NYT,pg1,lead: U.N. Forces Using Tougher Tactics to Secure Peace

[DeepModem Mom]

U.N. Forces Using Tougher Tactics to Secure Peace
By MARC LACEY
Published: May 23, 2005


NAIROBI, Kenya, May 22 - The United Nations, burdened by its inability to stave off the mass killings in Rwanda in 1994 and by failed missions in Bosnia and Somalia, is allowing its peacekeepers to mount some of the most aggressive operations in its history.

The change has been evolving over the last decade, as the Security Council has adopted the notion of "robust peacekeeping" and rejected the idea that the mere presence of blue-helmeted soldiers on the ground helps quell combat.

It is most obvious in Congo, which commands by far the largest deployment of United Nations troops in the world. Peacekeepers in armored personnel carriers, facing enemy sniper attacks as they lumber through rugged dirt paths in the eastern Ituri region, are returning fire. Attack helicopters swoop down over the trees in search of tribal fighters. And peacekeepers are surrounding villages in militia strongholds and searching hut by hut for guns.

"The ghost of Rwanda lies very heavily over how the U.N. and the Security Council have chosen to deal with Ituri," said David Harland, a top official at the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York.

A turning point came in 2000 after rebels in Sierra Leone killed some peacekeepers and took hundreds more hostage. The United Nations commissioned a review, headed by Lakhdar Brahimi, a former foreign minister of Algeria, which called for troops to be deployed more rapidly in peace enforcement operations. "No amount of good intentions can substitute for the fundamental ability to project credible force," the so-called Brahimi Report said....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/23/international/africa/23congo.html?oref=login

[Frederik]

1. France takes the lead

at least in the Congo. The US are busy with other things.

[LynnTheDem]

2. Tougher tactis to secure peace??? ARREST BUSHCARTEL.

-bush is VIOLATING his own UN Resolutions.

-bush committed THE SUPREME CRIME of war of aggression.

(TWICE. Iraq AND Afghanistan, altho most Americans aren't yet ready to accept Afghanistan's being a war of aggression. They will. Eventually.)

-bush committed GENOCIDE in Fallujah.

-bush committed/is committing GENOCIDE in Iraq.

-bush wants MORE WMD with his "bunker-busting nukes", which VIOLATES the anti-proliferation treaty on nukes.

-World polls show BUSH as being the "greatest threat to peace"

ARREST BUSH & CARTEL. Then ARREST SHARON.

And THEN maybe we can get somewhere with world peace.