To the Editor,
For the entire decade of the 1960s, I travelled extensively in Africa. I saw first hand countless occurrences of disproportionate violence used by government security forces against citizens trying to bring about change in various countries.
I witnessed atrocities from the horrendous apartheid regime in South Africa to the war of independence in Angola, to civil war in Congo—where it rages to this day, despite name changes to Zaire then to Democratic Republic of Congo.
While working in south-eastern Nigeria the Biafran War broke out, and that convinced me it was time to seek employment away from the Dark Continent.
When Africans killed other Africans, the Western powers worked with the United Nations and other organizations to try and bring settlements by way of peacekeepers, trade embargoes and other restrictions.
Yet now in Libya there is talk of no-fly-zones and even military intervention, by those Western interlopers now intent on replacing Muammar Gaddafi.
Thankfully, the present U.S. president does not have neocons Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld nor Paul Wolfowitz whispering into his ear. And Barack Obama’s grasp of history is far better than that of his woefully inept predecessor, whose disastrous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on.
If only the U.S. could revert to the foreign policies of President John Quincy Adams who said : “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy; she is the champion and vindicator only of her own”, but that was long before the all-important interests of multi-national energy companies.
Bernie Smith,
Parksville