plawolf
Lieutenant General
Please don’t make false claims.
The Center for Civilians in Conflict is NOT an UN body. It is an American NPO, with all the implications and baggage that comes with that.
Reports by the actual UN on the events were not at all enlightening, but laid the blame squarely at the feed of UN senior commanders (not PLA) who placed the Chinese battalion commander in charge of the incident, but crippled his ability to command with explicit orders to run a command link to a separate, cut-off headquarters.
Because of the lack of clarity from the UN report, you really need to read between the lines to get a clear picture of what happened.
The PLA incident commander was massively undermined by the other contingent commanders, who often played games and refused to follow orders, that resulted in the Chinese battalion commander replying overwhelmingly on his own battalion as the only troops he could rely upon.
Furthermore, it was the Indian and Rwandan commanders who were formally disciplined by the UN through repatriations, while the entire Ethiopian continent was repatriated due to poor performance.
It was the Ethiopians who abandoned their positions when armed troops advanced on them.
If you bother to look through the American report, you can see how ridiculous the basis for their charges against the Chinese contingent really is.
It cited an unnamed student, who saw PLA troopers climb down from their unprotected guard towers to take better cover below and cited that as ‘abandoning their posts’.
This theme follows as the American report base their findings almost exclusively on unnamed civilian accounts when dealing with the PLA’s performance. Anyone remotely familiar with military deployments can immediately see how problematic and nonsensical that approach is. To a terrified civilian, if a soldier isn’t running headlong into enemy fire, they are ‘fleeing’ or running away. While anyone with even the most basic military experience or knowledge will know that only idiots run into enemy fire in bad Hollywood war movies. In real life, real soldiers are trained to flank and outmanoeuvre the enemy, and to seek better cover if your position is compromised. Sitting on a compromised, untenable position and getting wiped out as a result won’t do the civilians you are trying to protect any good, moving to better positions where you can engage the enemy from a position of strength is far more important. That’s assuming the soldiers weren’t being redeployed per orders, which civilians would know nothing about.
There are no satisfactory reports to give any credible insight into what actually happened, so the best we can do is look at the results.
No civilians were massacred or raped as a result of the charges of Chinese troops ‘abandoning’ their positions, those positions were never even occupied by enemy forces. That to my eyes massively discredits the original charge. If the PLA troops were indeed fleeing from the enemy, as was charged, surely the enemy would have taken full advantage to pour into the compound to rape and pillage?
The fact that no PLA personnel were punished or reprimanded in any way in the aftermath, while commanders and whole contingents from other countries were, would point who where the fault truly lay.
The Center for Civilians in Conflict is NOT an UN body. It is an American NPO, with all the implications and baggage that comes with that.
Reports by the actual UN on the events were not at all enlightening, but laid the blame squarely at the feed of UN senior commanders (not PLA) who placed the Chinese battalion commander in charge of the incident, but crippled his ability to command with explicit orders to run a command link to a separate, cut-off headquarters.
Because of the lack of clarity from the UN report, you really need to read between the lines to get a clear picture of what happened.
The PLA incident commander was massively undermined by the other contingent commanders, who often played games and refused to follow orders, that resulted in the Chinese battalion commander replying overwhelmingly on his own battalion as the only troops he could rely upon.
Furthermore, it was the Indian and Rwandan commanders who were formally disciplined by the UN through repatriations, while the entire Ethiopian continent was repatriated due to poor performance.
It was the Ethiopians who abandoned their positions when armed troops advanced on them.
If you bother to look through the American report, you can see how ridiculous the basis for their charges against the Chinese contingent really is.
It cited an unnamed student, who saw PLA troopers climb down from their unprotected guard towers to take better cover below and cited that as ‘abandoning their posts’.
This theme follows as the American report base their findings almost exclusively on unnamed civilian accounts when dealing with the PLA’s performance. Anyone remotely familiar with military deployments can immediately see how problematic and nonsensical that approach is. To a terrified civilian, if a soldier isn’t running headlong into enemy fire, they are ‘fleeing’ or running away. While anyone with even the most basic military experience or knowledge will know that only idiots run into enemy fire in bad Hollywood war movies. In real life, real soldiers are trained to flank and outmanoeuvre the enemy, and to seek better cover if your position is compromised. Sitting on a compromised, untenable position and getting wiped out as a result won’t do the civilians you are trying to protect any good, moving to better positions where you can engage the enemy from a position of strength is far more important. That’s assuming the soldiers weren’t being redeployed per orders, which civilians would know nothing about.
There are no satisfactory reports to give any credible insight into what actually happened, so the best we can do is look at the results.
No civilians were massacred or raped as a result of the charges of Chinese troops ‘abandoning’ their positions, those positions were never even occupied by enemy forces. That to my eyes massively discredits the original charge. If the PLA troops were indeed fleeing from the enemy, as was charged, surely the enemy would have taken full advantage to pour into the compound to rape and pillage?
The fact that no PLA personnel were punished or reprimanded in any way in the aftermath, while commanders and whole contingents from other countries were, would point who where the fault truly lay.
