Congo Genocide: Will Obama's America collaborate or refuse?
by Ann Garrison
Global Research,
August 15, 2012
On Aug. 4, I reported on KPFA Radio that cholera had broken
out in the internally displaced persons camps growing again in eastern Congo, as Congolese people flee the war which,
with backing from the Kagame regime in Kigali,
Rwanda, resumed
in April. The cholera outbreak has sparked fears of an epidemic.
This looks in many ways like Native American Genocide or any genocide of native people. Armies break up families and communities, forcing them off the land that someone else covets, to die in refugee camps of hunger, disease or heartbreak. It took four centuries to decimate the native population of what became the United States, but millions of eastern Congolese people have perished since 1996 alone, mostly from hardship after being displaced.
As I worked on the radio news, I asked myself, as I often do, why report this on KPFA’s FM radio signal here in Northern and Central California, or even on KPFA’s webstream, to an audience which is mostly American?
My answer always is, because the U.S. is very, very involved. Two of the Pentagon’s most longstanding “partners,” Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, have been the principle aggressors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996.
Two of the Pentagon’s most longstanding “partners,” Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, have been the principle aggressors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996.
Congolese wait for aid in Kibati with little or no shelter
from the storm or protection from the insipient cholera epidemic. – Photo:
Jerome Delay, AP
In October 2010, President Obama announced the introduction
of combat equipped U.S. Special Forces into the region, and this week the
ENOUGH Project’s John Prendergast published a horrifying argument, “Let Them Hunt,” in the influential journal
Foreign Policy, where he called on Obama to “unleash the dogs of war” in Congo
and neighboring countries to hunt down minor East African warlord Joseph Kony
and his LRA militia.
In October 2010, President Obama announced the introduction of combat equipped U.S. Special Forces into the region. But this is not a hunt for Joseph Kony or any other bad actors. It’s a military operation to secure oil and other African resources and limit Chinese access.
Many agree that has already happened.
Driven from her home, where she would have been warm and dry
during the rainstorm, this child must try to survive a war fomented by foreign
forces plundering resources that belong to her and all Congolese in a camp
threatened with cholera. – Photo: Jerome Delay, AP
However, cynical as I may become about the brutal and ruthless scramble for Congolese resources, I never imagine that this is what the American people who rose above their history to elect their first African American president imagined. Americans voted him into the job, but they didn’t write the job description.
And now, grim as the news from eastern Congo is, there is some hope. It is still possible to fight for the Obama so many Americans hoped to elect. Here are reasons for hope:
1) Last week, a bi-partisan Congressional coalition headed by Washington State’s Jim McDermott wrote a letter to Rwandan President Paul Kagame to say that the latest U.N. report decisively proves that Kagame is backing the M23 militia’s resumption of the war in eastern Congo and that the current relationship between the U.S. and Rwanda must end.
2) The most recent U.N. experts report on Congo includes photographic and other documentary evidence that Rwanda is backing the M23 militia in Congo.
3) In response to the U.N. experts report, the U.S. suspended $200,000 in military aid to Rwanda, and the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden suspended contributions to Rwandan budget support.
4) More prominent people and publications, including Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, writing in the same Foreign Policy journal that published Prendergast’s “Let Them Hunt,” are pointing to President Obama’s own Senate legislation, the Obama Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006, which became Public Law 109-456, and suggesting that it gives Obama both special expertise and obligation in Congo.
5) On Friday, Aug. 17, Rwandans and Congolese will gather in The Hague, Netherlands, to present a complaint with documentary evidence and petition the new chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to indict Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
These efforts all deserve the attention and support of those who worked to elect Barack Obama, not because they thought he would serve as the Black face of resource war and African genocide, but because they hoped his election would signal the end of it.
