[R-G] Congo: How Rich Whites Caused Five Million Blacks to Die

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=572&Itemid=37

Congo: How Rich Whites Caused Five Million Blacks to Die
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

"The holocaust in the Congo is a collective crime by all of the Euro- 
American mineral extraction industries and the governments that serve  
them."

Five million Congolese have died in the last decade or so in order to  
make billionaires even richer. If there were such a thing as  
international law, this holocaust in the Democratic Republic of Congo  
should have already resulted in the public hanging of hundreds of the  
world's richest men - and rightfully so. If the Nuremberg laws that  
sent ten Nazis to the gallows for crimes against humanity and peace  
were applied to the Congo, we could quite easily find the names of the  
defendants in the columns of the world's financial press - the richest  
men on the face of the earth. These men conspired to murder millions  
so that there would be constant war in Central Africa - but no law to  
inhibit theft on the grandest industrial scale imaginable.

The so-called government of Congo is just now getting around to  
beginning a review of which companies are mining what and where in the  
country. Since the many invasions of Congo began a decade ago,  
corporations like De Beers, BHP Billiton, Anglogold, and the American  
giant Freeport-McMoRan have caused five million people to die so that  
they could use the chaos as a cover to smuggle billions of dollars in  
precious metals out of the country. These mining companies all have  
their own private armies to defend their stolen goods, or join with  
the armies of U.S. allied countries such as Rwanda and Uganda to  
establish free-fire and steal-whatever-you-can-carry-away zones. It is  
accurate to say that the holocaust in the Congo is a collective crime  
by all of the Euro-American mineral extraction industries and the  
governments that serve them. True justice for the Congo would require  
the imprisonment or execution of many tens of thousands - most of them  
white men.

"It's not clear who even has a contract to do business in Congo."

The Africans involved, including Congolese officials are relatively  
small fry, but they prosper from the table scraps of the  
cannibalization of the Congo. According to the commission to review  
the state of mining in Congo, various branches of the government  
protect some companies from paying any taxes at all on profits that  
range up to 600 percent. It's not clear who even has a contract to do  
business in Congo. None of the gold rushes of modern history bore any  
similarity to the violence of industrial capitalism scouring the earth  
for coltan, diamonds and cassiterite. The Congolese death toll already  
exceeds those killed by forced labor under the Nazis - but not one  
rich white man in a suit has been punished.

Congo is proof that those nations that claim to be the civilized  
powers of the world are in fact the opposite; they are the guardians  
and bankrollers of hell. While these men live, let no one dare speak  
of morality as anything other than a wishful hypothetical. Certainly,  
it does not exist anywhere in Congo.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.

  BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com