Congo wrong place for peacekeepers

Editor: A really horrific story just surfaced in the international media from the town of Luebo in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Soldiers from the rebel movement Kamuina Nsapu forced a woman’s stepson to rape her, because she had served them fish in their meal at her small restaurant.

Then both of them were beheaded in the public square, and bodies displayed for two days to intimidate local population.

Apparently the fish was a “forbidden food which broke the militant rebels’ protective charms.”

Seemingly nothing much has changed since Joseph Conrad wrote about Congo in Heart Of Darkness about 120 years ago.

I worked on British cargo vessels trading to West Africa for many years, and still vividly remember an incident in the newly-independent Congo in the early 1960s.

Our vessel had run the gauntlet between Congolese gunboats on one side of the mighty river and Portuguese gunboats from Angola on the other, to berth at Matadi in the early evening.

I was third mate supervising the gangway being lowered to the wharf to allow the Marine Pilot to disembark, when a jeep drew up and several heavily armed soldiers bounded up the gangway.

They demanded food to take away, and before I could even open my mouth, the assistant purser, Pete Scott, gave them an international greeting of in his strong Liverpudlian accent.

One soldier’s reaction was to put the barrel of his gun right under the nostril of Scott, who immediately wet his pants, and never lived that down for the rest of the voyage. Needless to say, the soldiers got all the food they could carry.

A little gallows humour in a quite terrifying situation, but ports in Congo remained by far the scariest of the countless visited in many other African countries at that time.

Even scarier is the Trudeau government’s plan to send Canadian peacekeepers to yet unnamed African countries, apparently to curry favour with the United Nations, in the hope of acquiring the seat on the security council that our Prime Minister so feverishly covets. Congo is rumoured to be on the shortlist of countries. Bernie Smith,

Parksville