Rich land, impoverished people
In Congo, imperialists intervene in many ways
By
G. Dunkel
Published Jul 13, 2006 9:17 PM
The Congo is scheduled to hold elections for
president and its parliament July 30, the first real elections since 1965. There
are 33 candidates for president, with the current president, Joseph Kabila,
considered the favorite, and 10,000 candidates for parliament.
International donors will be spending $400 million on this election. Most
of the ballots are going to be distributed by air, since the country has less
than 300 miles of paved roads.
The United Nations has 17,000 soldiers in
the Congo in an operation called MONUC. The European Union, in its first major
foreign deployment, has sent 2,500 soldiers to back them up, calling its
operation Eufor-RDC. (RDC are the French initials for the Congo’s official
name, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.)
President Kabila has said he
would prefer soldiers from the Southern African Devel opment Community. Mosinuo
Lekota, South Africa’s defense minister, speaking about Eufor-RDC, told
the press in February, “The presence of foreign troops in the Congo is not
necessary. If need be, the SADC, of which the Congo is a member, can send
some.” German Defense Minister Franz-Joseph Jung, in defending Eufor-RDC,
had what he considered a decisive argument: “The stability of this region
rich in raw materials will be profitable for German industry. “ (Le Monde
Diplomatique, July 2006)
The European imperialists want their own troops
on the ground to protect their own interests. The United States also has a long
history of involvement and interference in the Congo.
The elections have
drawn attention from major newspapers in the United States and Britain, as well
as France, Belgium and Germany—the former colonial powers in central
Africa.
These articles paint a vivid picture of the recent history of the
Congo. The July 1 New York Times even went so far as to call the civil war that
raged from the fall of Presi dent Mobutu in 1997 to 2002 “the
world’s deadliest conflict since World War II.”
But the Times
did not give the figure— 4 million deaths— that lies behind its
assertion. This count was published in the Lancet, a British medical journal,
and is accepted as authoritative by the UN.
While these press reports
raise some of the motivations that lie behind this extraordinary intervention in
the Congo—namely, that it is potentially the richest country in Africa and
has a strategically important location in the center of the continent—they
don’t put them in a historical context of imperialist
interventions.
The “Congo Free State” was officially
recognized by the 1885 Berlin Conference as the personal property of King
Leopold II of Belgium. The U.S. government had recognized Leopold’s claim
the previous year. The CFS responded to a number of revolts with bloody
suppression and killed millions of people to produce rubber, coffee and other
agricultural products and bring them to market. It then was converted into a
Belgian colony in 1908, when its mineral wealth became apparent and
Leopold’s viciousness became a hindrance to investment.
The Congo
was a huge source of wealth and profits for Belgium and its French and German
partners, but the African liberation movement began to challenge its control in
the late 1950s. Patrice Lumumba founded the National Congolese Move ment in 1958
and then became prime minister. When he declared he wanted to work with the
Soviet Union and other progressive countries to develop the Congo, U.S.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, on Aug. 18, 1960, authorized his assassination.
While the CIA and the U.S. government have never confessed to this, a
previously unpublished interview with a White House minute-taker surfaced in
2000. The minute-taker, Robert Johnson, had told the staff of the Senate
intelligence committee that “he vividly recalled the president turning to
Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, ‘in the full hearing of all those in
attendance, and saying something to the effect that Lumumba should be
eliminated. There was stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting
continued.’” (Guardian, Aug. 10, 2000)
In December 1960, with
U.S. and CIA support, Col. Joseph Mobutu and Gen. Kasavubu overthrew the
government. Lumumba fled but was caught and turned over by UN forces to
Mobutu’s troops, who let a firing squad of Belgian soldiers and cops kill
this outstanding African patriot in January 1961. The UN and the U.S. then
managed to cobble together a “unity” government which lasted until
Mobutu openly seized power in 1965.
The Lumumba forces had reorganized in
1963 and managed to take Kisangani, an important city in the eastern Congo. Che
Guevara and other Cubans gave them military training for some months. Then the
U.S. dropped Belgian paratroopers and provided air cover to a mercenary column
that took the city back for the government.
From 1965 through 1990,
Mobutu, who now called himself Mobutu Sese Seko, ruled without much serious
opposition, although the Lumumbists managed to hold on in the east and wage a
low-level guerrilla war. He enriched himself, some of his cronies and the
Belgian-French-U.S. mining companies that exploited the Congo’s mineral
wealth, while providing essential logistical support to the U.S.-backed Unita
forces that were trying to seize Angola and its oil riches for big oil. But he
lost favor with the imperialists, partly because his price tag was too large and
because opposition to him was growing.
The post-Mobutu transition began in
1990 and ended when Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who was one of the
Lumumbist leaders in the eastern Congo and the father of the current president,
was installed as president by a force consisting mainly of Rwandan and Ugandan
soldiers in 1997. The role the U.S. played in the fall of Mobutu and the
installation of Kabila came through its influence in Uganda and Rwanda.
A
year later, Kabila dismissed the Rwan dan commander of his army. When a Ugandan
and Rwandan column tried to seize the Congolese capital, Angola, Zim babwe and
later Namibia stepped in and kept Kabila in power. But the civil war and its
millions of casualties was on.
The opposition to Kabila’s central
government soon split into at least four movements that fought each other as
well. They managed to finance their struggles by selling diamonds, some gold and
especially coltan, a rare mineral used in cell phones and laptop computers.
Kivu, a province in the eastern Congo, had 80 percent of the world’s
supply.
All these minerals could be produced by thousands of workers
digging in individual pits, picking out the diamonds or the gold, or processing
the coltan without heavy investments or technology. As the political chaos in
the Congo grew more intense, Laurent Kabila was assassinated in January of 2001.
The market for what the Congo was producing shifted and the Western interests
that were making big profits realized they were going to have to make some big
investments. That is something they are very loathe to do in a politically
volatile situation.
The Western imperialists also get the World Bank to
monitor the financial practices of poor Third World countries and keep them from
requiring large foreign-owned companies to provide housing, retire ment benefits
and health care to their workers.
They could replace the hundreds of thou
sands of miners working around Lubum bashi, who make a dollar or so a day, with
a few thousand workers using heavy equipment and not making much more. They also
can make the heavy investment that developing new mines elsewhere will
require.
That was the reason for the peace treaty signed in Sun City,
South Africa, in 2003, which was supposed to be finalized by a national election
held July 30, 2006.
The imperialist interests hiding behind the World Bank
and the upcoming elections are not going to get a free ride. Besides the miners
protesting upcoming job losses, the port workers in Matadi, the Congo’s
only deep-water port for oceangoing vessels, struck for two weeks in early June
and forced the government to replace their bosses.
The people of the Congo
have been struggling many ways since their country was seized back in the 1880s.
All signs point to the struggle continuing.
Sources consulted: Georges
Nzongola-Ntalaja, “The Congo from Leopold to Kabila” and G. Heins
and H.Donnay, “Lumumba: the last fifty days.”
Email:
[email protected]
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