The stage for political
chaos in Congo was further set in September when the Democratic Republic of
Congo’s 83 year old Prime Minister, Antoine Gizenga, resigned
after two years. Then at end of October, with suspicious timing, the commander
of the United Nations peacekeeping operation, the Mission de l'Organisation des
Nations-Unies au Congo (MONUC, Mission of the United Nations Organization in
the Congo), Spanish Lieutenant General Vicente Diaz de Villegas, resigned after
less than two months on the job, citing, ‘lack of confidence’ in the leadership
of DRC President Joseph Kabila. Kabila, the Congo’s first democratically
elected President, has also been involved in negotiating a major $9 billion
trade agreement between the DRC and China, something which Washington is
clearly not happy about.
Nkunda is a long-standing henchman of Rwandan
President, US-trained Kagame. All signs point to a heavy, if covert, USA role
in the latest Congo killings by Nkunda’s men. Nkunda himself is a former
Congolese Army officer, teacher and Seventh Day Adventist pastor. But killing
seems to be what he is best at.
Much of Nkunda's well-equipped and relatively
disciplined forces are from the bordering country of Rwanda and the rest have
been recruited from the minority Tutsi population of the Congolese province of
North Kivu. Supplies, finance and political support for this Congolese rebel
army come from Rwanda. According to the American
Spectator magazine, ‘President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has long been a
supporter of Nkunda, who originally was an intelligence officer in the Rwanda
leader's overthrow of the Hutu despotic rule in his country.’
As the Congo News Agency reported on October 30,
‘Some have bought into the pretext of an endangered Tutsi minority in Congo.
They never fail to mention that Laurent Nkunda is supposedly fighting to
protect "his people". They have failed to question his true motives
which are to occupy the mineral-rich North-Kivu province, pillage its
resources, and act as a proxy army in eastern Congo for the Tutsi-led Rwandan
government in Kigali. Kagame wants a foothold in eastern Congo so his country
can continue to benefit from the pillaging and exporting of minerals such as
Columbite-Tantalite (Coltan). Many experts on the region agree today that
resources are the true reason why Laurent Nkunda continues to create chaos in
the region with the help of Paul Kagame.’
The Democratic Republic of the
Congo contains more than half the world’s cobalt. It holds one-third of its
diamonds, and, extremely significantly, fully three-quarters of the world
resources of columbite-tantalite or “coltan” -- a primary component of computer
microchips and printed circuit boards, essential for mobile telephones, laptops
and other modern electronic devices.
America Minerals Fields, Inc., a
company heavily involved in promoting the 1996 accession to power of Laurent Kabila,
was, at the time of its involvement in the Congo’s civil war, headquartered in
Hope, Arkansas. Major stockholders included long-time associates of former
President Clinton going back to his days as Governor of Arkansas. Several
months before the downfall of Zaire’s French-backed dictator, Mobutu, Laurent
Desire Kabila based in Goma, Eastern Zaire had renegotiated the mining
contracts with several US and British mining companies including American
Mineral Fields. Mobutu’s corrupt rule was brought to a bloody end with the help
of the US-directed International Monetary Fund.
Washington was not entirely
comfortable with Laurent Kabila, who was finally assassinated in 2001. In a
study released in April 1997 barely a month before President Mobutu Sese Seko
fled the country, the IMF had recommended "halting currency issue
completely and abruptly" as part of an economic recovery programme. A few
months later upon assuming power in Kinshasa, the new government of Laurent
Kabila Desire was ordered by the IMF to freeze civil service wages with a view
to "restoring macro-economic stability." Eroded by hyperinflation,
the average public sector wage had fallen to 30,000 new Zaires (NZ) a month,
the equivalent of one US dollar.
According to Chossudovsky, the
IMF's demands were tantamount to maintaining the entire population in abysmal
poverty. They precluded from the outset a meaningful post-war economic
reconstruction, thereby contributing to fuelling the continuation of the
Congolese civil war in which close to 2 million people have died.
Laurent Kabila was succeeded by
his son, Joseph Kabila who went on to become the Congo’s first democratically
elected President, and appears to have held a closer eye to the welfare of his
countrymen than did his father.
Dr. J.
Peter Pham, a leading Washington insider who is an advisor of the US State and
Defense Departments, states openly that among the aims of the new AFRICOM, is
the objective of ‘protecting access
to hydrocarbons and other strategic resources which Africa has in abundance ...
a task which includes ensuring against the vulnerability of those natural
riches and ensuring that no other interested third parties, such as China,
India, Japan, or Russia, obtain monopolies or preferential treatment.’
In testimony before the US Congress supporting creation of
AFRICOM in 2007, Pham, who is closely associated with the neo-conservative Foundation
for Defense of Democracies, stated:
‘This natural wealth makes Africa an inviting target
for the attentions of the People’s Republic of China, whose dynamic economy,
averaging 9 percent growth per annum over the last two decades, has an almost
insatiable thirst for oil as well as a need for other natural resources to
sustain it. China is currently importing approximately 2.6 million barrels of
crude per day, about half of its consumption; more than 765,000 of those
barrels—roughly a third of its imports—come from African sources, especially
Sudan, Angola, and Congo (Brazzaville). Is it any wonder, then, that…perhaps no
other foreign region rivals Africa as the object of Beijing’s sustained
strategic interest in recent years. Last year the Chinese regime published the
first ever official white paper elaborating the bases of its policy toward
Africa.
This
year, ahead of his twelve-day, eight-nation tour of Africa—the third such
journey since he took office in 2003—Chinese President Hu Jintao announced a
three-year, $3 billion program in preferential loans and expanded aid for
Africa. These funds come on top of the $3 billion in loans and $2 billion in
export credits that Hu announced in October 2006 at the opening of the historic
Beijing summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) which brought
nearly fifty African heads of state and ministers to the Chinese capital.
Intentionally
or not, many analysts expect that Africa—especially the states along its
oil-rich western coastline—will increasingly becoming a theatre for strategic
competition between the United States and its only real near-peer competitor on
the global stage, China, as both countries seek to expand their influence and
secure access to resources.’
Notably, in late October Nkunda’s well-armed troops
surrounded Goma in North Kivu and demanded that Congo President Joseph Kabila
negotiate with him. Among Nkunda’s demands was that Kabila cancel a $9 billion
joint Congo-China venture in which China gets rights to the vast copper and
cobalt resources of the region in exchange for providing $6 billion worth of
road construction, two hydroelectric dams, hospitals, schools and railway links
to southern Africa, to Katanga and to the Congo Atlantic port at Matadi. The
other $3 billion is to be invested by China in development of new mining areas.
Curiously, US and most European media neglect to report that
small detail. It seems AFRICOM is off to a strong start as the opposition to
China in Africa. The litmus will be who President Obama selects as his Africa
person and whether he tries to weaken Congo President Joseph Kabila in favor of
backing Nkunda’s death squads, naturally in the name of ‘restoring democracy.’.