Rwanda has broken international law with the visible presence of Rwandan troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo alongside Rwanda’s covert M-23 militia. M-23 is reported to have captured Goma (again) and the civilians are in a state of emergency. This is familiar because M-23 previously took over the city in 2012 but had to withdraw because it wasn’t equipped to administer the city of two million. As the M-23 rebels and their allies increase their takeover of the East Congo with reported vows of advancing to the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo in a “liberation” of the country, it becomes clear Rwanda has invaded Congo again, possibly for keeps this time to maintain its hold on the East’s gold, copper, and coltan mines.The Congo’s government has requested international sanctions against Rwanda. But the international community has allowed an ongoing genocide of the Congolese people for thirty years. The people of the Congo live under a genocide warning.
Paul Kagame began invading the Eastern Congo after he took over Rwanda in 1994. Subsequently Uganda which sponsored Kagame’s invasion of Rwanda with U.S. funding. and Rwanda have maintained militias in the area. While genocide was brought under control in Rwanda, an insistence on mass killing was carried into the Congo by Kagame’s Rwandan troops in pursuit of Hutu refugees who fled there. This also allowed Rwandan forces to protect Tutsi groups settled in the Congo, and access and control a portion of the mining resources.
But the resources belong to the people. As they do in the Sudan and South Sudan. As they do in Gaza and Palestine. All three areas are currently threatened by genocide against the people who have lived there.
The U.S. Government’s official site for the National Library of Medicine, notes “5.4 million people have died in Democratic Republic of Congo since 1998 because of conflict, report says” (Peter Moszynski, Jan. 31, 2008, BMJ). Since the “First Congo War” in 1996 to the present, the white press underestimates the death toll at six million, civilians.
From the perspective of preventing genocide the source of the problem rests, in both the five lakes region of Africa and the Middle East, with corporate interests using national leaders to effect policy. This facile academic statement of the obvious covers the fact that millions on millions of individual innocent civilian lives are currently being sacrificed, for corporate growth and profit. This is against any sense of ethics, knowledge of right and wrong, law, religious commitments to honour life, or the people’s informed consent.
In the DRC the genocide continues because it is meant to. It works. The mines are working, The resources are taken. The peoples’ deaths are not a corporate concern. The elites are not about to stop it. They are the reason Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in 1961 and the UN’s Dag Hammarskjöld killed. And the Simba rebellion crushed. And the Eastern Congo thrown into the chaos of warring militias.
The Rwandan sudden genocide among tribes living in peace brought in an Anglo-American-backed Paul Kagame. One could say Rwanda is responsible for the genocide of Congolese except that the benefits have devolved to International corporations, stock markets, manufacturers, economies.
This is so familiar because European and American policies have used Independent Congo (Zaire, DRC) since its colonial bondage as a people enslaved to the uses of Western capital. Now the Chinese have bought-in with the purchase of many previously American owned mines. The means of effecting colonialism has shifted but the people-as-prey remains the same. The genocide continues. With respect for conscience a portion of UN peacekeepers are in place to lessen the civilian body count. But the guilty parties here are the same who engineered the “Rwanda” genocide, which the UN did not stop, and which served a policy of Western corporate expansion.
There is little hope of any justice for the Democratic Republic of Congo’s people until the ownership and control of the mineral resources in the East are in the hands of a just regulator that assures the people safety and payment for their resources. It may have to be UN administered to include Russian and China. It is an alternative to an ongoing genocide. Until then all profits from the genocide should be tracked as evidence for eventual prosecution.
Background: The continuing genocide of civilians in the Congo is noted in Nightslantern’s genocide warnings for the Congo since 2004. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Recommended: Keith Harmon Snow’s “Merchants of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa” (2008); my 2006 essay, “Tactical Use of Genocide in Sudan and the Five Lakes Region,” (2006).
Image: “What it’s like to watch a genocide happening,” by Julie Maas