Imperialism primes Bemba as possible successor to Kabila in Congo
On June 8, 2018 the International Criminal Court (ICC) reversed their 2016 conviction of Jean Pierre Bemba, the leader of the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Bemba had been detained since May 2008 and was sentenced to 18 years in 2016, on the charge that he commanded a militia that committed mass murder, rape and pillage in neighboring Central African Republic (CAR), allegedly to prop up CAR’s then-president, Ange-Félix Patassé.
Bemba is currently free in Belgium pending a hearing related to a separate conviction for witness tampering. He is expected to return to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) this month for the MLC’s July 12-13 Congress to seek his party’s nomination and then run in the country’s December 2018 presidential election.
African neocolonialists fight wars for imperialism
We know who Jean Pierre Bemba and his MLC are. Bemba is a conscious representative of the African petty bourgeoisie, who never intended to challenge the European imperialist bourgeoisie and all imperialism in general.
Before his arrest, Bemba was one of the richest men in the DRC, inheriting the wealth of his father, a businessman who became successful under the former dictator and U.S. puppet, Joseph Mobutu. At age 30, Jean Pierre Bemba was employed as Mobutu’s personal assistant and his sister Catherine is married to Mobutu’s son Nzanga.
The MLC emerged as a militia fighting the current DRC government of Joseph Kabila. They were backed by Yoweri Kaguta Museveni and his thuggish army, the Uganda Defense Force during the war that destroyed Congo and decimated millions of lives between 1998 and 2003.
A cease fire agreement in 2003 established a “transitional government” in which Bemba was appointed to serve as a senator and one of the four vice presidents to Joseph Kabila. Elections were then held in 2006 and many people in Congo believed that Jean Pierre Bemba Gombo won, but white power imperialist leaders imposed Kabila as the winner.
The leader of the MLC was then forced to quit Congo for Belgium, to give Kabila space to run his neo-colonial government without the pressure from Bemba. Jean Pierre Bemba did not challenge any bourgeois law, he is safe follower of the white bourgeoisie and that is why he agreed to live in Belgian, where the Belgian ruling class soon double-crossed him. He thought he was safe in Belgium!
The hypocritical white colonial press has been moaning for the lack of justice for African victims of Bemba’s troops in Central Africa Republic. They report on the sadness of Africans there to see Bemba free again. The bourgeoisie does not give a damn about African people anywhere!
ICC serves the interests of white power imperialism
The truth is that Jean Pierre Bemba’s arrest by the ICC in 2008 was a political decision by the white ruling class to reduce his influence over neo-colonial politics in Congo in favor of Joseph Kabila.
The ICC, like the United Nations and the African Union, was formed to enforce the status quo where white imperialist power maintains control over the lives, land and resources of African and other colonized peoples throughout the world.
The United Nations played a critical role in the deposing of the DNC’s first elected leader Patrice Lumumba, leading to the U.S. and Belgian orchestrated assassination of one of the best sons of Africa.
The early release of Bemba exposes the political objective of the ICC to discipline African petty bourgeois leaders, to get them to toe the line according to white power imperialist interests. The same white power that arrested and locked up Bemba is also the same one that decided to release him.
Killing Africans in Central Africa Republic is not breaking the bourgeois law. That is what every neo-colonial army does in Africa: kill black workers and peasants with impunity.
Some Africans claimed that Bemba is their Mandela. Meaning that Bemba is coming out to save us from Kabila’s neo-colonial rule?
There are differences between situation in Congo and in South Africa; Mandela was freed to win African workers away from national revolutionary struggle and reform white power apartheid state into a neo-colonial state.
The African revolutionary threat in Congo is currently being contained by neo-colonialist counterinsurgency at the present time, but western imperialism is driven by a considerable fear to lose influence to other powers, particularly China.
“Africa is not poor; Africa is being looted!”
The Democratic Republic of Congo is widely considered to be the richest country in the world in its natural resources. Its deposits of raw minerals—copper, cobalt, gold, diamonds, coltan, zinc, tin and tungsten—are estimated to be worth in excess of $24 trillion.
The DRC is believed to have 80% of the world’s reserves of coltan, upon which wireless technology depends. During the colonial period the U.S. acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of the uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
The imperialists have been stealing copper for at least 100 years, as well as cobalt, diamonds, gold and tin – minerals as strategic as coltan and considered by the U.S. as critical to its own “national security”.
Yet the living conditions of the majority of African people in the DRC and throughout the continent of African are deplorable. Brutal violence, imprisonment and death are widespread across the continent.
Imperialism funds its proxy armies to gain and maintain control over Africa’s vast resources. African people must unite to free our Africa!
Self-government is our democratic right
The African Socialist International, led by Chairman Omali Yeshitela, is organizing African people around the world to unify into a single African nation, as a free and independent people.
We are the Party of the Africa workers and poor peasants. We are the Party of what is the best in the African nation. We are the Party of national liberation, of uncompromising struggle against foreign domination of Africa and the African nation.
It is the mission of the world wide African national liberation movement to initiate our own institutions of justice, which will deal with representatives of the African compradors and bureaucrats and all other traitors to the Africa nation.
The African People’s Socialist Party USA (APSP-USA), a component part of the African Socialist International, has already utilized the imperialists own “international law” to convict the U.S. government through an international tribunal of violating the U.N. Convention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in its treatment of African people in the U.S. For the moment, we lack the state power to enforce the verdict.
Free all African prisoners
Despite the fact that the incarcerated Africans in ICC’s jails are conscious representatives of the sell-out social class of African petty bourgeoisie, our view is that no African should be in ICC white power jails.
That is why we are saying all Africans jailed in Hague ‘s ICC court in Holland must be freed. This is demand that comes from the recognition that in the hands of white power state, all African prisoners must be freed, because they are prisoners of war or political prisoners. We reject any white colonial rule over us.
There are African workers who are in jails throughout the world because the political economy of parasitic capitalism doesn’t pay for our labor, or exclude us from the legal economy and forces us into an illegal economy such as the drug economy. These Africans, without the revolutionary world view of African Internationalism, in order to survive have to challenge the bourgeois law of private property by trying to access resources we produced ourselves directly or indirectly. That means breaking the law according to white rulers of neo-colonial rulers.
In Congo, we have political prisoners like Franck Diongo, Diomi Ndongala, Gecoco Mulumba and more. There are Africans who are locked up because they dared to demand political asylum in Europe, North America or Australia.
We are organizing for state power to bring imperialism to our own court.
Smash the sell out African petty bourgeoisie!
Smash Imperialism!
