What you need to know about the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC by its French acronym): 1. UN troops have been raping and sexually abusing girls as young as 12 in Congo
2. Mercenaries have been hired by multinationals as security providers around gold, diamond, copper, cobalt and coltan mines which they are looting there, posing as UN troops
3. Tutsi Rwandan, Ugandan, and Burundian troops, backed by well known superpowers and Western multinationals, after subjecting Congo to a 5-year-war of aggression, of invasion, of looting and of untold massacres of more than 5 million Congolese, have never left Congo but are still operating there, disguised as UN troops, thus ostensibly backing and encouraging the “TUTSIFICATION OF POWER” in Central Africa. Shame on the UN Mission in Congo!
By Antoine Roger Lokongo, a London-based Congolese journalist.
27.02.2005 I. INTRODUCTION
The UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, known by its French acronym as MONUC, constitutes the biggest, yet the feeblest UN presence in Africa today 16,000 men have been deployed in the country as big as the whole of Western Europe.
Its mission, officially, is to supervise the transition process - from country torn apart by a 5-year-war of aggression, of invasion, of looting and of untold massacres of more than 5 million Congolese by Rwandan, Ugandan, and Burundian troops, backed by well known superpowers and Western multinationals – to free and fair elections.
But that is just on paper. The mission of the UN Mission in Congo is something else. MONUC has become by-word for indecency, a Trojan horse for Western Secret services and business intelligence in a country which, placed at the heart of Africa, was geopolitically, coveted both by the West and the East during the Cold War; but most importantly because Congo remains a vast repository of mineral wealth, which has been mercilessly looted since the time of King Leopold of Belgium up to this day.
The past of this rich in mineral and natural resources central African country has been marred by horrible tragedies. The Belgian occupation was followed by 80 years of an oppressive colonial rule imposed on the people of Congo from 1885 onwards when King Leopold II acquired their country as his special private ‘Domaine Royale’ at the Berlin Conference and handed it over to the Belgian government as a colony afterwards when his own coffers went dry.
The people of Congo endured unbearable atrocities committed by King Leopold’s agents. The death toll of the forgotten genocide perpetrated against the natives is hardly known. Important elements of the King’s ‘system of exploitation’ endured for many years, particularly during the ivory and later the rubber boom, cause of the worst bloodletting (through the cutting of hands) which began under Leopold’s rule in the mid-1890’s, but continued several years after his ‘one-man regime’ (see Adam Hoschild, King Leopold’s Ghost…p.225ff.).
In the period after the second world war, the US struggled to secure a neo-colonial control of the tottering empires of the old European colonisers. In the course of the US efforts to supplant Belgian colonial rule in Congo, the Congolese people seized the chance to take a leap forward in the struggle for independence.
Congo’s independence on 30 June 1960 followed years of bitter and protracted struggle incarnated by one great man by the name of Emery Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected Congolese prime minister. In his independence day impromptus speech delivered in the presence of King Baudouin of Belgium, Lumumba rightly articulated the feelings of his people against the Belgians who ‘have only brought slavery and oppression to the Congo’ – contrary to what the King had said earlier, describing the Belgian occupation as the ‘dawn of civilisation in Congo.’ Lumumba also described the Congolese people’s struggle for independence in terms of ‘tears, fire and blood’.
The nationalist and popular Lumumba had then sealed his fate. The whole imperialist machinery was set up against him. The Belgian establishment rallied with the CIA to finish the daring ‘black pimpernel’, using Lumumba’s own entourage which they corrupted and bribed, and hoisted Lumumba’s own former secretary, then Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Désiré Mobutu, who would serve their interest for more than three decades. Their swift action took many forms: they masterminded a workers’strike, an army mutiny and the secession of the southern mineral- rich Katanga province under the leadership of Moise Tshombe with the backing of Belgian troops. Lumumba dismissed Belgian officers from the Congolese army and demanded for an immediate withdrawal of Belgian troops who had bombarded the port of Matadi on 11 July 1960. He also called for a UN neutral peace keeping force to force Belgians troops out of Katanga. The UN contingent dominated by Western interests, was obeying instructions from New York and Brussels. Lumumba then realised that he had made a big mistake.
Desperate by the hour, he turned to the Soviet Union and called Soviet troops to help him retake the secessionist provinces of Katanga and Southern Kasai which declared unilateral independence on 11 July and 8 August 1960 respectively. He was consequently branded ‘a dangerous communist’. This was unacceptable to the West at the height of the Cold War.
With the complicity of United Nations in Congo, known by its French acronym as ONUC (Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo) – funny they have just added an “M” and it has now become MONUC - and Mobutu’s troops, Lumumba was arrested, transferred to Katanga and assassinated on 17 January 1961. The truth about his assassination has finally been established 40 years after. Revelations in Belgian sociologist Ludo de Witte’s new book De Moord op Lumumba (= The Assassination of Lumumba), written in Dutch and published by Van Halewyrck, Louvain, Belgium and by Karthala, Paris last year; and based on newly declassified Belgian archives, has firmly pinned Belgium and the USA in the dock. The revelations including the fact that Lumumba’s body was cut into pieces and doused in sulphuric acid to erase the evidence are so startling that the Belgian parliament decided on 9 December 1999 to set up a commission of inquiry into Lumumba’s death and the West’s responsibility in it.
Fourty years after the Congolese Prime Minister, Patrice Emery Lumumba was assassinated, history repeated itself on 16 January 2001, when President Laurent Désiré Kabila, a disciple of Lumumba, was assassinated exactly in the same circumstances as Lumumba.
After Patrice Lumumba’s murder in 1961 and Mobutu’s subsequent ascendancy to power, sealed by his 1965 coup, Mobutu settled down into being “Our man in Zaire” as President Reagan called him, adding that Mobutu was “a friend of democracy and freedom, a voice of good sense and good will; one of our most valued friends on the entire continent of Africa”.
By the 1990s, the excesses of Mobutu’s kleptocratic rule were proving unsustainable for the West. So, sooner than see an anti-Mobutu revolt develop in a form openly hostile to western interests, Britain and America hoped to effect a controlled ‘regime change’ by supporting and controlling rebels forces led by Laurent Désiré Kabila, a long time guerrilla fighter, who since the 60s had fought alongside Che Guevara for the liberation of his homeland. However, Kabila allowed the West to believe that, by assisting his forces in the overthrow of Mobutu, the West would see the opening of a more stable field of exploitation. Indeed a number of advance contracts were signed, supposedly guaranteeing certain multinational companies privileged access to Congo’s mineral wealth should Kabila’s revolt prove successful. Washington even went so far as to mobilise Rwandan and Ugandan troops to assist in the overthrow of Mobutu.
But a triumphant Laurent Désiré Kabila tore up the paper promises he had made to sell his homeland to the multinational companies, and like Patrice Lumumba, articulated clearly the aspiration of his people for a complete independence of Congo.
He said: “More than 40 years of African independence have offered the world a sad spectacle of a continent looted and humiliated with the complicity of its own sons and daughters”. This state of affairs he vowed to change.
When the Western powers realised that Kabila was ‘not a man to do business with’, they hatched another regime change strategy. Those same client states or proxy forces of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi – and South Africa to a certain extent – now plunged Congo into a long a bloody war which has claimed 5 million lives, completely unnoticed by the world, compared to what we now see advertised everywhere in bill boards around London, I mean, Hotel Rwanda, a film about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, for which the Congolese people are now unjustly paying the price (Please read our previous magazine in our web site titled, The 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, Ten years on…) .
In order to go and systematically loot Congo’s natural and mineral resources, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi had a pretext according to which they had to pursue the perpetrators of that genocide who were hiding in the jungles of Congo. After six years of occupation, they failed to arrest a single one of them. You can see that the war has other motivations rather than the evoked security reasons. The intended coup claimed Laurent Désiré Kabila’s life but failed to completely overthrow his regime, which came under the command of his Joseph Kabila. To the dismay of the West, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola, those veterans of the frontline struggle against imperialism, under the SADC guidelines, came to the support of independence forces in Kinshasa. South Africa under Mandela opposed the intervention. In fact President Mandela gave arms worth $100 million to Paul Kagame of Rwanda to wage war in Congo in return for massive dividend.
That is why the Western media in general and the British Media particularly, have relentlessly demonised President Mugabe over the issue of land reform which Britain should have funded 20 years ago and have cited Zimbabwe’s intervention in Congo as the source of destruction and near collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy (Please read our previous magazine in our web site, titled Western Media and the Congo war).
The charter for Universal Human Rights Declaration does not apply in Congo. It is even violated by the UN Mission in Congo itself. MONUC troops have been engaging in activities unbecoming of them, including, buying gems, collaborating with militia, poachers, mercenaries, Tutsi invading troops and worse of all raping and sexually abusing girls as young as 14 in Congo.
Such is the tragedy of Congo that life expectancy has shrunk to 51 years for women, 46 for men. Infant mortality stands at 126 per 1,000 live births. Superpowers and their multinational companies (MNCs) will do anything to prevent and independent Congo from taking control of its own resources and raising the living standards of its own people. They do not hesitate to kill, rape and maim Congolese people on a massive scale, now using their client states of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi (the latter often kill and MONUC count the toll and the mass graves), in order to put their hands on Congo’s vast mineral and natural resources. Congo has 80% of the world’s reserve of coltan, a rare mineral which finds its way into million of mobile phones and laptop computers. It has huge resources of copper, cobalt, diamonds and other minerals essential to the technologies of the modern, developed world. And the West will do anything, even signing a pact with the devil to keep Congo under its influence if not carve it into pieces so that each western power may find a stake in it. The UN Mission in Congo is just one of the tools for such an endeavour, beside wars of invasion by Congo’s Tutsi-led neighbouring states in the east, masterminded by the same superpowers and their multinational companies (MNCs).
More than 5 million Congolese (equivalent of the whole Irish population) have been massacred since 1998 by Tutsi-led armies of Congo’s neighbouring states (Rwanda, Uganda and Burindi with the complicity od some Congolese sellouts and the so-called Congolose of Rwanda origin, who keep on changing their name: Yesterday they wanted to be called Banyamulenge, today they want to be called Rwandophones, tomorrow we don’t know what they would want to be called!).
This is a genocide rightly called by the late UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Viera, as “the greatest crimes against humanity in the 21st century, swept under the carpet”. It is taking place in total and deep silence as the whole world stand by, despite a UN presence there! And further massacres, starvation and disease are still going on. The silence of the international community has even deepened. Rape has become a weapon of war and HIV/AIDS is a ticking bomb in Congo. Often people are buried alive, chopped with machetes, their bodies thrown into rivers or forced down the latrines. Women raped and shot at their vagina thereafter. It is barbaric!
Yet it beggars belief that despite all the peace treaties Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi have signed with Congo; and subjecting Congo to a 5-year-war of aggression, of invasion, of looting and of untold massacres of more those 5 million Congolese, under the pretext of hunting down the Interahamwe, that is, those who committed genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and not managing to arrest one single one of them, the Tutsi army from Rwanda (and Uganda and Burundi) continue to kill, loot and rape in villages near their border with Congo since the end of November 2004, under the very nose of the UN Mission in Congo, in cities under the control of MONUC, which willingly refuses to use its mandate to ward off invaders.
Will justice, soon or later, have the last word over all crimes that are being perpetrated in Congo?
http://www.congopanorama.info/mag-monuc.shtml
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