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| Africa Subsaharan |
| UN-backed Forces Slaughter Christians in Ivory Coast |
| 2011-04-08 |
| Backed by French and United Nations military forces, and approved by President Barack Obama, Muslim militias loyal to opposition leader Alassane Ouattara are on a rampage in the Ivory Coast that, according to news reports and officials, has left over a thousand Christians dead so far in an effort to oust current President Laurent Gbagbo. Though conflicts have been a regular occurrence in recent decades, the current civil war engulfing the West-African former French colony stems from a contested presidential election held in November. The original vote count indicated a narrow victory for Ouattara, a U.S.-educated Muslim from the largely Islamic Northern part of the country who has worked at the International Monetary Fund and the Central Bank of West African States. But after the nationÂ’s Constitutional Council discovered evidence of alleged voting fraud and ballot stuffing, it nullified the results, re-counted the votes, and declared Gbagbo the winner. Gbagbo, who has ruled the Ivory Coast since 2000, is a leftist Catholic from the largely Christian Southern part of the country. He is claiming to be the legitimately elected President and is refusing to leave power. Why am I not surprised? |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #15 Nostalgia just ain't what it used to be. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2011-04-08 23:40 |
| #14 someone did the beetlejuice 3x times chant, and look what crawled out of the ground |
| Posted by: Frank G 2011-04-08 21:01 |
| #13 Aris! Long time no see (or argue with)! How's it going? |
| Posted by: Secret Master 2011-04-08 20:14 |
| #12 Dang. We ask for word from .com and TGA, and get Aris. Sigh. Nobody said life was fair. :-( |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2011-04-08 20:02 |
| #11 "one will pray for you that you will follow their God, and the other would kill you (or force you to pay a high-tax in submission) if you don't follow their god." The case in Bosnia was that the Muslims were the former, and the Christians were the latter. In places like Iran it's the other way around, of course. Do you have information about which is which in Ivory Coast? Nice usage of the word "slaughter" in the article, but other sources I've seen indicate that though both sides have committed crimes, the Christian Gbagbo is actually the worst one. |
| Posted by: Aris Katsaris 2011-04-08 19:37 |
| #10 The Ivory Coast is ten times the size of Belgium. It is a single country instead of a number of smaller kingdoms that preceded French conquest because for administrative convenience, the French governed the collection of kingdoms it conquered as a single territory. The problem is that the native peoples have a lot of history of interacting with each other in the form of wars and genocides. In Africa, national independence wasn't really national in the sense of the European countries. A close analogue would be Yugoslavia, where warring kingdoms were forced into a single country. Independence condemned African minorities to rule by figures from neighboring tribes or kingdoms that had previously massacred them before the advent of European rule. This was the real tragedy of decolonization - it placed oppressed peoples under the rule of their oppressors simply because they had been administered as a single geographical unit/province under European rule. The independent countries were simply empires covering many (pre-European rule) kingdoms, but without the (relative) impartiality of foreign rule. This is the source of many of the internal genocides and civil wars in former European colonies. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2011-04-08 17:10 |
| #9 one will pray for you that you will follow their God, and the other would kill you (or force you to pay a high-tax in submission) if you don't follow their god. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2011-04-08 16:58 |
| #8 "christian, muslim, who cares" I do, for one. As far as I can tell there are some rather large differences between the two groups. |
| Posted by: Jefferson 2011-04-08 16:42 |
| #7 Enabling the Muzzies to be winner via a slaughter. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2011-04-08 15:55 |
| #6 They could just as easily put a tribal name to those killed, but since we are not moved by tribal warfare Actually, given French and UN intervention in behalf of the Muslims, it appears that somebody's moved. Besides, we've gotten ourselves involved in Europe's tribal disputes, including a couple that killed perhaps 50m people and involved the largest non-famine related genocides known to man, WWI and WWII. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2011-04-08 15:34 |
| #5 I dunno, folks. Maybe it's tribal. Maybe it's religious. Maybe it's a little of each. But remember, it's typical for Muslims to spread their creed at the point of a gun. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2011-04-08 13:55 |
| #4 They could just as easily put a tribal name to those killed, but since we are not moved by tribal warfare they called them all Christians hoping to elevate the attrocity from mere tribal warfare to another war of religion, which in this case it is not. |
| Posted by: killjoy 2011-04-08 13:22 |
| #3 like its any of our business, christian, muslim, who cares, they all die in the end anyway |
| Posted by: 746 2011-04-08 10:15 |
| #2 Reminds of the Nigeria civil when the UN backed the Muslim side and the West meekly followed along. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2011-04-08 02:38 |
| #1 There have been and there currently are many American Christian missionaries who have built up the Christian faith in Africa, and now Obama is destroying that work with the slaughter of Christians through Obama's Muslim allies. |
| Posted by: Spagum Grundy6770 2011-04-08 02:01 |