Opinion: In today’s pages: Congo’s rape war, White House secrets, LAPD’s vicious cycles
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United Nations undersecretary general John Holmes says it’s time to act to stop the Congo conflict’s brutal sexual violence:
I cannot find the words to describe what I heard from the girls and women in Panzi Hospital, located in South Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, near the epicenter of one of the world’s major humanitarian crises. What I do know is that I am not the same person now as when I walked into that hospital. As a United Nations official with a special brief for humanitarian affairs, I have seen many people around the globe suffering under truly tragic circumstances. But Congo is different. Its long-running conflict has always been a brutal one, having claimed nearly 4 million lives between 1998 and 2004 -- the equivalent of five Rwandan genocides. And although the war formally ended years ago, fighting has continued in the eastern part of the country, where the national army is battling local and foreign militias in a struggle involving unresolved ethnic conflicts, regional power dynamics and the powerful tug of greed, with all sides vying for a slice of Congo’s rich mineral resources.
Columnist Rosa Brooks wonders who exactly the White House is protecting when it says it has a secret. And columnist Patt Morrison asks why kids obsess over athletes and not intellectuals.
The editorial board believes torture victim Khaled El-Masri deserves an apology and compensation, if not a day in court. It reviews the Los Angeles Police Department’s latest post-controversy report, this one on the May Day rallies. And it applauds the Nobel Prize winners in physics, who have made ever-smaller gizmos possible.
Readers react to a former Jay Leno writer’s critical take on his boss’ inability to abide by innocent-til-proven-guilty in the case of accused celebrities. Monterey Park’s Arnold Wong says, ‘Dickson’s true hypocrisy is bleeding these unfortunate incidents for all his paychecks, then complaining bitterly about his material being unfair to the subjects.’