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AFRICOM China and Congo resource wars
F. William Engdahl
Online
Journal
Tuesday, Dec 09, 2008
Just weeks after President George W. Bush signed
the order creating a new US military command dedicated to Africa,
AFRICOM, events on the mineral-rich continent have erupted which
suggest a major agenda of the incoming Obama Presidency will be
for the son of a black Kenyan to focus US resources, military
and other, on dealing with the Republic of Congo, the oil-rich
Gulf of Guinea, the oil-rich Darfur region of southern Sudan and
increasingly the Somali ‘pirate threat’ to sea lanes
in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. The legitimate question is whether
it is mere coincidence that Africa appears just at this time to
become a new geopolitical ‘hot spot’ or whether it
has a direct link to the formal creation of AFRICOM.
What is striking is the timing. No sooner had AFRICOM become
operational than major new crises broke out in both the Indian
Ocean-Gulf of Aden regarding spectacular incidents of alleged
Somali piracy, as well as eruption of bloody new wars in Kivu
Province in the Republic of Congo. The common thread connecting
both is their importance, as with Darfur in southern Sudan, for
China’s future strategic raw materials flow.
The latest fighting in the eastern part of the Congo (DRC) broke
out in late August when Tutsi militiamen belonging to the Congrès
National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP, National Congress
for the Defense of the People) of General Laurent Nkunda forced
loyalist troops of the Forces armées de la République
démocratique du Congo (FARDC, Armed Forces of the Democratic
Republic of Congo) to retreat from their positions near Lake Kivu,
sending hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians fleeing in
the process and prompting the French foreign minister, Dr. Bernard
Kouchner, to warn of the imminent risk of ‘huge massacres.’
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
Nkunda, like his mentor, Rwanda’s Washington-backed dictator,
Paul Kagame, is an ethnic Tutsi who alleges that he is protecting
the minority Tutsi ethnic group against remnants of the Rwandan
Hutu army that fled to Congo after the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
MONUC UN peacekeepers reported no such atrocities against the
minority Tutsi in the northeast, mineral rich Kivu region. Congolese
sources report that attacks against Congolese of all ethnic groups
are a daily occurrence in the region. Laurent Nkunda’s troops
are responsible for most of these attacks, they claim.
Strange resignations
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 fewer 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 USA role and AFRICOM
Evidence which was presented in a French court in a ruling made
public in 2006 claimed that Kagame was responsible for organizing
the shooting down of the plane carrying Hutu President of Rwanda
Juvénal Habyarimana, in April 1994, the event that set
off the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of thousands of people,
both Hutu and Tutsi.
The end result of the killings in which perhaps as many as a
million Africans perished was that US and UK backed Paul Kagame
-- a ruthless military dictator trained at the US Army Command-General
Staff College at Fort Leavenworth Kansas -- was firmly in control
as dictator of Rwanda. Since then he has covertly backed repeated
military incursions by General Nkunda into the mineral-rich Kivu
region on the pretext it was to defend a small Tutsi minority
there. Kagame had repeatedly rejected attempts to repatriate those
Tutsi refugees back to Rwanda, evidently fearing he might lose
his pretext to occupy the mineral riches of Kivu.
Since at least 2001, according to reports from Congo sources,
the US military has also had a base at Cyangugu in Rwanda, built
of course by Dick Cheney’s old firm, Halliburton, conveniently
enough near the border to Congo’s mineral-rich Kivu region.
The 1994 massacre of civilians between Tutsi and Hutu was, as
Canadian researcher Michel Chossudovsky described it, ‘an
undeclared war between France and America. By supporting the build
up of Ugandan and Rwandan forces and by directly intervening in
the Congolese civil war, Washington also bears a direct responsibility
for the ethnic massacres committed in the Eastern Congo, including
several hundred thousand people who died in refugee camps.’
He adds, ‘Major General Paul Kagame was an instrument of
Washington. The loss of African lives did not matter. The civil
war in Rwanda and the ethnic massacres were an integral part of
US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise
strategic and economic objectives.’
Now Kagame’s former intelligence officer, Nkunda, leads
his well-equipped forces to take Goma in the eastern Congo as
part of an apparent scheme to break the richest minerals region
away from Kinshasha. With the US military beefing up its presence
across Africa under AFRICOM since 2007, the stage was apparently
set for the current resources grab by the US-backed Kagame and
his former officer, Nkunda.
Today the target is China
If France was the covert target of US ‘surrogate warfare’
in 1994, today it is clearly China, which is the real threat to
US control of Central Africa’s vast mineral riches. The
Democratic Republic of Congo was renamed from the Republic of
Zaire in 1997 when the forces of Laurent Désiré
Kabila brought Mobutu’s 32-year reign to an end. Locals
call the country Congo-Kinshasa.
The Kivu region of the Congo is the geological repository of
some of the world’s greatest strategic minerals. The eastern
border straddling Rwanda and Uganda, runs on the eastern edge
of the Great African Rift Valley, believed by geologists to be
one of the richest repositories of minerals on the face of the
earth.
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 Mineral 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.
Now, in comes the new US AFRICOM. Speaking to the International
Peace Operations Association in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 27,
General Kip Ward, commander of AFRICOM defined the command’s
mission as ‘in concert with other US government agencies
and international partners, [to conduct] sustained security engagements
through military-to-military programs, military-sponsored activities,
and other military operations as directed to promote a stable
and secure African environment in support of US foreign policy.’
The ‘military operations as directed to promote a stable
and secure African environment in support of US foreign policy,’
today, are clearly aimed squarely at blocking China’s growing
economic presence in the region.
In fact, as various Washington sources state openly, AFRICOM
was created to counter the growing presence of China in Africa,
including the Democratic Republic of Congo, to secure long-term
economic agreements for raw materials from Africa in exchange
for Chinese aid and production sharing agreements and royalties.
By informed accounts, the Chinese have been far shrewder. Instead
of offering only savage IMF-dictated austerity and economic chaos,
China is offering large credits, soft loans to build roads and
schools in order to create good will.
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 neoconservative
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 basis of its policy toward Africa.
‘This year, ahead of his 12-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 50 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.’
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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