Isegoria

The War Nerd sees a confederacy of evil do-gooders cheering against the Tutsi:

It’s quite a spectacle. And just like you’d expect, where there are virtuous dupes cheering for something horrible, there’s dirty money behind it, very big money. This money has created a nasty alliance between old-school mineral exploiters, the Congolese kleptocracy, and a chorus of NGO do-gooders who like their Africans helpless, chaotic and needy. The Tutsi threaten the interests of all these groups by being Africa’s Prussians: Tall, snooty, efficient and soldierly.

The Tutsi came very close to carving out their own empire in Eastern Congo and the Lakes in the mid-1990s, and the world community suddenly got very concerned. The last thing anyone in the mineral business, the great powers, or the NGOs wanted was a self-sufficient Tutsi state. The cohesion and efficiency of the Tutsi, a classic militarized ethnic group, made them a threat to the lucrative chaos of Congo, where there is no dominant tribe. Nobody’s quite sure how many different ethnic groups are trying to scratch a living from the Congo basin, but the estimates start at 400 and go as high as 700. Most ethnic maps of Africa show you the dominant tribe pretty quickly, but the Congo ethnic map is just a bunch of small blobs.

The only stable empires that ever grew up in this wet, overgrown river basin were on the edges—the Lunda and Luba in the southern highlands, and the BaKongo near the coast. The rest is an ultra-Balkanized chaos of little ethnic enclaves. The only common languages are French, borrowed from the Belgians who messed the place up (i.e., slaughtered up to 10 million Natives), and a new one, Lingala, a trade language along the river.

Eastern Congo, where the fighting’s been going on, has nothing in common with this Balkanized rainforest. This is the part of the country that butts up against Rwanda and Burundi, two small countries where there are only two tribes, Tutsi and Hutu (the T’wa, the pygmies, the original and by far the nicest inhabitants of the area, don’t count unfortunately, having been reduced to the status of slaves or, occasionally, food). Both the Hutu and Tutsi are highly organized, efficient and at each other’s throats.

Both have given very recent displays of combat power—the Hutu when they grabbed their pangas and started chopping their Tutsi neighbors to death in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, and the Tutsi when a small force of Rwandan Tutsi militia marched in, stormed the capital, Kigali, and stopped the genocide.

That’s when things began to go weird. No one was particularly pleased to see the Tutsi RPF retake Kigali. No one in the world press had much pity for the 800,000 Tutsi hacked to death or burned in their houses and churches. When they reconquered Rwanda, the Tutsi didn’t massacre their Hutu neighbors, though everyone expected them to. I can’t think of a single ethnic group in the world that would show that kind of restraint and discipline. I wouldn’t; I couldn’t. You fight your way back home and find your whole family hacked to death with machetes and you don’t take revenge on the people who did it? That’s the kind of conduct that really deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. None was forthcoming, of course. The UN and assorted do-gooders had somehow decided that it was the Hutu genocidaires, the FDLR, who’d been too cowardly to fight the small Tutsi army, who deserved to be pitied.

The FDLR understood how to win over the do-gooders: You win by putting your people in misery, not by standing up for yourselves. Leftist victim-rhetoric has a lot to answer for in the pro-Hutu tilt of European opinion. In fact, Europeans raised on victim-rhetoric, like Georges Ruggiu, actually served as mouthpieces for the genocide while it was happening. So the Hutu militias turned their guns on their own people and led a forced migration, out of Rwanda into Kivu in Eastern Congo. The kleptocratic government of Congo went into alliance with the Hutu genocidaires, supplying them with all the materiel they needed to attack the Tutsi in Rwanda, and Tutsi refugees inside Congo. The Hutu militias started hit-and-run massacres inside Rwanda, and the RPF went into Congo to root them out in 1996. Again the Tutsi won on the battlefield and lost in the press and the boardrooms. They were forced out of power in Congo, designated as the one and only bad guy in Kivu, and finally, just this week, crushed by the first effective UN combat force since Korea.

Captain Davis of the Royal Marines has been awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross and dubbed the new Lawrence of Arabia for his work alongside Afghan allies:

He said: ‘So long as I was providing intelligence I could just get on with it.

‘My job was to go into areas where we didn’t have a lot of knowledge, to speak to the villagers and to train the local police officers.

‘In these areas allegiances could change in a moment, everyone knew somebody in the Taliban. I would lead these Afghan elements in engagements against the insurgents.’

He added: ‘Sharing a bed with the Afghans wasn’t the done thing, nobody else was doing that. I suppose I went a bit bush, especially with the really horrible beard.

‘I got accustomed to the title “Toran” too, which means captain in Pashto.

‘Fluency in Pashto was really important as I would have lost a lot of the wit and banter without that.

‘We were getting attacked by the Taliban every day. Then in the evening we’d prepare food together and recite poetry.

‘The Pashtuns have a history of great poets. We’d listen to this verse, which is often set to dreadful disco beats, until about midnight then fall asleep together on mattresses or these wicker beds outside, gazing at the stars.

‘We’d tell jokes too. They had a good sense of humour, a lot of slapstick. If somebody fell over they’d burst out laughing.

‘They loved cricket and being fairly ignorant about it I had to learn fast. We’d play together.

‘Family matters were also very important, so I’d always ask about their parents and children.

‘These were young guys from the villages, eager to do their bit and after a month or two together I did trust them.

‘Had there been any insurgents among them I’m sure those ALP I was closest to would have protected me.’

Davis’s friendships with his Afghans were tested to the extreme on June 13 last year when the ALP joined soldiers from the Grenadier Guards on an operation to capture a Taliban sniper — a mission which cost the life of Lance Corporal James Ashworth, who was later awarded the VC.

Davis recalled: ‘Me and the Afghans knew there was enemy inside the compound so we pushed in.

‘The guy with me was cut down pretty much straight away, killed after taking a burst of 15 to 20 rounds. He was touching distance from me.

‘As I moved forward to drag him out a grenade rolled around the corner. I jumped over a wall, landing upside down in a ditch. The guy who died was in his late 20s and was someone I was very close to. So I was really, really sad. Losing a close colleague is the worst feeling in the world.’

On a follow-up assault, L/Cpl Ashworth was killed trying to post a grenade through the window of a Taliban mud hut.

Davis cleared the remaining enemy from the building and rescued another British casualty.

Davis, who stands 6ft 4in and weighs 15 stone, joined the Marines after a serious back injury shattered his dreams of winning Olympic rowing glory in Beijing.

Now he is leaving the Marines to retrain as a doctor, and is hoping to work with medical charities in Africa. But Afghanistan will forever be in his heart.