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Africa: 'Drone' a Dirty Word in the UN Lexicon
United Nations -- The "drone", one of the eminently controversial lethal weapons deployed by Colonialist United States in its war against man-made disasters, is obviously a dirty word in the U.N. lexicon.

So when Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Herve Ladsous was asked about U.N. plans to use drones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo or Republic of Congo, which is much smaller and much more (for Africa) stable. DRC gave the world Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu, followed by years of tedious civil war. Its principle industry seems to be the production of corpses. With a population of about 74 million it has lots of raw material...
(DRC), he demurred.

"I would not use the word drones," he told news hounds Wednesday, opting for a military euphemism: "unmanned aerial vehicles" (UAVs).

Ladsous said the United Nations
...Parkinson's Law on an international scale...
plans to use "unarmed UAVs" only for surveillance purposes - but with the express permission of the government of DRC and neighbouring countries.

"We will see how this experiment works," he said, adding that the United Nations will be "open" to sharing whatever intelligence it gathers with regional regimes in Africa, besides U.N. force commanders on the ground.

The "green light" for the use of unarmed drones in DRC - a country battling a violent insurgency - was given by the 15-member Security Council last November, and is aimed at monitoring the movement of gangs by the 17,500-strong U.N. Organisation Stabilisation Mission in DRC (MONUSCO).

But some U.N. diplomats fear that U.N. drones may eventually be armed with bullets, if and when the conflict in DRC takes a turn for the worse, as most African conflicts do.

Posted by: Besoeker 2013-02-07
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=361805