EDITORIAL
Congo, Africa & imperialism
The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly
Zaire, is one of the richest countries on the face of the earth
in terms of mineral wealth. It is home to large reserves of
tantalum, a very rare mineral that is essential in creating
coltan. Coltan is essential to the high-tech needs of the
electronics industry. Once processed into a powder to coat
capacitors, its ability to hold an electric charge makes it
indispensible in high-tech equipment including cellular phones,
computers, jet engines, missiles and weapons systems. A major
portion of the world's tantalum is found in Africa, of which 80
percent is located in the DRC's eastern region.
Despite all this abundance of wealth, the DRC has one of the
world's poorest populations. While hundreds of millions of
impoverished people, many in Africa, live on $1 a day,
according to United Nations statistics, the people of the DRC
live on 25 cents a day. Since a civil war broke out in the DRC
in 1998, an estimated 4 to 5 million Congolese have lost their
lives. In 2001, the previous DRC president, Laurent Kabila, who
spoke out against the IMF and World Bank's stranglehold on his
country's economy, was assassinated.
Reports have recently appeared in the U.S. media expressing
optimism that the war is over and peace is on the horizon,
after an agreement three months ago to set up a transitional
government in which the government of the Democratic Republic
of Congo must share power with rebel groups. But the Congo
government in Kinshasa disputes this, saying that foreign
troops from Uganda and Rwanda, which backed the rebels, are
moving back into the area.
What the media are not writing about is how this terrible
war has served the interests of the imperialist-owned
corporations that want to exploit the Congo.
One of those corporations is American Mineral Fields, a
relatively small company originally based in Hope, Ark.--the
hometown of Bill Clinton. It announced early in October that it
was about to conclude an agreement with the Congo's state
minerals agency, Gecamines, for the development of "what could
become the world's biggest and lowest-cost cobalt project."
(Reuters, Oct. 2) The Kolwezi project involves an estimated
800,000 pounds of cobalt and 3.7 million pounds of copper.
With the Congo government hard-pressed on all sides, the
World Bank got Gecamines to revise its mining code. Tim Read,
AMF's chief executive, told Reuters that "For the first time in
20 years the Congo is investable. The mining code brings a
stable, transparent and robust legal and fiscal regime. It
brings great confidence."
And why is the Congo now "investable"? Because the new
mining code reduced the stake of Gecamines in this $300-million
project from 40 percent to just 12.5 percent.
Now wonder that the share price of American Mineral Fields
has doubled in the last few months.
The media, in writing about the devastation in the Congo,
leave out the role that U.S. and European imperialist
intervention have played in wreaking havoc upon its economic
and political development since the end of the 19th century,
when the Belgians first brutally colonized this country.
This past August, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in
Europe, Gen. Charles Wald, went to the DRC accompanied by a
U.S. military delegation of 20 members to join French and
Belgian military forces there. The Pentagon, along with NATO,
is planning to establish military facilities in areas in
western, eastern and northern Africa, enabling the U.S. to
rival its European allies for hegemony from Congo to Liberia to
Zimbabwe.
The U.S. and other imperialists cloak their interventions in
Africa as humanitarian efforts, but the hard economic facts
show that for every penny of aid they give, they take out vast
fortunes in stolen resources and labor.
The worldwide anti-war movement can assist the resistance of
African peoples to the giant profiteering banks and
corporations by connecting the struggle for reparations for
Africa to the struggle against war and occupation. This will
help strengthen international solidarity with working and
oppressed peoples here and abroad.
Reprinted from the Oct. 30, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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