58 killed as Guinean soldiers open fire at rally
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Independent Minds
At least 58 people were killed when Guinean security forces fired into the crowd at an opposition rally at a football stadium yesterday, according to a human rights organisation in the country.
Witnesses said several prominent opposition leaders were arrested and protesters were injured in violence that began when thousands of people took to the streets and met in the stadium despite a massive security operation by the authorities. Opposition parties had organized the protest in the main football stadium in the capital Conakry, which drew some 50,000 people. Soldiers wearing the red berets of the presidential guard later entered the stadium and fired into the crowd.
"At one hospital alone, we have counted 58 bodies," Thierno Maadjou Sow, president of the Guinean Human Rights Organisation said. "It seems there are many more corpses in (the other hospital)," he said.
The violence is the worst in the country since military ruler Captain Moussa Dadis Camara seized power in 2008, hours after the death of longtime dictator Lansana Conte. He has recently said he has the right to run in forthcoming elections if he chooses, which has angered opposition leaders.
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Comments
Guinea is in WEST AFRICA, and its troubles are largely of its own making. You cannot blame every single incidence of political corruption, civil unrest or military atrocity on outside forces. Sometimes these things are home-grown - unless you believe in the rather racist (in fact, doubly racist) view that Africans would live alongside each other in a state of simple, pre-industrial, pre-capitalist innocence had it not been for the influence, past or present, of evil imperialist powers from outside.
Africa is not a land of angels and saints; its people can be every bit as wicked, stupid, corrupt and murderous as the people of any other country or continent, and they have been waging wars against each other for millennia. Of course, now they can do it with automatic weapons....
Of course Africa comes into the present with it's own sets of circumstances and legacy of issues not entirely attributable to how it has been influenced by the historical facts of colonialist patrimony and the destruction of what would have been its arc of development on all fronts by the subsequent re-establishment of another socio-political-environmental time line of events and phenomenon due to the colonialist incursion.
Of course.
But (and another BIG BUT...) to disavow the nature of how current trends of actions by leading nations of the world act as examples to nations that are in many ways defined politically by how much and in what ways they cooperate with or against a status quo that is set by these global leaders is short-sighted; out of a vision of how the world's various cultures and political systems inter-react and relate to one another that is far too rigidly compartmentalized and not realistic; more ideological that real.
I propose that, at the very least, the outcry against such actions like the one that has taken place in Guinea (your assumption that I did not know WHERE it is, is troubling and bizarre) will be muted in direct correlation to how acclimated people have become to similarly obscene actions being initiated by their own and other world leaders and their proxies? nations that are touted to their own citizens and to smaller developing nations like Guinea as beacons of freedom and market stability to be emulated. This muting is tragedy enough, even if the government forces in Guinea and elsewhere (Sri Lanka?) that undertake such massacres are completely divorced from how they see other more "advanced" and "democratic" nations responding to what they perceive as threats to their own security, domestically and globally.
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Then there is the question of how world governing and advising bodies can respond to such actions in places like Guinea when they allow the US, Israel, Russia, China and India to commit even more heinous crimes with barely a wrist slap. What more connection... permission really... can there be for places such as Guinea to continue to behave in the way they have?
Are you using "anti-American" to justify the muting of your own revulsion, or what might be revulsion, for the acts of Americans that are revolting? If you ask me to list the things I think are GOOD about "America" I could present you with a bouquet of them. But Colonialism and its legacy was hardly an American invention, neither is torture or applying democratic conceits to actions that are strictly the anti-thesis of anything the word can or should represent.
We seem to find excuses for the massacres committed by those who we want to please or believe who are closer to our own front door, and condemn our chosen enemies for the same acts. Why do you think this is?
I also think we reserve and compartmentalize our horror at such things (and the fact that, in reality, there is nothing to protect us from being among the next victims) for these less developed nations when they commit such devastating bloodletting. It is safer and less complicated.
Hence we are loud and proud in our objections to the ridiculous and disgusting crimes of Polanski but refrain from consistent and effective action against those in power in our own countries who order and commit (or stay in a blessed state of enforced plausible deniability)unspeakable crimes against whole cities, kidnapping at will regardless of age, torture and murder.
We stop, somewhere along the way, at imagining what those acts might be like if it were our city, if they happen to our family. We insist "those people aren't us... they are ?other?"... when in fact, history has shown, they are exactly in our image with very very superficial differences.
Your moral posturing is patronizing and your accusations are groundless and offensive. Why is it not possible for someone to make a simple comment about such tragedies as this massacre without people like you immediately leaping into the fray and accusing them of having double standards, for having committed the unforgiveable sin - as you see it - of not denouncing their own government for what you consider to be its graver crimes?
You seem determined to hijack every such story and exploit it as yet another opportunity to bang the drum of your personal obsession. But you don't seem to realize that by doing so, and by constantly attempting to assert that none of these atrocities are as great as those committed by our government, you are implicitly belittling the tragedy of the former and implying that, on a scale set by the crimes of the latter, they really are of no signficance. Ironically, you are thereby displaying eactly the kind of callous indifference that you accuse others of, and betraying the fact that your supposed humanitarian sensitivities are merely just a front, and all you really care about is political point-scoring.
Well, enough of your point-scoring, your disingenuous moral posturing and your tiresome lecturing! We've heard it all countless times on these threads now, and we're sick of it. Change the bloody tune or just bugger off!
As I have no real of formal affiliation with any political group of any kind whatsever, again your complaints seem to me to be directed at someone other than myself. You know nothing of my life, what I do in the world or what constitues a tragedy in my own personal experience. Your assumptions are telling though I agree with many of your points about how people denigrate those they use as examples of tragedy to bolster their own self-ordained positon as protectors of the sick and down trodden. I too tire of well renumerated celebrities picking up dying children. But I also wonder, in this world, how else to underscore such inhumanity?
No where did I say that the massacre in Guinea was less tragic or horrific than massacres committed by governments anywhere else. My point is simply that they are related and equal and should all be treated as equally worthy of our grief and our work toward justice and equality.
The Indy is not allowing any comments under its Iran war propaganda, well aware of the utter mendaciousness of its allegations that would collapse under the slightest scrutiny.
The latest allegations of Iranian nuke foul play are a pile of horse manure no less foul than Mr. Bush's Iraq WMD or Tony Bliar's "45-minute" fast-order WMD. They are a pile of manure stovepiped, as was the Iraq WMD BS, by Tel Aviv directly to the Likud Party's franchisees in Washington, Hillary and Hussein, entirely bypassing the CIA, which keeps telling the misleader-in-chief that Iran has shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003, the end.
Barack Obomber now boogies to "bomb bomb bomb Iran" as well as to "I see the light at the end of the Khyber Pass." He lies with the ease of Dick Cheney, telling us that Iran's new pilot plant is a "secret facility" after Iran declared it by the book to the IAEA and invited it to set up 24/7 monitoring there.
He tells us Iran is making bomb material there when the plant is designed to produce 5% enriched uranium at best and the IAEA's cameras and telemetry is going to make sure it doesn't go beyond that, 75% short of bomb-grade uranium.
He wants us to believe that Iran builds its nuke plants underground so we can't find them when the obvious reason the plants are underground is that the Israelis are stockpiling bunker-busters and conducting full-scale aerial bombing exercises and would have already done the real thing if Admiral Fallon hadn't put his CENTCOM job on the line and stopped them.