LONDON—The current genocide of more than six million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a human tragedy that continues unabated.
This genocide is the direct result of a world political economy which has been imposed on us by a series of white rulers.
The so-called M23 war in the Congo is not a tribal, local or ethnic war.
It is not a civil war or an African world war, but an imperialist war, which requires a permanent political economy of war.
This is what we are looking at whenever we speak of the crisis in the Congo—the mass rapes, refugees and internally displaced people.
It is a political economy of war that built the new skyscraper buildings in Kigali and the luxurious palaces in Uganda for Museveni and his cronies.
It is this war that creates the basis for the success of Nokia, Apple and numerous other high-tech, white and foreign-owned companies.
This is not a new phenomenon.
It is reminiscent of Leopold II’s conquest of looting and genocide in Congo.
In order to consolidate the newly industrial political economy in the early 20th century, the industrialization itself was a development of the initial political economy that Marx characterized as “primitive accumulation, a capital accumulation that was not a result of capitalist production, but its starting point."
This “primitive accumulation” was slavery of African people.
Such is the foundation of white wealth and capitalist economic development.
The slave-raids of today
The war in the Democratic Republic of Congo is the modern-day slave-raids into villages to impose terror and submission.
In this war, men and children are kidnapped for forced labour in the mines or recruited as child soldiers.
Women and young girls suffer rapes, while sexual mutilations are used as a weapon to terrorize the people into submission.
The uninvited Europeans, such as Diego Cao, Livingstone, Cecil Rhodes, Christopher Columbus and missionaries are today replaced by Bill Gates, the Clintons, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the evangelists, United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) and so on.
These white invaders and aggressors are joined by treacherous African petty bourgeoisie parasites, such as Obama, Kagame, Museveni, Kabila and others whose main demands have been integration into the command and leadership of the white capitalist parasitic political economy.
From the Portuguese to the Dutch and others who initiated the 15th century slave-raids off the coast and hinterland Congo, to the current financial backers of coltan and gold wars, European aggressors continue to attack Africa for the purpose of exploitation.
We are looking at the same illegitimate worldwide political economy that has its origin in the assault against Africa and is maintained by means of vicious violence against Africa and other colonized peoples around the world.
Uganda’s Museveni, Rwanda’s Kagame and Congo’s Kabila fuelled by and for imperialists’ looting
The Alliance for Democracy and Liberation, which removed Mobutu from power in Congo in May 1997, was largely the result of a military collaboration between the governments of Uganda, Rwanda and Angola.
Museveni has been in power in Uganda since 1986 as a key client of the U.S. in the region.
He used his position to help Kagame and the exiled Tutsi petty bourgeoisie sell-out leadership to take power back in Rwanda in 1994.
The two main new Anglo-American mining conglomerates that stood at the heart of this alliance were American Mineral Fields Inc. and Barrick Gold Corporation. American Mineral Fields Inc. is based in Hope, Arkansas, and chaired by Mike McMurrough, said to be a personal friend of former U.S. president Bill Clinton.
American Mineral Fields Inc. directly financed the Alliance for Democracy and Liberation’s military campaign to remove Mobutu by, for example, putting at the disposal of Kabila its hired corporate jet. In return, American Mineral Fields Inc. secured the copper-zinc mine at Kipushi in Katanga (Shaba) province.
Barrick Gold Corporation, headed by former U.S. president George H.W. Bush and former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, was also formed just before the outbreak of the Alliance for Democracy and Liberation’s rebellion.
Rwanda and Uganda were rewarded with some of the stolen loot from Congo’s resources as their reward for helping Laurent Kabila get to power.
Another part of the deal was that Kagame and his Tutsi army were to hunt Hutu refugees, regardless of whether they were either exFAR not.
Refugee camps, crowded with Hutu women, the elderly and children, were regularly encircled and bombarded by Kagame‘s Rwandan Patriotic Front.
Part of the deal was also the annexation of the Kivu provinces of Congo to Kagame’s Rwanda and of Ituri province to Museveni’s Uganda.
One blatant and glaring impact of the Alliance for Democracy and Liberation’s victory was the overwhelming number of Tutsi in key positions in Laurent Kabila’s administration.
The most glaring example was of James Kababere, the current Rwandan defense minister who became Laurent Kabila’s chief of army staff in Congo.
The influence of Kagame over Kabila’s rule has come under constant criticism from the Congolese petty bourgeoisie, who are simply seeking political opportunities for themselves.
Laurent Kabila disobeys imperialists
Laurent-Desire Kabila ended his dependency on Kagame’s army in July 1998 by asking them to leave Congo.
As soon as Kabila reneged on his mining contracts with U.S. imperialism and others, and ended his reliance on the Rwanda army, on August 2, 1998, a second war was launched by Kagame and Museveni to unseat Laurent-Desire Kabila from power in Congo.
When Laurent Kabila was assassinated on January 16, 2001, his son Joseph Kabila unexpectedly replaced him.
To this day, the killers have never been brought before a court of law.
Even when they succeeded in gunning down Laurent-Desire Kabila in January 2001, the war continued until 2003.
What became clear was that Kagame and Museveni were not able this time to march against Kinshasa, due to the intervention of Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe.
They created proxy politico-military groups, of which the main one was the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), controlled by Kigali and the Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC), controlled from Kampala.
With these proxy groups, Kigali and Kampala controlled the economic and political lives in eastern Congo.
Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD) split into other groups equally controlled from Kigali, and Museveni created other small groups like the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) of Thomas Lubangu in the Orientale.
Peace accords were signed between the so-called "rebels" from Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC) and Joseph Kabila.
In the so-called “Congolese dialogue of reconciliation,” most of the participants became members of the parliament and of the government.
They also formed a single Congolese army.
Armies merge together
Many people who committed war crimes became part of Congo’s army.
A new formula of “1+4” where Joseph Kabila was the president working with four vice presidents was formed. This consisted of mostly former pawns of Museveni and Kagame in their proxy wars, notably Jean Pierre Bemba (Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC)), Zahidi Ngoma and Ruberwa (Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD)) and Yediora Ndombasi (Alliance for Democracy and Liberation).
At this time, the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) lacks cohesion and strength. This army is trained by different imperialist centres; whose governments also support the aggression against the people in Congo.
Another aspect of the crisis comes from the integration known as “brassage,” where rebel factions and the Congolese army merged into one and its units moved around the country.
Troops under the influence of the Rwandan government have refused, so far, to be moved around Congo or to follow the command of any other officer except their own.
The same elements who refused to obey the order of integration have been promoted to higher offices in the Congolese army.
That is how people like Bosco Ntangana and Sultan Makengi have been promoted general and colonel despite being widely accused of war crimes against the people.
Laurent Nkunda, who led the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) rebellion against the Congo government in 2008, now lives happily in Rwanda, despite the existence of an international warrant against him by the international criminal court (ICC), who has a history of hunting down and capturing Africans who they want to remove from the scene.
CNDP and M23 are a U.S. strategy with a Tutsi face to annex Kivu province to Rwanda
We all know that as long as Kagame and Museveni are in U.S. favor and operate as U.S. agents of aggression and looting in Africa, they will never be arrested and tried by the ICC.
The creation of the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) under Laurent Nkunda’s leadership and the M23 under Ntangana or Sultan Makengi, are tools for the neocolonial regime of Rwanda to keep its troops in Congo.
Despite the growing body of documented evidence by the UN and other agencies against Kagame, Nkunda and Ntangana and their CNDP and M23, the U.S. government has consistently stood in support of its agents in the same way it does for Israel.
Therefore, it is not surprising that certain ideologues for Tutsi power claim to be the Jews of Africa, destined to rule over their neighbors.
For almost two decades, the main argument of Kagame’s government to invade Congo was to pursue the “genocidaires” (committers of genocide), who were threatening the peace and stability of a new Rwanda.
The Rwandan Tutsi army can come into Congo any time to kill and loot. They had no accountability to anyone.
If you opposed them, you would be accused of being a “genocidaire” yourself or of promoting anti- Tutsi ethnic hatred.
This is not unlike the situation in the Middle East, where if you criticise the settler colonial state of Israel or support Palestinian struggle, the Zionist press and supporters would call you an anti-Semite.
It is clear that it is in the interests of the U.S., Britain and the rest of EU, which fund the national budget of Rwanda, to say that the former Tutsi refugees in power in Kigali have no means of making a long war of occupation by themselves.
They cannot redraw the map of Africa of their own accord unless they have the backing, if not the order to do so by the imperialists.
Walter Kansteiner, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, provides us the possible objectives of U.S. imperialism in eastern Congo.
In a paper on the then-eastern Zaire, written for the Forum for International Policy in October 1996, called for the division of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Great Lakes region between the primary ethnic groups, creating homogenous ethnic lands that would necessitate redrawing the boundaries.
The creation of a Tutsi state in eastern Congo, Madsen notes, was “exactly what Rwanda, Uganda and their American military advisers had in mind when the plan to remove Mobutu was implemented in 1996.
In an August 23, 2000 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, Kansteiner stated that the “break-up of the Congo is more likely now than it has been in 20 or 30 years.”
“Of course, the de facto break up of Congo into various fiefdoms has been a boon for U.S. and other Western mineral companies. After all, 80 percent of the world's known reserves of coltan are found in the eastern Congo. It is potentially as important to the U.S. military as the Persian Gulf region.”
Imperialism wants to create a volcano republic disguised as “Tutsiland,” where all other ethnic groups must be eliminated or reduced to a minimum.
We are opposed to ethnic and tribal politics, which are nothing but a defense of imperialism by the African petty bourgeoisie. This is not acceptable to any African freedom-loving human being.
The Tutsi population and the Congo population are part of the same African nation that needs to be organized, freed and united against U.S.-led white imperialism and the sell-out international African petty bourgeoisie.
We must expose and denounce Kagame and Museveni as agents of the U.S. government and proclaim loudly that our land is not for sale!
Congo belongs to the people of Congo, not to some multinational companies or tribal leaders in Congo, Rwanda or Uganda.
End all wars against Africa and African people!
This era belongs to the poor workers and peasants of Africa.
We are calling on all African people in Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi to organize for a single movement to end minority rule, imperialist rule and wars in Central and East Africa.
U.S. and AFRICOM out of Africa!
All power to African workers and poor peasants!
Build the African Socialist International!
