Congo Death Toll over 5 Million - UN In Charge

It was all over the news – or not – the death toll in Congo keeps rising. The NY Times claims Congo’s Death Rate Unchanged Since War Ended

In 2004, CBS News reported that 3.8 million people died in the Congo wars and after “peace” was declared 31,000 people continued to die every month.

In 2008, the NY Times (an unreliable source) gives us the statistic that 41,000 people die every month in that unfortunate country even as the UN and the international community have poured in billions in aid.

DAKAR, Senegal — Five years after Congo’s catastrophic war officially ended, the rate at which people are dying in the country remains virtually unchanged, according to a new survey, despite the efforts of the world’s largest peacekeeping force, billions of dollars in international aid and a historic election that revived democracy after decades of violence and despotism.

The survey, released Tuesday, estimated that 45,000 people continue to die every month, about the same pace as in 2004, when the international push to rebuild the country had scarcely begun. Almost all the deaths come from hunger and disease, signs that the country is still grappling with the aftermath of a war that gutted its infrastructure, forced millions to flee and flattened its economy.

In all, more than 5.4 million people have died in Congo since the war began in 1998, according to the most recent survey’s estimate, the latest in a series completed by the International Rescue Committee, an American aid organization. Nearly half of the dead were children younger than 5 years old.

Having seen how easy it is to manipulate statistics like this via the Lancet study, since discredited, that 650,000 (others have increased that to one million) people died in Iraq after the invasion, we are apt to take these statistics with a grain of salt.

There are, after all, several thriving industries associated with natural and man-made disasters. In the case of the fraudulent Lancet study, the authors were making the case that the US had perpetrated a calamity in Iraq by invading and deposing Saddam Hussein. They were part of the Soros funded effort to discredit what we have done to try to put the Iraq, and eventually the entire Islamic world, on the path to peace via democracy. They were rushed into print just before the 2006 elections and were an obvious election ploy on the part of the Soros funded Left.

Subsequent analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine puts the number of deaths at 151,000. Interestingly enough, the higher number is still being quoted by the press and politicians, undeterred by facts or reality.

There is another thriving industry consisting of people and organizations, including the UN, who benefit from disasters. The bigger the disaster, the more money is funneled to these organizations to “help.” The fact that this aid does not appear to improve the situation is never examined by supporters. They are merely the basis for the next pitch for more money.

But if we can suspend our disbelief for just a moment and accept these numbers at face value, what can we learn?

That it’s better, much better, to be invaded and conquered by the US military than it is to be “rescued” by the United Nations; especially if you are female.