Updated 4/11/11, Ivory Coast Killing Ground, Is Africa Hopeless?

In my 60 years I have seen many acts of evil by people, mostly in civil wars and in some cases nation vs nation wars.  Out of these wars it seems men have lost their minds and they commit unbelievable acts of cruelty and murder.  Many are genocidal and there are mostly racial, ethnic and religious reasons these people kill.  We have some more murderous thugs in the Ivory Coast an African country governed by native peoples.  It was once a French colony and as of late, the French have sent in a few Foreign Legionnaires but to no avail.

HERE is a current article on the strife and what caught my eye is the comment by one official that the war is partially "ethnically" motivated.  Sort of reminds me of Rwanda in the early 90's when the Hutu and the Tutsi, two black peoples, murdered almost a million of each other, mostly with machete type weapons.  They just hated each other because they were from different tribes.

The first time I paid attention to African strife was in the early 60's and I watched as the Colonial powers were getting out of the African countries and granting them their independence, (as if they had that right). Most of the countries ended up in civil war because power hates a vacuum and when the British, French, Portuguese and the others left, there was a vacuum someone wanted to fill.  Mostly with guns and machetes.  The Congo, Angola and Sudan have been in almost constant strife ever since.

The people of the west have tried to help as best they could but for some reason sensibility has not taken hold in many places on the continent.  George Bush tried to help during his term on the AIDS epidemic destroying the peoples of sub Saharan Africa.  He spent billions of American taxpayer dollars to help stem the monster of AIDS.  Unfortunately, even in South Africa, men there commit outrageous crimes against women and children in some misguided attempt to satisfy their urges.  Without these countries having some form of modern education, I don't think there will be a lot of headway in stemming many African maladies. 

The Ivory Coast, Nigeria and in the last few years, Sierra Leone and Liberia have experienced murderous civil wars which took countless lives.  Of course, these kinds of murder binges have happened elsewhere, Yugoslavia, Lebanon and of course China and the Soviet Union.  What makes me worry the Africans may never succeed in stopping this strife is their tribal structures.  Unless they can "compromises" I see endless murder and mayhem there (se Congo).  When one looks at the Western Hemisphere, especially the USA, Canada and most South American countries, you see relative calm in comparison.  This side of the Atlantic sees wars over drugs, rarely wars over ethnic, religious and racial differences.

Updated 4/11/11.  HERE is the latest.  The IC leader who would not turnover his country to the duly elected successors is now under arrest.