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Military Tribunal or Criminal Court?

I'd like to self-flagellate over Rwanda but the truth is nobody forced one tribe to eliminate the other one. There's tribal grievance and then there's genocide.
 
Oh, not blaming tribal problems on anyone but them, just saying that by creating artificial borders that forced long-time enemies into calling themselves a country, rather than drawing those borders up by looking for groups/areas that self-identified as 'nations', it increased that tension dramatically.

Not to say that if they were seperate countries, they wouldn't still go at each other, but forcing the two groups to co-exist like that pretty much ensured problems...
 
No, it's not. British colonialism is far more responsible for the ills of this world than just about any other political/economic force in history.

Could you give us a for instance here?

The conflict between Pakistan and India. While India (which included what would become Pakistan) was fighting for independence from the British, the British secretly encouraged hate between Muslims and Hindus.

And hell, all the wealth that was pulled out of India--the gold taken from temples, etc., by the British.
 
Wasn't the English alone, but a whole lot of Africa's problems can be traced back to the arbitrary borders that the Europeans drew up for them, ignoring local history and tribal feuds in favor of the colonial forces carving up who gets what...

Well actually, the Europeans didn't ignore tribal feuds, they exploited them to ensure 'divide and conquer' meant their colonial subjects would be too busy hating each other to fight back against their overlords. Then we left, leavign them with even fewer resources than they had before, new diseases, and easy access to guns. Swell job.

But I would like to point out your first sentence in the midst of Dennis' generalising. The British Empire was directly responsible for many of today's fucked up political situations. But the French and Spanish tried their damnedest to do the exact same thing. Plenty of the problems in Africa are down to French colonialism, just as much as British. It is the whole practice of colonialism that is reprehensible, not any one nation that practised it in particular.
 
Wasn't the English alone, but a whole lot of Africa's problems can be traced back to the arbitrary borders that the Europeans drew up for them, ignoring local history and tribal feuds in favor of the colonial forces carving up who gets what...

Well actually, the Europeans didn't ignore tribal feuds, they exploited them to ensure 'divide and conquer' meant their colonial subjects would be too busy hating each other to fight back against their overlords. Then we left, leavign them with even fewer resources than they had before, new diseases, and easy access to guns. Swell job.
You also cunningly used flags.
 
To be honest, in some ways our current "awwww, little children need our charity" intermingled with blinkered indifference is almost worse for Africa than the colonialism was. While the Chinese engage African nations as equal business partners and give them something to work for in improving their future, we periodically release charity singles, hand the money to the arm-a-teenager campaign, and sit back contented.
 
There was an interesting documentary shown last week of a US soldier who guarded prisoners at Guantanamo meeting two former prisoners he contacted through Facebook. He came over to the UK to meet them. It was surprisingly upbeat, despite the 3 years the former prisoners had spent in limbo. He went to dinner with the two families and the most jarring note of all was one of the wives in full black burqa at the dining table. How the hell did she eat?

Have you seen The Fly? ;)
 
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