable Congo. That is why the Eastern Congo Initiative has developed a set of recommendations for U.S. policymakers that can lead to a mutually beneficial improvement in the lives of the Congolese people. The four most significant recommendations happen to be the easiest to implement, with several already mandated by existing legislation.
First, it is imperative that the United States maintain the State Department office of special adviser for the Great Lakes region with a new appointment and open a renewed political dialogue.
Second, Washington must implement the provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act designed to strengthen enforcement sanctions related to conflict minerals. Only in an equitable and transparent business environment can Congo's mineral wealth pay for Congo's future.
Third, the United States and the international community must continue to provide technical assistance and ensure the appropriate environment for the elections scheduled for 2011. Fair national, regional and local elections, in which the outcomes are accepted by the people, are vital for reestablishing confidence in civic institutions.
Finally, we must support Congo's efforts to implement administrative and judicial reforms to root out political interference, stop corruption and foster the rule of law. Sealing the security vacuum with something other than militias will place the Congolese people in control of their destiny.
Following bipartisan leadership in the United States, the world can ensure that Congo never again experiences the violence and exploitation that defined much of its past two decades.
Synergy's creator, Justine Masika Bihamba, began helping women after rebels broke into her house and sexually assaulted her daughter. Her family is under constant threat because of her humanitarian efforts. When asked why she stays, she says, "I have to do my work."
For the same reason, to help realize a vibrant Congo with abundant opportunities for economic and social development, we can't leave either.
The writer, an actor and director, first visited Congo in 2007 and founded the Eastern Congo Initiative early this year.
Blitz 70th anniversary: Night of fire that heralded a new kind of war | World news | The Guardian
London Blitz: 7 September 1940 was the first day of the German bombardment of London that lasted 76 consecutive nights.St Paul's cathedral in London during the blitz in World War II. Credit: Popperfoto
It was late in the afternoon of an early September Saturday 70 years ago when the German bombers came, flying low, in formation, up the Thames, their engines roaring as they headed for London to start eight months of bombing the capital.
"It was the most amazing, impressive, riveting sight," wrote Colin Perry, a lad cycling that afternoon on Chipstead Hill, Surrey, in a memoir years later. "Directly above me were literally hundreds of planes … the sky was full of them. Bombers hemmed in with fighters, like bees around their queen, like destroyers round the battleship, so came Jerry."
Mavis Fabling, now 80, remembers that afternoon of 7 September 1940 just as clearly. She said: "I can still remember it very vividly. We lived in Abbey Wood, three miles from Woolwich Arsenal. My mother was baking in the kitchen, I was playing outside and my father was digging in the garden. Suddenly he rushed inside. He'd seen the planes overhead. 'Quick, quick, quick, get into the air raid shelter.' We ran down into the shelter in our garden.
"There were awfully frightening sounds, of bombs dropping and then there was one ghastly, thunderous sound. It was a direct hit on our neighbour's shelter. They were all killed, the whole family, except the father who was out. My mother had taken his wife shopping the day before to buy clothes at the Co-op. I can remember looking out of the window at the coffins being brought out and my mother very distressed.
Remembering the blitz: was it an avoidable tragedy? Hitler unleashed the blitz on Britain on 7 September 1940. But could more have been done to lessen the destruction and bloodshed that followed?
Just after 4.30pm on Saturday, 7 September 1940, 364 German bombers and 515 fighters flew across the Channel and followed the Thames estuary to London, using the fires caused by their bombs as markers. They came for a further 75 consecutive nights (except for one that was too cloudy for the bombers to operate). The blitz would last until 16 May 1941 – when most of the Luftwaffe was reassigned to the invasion of Russia. In 1940, 13,000 people were killed in London alone. Attacks on other major cities throughout the UK began on 15 October 1940, with the centre of Coventry being destroyed on the night of 14/15 November.
The idea was to force Britain to seek peace: German bombs would destroy its industry, transport and communications links around major cities, and so terrify the civilian population that they would force their government to sue for peace. Hitler knew it would take time, but London's four million inhabitants, its packed and inflammable warehouses, its maze of narrow streets and teeming slums, were ripe for terror tactics.
And terror there certainly was. Men old enough to have fought in the first world war said the western front had offered nothing worse than they saw on the first night of the blitz. The next day, most of London's firefighters were convinced they would not live for more than another week.
Acts of bravery abounded among the terrible onslaught; yet, when postwar prime minister Clement Attlee would later demand sacrifice from his people, he appealed to "the Dunkirk spirit", not "the blitz spirit" – perhaps because, if you were at Dunkirk, you were part of a self-electing group doing brave things. Everyone was in on the blitz: the brave and the not-so-brave, the honest and the dishonest, and those, like most of us, who are a little of both. Maybe this explains why it has taken so long for Britain to mark properly the events of 70 years ago.
We think of it as a time when cheerful cockneys defied the Nazi menace; and that's not wrong, but it is a small part of the story. People knew someone had blundered. Britain had had plenty of time to prepare: the Home Office had been thinking about mass bombing since 1933, and in 1937 German bombers supporting Franco in the Spanish civil war destroyed the town of Guernica and killed 2,000 citizens. Deep shelters had been built in Barcelona, which proved very successful, and there was a move to build them in London, but it was never done. Families were given Anderson shelters (named after the home secretary, Sir John Anderson) instead. This, as the author Stephen Spender wrote in 1945 in Citizens in War, "overlooked the fact that in the majority of homes there was no room for an Anderson shelter". So Londoners forced the authorities to permit the use of tube stations as shelters.
Britain was ill-equipped to defend its cities. The underpowered searchlights were usually ineffective against aircraft at altitudes above 12,000ft. During the first raid, only 92 anti-aircraft guns were available to defend London, though within five days there were twice as many, with orders to fire at will. This boosted civilian morale and encouraged bomber crews to drop before they were over their target, though it had little physical effect.
The blitz did not provide a respite from human greed, bureaucratic idiocy and official meanness. "Don't talk to me about everyone pulling together," says David Clark, who was a little boy when his home in Ilford suffered a direct hit. The family was safe in its Anderson shelter, "but the neighbours and the ARP [Air Raid Precautions wardens] assumed we were dead and looted the house. They didn't get the fish knives or the port decanter and I still have those."
Such stories do not form part of our collective memory of the war. As Angus Calder writes in The Myth of the Blitz, "Successful after-raid looters have not written their memoirs. Cowardly people in local government have not advertised their shame." It is true that brave cockneys shouted to Winston Churchill, "We can take it!" – but the full story of that day, as told in Juliet Gardiner's fine new book The Blitz, is one of dreadful and avoidable tragedy. A bomb crashed through a ventilation shaft into a shelter containing more than 1,000 people. Churchill visited the scene while parents were still turning over their dead children: "It was good of you to come, Winnie. We thought you'd come. We can take it. Give it back." An old woman said: "You see, he really cares, he's crying."
About the only thing the government had got right was the creation in March 1938 of the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS), which saw 28,000 auxiliary full- and part-time firefighters recruited for the London Fire Brigade alone. But even the AFS might easily have failed. Professional firefighters resented it, while AFS people grumbled that they were paid less and their conditions of service were inferior. The situation was saved by an alliance between London Fire Brigade chief Major Frank Jackson and the leftwing leader of the Fire Brigades Union, John Horner, who collaborated in persuading regular firefighters to accept the AFS as equals. Horner later wrote of "the complete lack of preparedness which left men isolated for hours without food or drink, which condemned men who had been wet through for days to return to their stations and turn out again, still in wet clothes".
Tens of thousands of civilians were forced to sleep far from their homes – in parked cars, taxis and buses; in churches and barns; even out in the open, on Hampstead Heath or Greenwich Park – and walked, cycled or took buses into work every day (it was called "trekking"). But once again, the way some of these homeless casualties of the blitz were received punctures the idea of everyone being "in it together". Baldock in Hertfordshire, for example, was known to be unwelcoming, while Windsor would not accept "Jews or children". The prejudice of the burghers of Windsor was echoed both lower down and higher up in the social scale: the military engineered the dismissal of the Jewish secretary of state for war, Leslie Hore-Belisha, on thinly disguised antisemitic grounds.
In 1941, RAF Bomber Command asked the fire chiefs: "What change of tactics by the Luftwaffe would cause you most concern?" Firefighters said the concentration of a heavy attack into a very short space of time could swamp fire service resources. And so, when 1,000 RAF bombers attacked Cologne in May 1942, 1,500 tonnes of high explosive were dropped on the city in the space of an hour and a half, and fire services were overwhelmed. The allies won the war partly because we ran a more effective blitz than Hitler.
US decision to attend Hiroshima event seen as a breakthrough, but still sensitive
World
US decision to attend Hiroshima event seen as a breakthrough, but still sensitive
Published August 05, 2010
| Associated Press
- Share
- Comments (1)
- Text Size
HIROSHIMA, Japan
HIROSHIMA, Japan (AP) — The site of the world's first atomic attack swarmed with tens of thousands of people Thursday as Hiroshima prepared for a memorial that will for the first time have representatives from the United States and other major nuclear powers.
Washington's decision to attend the 65th anniversary event on Friday has been welcomed by Japan's government, but has generated complex feelings among some Japanese who see the bombing as unjustified and want the United States to apologize.
"Americans think that the bombing was reasonable because it speeded up the end of the war. They try to see it in a positive way," Naomi Sawa, a 69-year-old former teacher, said after paying her respects to the dead. "But we were devastated."
About 140,000 people were killed or died within months when an American B-29 bombed Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Three days later, about 80,000 people died after the United States attacked Nagasaki.
Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, ending World War II.
Concerns that attending the ceremony — an emotional event beginning with the offering of water to the dead and the ringing of a bell to soothe their souls — would reopen old wounds had until this year kept the U.S. away.
Former President Jimmy Carter visited Hiroshima's Peace Museum in 1984, after he was out of office. The highest-ranking American to visit while in office is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who went in 2008.
Neither went for the annual memorial.
But to gain wider attendance, Hiroshima has taken great pains to ensure that the memorial will be a forward-looking event, a key to getting Washington to participate. Japanese officials said it is important to use the anniversary as a chance to push nuclear disarmament, not revisit history.
That message appears to have resonated.
Friday's memorial is to be the largest gathering yet, with representatives from 75 countries and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. John Roos, the ambassador to Japan, will represent the U.S.
French and British dignitaries were to join for the first time as well.
The presence of the U.S. has been hailed by officials in Hiroshima and Tokyo as a breakthrough and a sign of President Barack Obama's desire to push ahead with his ambitious goal of creating a world without nuclear weapons.
"We believe the attendance of the nuclear powers will bolster a global desire to abolish nuclear weapons," Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said in a statement.
Ban, who visited Nagasaki on Thursday before arriving in Hiroshima, said this year's memorial will send a strong signal to the world that nuclear weapons must be destroyed.
"The only way to ensure that such weapons will never again be used is to eliminate them all," he said. "There must be no place in our world for such indiscriminate weapons."
Hiroshima has invited Obama to visit the city, and he has expressed interest in doing so at some point while he is in office.
But such a visit would be highly controversial.
At Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park, some visitors expressed concerns that Japan's view of the bombing — seen by many as excessive use of deadly force — still remains at odds with America's.
Katsuko Nishibe, a 61-year-old peace activist, said she welcomed the decision to send Roos, but added that she thought it was dangerous to think that the bombing of Hiroshima was justified.
"I don't think it was necessary," she said. "We have a very different interpretation of history. But we can disagree about history and still agree that peace is what is important. That is the real lesson of Hiroshima."
Jerry Wohlgemuth, a 23-year-old college student from Great Meadows, New Jersey, said he supported the decision to send a representative from the U.S.
"It shows how much progress we've made as a country," he said.
But he said he thought the bombing was unavoidable.
"Just imagining sending Marines to Japan's mainland and having to take Tokyo — millions would have died. It might not have even been possible. World War II was total war."
- Share
- Comments (1)
- Text Size
Leave A Comment
Fox News encourages you to participate in this discussion; however, please be sure to review our Terms of Use and Privacy Statement.
Afghan soldiers, Combat Oupost Ware, southern Afghanistan | In pictures | World news | guardian.co.uk
Afghan soldiers, Combat Oupost Ware, southern Afghanistan
Images of 10 of almost 40 soldiers from the Afghan national army, who patrol from a US outpost in the Arghandab valley, near Kandahar. The army is largely made up of northerners, who fought the Pashtun-dominated Taliban from the south of the country. Portraits by Kevin Frayer
Former Child Soldiers
NEWS AFRICA
Former child soldiers lack support
By Andrew Wander250,000 children around the world are thought to be serving as soldiers, experts say. [AFP]
Former child soldiers exposed to brutal episodes of war-related violence face a range of psychological and emotional problems that are often left untreated when they leave military service, experts have found.An estimated 250,000 children around the world are forced to fight as soldiers in conflicts, where they are subjected to a range of traumas including physical and sexual abuse, torture and mass killings.Two studies, which are to be published next month in the journal Child Development, explored how such children adjust to life in peacetime and found that many of them suffer serious emotional and behavioural problems that are rarely treated.One study focused on Uganda, where an estimated 25,000 children and adolescents have been forcibly recruited into the Lord's Resistance Army, an armed group that began a bloody war against the Ugandan government in 1987.It found that former child-soldiers who fought with the group exhibited a range of problems long after leaving the battlefield, and that there was little infrastructure in place to deal with the problem. Behavioural problemsAccording to the study, carried out by researchers from the University of Hamburg, almost half the 330 children surveyed had killed someone and more than a quarter had been raped during their time as soldiers.The researchers found that after leaving the armed forces, a third of the children exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress, more than a third were depressed and over half had behavioural problems.The figures indicate an urgent need for rehabilitation in the country, the researchers said, pointing out there is just one psychiatrist in Uganda for every 1.3 million people.The study also found that the overwhelming majority of former child soldiers face continued violence after they return home, with 90 per cent of those surveyed reporting abuse including caning, burning and rape after leaving the military.Nivi Narang, director of campaigns at the charity War Child UK, which helps 1,400 former child soldiers in Uganda, said that funding was a major problem for many rehabilitation programmes."There is just not enough funding," she says. "The kind of funding that is available is just not suitable. We try to get them back into education- it's really important."Rejected by communityA separate study, carried out in Sierra Leone, found that the extent to which children can recover from the horrors of conflict zones depended largely on the treatment they received after returning home.Researchers from Harvard University concluded that children who were returned to communities where they were accepted and not isolated from their peers fared better than those who were forced to drop out of school."There’s a lot to do in terms of cultural attitudes,"Nivi Narang, director of campaigns, War Child UKBut the study concluded that children who had been through extremely traumatic episodes exhibited lasting symptoms of psychological disturbance that required far more intensive rehabilitation support."Witnessing general war violence, although very common, didn't have a strong effect on the children's psychological and social adjustment over time," said Theresa Betancourt, the child health and human rights expert at Harvard who authored the study."In contrast, the effects of experiencing rape and wounding or killing others were longer lasting," she said.Both studies found that post-conflict support for former child soldiers was severely lacking in the countries it is needed, and warned of "broader consequences for society" as a generation of war-damaged children reach adulthood with such limited support.It is a concern that has long been recognised by charities working in the field."There's a lot to do in terms of cultural attitudes," Narang said. "If children come out and they have no means of getting a job, no means of getting back into education, and are rejected by their families, they will go back to the army."It's the only family they know. It's a potential trigger for conflict."The studies were the first scientific research to focus on the psychological impact of conflict on child soldiers, despite them being used in at least 86 countries around the world.
Nurse being kissed in iconic wartime picture dies, aged 91 | World news | The Guardian
Edith Shain is kissed by an American sailor while thousands jam Times Square, New York, to celebrate victory over Japan in 1945. Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
A nurse who was photographed being kissed in Times Square in New York to celebrate the end of the second world war in 1945 has died, aged 91.
The iconic VJ Day picture of Edith Shain by Alfred Eisenstaedt was published in Life magazine.
The identity of the nurse in the photograph was not known until the late 1970s when Shain wrote to Eisenstaedt to say that she was the woman in the picture. It was taken on 14 August 1945 when she had been working at Doctor's Hospital in New York.
Nurse being kissed in iconic wartime picture dies, aged 91 | World news | The Guardian
Edith Shain is kissed by an American sailor while thousands jam Times Square, New York, to celebrate victory over Japan in 1945. Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
A nurse who was photographed being kissed in Times Square in New York to celebrate the end of the second world war in 1945 has died, aged 91.
The iconic VJ Day picture of Edith Shain by Alfred Eisenstaedt was published in Life magazine.
The identity of the nurse in the photograph was not known until the late 1970s when Shain wrote to Eisenstaedt to say that she was the woman in the picture. It was taken on 14 August 1945 when she had been working at Doctor's Hospital in New York.
