Stealing Mineral Wealth for Corporate Interests: U.S. Bankrolled Mass Murder
of Millions in Central Africa
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - December 2, 2020
from Covert Action
William J. Perry, the U.S. Defense Secretary from 1994 to 1997, speaks with
Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame. Perry helped secure the delivery of weapons to
Kagame that were used to attack Congo and exterminate Hutu refugees in
eastern Congo. [Source: therwandan.com]
A new book reveals how U.S. Presidents of both parties unleashed the CIA in
the Congo to do the dirty work of greedy corporations, causing misery,
mutilations and massacres of such magnitude they dwarfed even the wildest
accounts depicted in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness.
On June 30, 2020, 60 years after the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
first achieved its independence from Belgium, author Justin Podur envisions
a 95-year old Patrice Lumumba giving a speech celebrating the creation of a
successful democracy in the heart of Africa that has used its immense
mineral wealth to build a high-tech manufacturing base, while helping to
avert ethnic conflict in neighboring countries.
In real life, Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in February 1961 in a plot
supported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Patrice Lumumba speaks before Congolese Senate on eve of Congos
independence. [Source: vanguardngr.com]
Podurs book, Americas Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DR Congo (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), juxtaposes the bright future that Lumumba
promised as the DRCs first prime minister with the dark history of what
actually happened.
The CIAs favorite: Joseph Mobutu. [Source: wikimedia.org]
After Lumumba was killed, the U.S. government lavished hundreds of millions
of dollars in aid to help consolidate the power of his former army chief of
staff and assassin Joseph Mobutu, who stole millions of dollars from the
public treasury over the next 30 years, killed thousands of people, and
wrecked any prospects for the DRCs successful development.
When Mobutu fell ill with cancer and lost his strategic utility in the
1990s, the U.S. had him replaced and sponsored a joint Rwandan-Ugandan
invasion of the DRC that caused millions more deaths and resulted in further
looting of Congos resources.
Map showing resources and incursions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
[Source: newint.org]
Congos Tortured History
Congos tortured modern history began when the country was colonized by the
Belgian King Leopold.
The cruelty of the Belgian colonial agents was memorialized in Joseph
Conrads book, Heart of Darkness (1899), which centered on the journey of a
Belgian trader who witnesses gruesome atrocities as the locals are put to
work in the service of the colonial masters.
Americas Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DR Congo by Justin Podur.
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) [Source: pelgrave.com]
Podurs book shows how colonialist attitudes, along with predatory economic
practices, have continued into the 21st century accompanied by horrific
violence, which would have even shocked Conrad.
In some of his best chapters, Podur takes to task academic specialists and
journalists for reinforcing a colonialist discourse by denying the negative
impact of Western intervention and by promoting stereotypes implying that
Africans cannot govern themselves effectively.
Some of these writers repeat CIA disinformation about Lumumbas allegedly
voracious sexual appetite, and imply that Lumumba would have inevitably
evolved as a dictator if he had lived. They also obscure that American
intervention in Central Africa has long been undergirded by economic
motives.
In 1963, U.S. private investment in the Congolese mining industry reached
$1.2 billion. The Rockefellers had holdings in the Congolese bauxite
industry and the Katanga mining company, as did American Metal Climax and
Templesman & Sons, a diamond trading company, which employed the CIA station
chief in the DRC, Lawrence Devlin, as a private consultant.
Congolese natural resources. [Source: medium.com]
Believing that real democracy in the Congo was unattainable, Devlin helped
coordinate the suppression of the Simba revolt led by pro-Lumumba forces
after Mobutus power was consolidated. The Simba were supported by the
Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, who traveled to the DRC to provide
training in guerrilla warfare techniques.
CIA Station chief Lawrence Devlin played a key role in Lumumbas
assassination. He later became a private consultant to Templesman & Sons
which exploited Congos diamond wealth. [Source: nytimes.com]
To fight the Simba, the CIA helped mobilize white mercenaries who committed
horrific atrocities reminiscent of the U.S. army in Vietnam. A French
mercenary told AP News that [Congolese] people dont like us. We get good
pay for killing women and children.
The Simba war of the 1960s set the groundwork for the Congo wars of the
1990s, which were instigated by U.S. proxy forces in Rwanda and Uganda who
committed yet more atrocities.
Life Magazine depicts white mercenaries who terrorized the Congo as nobly
fighting against communism. [Source: tumblr.com]
The Clinton administration followed precedent by transferring military
vehicles and providing aerial reconnaissance and radio intelligence. U.S.
military attaché Peter Waley, was in such close contact with the new DRC
leader, Laurent Kabila, who supported the Rwandan and Ugandan invasions,
that the conflict became known as Waleys war.
Supporting Another Monster
If Mobutu was the U.S.s favored client during the Cold War, Rwandan
dictator Paul Kagame has fit the designation ever since. During his
quarter-century in power, he has been lavished with honorary degrees from
Harvard, named as one of Time Magazines most influential people, and lauded
by Bill Clinton as one of the greatest leaders of our time. Journalist
Stephen Kinzer compared Kagame to Abraham Lincoln and described his 1996
invasion of the DRC as one of the most remarkable military campaigns in
modern African history.
According to Podur, Kagame is actually one of the most outstanding mass
murderers of our time. He has developed a global assassination machine to
kill off rivals while advancing a phony narrative about the genocide in
Rwanda, which has been bought hook line and sinker by his naive admirers.
Bill Clinton was very close to Paul Kagame, calling him one of the greatest
leaders of our time. [Source: laprogressive.com]
In October 1990, as leader of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in
Uganda, Kagame helped plan the invasion of Rwanda in an attempt to overthrow
the Hutu-led government of Juvenal Habyarimana, and oversaw mass killings
that made use of open-air crematoria to dispose of the bodies efficiently.
On April 6, 1994, according to various investigations, Kagame ordered the
shooting down of Habyarimanas airplane, which led to the mobilization of
Hutu militias (Interhamwe) in an attempt to save Rwanda from RPF takeover.
Habyarimana had just signed the Arusha accords instituting a power-sharing
arrangement and establishing free elections, which Kagame knew he would
lose.
To punish the Hutu population after the RPFs military victory, Kagame set
up a draconian prison system whose inmates died like flies in overcrowded
cells. The RPF at the same time hunted down Hutu refugees in Eastern Congo,
and systematically looted its mineral resources in order to finance Kagames
military machine.
The U.S. has stood by Kagame during his reign of terror because he welcomes
private investors and invaded the DRC twice in support of Western interests.
One of the main beneficiaries of the Congo Wars was the copper giant Phelps
Dodge, which secured ownership of the cobalt-producing Temke-Fungunume mine
with the help of the U.S. embassy.
No Mere Bystander to Genocide
Rwandas political troubles are rooted in the Belgian colonial order. As
part of their strategy of divide and rule, the Belgians elevated a Tutsi
aristocracy, which was overthrown after Rwanda achieved independence in
1962. When Hutu seminarian Grégoire Kayibinda became head of state, the
Tutsi tried to reclaim their former privileged status, and many were
expelled into neighboring countries and others massacred.
During the 1980s, Paul Kagame and other Tutsi exiles supported Ugandan
leader Yoweri Musevenis guerrilla forces as they fought a bush war in an
attempt to unseat President Milton Obote (1966, 1971; 1980-1985). Kagame and
the RPF subsequently applied military tacticsincluding gruesome torture
techniques and the art of political assassinationthat they learned in their
wars in Rwanda and the DRC. Kagame never forgot how the tide in the bush war
turned when one of Obotes top commanders, David Oyite-Ojok, had his
helicopter shot down.
RPF commander Fred Rwigyema. His murder paved the way for Kagames
ascendancy as head of the RPF [Source: alchetron.com]
When Tutsi officers who had assisted Musevenis rise to power were demoted
in the late 1980s, they realized that the time had come for them to return
to Rwanda through armed struggle. A dispute erupted at that point between
Kagame and RPF commander Fred Rwigyema, who wanted to proceed with the
invasion of Rwanda cautiously, to first politicize the peasantry and get
their rural masses on the RPF side.
According to Podur, Rwigyema was a brilliant man whose combination of royal
legitimacy and revolutionary charisma made him a probable future national
leader. Unfortunately, Rwigyema was shot and killed by one of Kagames
confidantes. Abdul Ruzibiza, an RPF veteran, stated that Kagame [now] found
himself at the head of an army that did not accept him. He maintained his
rule through terror, assassination, imprisonment and executions.
Prior to his death, Rwigyema had been selected by Museveni to attend an
officers course at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Kagame went in his place and
was trained in the art of psychological warfare and other counterinsurgency
tactics. In his spare time, Kagame helped plot the Rwandan invasion in phone
calls with Rwigyema that were likely monitored by his hosts. American
assistance to the RPF at the time was being laundered through Uganda, which
purchased ten times more weapons in 1991 than in the preceding 40 years
combined.
Foreign journalists interview Maj. Kagame shortly after the death of Maj-Gen
Fred Rwigyema in 1990. [Source: monitor.co]
The April 1994 genocide took place within the context of Rwandas civil war
triggered by the RPFs 1990 invasion from Uganda. According to the latest
independent research, more Hutu were killed than Tutsi, many by RPF forces
who sacrificed the local population in their bid for political power.
Podurs book effectively challenges the official narrative and myth that the
U.S. was a bystander to genocide, as former U.S. ambassador to the UN
Samantha Power framed it in her Pulitzer prize winning book, A Problem from
Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (2003).
Power leaves out mention of the RPFs destabilizing invasion of Rwanda and
how the U.S. helped Kagame to gain state power.
After the RPF victory, U.S. troops arrived to support Kagames new
government and stayed until the end of September 1994. The Clinton
administration further called back UN troops, which might have impeded the
RPF victory, and encouraged UN mission chief Romeo Dallaire while he worked
to disarm the Hutu government forces and allowed weapons to flow to the RPF
through the Ugandan border.
In 1995, U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry visited with Kagame and
helped broker an expansion of military training and intelligence-sharing
operations while supporting the lifting of an international arms embargo to
the RPF regime.
The Clinton administration subsequently increased its military assistance
and provided political cover as Rwanda invaded and plundered the DRC.
Western academics and media pundits demonized the entire Hutu population and
lent support to the Rwandan governments argument that they were all
génocidaires who had to be hunted down and killed.
In fact, only a small percentage of Hutu had carried out killings in the
spring of 1994. Thousands of women and children were among those slaughtered
or forced into squalid refugee camps where they died from starvation and
disease outbreaks.
Hutu refugees in the DRC. [Source: face2faceafrica.com]
Massacres carried out by Rwandese militias backed by the Congolese army
continue to this day as the U.S. lavishes military and economic aid on
Rwanda while protecting Kagame from prosecution for his crimes.
Although the United States may conceive of itself as the indispensable
nation, Podurs study shows it to be an heir to the colonial powers. Under
successive administrations, it has sustained racialist discourse and
stereotypes as a means of justifying naked economic exploitation, sordid
military alliances, and shameful atrocities. Most egregious has been the
demonization of an entire ethnic group, the Hutu, in a manner that lent
justification to their attempted extermination.
Podurs book is significant in one other important respect: He has reminded
us about the positive historical legacy of Patrice Lumumba, who stood
against colonial depredations, for African control over its economy and
resources, and for the healing of ethnic divisions. Though Lumumba was
killed prematurely, his vision will continue to resonate in the coming era
when a weakened West can no longer wreak the same kind of havoc that it has
in the past, and where Conrads dystopia, with hope, may finally be brought
to an end.
