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As the
United States (US) military establishes more bases across
Africa, its government continues to seek a home for AFRICOM,
the future centre of US military power on the continent.
Meanwhile, multi-national corporations continue to plunder
Africa’s natural resources, and play troubling roles in the
region’s conflicts. The past has shown that the US military
has helped these corporations reap incredible wealth.
AFRICOM
is the acronym for the US military’s new command post it
hopes to establish somewhere in Sub-Sahara Africa. Devoted
solely to Africa, AFRICOM will seek to bolster regional
security and upgrade humanitarian efforts, says the White
House.
AFRICOM
is set to be up and running somewhere on the continent no
later than September 2008, as authorised by President Bush
last spring. The problem is, no African nation has said yes
to a US military base that may house hundreds of soldiers
and staff. Now there is debate in the US Congress over
whether AFRICOM should even touch African soil.
There
is no question AFRICOM is dogged by controversy, partially
because of past US military adventures on the continent that
went tragically awry. What is more, Africans believe the US
is growing more interested in their natural resources, as
are other nations, such as China.
In the
US, opposition to AFRICOM is growing. TransAfrica Forum, a
Washington think-tank, has gone on the offensive, saying
AFRICOM is another tool President Bush will use to push his
“corporatist agenda” on Africa. Actor Danny Glover,
TransAfrica Forum’s current chairman, said during a recent
Democracy Now! radio interview, that AFRICOM will be
used as “a threat, being a technique, a mechanism to keep
people in line, to keep nations in line. So the very
presence of that is a threat to democracy, sovereignty and
independence on the continent itself.”
There
is a wide-spectrum of opinion on AFRICOM. “We are not going
there just for the oil because we are not that evil. It is
just a stupid argument,” says Thomas P.M. Barnett, a New
York Times best-selling author and military expert who
is a forecaster of future global conflicts. “We are going so
to create better governments, improve the people, create
jobs, create stability.”
In
essence, the US has grand plans to set in motion “the great
African renaissance,” says Barnett, who travelled to
Ethiopia and Kenya this past summer, visiting several newly
established US military outposts.
The
White House, however, is not saying much about their plans
for AFRICOM to those who should be in the know, says a
prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Many
African leaders have stated publicly the US never consulted
with them about AFRICOM. The same goes for black
office-holders on Capital Hill, says Noelle LuSane, a
spokesperson for Rep. Donald Payne, D-New Jersey, who chairs
the House subcommittee on Africa. “There was no consultation
with him about AFRICOM,” says LuSane. When Rep. Payne read
about its conception in a newspaper, “He was shocked.”
The
White House claims that AFRICOM is also a move against the
rise of radical Islam over the continent. Islam is estimated
to be the largest religion on the continent with
Christianity a close second. The TransAfrica Forum, however,
does not believe radical Islam is spreading rapidly across
the continent.
“[Radical Islam] is not even proportionally the biggest
problem on the continent,” says Nicole Lee, the think-tank’s
director. Lee says AFRICOM’s presence alone will help US
corporations to out-maneuver and intimidate other nations
desperate for resources. Besides African oil, which now
accounts for an estimated 19pc of the US’s annual
consumption, dozens of US-based multi-national companies
have concessions with African governments involving
diamonds, gold, copper, uranium and timber, to name a few.
But the
rush for African mega-profits does not lead to just natural
resources. Similar to what is going on in Iraq, US-based
“Private Military Corporations” or PMCs are gobbling up
hundreds of millions, if not billions of US aide dollars and
United Nations (UN) peace-keeping funds. Lee gave the
example of DynCorp International, which is currently running
the Liberian army, and has been doing so for two years.
As for
the US army, there have been calls for it to provide air
defence for civilians. What many do not know is that
millions have gone to DynCorp and Pacific Architects and
Engineers (which is now run by defence-contractor giant
Lockheed Martin) so they can train and provide military
logistics for thousands of African Union (AU) peacekeepers,
some just deployed to Darfur.
“Should
they [PMCs] be over there executing foreign policy? We say
‘absolutely not’,” said Lee. “US military contractors are
not charged with protecting the people, they have to protect
the bottom line.”
RESOURCE WARS
When
many think of an enormous US military disaster on the
continent, tragic images of crashing Black Hawk helicopters,
and mutilated bodies in the streets of Mogadishu often come
to mind.
But
there is a group of independent journalists and researchers
who say the US military was involved in another African
nightmare in the 1990s that has gone largely unnoticed by
the American mainstream media, and thus a majority of
Americans.
Those
familiar with the civil wars and invasions of the last
decade that embroiled the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC),
convey a situation that turned into what many call a
“free-for-all.” It was a set of conflicts that would allow
the DRC’s neighbour, Rwanda, along with its military, some
Rwandan-supported militias, and a few multi-national mining
corporations, to move into the mountainous regions of
eastern DRC so they could extract gold, copper, uranium and
other exotic metals, on the cheap as chaos erupted across
the country.
According to investigative journalist Wayne Madsen, helping
the Rwandan military and its militias to invade the DRC were
US special forces, intelligence operatives, and Private
Military Companies. The stated reason for the invasion was
so Rwanda could counter the remnants of the Hutus, who had
slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsi’s in Rwanda
during the 1994 genocide, and then escaped into eastern DRC.
But independent journalists such as Madsen suggest the
“Hutu” problem was actually a ruse.
In
2001, Madsen testified before the US Congress. This
testimony shows how the US military has been knee-deep in
some disturbing African activities. In 1996, stated Madsen,
a Pentagon official told a House of Representatives
subcommittee the US military was training the Rwandan
military as it prepared to invade the DRC for the first
time. In 1998, the Pentagon was forced to admit that a
twenty man US Army Rwanda Interagency Assessment Team (RIAT)
was working in the Rwanda at the time of the second invasion
of Congo, testified Madsen.
Madsen,
citing French intelligence and Roman Catholic priests who
were in eastern DRC during the first invasion, told
Congress, “there was reason to believe” Rwandan troops
massacred hundreds of Hutus and a small number of Hutu
Catholic priests.
Viewpoint
Factline
Authorised: February 6, 2007
Active: September 30, 2008
Headquarters: Kelley Barracks, Stuttgart, Germany
Scope: Africa, except Egypt (under USCENTCOM)
In
addition to Madsen’s findings, investigators from Humans
Right Watch discovered, in 1995, that the Pentagon had hired
the Ronco Consulting Corporation to work in Rwanda. Ronco, a
company known for clearing land mines from war zones, was
funnelling military equipment, explosives and armoured
vehicles to the Rwandan military, even though Rwanda was
under a UN-imposed arms embargo.
During
the first invasion of the DRC, besides going after Hutus
guilty of taking part in the Rwandan genocide, Madsen said
Rwanda wished to overthrow the DRC leader at the time,
President Mobuto, who supported the Hutus, but apparently
did not support Western mining efforts in his country.
“It is
my observation that America’s early support for (Rwanda),
had less to do with getting rid of the Mobutu regime than it
did in opening up Congo’s vast mineral riches to North
American based mining companies,” Madsen testified.
The
Rwandan invasions of the DRC have caused the deaths of
hundreds of thousands. But in the midst of the killing,
mining interests and other corporations, mostly from the
West, made their own killing.
CORPORATE INTERESTS TAKE CENTRE STAGE
In an
eye-opening report titled, “The Panel of Experts on the
Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of
Wealth of DR Congo”, the UN reveals how the Rwandan military
and their militias made millions moving minerals and metals
out of the DRC. During Rwanda’s second invasion of the DRC
in late 1998, the UN, as did many independent journalists,
discovered that Rwanda, once again, wasn’t after the
“genocidaires” who committed the massacres of 1994.
Instead, their true intentions for the second invasion
became quite clear – take over the coltan mines of the
eastern DRC. Coltan is a key ingredient to meeting the
West’s obsession with personal technology. Coltan is first
refined into a heat-resistant bluish-grey powder called
tantalum, which can hold a high-electrical charge. The
tantalum goes into making capacitors, which in turn, are
used to manufacture cell phones made by Nokia, Intel
computer chips and Sony PlayStations.
According to the UN and other sources, the Rwandan military
and its militias used rape and torture as a weapon and
forced locals and children to work in the mines as cheap
labour.
“The
Rwandans had one motive, right from the beginning: to seize
Congo’s massive mineral wealth, to grab the coltan mine I am
standing in now and thousands like it, and to sell it on to
us, the waiting world, as we quickly flicked the channel
away from the news of this war with our coltan-filled remote
control,” wrote Johann Hari, a British journalist.
In
2000, Rwanda reported producing 83tns of coltan for the
entire year. For the first few months of 2001, their
production topped 120 tons – per month. The UN says the
Rwandan army made 250 million dollars from selling the
metallic ore coltan over these two years.
Most of
the DRC coltan moved illegally by the Rwandans went first to
foreign traders, who then distributed to the booming cell
phone industry and Sony for the launch of their PlayStation
2.
“In
1998, coltan was valued at 20 dollars per pound. By the end
of 2000, it was worth more than $200 per pound,” wrote David
Barouski, an African Affairs researcher and a political
science student at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, for
Z magazine. “Prices soared due to skyrocketing demand
from the electronics, defence, and aerospace industries.
From 1998-2001, the US was the world’s top coltan importer.”
Many
corporations over the last several years rejected coltan
that comes from anywhere in Central Africa. “But it may be a
case of too little, too late. Much of the coltan illegally
stolen from Congo is already in laptops, cell phones and
electronics all over the world,” wrote a UN official.
As we
see here, the US military’s involvement in the region
indirectly helped multi-national companies plunder minerals
and metals. AFRICOM, and any US military presence, is likely
to do more harm than good in a region where US and corporate
policy often prioritises profits over human rights.
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