By Matthew Russell Lee, News Muse
UNITED NATIONS, July 14 – The Florida town of Sanford, where George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, was founded and named for Henry Shelton Sanford, who lobbied and got the US to recognized Belgian King Leopold II's Congo “Free” State in the 1870s.
Sanford worked on this with the chairman the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Alabama Senator John Tyler Morgan, who wanted freed slaves sent back to Liberia in Africa.
This was 140 years ago – but Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo still have UN Peacekeeping missions in them, run by France's Herve Ladsous. As Inner City Press exposed, the UN in Liberia was paying workers $8 a day, here.
After buying 23 acres in Florida and naming them after himself, Sanford headed to Brussels as US minister, and later became Leopold's negotiator on the Congo.
Both pretended that the venture was intended, at least eventually, to end the slave trade. But hands were cut off; African soldiers were paid in brass for the decapitated heads they carried back from battles.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but in 2013 a UN Intervention Brigade is being deployed in Eastern Congo, ultimately run by Ladsous, the fourth Frenchman in a row to head the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations.
Leopold held so-called anti-slavery conferences (some might think of some ironic UN conferences); Sanford paid journalists to spread propaganda about the “humanitarian king.”
At the UN in 2013, running “peacekeeping” missions in Liberia and the DRC, the latter with an all-African Intervention Brigade, Ladsous refuses to answer critical Press questions, running into to friendly scribes to, well, tell his stories.
Ban Ki-moon, who issued a statement about the recent crash in San Francisco of a South Korean airline's jet, has yet to speak on the Trayvon Martin non guilty verdict in the UN's host country.
Ban is at the colonial Bastille Day parade on the Champs d'Elysees in Paris with Ladsous, who runs missions in Liberia and the DR Congo. Plus ca change. This ends Inner City Press' Sunday history musing. Watch this site.
