March 23, 2012
Since
the time of the British Empire and the manifesto of Cecil Rhodes, the pursuit
of treasures on the hopeless continent
has demonstrated the expendability of human life. Despite decades of apathy
among the primary resource consumers, the increasing
reach of social media propaganda has ignited public interest in Africa’s long
overlooked social issues. In the wake of celebrity endorsed pro-intervention
publicity stunts, public opinion in the United States is now being mobilized in favor
of a greater military presence on the African continent. Following the
deployment of one hundred US military personnel to Uganda in 2011, a new bill has been introduced to the
Congress
calling for the further expansion of regional military forces in pursuit of the
Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an ailing rebel group allegedly responsible for
recruiting child soldiers and conducting crimes against humanity.
As
the Obama administration claims to welcome the peaceful rise of China on the
world stage, recent policy shifts toward an American
Pacific Century indicate a desire to maintain the capacity to project
military force toward the emerging superpower. In addition to maintaining a
permanent military presence in Northern Australia, the construction of an
expansive military base on South Korea’s Jeju Island has indicated growing antagonism
towards Beijing. The base maintains the capacity to host up
to twenty
American and South Korean warships, including submarines, aircraft carriers and
destroyers once
completed in 2014
– in addition to the presence of Aegis
anti-ballistic systems. In response, Chinese leadership
has referred to the increasing militarization in the region as an open
provocation.
On the economic front, China has been excluded from
the proposed Trans-Pacific
Partnership Agreement (TPPA), a trade agreement intended
to administer US-designed international trading regulations throughout Asia, to
the benefit of American corporations. As further fundamental policy divisions
emerge subsequent to China and Russia’s
UNSC veto mandating intervention in Syria, the Obama
administration has begun utilizing alternative measures to exert new economic
pressure towards Beijing. The United States, along with the EU and Japan have
called on the World Trade Organization to block Chinese-funded mining projects
in the US, in addition to a freeze on World Bank financing for China’s
extensive mining projects.
In a move to counteract Chinese economic ascendancy,
Washington is crusading against China's export restrictions on minerals that
are crucial components in the production of consumer electronics such as
flat-screen televisions, smart phones, laptop batteries, and a host of other
products. In a 2010 white paper entitled "Critical Raw
Materials for the EU," the European Commission cites the immediate
need for reserve supplies of tantalum, cobalt, niobium, and tungsten among
others; the US Department of Energy 2010 white paper "Critical Mineral
Strategy" also acknowledged the strategic importance of these
key components. Coincidently, the US
military is now attempting to increase its presence in what is widely considered
the world’s most resource rich nation, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo.
China’s unprecedented economic transformation has
relied not only on consumer markets in the United States, Australia and the EU
– but also on Africa, as a source for a vast array of raw materials. As Chinese
economic and cultural influence in Africa expands exponentially with the
symbolic construction of the new $200 million African
Union headquarters funded solely by Beijing, the ailing United States and its leadership have expressed dissatisfaction
toward its diminishing role in the region. During a diplomatic tour of Africa
in 2011, US Secretary of
State Hilary Clinton herself has irresponsibly insinuated China’s
guilt in perpetuating a creeping "new
colonialism."
At a time when China holds an
estimated $1.5 trillion in
American government debt, Clinton’s comments remain dangerously
provocative. As China, backed by the world’s largest foreign currency reserves, begins
to offer loans to its
BRICS counterparts in RMB, the prospect of emerging nations resisting the
New American Century appear
to be increasingly assured. While the success of Anglo-American imperialism
relies on its capacity to militarily drive target nations into submission,
today’s African leaders are not obliged to do business with China – although
doing so may be to their benefit. China annually invests an estimated $5.5
billion in Africa, with only 29 percent of direct investment in
the mining sector in 2009 – while more than half was directed toward domestic manufacturing,
finance, and construction industries, which largely benefit Africans themselves
– despite reports of worker mistreatment.
China’s deepening economic engagement in
Africa and its crucial role in developing the mineral sector, telecommunications
industry and much needed infrastructural projects is creating "deep nervousness" in the West, according to David Shinn, the
former US ambassador to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia. In a 2011 Department of
Defense whitepaper entitled "Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China", the US acknowledges the
maturity of China’s modern
hardware and military technology, and the likelihood of Beijing finding
hostility with further military alliances between the United States and Taiwan.
The document further indicates that "China’s rise as a major
international actor is likely to stand out as a defining feature of the
strategic landscape of the early 21st century." Furthermore, the Department of Defense concedes to
the uncertainty of how
China’s growing capabilities will be administered on the world stage.
Although a US
military presence in Africa (under the guise of fighting terrorism and
protecting human rights) specifically to counter Chinese regional economic
authority may not incite tension in the same way that a US presence in North
Korea or Taiwan would, the potential for brinksmanship exists and will persist.
China maintains the largest standing army in the world with 2,285,000 personnel
and is working to challenge the regional military hegemony of America’s Pacific Century with its expanding naval and
conventional capabilities, including an effort to develop the world’s first anti-ship
ballistic missile. Furthermore,
China has moved to begin testing advanced anti-satellite (ASAT) and Anti
Ballistic Missile (ABM) weapons systems in an effort to
bring the US-China rivalry into Space warfare.
The concept of US intervention into the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Central African Republic and
Uganda under the pretext of disarming the Lord’s Resistance Army is an
ultimately fraudulent purpose. The LRA has been in operation for over two
decades, and presently remains at
an extremely weakened state, with approximately 400 soldiers. According
the LRA Crisis Tracker, a
digital crisis mapping software launched by the Invisible Children group, not a
single case of LRA activity has been reported in Uganda since 2006. The vast
majority of reported attacks are presently taking place in the northeastern
Bangadi region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, located on the foot of
a tri-border expanse between the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
The existence
of the Lord’s Resistance Army should rightfully be disputed, as the cases of
LRA activity reported by US State Department-supported Invisible Children rely on
unconfirmed reports – cases where LRA activity is presumed and suspected.
Given the extreme instability in the northern DRC after decades of foreign
invasion and countless rebel insurgencies, the lack of adequate investigative
infrastructure needed to sufficiently examine and confirm the LRA’s presence is
simply not in place. The villainous branding of Joseph Kony may well be
deserved, however it cannot be overstated that the LRA threat is wholly
misrepresented in recent pro-intervention US
legislation. An increasing US presence in the region exists only
to curtail the increasing economic presence of China in one of the world’s most
resource and mineral rich regions.
The Lord’s Resistance Army was originally formed in
1987 in northwestern Uganda by members of the Acholi ethnic group, who were
historically exploited for forced labor by the British colonialists and later marginalized
by the nation’s dominant Bantu ethic groups following independence. The Lord’s
Resistance Army originally aimed to overthrow the government of current Ugandan
President, Yoweri Museveni – due to a campaign of genocide waged against the
Acholi people. The northern Ugandan Acholi and Langi ethnic groups
have been historically targeted and ostracized by successive Anglo-American
backed administrations. In 1971, Israeli and British intelligence agencies
engineered a coup against Uganda’s socialist President Milton Obote,
which gave rise to the disastrous regime of Idi Amin.
In a detailed report of Museveni’s atrocities, Ugandan writer Herrn Edward Mulindwa offers, "During the 22-year war, Museveni’s army
killed, maimed and mutilated thousands of civilians, while blaming it on
rebels. In northern Uganda, instead of defending and protecting civilians
against rebel attacks, Museveni’s army would masquerade as rebels and commit
gross atrocities, including maiming and mutilation, only to return and pretend
to be saviors of the affected people." Despite such
compelling evidence of brutality, Museveni has been a staunch US ally since the
Reagan administration and received $45 million
dollars in military aid from the Obama administration for Ugandan
participation in the fight against Somalia’s al Shabaab militia. Since the
abhorrent failure of the 1993 US intervention in Somalia, the US has relied on
the militaries of Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia to carry out US interests in
proxy.
Since colonial times, the West has historically
exploited ethnic differences in Africa for political gain. In Rwanda, the
Belgian colonial administration exacerbated tension between the Hutu, who were
subjugated as a workforce – and the Tutsi, seen as extenders of Belgian rule. From the
start of the Rwandan civil war in 1990, the US sought to overthrow the 20-year
reign of Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana by installing
a Tutsi proxy government in Rwanda, a region historically under the influence
of France and Belgium. At that time prior to the outbreak of the Rwandan civil
war, the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) led by current Rwandan President
Paul Kagame, was part of Museveni’s United People's Defense Forces (UPDF).
Ugandan forces invaded Rwanda in 1990 under the
pretext of Tutsi liberation, despite the fact that Museveni
refused to grant citizenship to Tutsi-Rwandan refugees living in Uganda at the
time, a move that further offset the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Kagame
himself was trained at the U.S. Army Command and Staff College (CGSC) in
Leavenworth, Kansas prior to returning to the region to oversee the 1990
invasion of Rwanda as commander of the RPA, which received supplies from
US-funded UPDF military bases inside Uganda. The invasion of Rwanda had the full support of the
US and Britain, who provided training by US Special
Forces in collaboration with US mercenary outfit, Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI).
A report issued in
2000 by Canadian Professor Michel Chossudovsky and Belgian economist Pierre Galand concluded
that western financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and
the World Bank financed both sides of
the Rwandan civil war, through a process of financing military expenditure from
the external debt of both the regimes of Habyarimana and Museveni. In Uganda, the World Bank imposed austerity
measures solely on civilian expenditures while overseeing the diversion
of State revenue go toward funding the UPDF, on behalf of Washington. In
Rwanda, the influx of development loans from the World Bank's affiliates such
as the International Development Association (IDA), the African Development
Fund (AFD), and the European Development Fund (EDF) were diverted into funding
the Hutu extremist Interhamwe militia, the main protagonists of the Rwandan
genocide.
Perhaps most disturbingly, the World Bank oversaw huge
arms purchases that were recorded as bona fide government expenditures, a stark
violation of agreements signed between the Rwandan government and donor
institutions. Under the watch of the World Bank, the Habyarimana regime imported approximately one million machetes
through various Interhamwe linked organizations, under the pretext of importing
civilian commodities. To ensure their reimbursement, a multilateral
trust fund of $55.2 million dollars was designated toward postwar
reconstruction efforts, although the money was not allocated to Rwanda – but to
the World Bank, to service the debts used to finance the massacres.
Furthermore, Paul Kagame was
pressured by Washington upon coming to power to recognize the legitimacy of the
debt incurred by the previous genocidal Habyarimana regime. The swap of old
loans for new debts (under the banner of post-war reconstruction) was
conditional upon the acceptance of a new wave of IMF-World Bank reforms, which
similarly diverted outside funds into military expenditure prior to the
Kagame-led invasion of the Congo, then referred to as Zaire. As present day Washington legislators attempt to
increase US military presence in the DRC under the pretext of humanitarian
concern, the highly documented conduct of lawless western intelligence agencies
and defense contractors in the Congo since its independence sheds further light
on the exploitative nature of western intervention.
In 1961, the Congo’s first
legally elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba was assassinated with support from Belgian
intelligence and the CIA, paving the way for the thirty-two year reign of
Mobutu Sese Seko. As part of an attempt to purge the Congo
of all colonial cultural influence, Mobutu renamed the country Zaire and led an
authoritarian regime closely allied to France, Belgium and the US. Mobutu was
regarded as a staunch US ally during the Cold War due to his strong stance
against communism; the regime received billions in international aid, most from the United
States. His administration allowed national infrastructure to deteriorate while
the Zairian kleptocracy embezzled international aid and loans; Mobutu himself reportedly held $4 billion USD in a personal Swiss bank
account.
Relations
between the US and Zaire thawed at the end of the Cold War, when Mobutu was no
longer needed as an ally; Washington would later use Rwandan and Ugandan troops to invade the
Congo to topple Mobutu and install a new proxy regime. Following the conflict in Rwanda, 1.2
million Hutu civilians (many of whom who took part in the genocide) crossed
into the Kivu province of eastern Zaire fearing prosecution from Paul Kagame’s
Tutsi RPA. US Special Forces trained Rwandan and Ugandan troops at Fort Bragg in the United States and
supported Congolese rebels under future President, Laurent Kabila. Under the
pretext of safeguarding Rwandan national security against the threat of
displaced Hutu militias, troops from Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi invaded the
Congo and ripped through Hutu refugee camps, slaughtering thousands of Rwandan
and Congolese Hutu civilians, many of who were women and children.
Reports
of brutality and mass killing in the Congo were rarely addressed in the West,
as the International Community was sympathetic to Kagame and the Rwandan Tutsi
victims of genocide. Both Halliburton and Bechtel (military contractors that
profited immensely from the Iraq war) were involved in military training and
reconnaissance operations in an attempt to overthrow Mobutu and bring Kabila to power. After
deposing Mobutu and seizing control in Kinshasa, Laurent Kabila was quickly
regarded as an equally despotic leader after eradicating all opposition to his
rule; he turned away from his Rwandan backers and called on Congolese civilians
to violently purge the nation of Rwandans, prompting Rwandan forces to regroup
in Goma, in an attempt to capture resource rich territory in eastern Congo.
Prior
to becoming President in 1997, Kabila sent representatives to Toronto to
discuss mining opportunities with American Mineral Fields (AMF) and Canada’s Barrick Gold Corporation; AMF had direct
ties to US President Bill Clinton and was given exclusive exploration rights to
zinc, copper, and cobalt mines in the area. The Congolese Wars perpetrated by Rwanda and Uganda killed at least six
million people, making it the
largest case of genocide since the Jewish holocaust. The successful
perpetration of the conflict relied on western military and financial support,
and was fought primarily to usurp the extensive mining resources of eastern and
southern Congo; the US defense industry relies on high quality metallic alloys
indigenous to the region, used primarily in the construction of high-performance
jet engines.
In 1980, Pentagon documents
acknowledged shortages of cobalt, titanium,
chromium, tantalum, beryllium, and nickel; US participation in the Congolese
conflict was largely an effort to obtain these needed resources. The sole piece of legislation
authored by President Obama during his time as a Senator was S.B. 2125, the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief,
Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006. In the legislation, Obama
acknowledges the Congo as a long-term interest to the United States and
further alludes to the threat of Hutu militias as an apparent pretext for continued interference
in the region; Section 201(6) of the bill specifically calls for the
protection of natural resources in the eastern DRC.
The
Congressional Budget Office’s 1982 report "Cobalt: Policy Options for a Strategic
Mineral"
notes that cobalt alloys are critical to the aerospace and weapons industries
and that 64% of the world’s cobalt reserves lay in the Katanga Copper Belt,
running from southeastern Congo into northern Zambia. For this reason, the
future perpetration of the military industrial complex largely depends on the
control of strategic resources in the eastern DRC. In 2001, Laurent Kabila was
assassinated by a member of his security staff, paving the way for his son
Joseph Kabila to dynastically usurp the presidency. The younger Kabila derives
his legitimacy solely from the support of foreign heads of state and the international
business community, due to his ability to comply with foreign plunder.
The
framework of the deal allocated an additional $3 million to develop cobalt and
copper mining operations in Katanga. In 2009, the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) demanded renegotiation of the deal, arguing that the agreement between China
and the DRC violated the foreign debt relief program for so-called HIPC (Highly
Indebted Poor Countries) nations. The vast majority of the DRC’s $11 billion
foreign debt owed to the Paris Club was embezzled by
the previous regime of Mobuto Sesi Seko. The IMF successfully blocked the deal in May 2009,
calling for a more feasibility study of the DRCs mineral concessions.
The United States is currently mobilizing public
opinion in favor of a greater US presence in Africa, under the pretext of
capturing Joseph Kony, quelling Islamist terrorism and putting an end to
long-standing humanitarian issues. As well-meaning Americans are successively coerced
by highly emotional social media campaigns promoting an American response to
atrocities, few realize the role of the United States and western financial
institutions in fomenting the very tragedies they are now poised to resolve. While
many genuinely concerned individuals naively support forms of pro-war brand
activism, the mobilization of ground forces in Central Africa will likely employ
the use of predator drones and targeted missile strikes that have been
notoriously responsible for civilian causalities en masse.
The further consolidation of US presence in the region
is part of a larger program to expand AFRICOM, the United States Africa Command through a
proposed archipelago of military bases in the region. In 2007, US State
Department advisor Dr. J. Peter Pham offered the following on AFRICOM and
its strategic objectives 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." Additionally, during an
AFRICOM Conference held at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller openly
declared AFRICOM’s guiding principle of protecting "the free flow of
natural resources from Africa to the global market," before citing the increasing presence of China as a major challenge to
US interests in the region.
The
increased US presence in Central Africa is not simply a measure to secure
monopolies on Uganda’s
recently discovered oil reserves; Museveni’s legitimacy depends solely on
foreign backers and their extensive military aid contributions – US ground
forces are not required to obtain valuable oil contracts from Kampala. The push
into Africa has more to do with destabilizing the deeply troubled Democratic
Republic of the Congo and capturing its strategic reserves of cobalt, tantalum,
gold and diamonds. More accurately, the US is poised to employ a scorched-earth policy by creating
dangerous war-like conditions in the Congo, prompting the mass exodus of
Chinese investors. Similarly to the Libyan conflict, the Chinese returned after
the fall of Gaddafi to find a proxy government only willing to do business with
the western nations who helped it into power.
As the
US uses its influence to nurture
the emergence of breakaway states like South Sudan, the activities of
Somalia’s al Shabaab, Nigeria’s Boko Haram and larger factions of AQIM in North
Africa offer a concrete pretext for further US involvement in regional affairs.
The ostensible role of the first African-American US President is to export the
theatresque War on Terror directly to the African continent, in a campaign to
exploit established tensions along tribal, ethnic and religious lines. As US
policy theoreticians such as Dr.
Henry Kissinger, willingly proclaim, "Depopulation
should be the highest priority of US foreign policy towards the Third World,"
the vast expanse of
desert and jungles in northern and central Africa will undoubtedly serve as the
venue for the next decade of resource wars.
Nile Bowie is an independent writer and photojournalist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
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