Word: french
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...brave whites surrounded by maddened savages on the Dark Continent: it was the sort of story that once gave a romantic veil to the sordid history of Africa's colonization. American newspapers seized on the invasion of Shaba province by Katangan rebels and the subsequent rescue mission by French and Belgian paratroopers, as if they had found a modern version of Stanley and Livingston. The Boston Herald-American screamed out "Whites Massacred in Zaire," while Newsweek, slightly less hysterically racist, went with "Massacre in Zaire." White casualties were carefully tabulated and lamented, but the death toll for blacks--a much...
...story that the media was pounding into our consciousnesses was one of marauding blacks, drunk on white blood, systematically murdering every white they could find. But, as David Ottoway reported this week in The Washington Post, the massacre reports came from French and Zairean sources and "were deliberately exaggerated to gain quick Western public sympathy" for the French-Belgian intervention...
Ottoway's story contradicts on almost every count the official line we've been fed. The French claimed last week that 200 Europeans had been killed, but independent groups like the Red Cross have been able to verify fewer than 100 European deaths among the more than 2000 Europeans in Kolwezi. And at least 20 Europeans may have been executed by Zairean army troops, not by the rebels. Ottoway reports that the victims, both African and European, "died in a mostly haphazard manner," singly and in small groups, with "no overall design for the killing or even the saving...
...lesson we should learn from all this is that the French-Belgian intervention, which Newsweek called "a gallant rescue mission" for the Europeans in Kolwezi, was actually a rescue mission for the shaky, uniquely corrupt and autocratic regime of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire. Even with the hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid that the U.S. has pumped into Mobutu's army, it broke and ran in the face of a few thousand Katangan rebels, and had to be bailed out by the French and Belgians. Mobutu's latest pronouncement on the subject was his call this week...
DIED. Lord Selwyn-Lloyd, 73, Sir Anthony Eden's Foreign Secretary, who with French and Israeli leaders was alleged to have engineered the ill-fated 1956 Suez Canal seizure after it was nationalized by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser; of complications from a fall and subsequent brain surgery; in Oxfordshire, England...