Ivory Coast Massacre
by digby
I looks as though this is unraveling very quickly:
Soldiers of Ivory Coast’s rival leaders battled for the main city Abidjan on Saturday, clashing by the presidential palace and state TV offices in a conflict so brutal that 800 people have died in one smaller town alone. State television came back on air after fighting took it down for a day, showing Gbagbo looking relaxed and drinking tea, saying the pictures were from his city residence on Saturday. The International Committee of the Red Cross said at least 800 people were killed in intercommunal violence in the western Ivorian town of Duekoue this week. Catholic charity Caritas said scores of people were also missing from the town… Spokesman Patrick Nicholson told The Associated Press that Caritas workers visited Duekoue Wednesday.
He said one neighborhood was filled with bodies of victims killed by gunshots and hacked to death with machetes. He said those killed were civilians that included many refugees from fighting elsewhere in the country, where rival forces were battling over a disputed November election.
The ICRC said earlier this week that thousands have been killed or injured in post-election violence since November, which has driven up to 1 million people from their homes in Abidjan alone…
“We can hear shooting and see soldiers moving but there are also armed civilians running in the streets,” said Camara Arnold, a resident of Cocody, the neighborhood that is home to the state television building and Gbagbo’s residence.
Two white MI-24 attack helicopters belonging to the United Nations peacekeeping mission circled above central Abidjan’s palm-fringed lagoon, but did not intervene.
This would seem like the kind of thing you wouldn’t want to “stand idly by” for if large scale human tragedy and violence moved your conscience. But I’m fairly sure that it doesn’t meet the longstanding American doctrinal test of being a political crisis in a country in which we or our allies happen to have a large financial/strategic interest, so it doesn’t meet our definition of “humanitarian” intervention.
I know. It’s hard to sort these things out. Just because we only help when it’s in our interest doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get credit for doing it out of selfless generosity and deep concern for the plight of others. If it obscures the real motives for our actions and makes a mockery of both democracy and humanitarianism, that’s ok. We feel good about ourselves and that’s important too.
.