The following is an edited version of a talk presented at the PSL National Conference on Socialism on Dec. 6 by Akufuna Ngonda, a member of the Washington, D.C., branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
|
Any argument regarding imperialism as it relates to Africa must include an engaged, dialectical critique that defines and analyses the various manifestations of global oppression.
Our functioning questions are these: What is the U.S. government doing in Africa? What is the basis of the formation of AFRICOM and what are we, as revolutionaries, to make of the invective pronouncements coming from Washington directed at the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe and Darfur?
On Feb. 6, 2007, the Bush administration announced the creation of AFRICOM, a unified military command for Africa. AFRICOM is a by-product of militarized U.S. foreign policy, and the framework was conceived of by one of the principal architects of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The policy falsely asserts that a military command in Africa can forge an alliance with the aim of engaging in the “global war on terror.” There is no doubt that AFRICOM is the latest tool for the overriding purpose of economic and political U.S. domination.
The expression of this is threefold:
1. To economically gain unrestrained access to Africa’s natural resources.
2. To politically subdue African nations with the illusory promises of development assistance.
3. To further increase the number of military outposts in Africa to reinforce U.S. military supremacy in the global north and south.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 250,000 people fled from North Kivu province in the eastern region bordering Rwanda in the last two months. The total of internally displaced people and refugees in the region is well over 1 million. Under the control of ethnic Tutsi Laurent Nkunda, the rebel group National Congress for the Defense of the People has gained strongholds in the province, particularly the regional capital Gomu.
The civil war began in 1998 and over 5 million people have been killed. Life expectancy is only 45.8 years in the country as a whole; in North Kivu, it is 43.7 years. Seventy-three percent of the population lives in poverty.
In addition, the province has seen large usage of child soldiers. North Kivu province itself has the worst incidence of sexual violence in the world. According to United Nations 2007 figures, there are around 350 rapes a month; local figures suggest over 800 in April 2008 alone.
The country’s rich mineral resources—particularly diamonds, copper, zinc and coltan, which is used in mobile phones and computers—have been fought over in the civil war, with various companies backing warlords with arms to facilitate their plundering of the country. A United Nations’ report named 85 multinationals that are believed to be “violating ethical guidelines,” such as Anglo-American, Standard Chartered Bank and De Beers to name a few.
It is not accidental that, when an anti-imperialist government under Patrice Lumumba was elected in 1960, Belgian imperialism sought to support the breakaway of resource-rich Katanga province in a manner that parallels the moves toward autonomy by the Media Luna provinces in Bolivia.
The United Nations peacekeeping force has over 16,000 troops in the country and is blatantly failing to stop the abuses. Indeed, U.N. documents disclosed by Human Rights Watch demonstrate how U.N. peacekeepers in Congo took part in weapons trading with rebels and smuggling. These forces are part of the problem because of their subservience to the imperialist powers that dominate the U.N. Security Council.
In a 2002 article from Socialism and Liberation magazine, Arthur Covington indicates that the hostility toward Zimbabwe’s African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government on the part of the imperialist countries is deep-rooted.
The hostility stems first and foremost from the fact that Zimbabwe’s government has its origin in the armed struggle that ended the Western-backed racist, fascist settler regime. U.S. and British opposition reached a crescendo as the Mugabe government moved to confiscate and redistribute the commercial agricultural land owned by white farmers. This land constituted 70 percent of the country’s prime farmlands.
The U.S. and British governments are following a well-rehearsed destabilization script. Their campaign is remarkably similar to what was used in Iraq, Haiti, Panama, Nicaragua and wherever else the imperialists have sought to destabilize governments in preparation for their overthrow and replacement with puppet regimes.
By exploiting linguistic, ethnic and cultural differences, the imperialist policy of divide- and-conquer is particularly evident in Sudan’s Darfur region. Initially, the British ruled the Sudan, north and south, as two different colonies, and it wasn’t until just prior to independence in 1956 that the British combined both areas into one colony.
In keeping with colonial rule, much like other European imperial powers, the British entrenched the idea that one group would constitute the workforce while the other group would be the extension of their rule. This politicization of these differences was quite useful, since the colonialists were a small portion of the population.
The Sudan exports over 500,000 barrels of oil a day. The U.S government has tightened sanctions against Sudan and utilized the colonial ploy of exploiting differences to gain a stronghold in the Sudan so that U.S. companies can have control of the country’s oil resources.
What is needed to combat the abuses of militias, rebels, government troops and “peacekeepers” alike are democratic, working-class defense organizations. Such organizations can cut across the ethnic divides and build up the mass resistance of workers and peasants to militia-backed warlords, multinational companies and the major capitalist powers.
