This piece comes to me via Lara J. Nettelfield, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada. It’s the story of one man trying to get a good count of the number of people who died in Bosnia, and the death threats he’s getting as a thank-you.

And this piece comes via Google Alerts, which get more depressing every day, and tells the story of a Congolese UN journalist who was murdered. Bullet-between-the-eyes murdered, not accidental-war-wound killed. The UN has an incredible radio program there called Radio Okapi, and their journalists, are rigorous, thorough, non-partisan reporters (despite the UN label and financing) who can get into the toughest places there and really get the word out.

Taking a little moment of gratefulness about the ease of blogging where I live….

I just wanted to draw attention to this blog, by a guy who’s spent his career covering Africa and, in my estimation, has some really insightful things to say about what’s happening there, and about how it’s being covered here. Meet Alex Belida.

Okay, people. I really don’t want to go here more than once. (And I haven’t, on the blog, but I have this conversation with people.) Let’s get the record straight: Fascists and Marxists…not the same. Both, in the eyes of some people like Republican Rep. (GA) Paul Broun, evil…but in a country with our level of college education, can’t we please distinguish between types of alleged evil?

Here’s what Broun said earlier this week:

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist….We can’t be lulled into complacency[...]. You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential.”

I’m not even going to touch the Hitler non/comparison. Except to say that Paul Broun apologized for calling Obama….a Marxist. But not for comparing him to Hitler.

One day after the Athens Republican told a radio talk show that he regretted calling Obama a “Marxist,” a spokeswoman for the Athens congressman said, “We have not issued any official apology” for comparing Obama’s proposals to the tactics of Hitler and the Soviet Union.

That’s right. He did say he apologized “to anyone who took offense at that”–and the “that” was the use of the word Marxist, not the non-comparison comparison to the architect of the Holocaust. Broun’s office did issue this non-apology statement, which you can’t find anywhere on Broun’s own website—transparency in government?—but if you Google enough different things, you can find reprinted in full on the website of a Georgia NBC affiliate.

It was a beautiful week-long respite from partisan hackery we had, but it has, apparently, passed. Now the hacks are back to being partisans, and vice versa, and it’s starting to feel a lot more like my country again, where socialists, Marxists, fascists, and Democrats are all, apparently, the same. Give or take a moustache.

Earlier this week, the New York Times published an editorial that sketches the violence in Congo this way: It has its roots in Rwanda; it has a renegade rebel commander who wants a lot of power; it has 17,000 peacekeepers on the ground (though, PS NYT, only roughly 6,000 are in eastern DRC). And therefore the logical, emotive conclusion of the editorial is:

The international community failed to stop Rwanda’s genocide and promised not to let it happen again. Has the world forgotten so quickly?

This completely misses the point. In fact, the Rwandan genocide frame has made establishing peace more difficult in Congo than it might otherwise be. It saddles the already difficult politics with extra layers of complication, not the least of which is developing a game plan from the psychological position of guilt. But more to the point, it seems to me outsiders can do less in Congo now than they could have in Rwanda in 1994. That was clear: We could’ve stopped the genocide. This is not genocide, and how to end it is not as clear.

I’m all for looking to history for guidance in dealing with today’s problems, but only if we’re asking of history the right questions. Rwanda and Congo are only rhetorically parallel; peace is going to take the courage and tenacity, on the part of the Congolese and the international community, to imagine a shared political future and a stable political and social infrastructure. And we won’t find that by looking anywhere but to the people of Congo, fighters and civilians, themselves.

It is a topic of distraction, in part because of the news, and in part because of my most recent piece.

Here’s an insightful look at what the bureacratization of language does to experience, from William’s Dispatches

The danger of bullshit euphemisms is that they actively obscure meaning. Common usage can’t afford to beat around the bush because most people rely on language to accurately convey concepts and observations, whereas euphemisms are intended to disfigure our understanding of reality. So when some odious Bush Administration spokesperson mouths the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” in place of the word “torture,” the effect is to fundamentally shift our perception of what’s being done to detainees. This, of course, isn’t an organic cultural transition towards a more popular or aesthetically pleasing or powerful term of art. It’s a deliberate attempt on the part of a few bad people to prevent the public from understanding exactly what’s going on.

And there’s a great conversation about language and ethics going on at John Schwenkler’s Upturned Earth.

Meanwhile, EcuProphets, an ecumenical group in New York, has a great note about the religious roots of waterboarding, laid bare by William Schweiker of the University of Chicago.

There’s more, but I’m out of time.

Here’s a story from Salon today, suggesting that an Obama administration may investigate–and I wonder, prosecute?–Bush and his subordinates for their pursuit of harsh interrogation policies, otherwise referred to in the rest of the world as “torture.”

The piece suggests, among other things, a fight within the Democratic party about whether to have a fact-finding commission or a full-on prosecution. It also suggests that fight could be irrelevant, if Bush uses his power to pardon to cover those who might be implicated in such prosecution.

(Caveat: I would personally want it on better authority, as a reader, that Bush is indeed actually thinking about these pardons. The piece says there is “growing talk in Washington,” but it only links back to an opinion piece in its own virtual pages, an article in July that is actually about the history and politics of presidential pardons and does not claim any knowledge, through reporting, that Bush torture pardons are likely or imminent. I’m not satisfied as a reader, nor as a journalist. Still, see for yourself. But the reporting on the Democrats’ debate about how to proceed is more solid.)

Another piece worth a read is Scott Horton’s latest blog entry at Harper’s Magazine. He’s been on the torture beat for them for awhile; he’s insightful, and he digs deep. Today’s blog is about the conversion of a conservative talk radio host who, after seeing a powerful documentary, changed his mind completely about whether our policies are torture. But it’s not a doc you’ll see at all soon:

Taxi was to be aired on the Discovery Channel, but with Discovery Communications then in the process of going public and facing sensitive SEC clearances, executives apparently decided not to risk provoking the anger of the White House. As I reported elsewhere, PBS also found that it had no network space for Torturing Democracy until January 20, 2009—the day the Bush Administration decamps from Washington.

I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I’m not there at the moment, alas. Here’s a piece by a colleague of mine, Scott Baldauf, the Christian Science Monitor’s staff writer based in Africa, that analyzes some of the political questions at the center of the recent wave of violence.

More soon.

Here’s a story from the NY Times about an elaborate blogosphere hoax the swept up the American media. There’s a guy who invented a name, a think tank, and a credit as a ’senior advisor’ to John McCain, who’s none of those things. The thing the media trekked around? That Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent and not a country. Here’s the story.

Palin refused to comment on the Africa matter when asked about it last week, saying she wouldn’t get into debates about things from unnamed sources. It seemed fair enough at the time, and now makes her look purty darn clever. Or right, at least.

Anyway, this comes to me on the heels of several corrections from my own readers, and I promise to be more careful.

From today’s New Times, Rwanda’s English-language daily: the Rwandan government is going to indict French officials named in the Mucyo Report, an investigation of the French role in the genocide. The report does not give a flattering picture of France (though my French is too bad to understand the whole 300 pages or so). But then, neither have honest historians. There’s a subset of French historians eager to peddle revisionist histories–I take this on the good authority of Gerard Prunier, a historian of the region, but I don’t know the ins and outs of it.

In any case, there will soon be warrants in both hemispheres. Which is no small thing. Much has been made recently of Rwanda’s decision to educate students in English; as a rebuke of France, it is said, it marks a turning away from post-colonial power structures. These warrants would take that even further, and put the power of the international justice system in the hands of a country that, like so many African countries, is usually the object of, and not an agent in, the system.

Which is to say, things are going to get really interesting.

I spoke with a friend in Kigali yesterday who told me that an estimated 7,500 people joined a march to protest Kabuye’s arrest. That’s quite a figure anywhere, but especially in a country that doesn’t use a march as a forum for expression as often as, say, America. I also hear from folks in Kigali that the German ambassador has been expelled.

Also, corrections from on-the-ground in Kigali: Kabuye is a former, not a current, member of Parliament, and she is chief of protocol for President Kagame, so she went to Germany to help arrange his visit. There’s more about her background in the links I posted.

Keep the news (and corrections) coming, readers!