By Udo W. Froese
JOHANNESBURG
Destabilisation for ProfitTHIS column can confirm that the war for Africa is everything but over. Evidence is aplenty and should not be withheld, as it will shed light on this war and the marginalisation of Africa as a whole.
Former US Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney, declared during her term of office, "the whole world knows that Uganda and Rwanda are allies of the United States and that they have been given a carte blanche for whatever reason to wreak havoc in the Congo". She was quoted in the New African news magazine.
American investigative journalist specializing in intelligence and privacy matters, Wayne Madsen, testified before the Congressional Sub-Committee on International Operations and Human Rights Committee on International Relations, having written the book "Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993 - 1999". Wayne Madsen based his book on three years of research and interviews in countries with a criminal colonial record such as Britain, the United States of America, Canada, France, Belgium and the Netherlands and some of their stooges in Africa, such as Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.
Madsen describes for the record, how US Special Operations Command (SOC) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) are running the Congo war since 1996 as "destabilisation for profit". In his report Madsen further reveals that US Special Operations personnel were deeply involved in training troops on both sides of the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - on the one side the "rebels" (the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie - RCD factions) under the warlords of Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda and on the other, the central government of the late Laurent Kabila and eventually his son Joseph, and the official alliance with Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe.
According to Madsen's findings, various sources in the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa repeatedly point to the presence of an American-built military base on the border with the DRC near Cyangugu, Rwanda. In fact, the British daily newspaper, The Independent, reported some time ago on secretly CIA funded military operations of Rwanda in the DRC which were well above the means of Rwanda as that country had at one stage some 10 000 troops in the Congo.
There is systematic pillaging of Congo's most valuable natural resources, as observed by the United Nations' "Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the DRC".
That UN panel also reported that the "leading military commanders from various countries needed and continue to need this conflict for its lucrative nature and for temporarily solving some internal problems in those countries as well as allowing access to wealth".
It further seems that the US Department of Defense relies to a great extent on so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs). Those PMCs were previously known as "mercenaries", when they were deployed from time to time as foreign policy instruments by the colonial powers of Belgium, France, Portugal and South Africa and have close links with some of the leading mining and oil companies involved in Africa.
The privately owned "army" of the defunct 'Executive Outcomes' is a prime example.
The above report further points to the findings of a commission headed by the Canadian UN ambassador, Robert Fowler, which inform that Rwanda has violated the international embargo against Angola's former UNITA bandits by allowing them to operate seemingly freely, selling conflict diamonds and dealing with arms traders in its capital, Kigali.
According to that report, the late Jonas Savimbi openly traded rough diamonds for arms in Kigali.
The war casualties (deaths) of Africans in the DRC are estimated by the author, Wayne Madsen, at a total of some two million since the first invasion from Rwanda in 1996. This is based on his three years of research in that region.
During Belgium's King Leopold II's conquest of the Congo, some 10 million Congolese were killed between 1890 and 1910. It seems that the break-up of the DRC into various federal states, all of them becoming members of the SADC, is the final aim of the neo-colonial structures for which they are seemingly prepared to keep that war going at any price.
This would explain the role of the vicious sell-out, Moise Tshombe, who once attempted to rule the mineral-rich Katanga province from its capital, Lubumbashi. The DRC war is not the only one in Africa.
Whenever one watches television, images of peace and wealth come up when focused on Europe, Britain and the US. However, as one sees reports from Africa, war and destruction, abject poverty and diseases seem to be the order of the day.
"Africa, the hopeless continent", as the British magazine, The Economist gave its opinion, has so far been successfully pillaged and bled in order to build the wealth of its former colonial masters. Strange, how white Europe makes good news and black Africa only bad news.
Destructive images of Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Zimbabwe and even South Africa continue to make headlines. It is interesting to note that all of the above-mentioned countries have a wide range of highly profitable natural resources of strategic minerals. Yet, Africans have no access to those strategic resources, whether it is diamonds, gold, platinum, gem stones, crude oil, copper, uranium, cobalt and columbite-tantalite (or coltan), a primary component of computer microchips and printed circuit boards, high-quality timber and agricultural produce - a large range of quality and quantity of natural resources nowhere to be found in the industrialized G-7 countries, particularly not for the low prices as only African resources are being traded at.
In essence, this seems to be the real reason why it is that resource-wealthy African countries have to be reduced to so-called civil and ethnic wars without any functional infrastructure and ridiculously irrelevant currencies.
South Africa has paid a dear price for its "negotiated" British Parliamentary Democracy. "Bullied into submission" would be a more appropriate description.
In the four years of violence since the release of its true leaders to the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president, that is, from July 1990 to April 1994, 48 000 political deaths and 22 000 injured were counted, all of them Africans. Despite sophisticated mining, financial and manufacturing industries, South Africa's former colonial-apartheid robber-barons are able to retain their exclusive hold on the economy, successfully shutting African South Africans out, reducing them to almost permanent unemployment, abject poverty, prostitution, disease and starvation, simply put, margi-nalizing them into crime.
In an exclusive oligo-polistic, cartellised, warehouse and rent-seeking economy with its 'BEE-Uncle Tomism', an almost equally cruel 'free market economy' (new age capitalism) has little space. As reported in previous columns, up to 20 million African South Africans out of a population of about 43 million are starving on a daily basis and only four out of 100 school-leavers annually have a mere hope for formal employment.
The economic war is as much a reality in South Africa, as are the wars in other wealthy African countries. The current debate between the trade union umbrella body, COSATU, the South African Communist party (SACP) and the Presidency, whether or not the country's unemployment rate is as high as between 40% and 50%, or below 26%, is daily reflected in the media.
In essence, Africa needs to determine its own future and has no option, but to pool its resources in order to establish its place firmly in an economically competitive world with its brutal capitalism and powerful judiciary under the cloak of 'neo-liberal democracy'. As the Nigerian Prof Adebayo Adedeji warned explicitly in his position as head of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, any economic policy that marginalizes people is clearly destined for failure.
http://www.newera.com.na/page.php?id=19
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