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The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Congo's Crisis, Congo's History
by Christian Parenti The horrors of violence in the eastern Congo demand some explanation. Reports from the ground paint a picture of a hell on earth, one of the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crises. But too often these reports, providing little context, can leave an implicitly racist aftertaste.
The implication seems to be, “Well, these people are just savages.” Some history makes the madness appear slightly more logical, if no less evil.
[Republished at PFP with express Agence Global permission.]
Today's brutal militia violence in the Congo is motivated by the
looting of the region's natural resources -- a practice begun by slave
traders, and refined by Belgian King Leopold II. The Congo's "conflict
resources" -- gold, diamonds, timber, coltan, etc. -- are sold
worldwide through Uganda and Rwanda.
Several months ago, I visited Goma, a city on the Rwandan border,
the surrounding countryside of North Kivu province is the epicenter of
Congo’s violence. In the lush mountains outside the city, UN troops and
the national army -- such as it is -- face off against an array of
competing militias. Among them are General Nkunda’s Tutsi forces, who
fight against elements of the old Hutu Interuwama of Rwanda (the FDLR).
Nkunda also fights the government's army: a largely unpaid force of
ragged former militiamen and boys. The DRC and the UN want Nkunda to
disband his forces as part of the peace process.
Further
north are the Mai Mai, some of whom began as followers of the Leftist
independence leader Patrice Lumumba, but that was long ago. These days
they fight naked, protect themselves against enemy bullets by washing
in water, and commit atrocious human rights abuses. Around the time I
visited Goma, a band of Mai Mai raided a village and systematically
raped scores of women -- a crime all too common. The International
Crisis Group estimates that throughout the Congo “over 1,000 people
continue to die each day from conflict-related causes.”
Many
of the militias here fund themselves by exporting illegal timber,
diamonds, gold, coltan, and other resources to Rwanda and Uganda. Both
countries’ export these products in amounts that seem to far exceed
their own natural supplies. This traffic in “conflict resources” makes
Rwandan and Ugandan elites rich, and helps the general development of
both economies.
So at one level the horror and misery of the
militia warfare in Congo is just part of a rush for African resources.
But why the rape and mutilation and scorched earth policies against
civilians? Alas this pattern -- resource extraction by terror -- is old
in this region. It begins with the rise of the slave trade and
continues into the present.
Starting in the late 15th
century, the Portuguese marauded in from the west coast, while “Arabs”
(really Muslim Africans) raided in from the east, making Zanzibar their
capital market.
As an industry, stealing bodies required
methods akin to total war: villages annihilated, the old and the young
slaughtered, the working age carried off in chains. The raiders
sustained themselves by killing off wildlife and stealing crops, but at
times they even ate humans.
Belgian King Leopold II
invoked these horrors to justify his “humanitarian intervention” and
the creation of his Congo Free State. His official goal was to stamp
out slavery, but his real goal was to steal ivory and rubber.
In
reality, the slaving militias were not conquered so much as they simply
morphed into agents of colonial resource extraction in the service of
rapacious station chiefs working for King Leopold’s Free State. The
militia would descend upon villages and demand rubber and ivory, if the
tribute was not paid the locals were killed or dismembered.
The
methods worked: Farmers moved heaven and earth to please the militias.
The Belgians grew rich and Leopold built monuments to himself.
Among
the most famous of these colonial-era terrorists was Tippu Tip. His
private army’s methods included: sacking villages, mass murder, rape,
systematic mutilation, and routine cannibalism. Tippu Tip had conflicts
with the Belgians, but by 1887, had made common cause with them and
even became the governor of the Stanleyville district of the Congo Free
State.
In this process the slaving militias were
transformed into the uniformed Force Publique the colonial-era
paramilitary police. This in turn became Mobutu Sese Seko’s army and
with the end of his 32 year dictatorship in 1997, many of his soldiers
moved on to become conflict resources militias. Through it all, the
methods inherited from the slave raiding warfare of the colonial era
persist in varying degrees.
When I see the Mai Mai or other
militias in their rag tag fatigues, carrying Kalashnikovs and crazy
amulets, policing the loot-economics of the conflict minerals and
timber sector, I also see Tippu Tip’s raiders sucking up labor, rubber
and ivory to be injected into the global economy.
Some
describe the militias of North Kivu as the failure of the UN peace
process. These armed bands are also the living monuments to the past
barbarism of slavery and colonialism. They are heirs to a long, oft
forgotten history of terror as a means of economic extraction. As in
the past, the violence takes its toll here in the heart of Africa, but
the wealth flows out and away to all points of the compass, bearing
with it no sign of the bloody processes that produce it.
Christian
Parenti is an investigative journalist and scholar. His most recent
book is The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq
(2004), is an account of the US occupation in Iraq. Parenti has
reported from Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, and Bolivia.
Agence
Global is the exclusive syndication agency for The Nation, Le Monde
diplomatique, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Mark
Hertsgaard, Rami G. Khouri, Peter Kwong,Tom Porteous, Patrick Seale and
Immanuel Wallerstein.
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Released: 27 December 2007
Word Count: 825
Rights & Permissions Contact: Agence Global, 1.336.686.9002, rights@agenceglobal.com
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