McKinney holds congressional hearings
Experts bare covert U.S. role in African wars
By Monica Moorehead
Even as international attention has been focused on the
devastating, genocidal impact of the AIDS crisis on the African
continent--and rightly so--the issue of covert U.S.
intervention on the continent is being aired in surprising
places, but with little media attention.
It has been estimated that at least 36 million African
people are suffering from AIDS. The widespread AIDS epidemic
did not occur within an isolated vacuum. It is a direct
outgrowth of centuries-old colonialism, neo-colonialism and
present-day imperialism. That is what caused Africa, the
richest continent in terms of mineral wealth, to become the
most underdeveloped, super-exploited and poverty-stricken in
the world.
Africa was brutally carved up by the European capitalist
countries several centuries ago because of its abundance of
ivory, diamonds, gold, silver and other valuable resources.
This full-scale plunder, coupled with the African slave trade,
helped build up capitalism in Europe at a rapid pace and
enriched the slave owners in the U.S.
At the same time, this theft has left the overwhelming
majority of the African continent with a lack of economic
infrastructure to produce an adequate number of goods and
services for what now numbers 600 million human beings.
Cynthia McKinney
sponsors hearing
In April an important hearing took place on covert action in
Africa by the most powerful imperialist countries, especially
the U.S., in the post-colonial period. This meeting, which
received hardly any media coverage, was sponsored by U.S.
Congressmember Cynthia McKinney from Georgia, who is African
American.
A number of experts in African affairs offered testimony
substantiating not only that Western imperialism is responsible
for the dire situation in Africa today but that the U.S. is in
the midst of a fierce, predatory struggle with its European
junior partners for economic and political hegemony in Africa,
all to control profitable markets.
Referring to the speakers' information, McKinney stated in
part, "Their investigations into the activities of Western
governments and Western businessmen in post-colonial Africa
provide clear evidence of the West's long-standing propensity
for cruelty, avarice and treachery.... The West has, for
decades, plundered Africa's wealth and permitted, and even
assisted in slaughtering Africa's people. The West has been
able to do this while still shrewdly cultivating the myth that
much of Africa's problems today are African made.
"We have all heard the usual Western defenses that Africa's
problems are the fault of corrupt African administrations, the
fault of centuries-old tribal hatreds, the fault of
unsophisticated peoples rapidly entering a modern,
high-technology world. But we know that those statements are
all a lie."
DeBeers, South Africa
and the U.S.
Janine Farrell Roberts, author of the book "Blood Stained
Diamonds," spoke on how the diamond industry has heavily
influenced U.S. policy in Africa. She focused on the powerful
DeBeers diamond corporation, which has dominated the economy in
southern Africa, and one of its main representatives, Maurice
Tempelsman.
Tempelsman is a long-time diamond merchant who has been
romantically linked to both Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and
former Secretary of State Made leine Albright. DeBeers employed
Tempelsman as a negotiator to broker deals with the U.S. As a
result, Tempelsman sold millions of diamonds, a majority of
them from Congo, to this country.
When the first democratically elected prime minister of
Congo, Patrice Lumumba, talked of using Congo's mineral wealth
to benefit the people, the Central Intelligence Agency plotted
to assassinate him. Following Lumumba's assassination, the U.S.
government installed its stooge, Joseph Mobutu, as president of
Congo.
Tempelsman then became a "technical advisor and mediator" on
behalf of DeBeers and other U.S. corporate interests, not only
in Congo but also in Sierra Leone, Ghana and Angola.
A number of speakers focused on the destabilization process
that has taken place in central Africa--Congo, Rwanda, Burundi
and Uganda--on the part of the European powers and especially
the U.S. This process has outwardly taken on a military aspect,
but underneath lies the insatiable goal of economic greed and
plunder of Africa's resources.
For instance, private military contractors have direct
connections to the U.S. Department of Defense as well as some
of the largest mining and oil corporations that exploit Africa.
PMCs are in reality mercenary outfits that do the dirty work
for big business in Africa.
American Mineral Fields
and Barrick Gold
One of the big corporations benefiting from these hired
killers is American Minerals Fields, Inc., based in Hope, Ark.
The major stockholders of AMF included several close associates
of Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas.
This mining conglomerate was instrumental in promoting
Laurent-Desire Kabila to power in Congo as the head of a
coalition backed by Rwandan and Ugandan troops. The U.S.
thought it could use Kabila to further the interests of big
business as opposed to the Congolese people.
However, Kabila did not accept the role of puppet and was
assassinated early this year on Jan. 16, the anniversary of the
murder of Lumumba.
Barrick Gold, Inc., based in Canada, is another major player
in central Africa. Its international advisory board includes
former U.S. president and CIA director George Bush. Barrick
Gold and other mining industries are backing the partition of
Congo into four zones by military means.
Not only are these bandits in three-piece suits, based in
Rwanda and Uganda, stealing the diamonds and gold from eastern
Congo, but they are concentrating on pillaging valuable black
sand called "col-tan" that is a vital material used in making
computer chips.
Responsibility for massacres
These same big business interests are linked to the shooting
down on April 6, 1994, of an airplane that carried the
presidents of two Central African countries--Rwandan President
Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira.
Both were Hutus, and their deaths unleashed a genocidal war
that cost the lives of 1.5 million Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda
and Congo.
James R. Lyons, a retired FBI specialist on terrorism,
testified that he had been sent to Africa by the State
Department to be an investigator with the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. When his team assembled evidence
showing that the shooting down of the plane had been carried
out by the Rwandan Patriotic Front--which at the time of the
crash was carrying out a war against the Rwandan government
with covert U.S. support and is now in power--the investigation
was shut down.
Wayne Madsen, an investigative journa list who authored
"Genocide and Covert Activities in Africa 1993-1999," confirmed
that at the time of the downing of the plane the U.S. was
secretly backing the RPF. The RPF leader, Paul Kagame, received
military training at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff
College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The U.S. Defense
Department has admitted that it provided training to the RPF in
January 1994, three months before the April 6 incident.
In his conclusion, Madsen stated, "Certain interests in the
United States had reason to see Habyarimana and other
pro-French leaders in central Africa out of the way. As
recently written by Gilbert Ngijol, a former Assistant to the
Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United
Nations to Rwanda in 1994, the United States benefited
economically from the loss of influence of French and Belgian
mining interests in the central Africa and Great Lakes
regions."
This article is copyright under a Creative
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