(HERALD ZW) Latest: Antwerp pins future on Zim gems
January 28,
Sanctions also contributed towards the opaque nature of transactions in the trade of Marange diamonds
Harare – The Antwerp Diamond World Centre (AWDC) said on Tuesday it is pinning its long term survival on Zimbabwe, a key emerging producer in the world.
The Belgium based AWDC, which currently ranks as the largest diamond trading hub, is facing increasing competition from other players such as Dubai, Mumbai (India) and Tel Aviv (Israel).
AWDC said in its 2013 report that its future would be secured through cementing relations with countries such as Zimbabwe.
“This long term strategy is also designed to bear fruit over the next coming years, for example through further intensifying of the trade relationship with Zimbabwe, which will, according to experts, account for at least a quarter of world diamond production over the next decade,” AWDC said.
Zimbabwe successfully sold about 300 000 carats on the Belgium market in December last year for $10.5 million.
The country is targeting to go on the market for a second sale in February.
Selling of the diamonds through Antwerp is expected to enhance transparency in tracing revenue earnings and followed lifting of sanctions on Zimbabwean diamond mining companies by the European Union.
Russian and Canadian firms, AWDC said, would also be keys in securing its future.
To ward off competition, AWDC said it would continue to explore options to make the market the most viable as well as push for a level playing field.
AWDC said it traded goods worth $55 billion last year after recording an eight percent increase in rough diamond trade and four percent increase in polished gem sales.
The 2013 annual figures are in line with the trade analysis of the past decade, once again confirming Antwerp’s leadership as the world’s first and foremost diamond trading hub. New Ziana
Labels: ANTWERP, BELGIUM, DIAMONDS
Read more...
(NEWZIMBABWE, BUSINESS DAY SA) Govt plans second Antwerp diamond auction
23/12/2013 00:00:00
by Business Day
ZIMBABWE is planning a second auction of its Marange diamonds in February, buoyed by the interest in and sale of more than 279,000 carats of diamonds in Antwerp, Belgium last week which raked in $10.7m.
Mines and mining development permanent secretary, Francis Gudyanga, said on Monday the initial sale of the Marange gemstones last week had "provided insight" and "tangible guidelines" that will allow the Zimbabwe government to fully optimise a second, larger tender of Marange goods.
"The next sale is scheduled for February 12 to 19 2014," Gudyanga said.
The European Union lifted sanctions on Zimbabwean diamonds in September, making way for the first-ever sale of the Marange diamonds in Antwerp, which is regarded as the world’s diamond capital.
Gudyanga pointed out that the auction of the Marange diamonds in Belgium would take place alongside regular sales organised by the State, which have traditionally attracted scores of Indian and Chinese buyers.
"The philosophy of trial tender of Marange goods was to enable government and industry stakeholders to make a thorough assessment of the benefits of selling rough diamonds on the open Antwerp market ... alongside the regular tenders that are organised in Zimbabwe."
An estimated 115 clients showed interest in the Marange diamonds during the sale, compared to the 10 to 15 companies that attend regular auctions in Zimbabwe.
The government is set to pocket $1.6m from the diamond auction in Belgium and will from January 1 seek to reduce the porousness of the diamond industry, of which the contributions to the fiscus have so far been minuscule.
Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa, in his budget statement presented on Thursday, indicated that Zimbabwe’s treasury would increase mining royalties from 10% to 15% as the cash-strapped government tries to grow its revenue base.
Other measures set to be introduced in the diamond industry include closed-circuit TV surveillance of the entire process of production, sorting and transportation of diamonds.
Diamond production in Zimbabwe has been on the rise to 12 million carats in 2012, from 1,3-million carats recorded in 2009.
Chinamasa has earmarked the economy to grow by 6.1% next year, on strong performance from the mining and agriculture sectors.
Labels: BELGIUM, DIAMONDS, MARANGE DIAMOND FIELDS, ZIMBABWE
Read more...
(SUNDAY MAIL ZW) Zim gems up for grabs in Belgium
Sunday, 01 December 2013 00:00
Kuda Bwititi
Zimbabwe is set to commence the sale of Marange diamonds on the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC) market in Belgium this week, with an initial consignment of 500 000 carats expected to fetch good prices.
The development, which will have a positive impact on the country’s economy, comes at a time when a cocktail of measures have been adopted to increase revenue generation in the mining sector.
AWDC is the diamond capital of the world with more than 1 800 companies and dealers and a capacity to handle 80 percent of the world’s rough diamonds and 50 percent of polished gems, guaranteeing local diamonds a diversified market.
This week’s auction is expected to see the country fetching massive returns on its diamonds unlike in the past when auctions had to be done “clandestinely” as a way of sidestepping the illegal economic sanctions.
The development will certainly come as good news to Finance and Economic Planning Minister Patrick Chinamasa who is desperately looking for revenue sources for the 2014 National Budget which must be announced before the end of next month.
Indicators from the Antwerp market last week showed that Zimbabwe’s gems are likely to attract hordes of buyers, as there is growing demand for rough diamonds.
Mines and Mining Development Minister Walter Chidhakwa last week disclosed that the inaugural sale of local diamonds on the Antwerp market will be held between 4 and11 December. Minister Chidhakwa added that an official from Antwerp, who was in the country last week to access modalities for the sale of the precious stones, had placed a seal of approval on the gems that Zimbabwe will be shipping.
“I am aware that an expert was here to assist us over the past few days and the diamond companies had an opportunity to meet him and prepare the parcels so that they are consistent with the Antwerp exchange.
“They (diamond mining companies) are trying to reach a target of 500 000 carats and I am sure they have already achieved that. This is to test the market. Hopefully, if the market is doing well, we will send more,” he said.
Minister Chidhakwa noted that the sale of diamonds on the auction market will enhance transparency, as all diamonds will be accounted for.
“We hope that the prices arising out of that first auction will encourage our companies to continue to go the auction route.
“I also think that when you compare with the tender systems that we used to have, I think that there is much greater transparency in the auctions system and we hope that system will give us the benefits that we are looking for including the issue of being transparent.
“We want to continue to move towards a transparent diamond mining system and a transparent diamond marketing system that gives Zimbabwe the best benefits available,” he said.
In a recent interview, Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC) managing director Engineer Jerry Ndlovu projected that the Antwerp sales will increase revenue inflows by at least 20 percent.
“Definitely, we are most likely to see an increase of above 20 percent. Demand for our unique Marange Diamonds will definitely increase pushing prices up.
“On average we used to sell at a lowest price of US$50 per carat and a highest price of US$100 per carat for rough diamonds depending on the market forces but due to our footprint on the Antwerp market, we expect to get higher prices,” he said.
Engineer Ndlovu said the opening of the Antwerp market would see all sales concluded within two days, a major progress from the previous system that resulted in sales taking months to complete.
“Conclusion of diamond sales which was taking up to three months to complete will now take the normal 48 hours. Despite the fear on the global market that Zimbabwe is going to flood the market and lower prices, Zimbabwe will in actual fact be able to access the best market prices for its gems,” he said.
Engineer Ndlovu said the entry into the Antwerp market would help to unlock capital for ZMDC.
“ZMDC will now be able to procure inputs from EU countries. It will also be able to access foreign loans for its operations and lure investors in the diamond industry from European countries. It will also access capital to rehabilitate and re-equip existing mines as well as resuscitate closed mines.
“A vibrant Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation will cascade into downstream industries and manufacturing services and suppliers. Supportive industry that had been negatively affected will also benefit from the lifting of sanctions” he said.
Resource Exploitation Watch Chairman Mr Tafadzwa Musarara said the Antwerp market will open massive potential benefits for Zimbabwe.
“First of all I think the Minister of Mines has to be commended for the work that he has done in this short space of time in office.
“By going to the Antwerp market, we are now playing with the big boys in the diamond industry. Before this our diamonds used to be bought by middle men who would then sale them to the same Antwerp market that we now have direct access to.
“It’s a gigantic boost to our sector because in terms of prices, we can expect to get about 100 percent more than what we were getting before. More importantly, the direct interaction that we will have with the big boys in the diamond industry means that we can create further synergies with them for the beneficiation of our diamond industry,” he said.
Meanwhile, Minister Chidhakwa disclosed that plans to clean diamonds before their sent to the market are already afoot.
“We agreed that all diamonds from Zimbabwe starting from the 1st of February 2014 will have to be cleaned. There is a deep acid cleaner that is applied to diamonds which ensures that the diamonds are clean and the valuation will then be done and the marketing will be undertaken. We agreed that they will have to bring in equipment and we will work with our companies in bringing in this equipment which is used for the cleaning of diamonds. We hope this will help us increase revenue from diamonds,” he said.
He added that the 24 hour surveillance of all diamond mines will ensure that there is full transparency in the mining of the precious mineral.
“The second thing is that in a bid to strengthen the security systems at Marange, as much for existing diamond mining companies and those that will come in the future, we expect that the entire process at the diamond mining sites as well as the marketing sites must have CCTV and that CCTV becomes available also to Government through ZMDC as a shareholder,” said Cde Chidhakwa.
Minister Chidhakwa said Government has resolved to cut down the 15 percent tax for local diamond cutters and polishers who have failed to kick off operations because of the restrictive taxes.
Other tax reforms in the mining sector are expected to be announced during the budget presentation which is due before January next year.
Zimbabwe got the green light to trade its diamonds on the Antwerp market following the lifting of sanctions on the companies mining diamonds in Marange by the European Union.
Last week, the World Federation of Diamond Bourses President Ernie Blom described Zimbabwe’s entry onto the Antwerp market as a positive step.
“I think it is a positive step and will benefit both Zimbabwe and Belgium.
“They are KP compliant and based on this should be able to trade on the world markets.
Zimbabwean diamonds are being sold in many other markets so why not in the EU (Antwerp)?
“While Zimbabwean diamonds might not always be of the highest quality they make up for this in volume which has helped sustain the demand for rough diamonds when many other mines around the world have seen a drop in production.
“In 2012 Zimbabwe generated 8 million carats and in 2013 they are expected to generate 16.9 million carats,” Mr Blom was quoted as saying by the media.
Labels: BELGIUM, DIAMONDS, MARANGE DIAMOND FIELDS
Read more...
(HERALD ZW) ‘Lifting of sanctions was long overdue’
November 15, 2013 Obert Chifamba Top Stories
Lovemore Chikova in ANTWERP, Belgium
The removal of illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe’s diamond mining companies was long overdue and will now spur the development of the country’s natural resources, especially as it trades in its Marange gems at Antwerp, a Belgium official has said.
Speaking during a dinner hosted for the Zimbabwean delegation touring Antwerp, the world’s biggest diamond trading hub, on Wednesday, Antwerp’s vice mayor Mr Ludo Van Campenhout said it was good that the country was now part of the world diamond trading centre.
“We are happy that the embargo has been cancelled by the European Union,” he said. “That is a good thing and it gives us an opportunity to develop trade. The lifting of the sanctions was overdue. The diamond industry is part of the city and today you are now also part of the city.”
Mr Van Campenhout said Antwerp had a tradition of being open and friendly, with people from almost 170 nationalities living in the city in harmony. The trading of diamonds from Zimbabwe on the world market had been stalled by the illegal sanctions regime imposed on the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation and its subsidiaries by the European Union.
ZMDC is a State enterprise in partnerships with five diamond mining companies in Marange, whose operations have all been certified by the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme.
Speaking at the same occasion, secretary for Mines and Mining Development Professor Francis Gudyanga said it was important that Antwerp played a role in ensuring that the sanctions were lifted.
“We know you have done a lot to have the sanctions lifted,” he said. “Our view is to try and learn how the business (of diamond trading) goes.
“There is so much expectation back home that the selling of our diamonds will translate into the building of roads and schools. We call on you to mentor us so that we have an efficient system in handling our diamonds.”
Speaking in an interview yesterday, Prof Gudyanga said the visit to Antwerp which started on Tuesday and ends on Monday next week had been so far productive.
He said the delegation had learnt a lot within the few days, especially on the technical issues required to successfully auction diamonds.
“We have been taken through various processes to do with finances, economic arrangements and we have also gone through the logistics on how the system works for bringing up the diamonds,” he said.
“But the most important thing we have come to understand is that we add value to our minerals. We are improving the system. We have to have integrity into the system that we operate.
“Whether it is the system of sorting our diamonds, the system of grading them, the system of purchasing, the system has to be really not tampered with. This is where we get maximum value of our diamonds.”
Prof Gudyanga said it was important to have Zimbabweans trained for them to operate the diamond system efficiently.
He said all stakeholders in the diamond industry, including producers, should be aware of all the various aspects so that the system becomes flawless.
“This involves various arms of Government, the producers, the security as well as the financiers, so it’s really a very integrated system which we hope we can introduce in Zimbabwe,” said Prof Gudyanga.
“The people here in Antwerp are very keen to assist us with all the various aspects. We are having various dialogues with various people so that every aspect of it is done according to well tested systems so that we have the best practices we will be bringing to Zimbabwe.”
Prof Gudyanga said if all the proper channels were followed, the country would get value from its gems.
The delegation, which is being led by Prof Gudyanga and made up of officials from the Minerals Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe, the ZMDC and embassy officials, has so far toured a number of establishments associated with the marketing and auctioning of diamonds.
On Wednesday, the delegation was upraised by Belgian government officials on the procedures to be followed for the export of diamonds to Antwerp, before visiting the Diamond Office to observe the process.
The delegation yesterday visited Malca Amit, a company that provides security for diamonds in transit and those already at Antwerp, and also had sight of procedures at the diamond trading hub’s laboratory.
Labels: ANTWERP, BELGIUM, DIAMONDS, SANCTIONS
Read more...
(HERALD ZW) ‘Diamond sanctions removal to spur development’
November 14, 2013
Lovemore Chikova in ANTWERP, Belgium
The removal of illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe’s diamond mining companies was long overdue and will now spur the development of the country’s natural resources, especially as it trades in its Marange gems at Antwerp, a Belgium official has said.
Speaking during a dinner hosted for the Zimbabwean delegation touring Antwerp, the world’s biggest diamond trading hub on Wednesday, Antwerp’s vice mayor Mr Ludo Van Campenhout said it was good that the country was now part of the world diamond trading centre.
“We are happy that the embargo has been cancelled by the European Union,” he said. “That is a good thing and it gives us an opportunity to develop trade.
“The lifting of the sanctions was overdue. The diamond industry is part of the city and today you are now also part of the city.”
Mr Van Campenhout said Antwerp had a tradition of being open and friendly, with people from almost 170 nationalities living in the city in harmony.
The trading of diamonds from Zimbabwe on the world market had been stalled by the illegal sanctions regime imposed on the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation and its subsidiaries by the European Union.
ZMDC is a state enterprise in partnerships with five diamond mining companies in Marange, whose operations have all been certified by the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme.
Speaking at the same occasion, Secretary for Mines and Mining Development Professor Francis Gudyanga said it was important that Antwerp played a role in ensuring that the sanctions were lifted.
“We know you have done a lot to have the sanctions lifted,” he said. “Our view is to try and learn how the business (of diamond trading) goes.
“There is so much expectation back home that the selling of our diamonds will translate into the building of roads, schools. We call on you to mentor us so that we have an efficient system in handling our diamonds.”
In an interview yesterday, Prof Gudyanga said the visit to Antwerp which started on Tuesday and ends on Monday next week had been so far productive.
He said the delegation had learnt a lot within the few days, especially on the technical issues required to successfully auction diamonds.
“We have been taken through various processes to do with finances, economic arrangements and we have also gone through the logistics on how the system works for bringing up the diamonds,” he said.
“But the most important thing we have come to understand is that we add value to our minerals. We are improving the system. We have to have integrity into the system that we operate.
“Whether it is the system of sorting our diamonds, the system of grading them, the system of purchasing, the system has to be really not tampered with. This is where we get maximum value of our diamonds.”
Prof Gudyanga said it was important to have Zimbabweans trained for them to operate the diamond system efficiently.
He said all stakeholders in the diamond industry, including producers, should be aware of all the various aspects so that the system becomes flawless.
“This involves various arms of Government, the producers, the security as well as the financiers, so it’s really a very integrated system which we hope we can introduce in Zimbabwe,” said Prof Gudyanga.
“The people here in Antwerp are very keen to assist us with all the various aspects. We are having various dialogues with various people so that every aspect of it is done according to well tested systems so that we have the best practices we will be bringing to Zimbabwe.”
Prof Gudyanga said if all the proper channels were followed, the country would get value from its gems.
The delegation,which is being led by Prof Gudyanga and made up of officials from the Minerals Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe, the ZMDC and embassy officials, has so far toured a number of establishments associated with the marketing and auctioning of diamonds.
On Wednesday, the delegation was upraised by Belgian government officials on the procedures to be followed for the export of diamonds to Antwerp, before visiting the Diamond Office to observe the process.
The delegation yesterday visited Malca Amit, a company that provides security for diamonds on transit and those already at Antwerp and also has a site of procedures at the diamond trading hub’s laboratory.
Labels: ANTWERP, BELGIUM, DIAMONDS, FRANCIS GUDYANGA, SANCTIONS, ZDERA
Read more...
(NEWZIMBABWE, 'THE SOURCE') Zimbabwe, EU set for Antwerp diamond talks
12/11/2013 00:00:00
by The Source
GOVERNMENT and diamond mining officials left the country on Monday for Antwerp, Belgium to tie up agreements on Zimbabwe exports, two months after the European Union lifted sanctions on the state-owned mine Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation, the mines minister said.
The EU lifted sanctions on the ZMDC in September which allowed Zimbabwe to negotiate better prices after relying on middlemen to undercut the EU sanctions for several years.
“It is important for (Zimbabwe) to familiarise itself with the marketing systems, regulatory frameworks and logistical issues because, we want all systems to be in place ready to market our diamonds,” Mines minister Walter Chidhakwa told The Source.
He said diamonds exports should start soon after the delegation’s return.
Last month, officials from the Antwerp World Diamond Council (AWDC), the world’s leading diamond trading hub visited the country and toured diamond mines in Chiadzwa area in eastern Zimbabwe.
The Zimbabwe government has said it will use extra cash generated from diamond sales to finance its ambitious Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (ZimAsset) which it says will grow the economy by up to 10 percent by 2018.
ZMDC is the primary holder of mining concessions in the country and owns diamond miner Marange Resources.
It also partners five other diamond mining companies - Mbada Diamonds, Diamond Mining Corporation, Anjin Investments, Gye Nyame Diamonds and Kusena Diamonds which are also exploiting the gems.
Labels: BELGIUM, DIAMONDS, EU, SANCTIONS
Read more...
(NEWZIMBABWE, BLOOMBERG) Diamond exports can start immediately: EU
10/10/2013 00:00:00
by Bloomberg
THE European Union’s representative in Zimbabwe said the country can resume exports of diamonds mined in Marange to the 28-member bloc after sanctions were lifted last month.
“They can start immediately,” Aldo Dell’Ariccia, the head of the European Union delegation, said Wednesday on the side-lines of a Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries meeting in Bulawayo.
A Belgian delegation of diamond buyers, cutters and polishers is expected to arrive in the country before the end of this month, he said.
The EU last month ended sanctions against the state-owned Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation which operates five mining companies on a 50:50 joint venture basis with private investors in the eastern Marange district.
Advocacy groups including Ontario-based Partnership Africa Canada, have accused Zimbabwe’s ruling party of looting about $2 billion from the Marange fields, partly to fund the nation’s military.
Lifting sanctions is expected to boost Zimbabwe’s tax revenue by $400 million a year, according to the EU.
The bloc wants to ensure that some polishing and cutting of the gems is done in Zimbabwe so that “more value-added remains in the country,” Dell’Ariccia said. “Now we don’t have restrictive measures anymore against ZMDC, European investors and specialists can see what can be done.”
Zimbabwe is expected to mine 16.9 million carats this year, according to Mines Ministry estimates. Last year, the country produced 8 million carats, generating $685 million of revenue.
Labels: ALDO DELL'ARICCIA, BELGIUM, DIAMONDS, EU, SANCTIONS, ZDERA
Read more...
(NEWZIMBABWE, REUTERS) Belgium wants diamond miner sanctions lifted
05/09/2013 00:00:00
by Reuters
BELGIUM, centre of the global diamond trade, is demanding that the European Union lift sanctions on a local diamond mining firm despite deep concerns within the bloc over alleged fraud in a July election that kept President Robert Mugabe in power.
Belgium's call for the removal of sanctions on the state-run Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC) has put it at odds with other EU countries such as Britain which is reluctant to rush into a move that could be seen as rewarding Mugabe.
EU states are squabbling over how to interpret an agreement by EU foreign ministers in February to lift sanctions on ZMDC within a month of the poll unless EU governments unanimously agreed the vote was not "peaceful, transparent and credible."
This was part of an EU strategy of easing sanctions to try to encourage 89-year-old Mugabe, Africa's oldest leader who has ruled the former British colony for 33 years, to hold a fair election.
Mugabe overwhelmingly won the July 31 vote but it was denounced as a "huge fraud" by his main rival Morgan Tsvangirai. The EU has expressed "serious concerns" over the alleged irregularities.
However, Belgium - home to the world's leading diamond trading hub at Antwerp - argues that the EU has not refused to recognise the election and so the February agreement must be respected and sanctions on ZMDC lifted.
"For us, there is an agreement," Belgian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hendrik van de Velde said.
He said the agreement was confirmed by diplomats from EU member states last Friday and it was now simply a question of drawing up a legal instrument lifting the sanctions on ZMDC, something he expected to happen soon.
Belgium's interpretation of the debate is not shared by EU officials who say talks are still going on about what to do.
Inevitable
Former colonial power Britain, which has been more critical of the Zimbabwean elections than the EU as a whole, is reluctant to see a rush to lift sanctions on ZMDC.
"No decision has yet been taken regarding the de-listing of any individual or entity under the measures related to Zimbabwe, including ZMDC. Discussions continue on the listing of ZMDC," a Foreign Office spokeswoman in London said.
However unwelcome the move would be to Britain, some European diplomats say it is inevitable the bloc will have to lift sanctions on ZMDC in line with the February agreement.
"At the end of the day, we have to delist ZMDC," a diplomat from one EU country said, asking not to be named.
ZMDC operates five joint-venture mines in the rich Marange diamond fields, producing eight million carats last year and generating $685 million in exports, the state-owned Herald newspaper reported earlier this year.
Belgium says lifting EU sanctions on ZMDC would increase Zimbabwe's tax revenues by $400 million a year as well as bringing more trade to Antwerp.
Mugabe, buoyed by broad approval from African election observers for the vote, has rejected the Western scepticism.
Anti-corruption watchdog Global Witness, citing links between mining companies, insiders in Mugabe's Zanu PF party and the country’s pro-Mugabe military, has alleged that state diamond revenues may have been directly spent on securing the Mugabe re-election through intimidation of voters and vote-rigging.
"We would be very concerned if sanctions were lifted on ZMDC now," Global Witness' senior campaigner on conflict resources, Emily Armistead, told Reuters. "These sorts of allegations need to be looked at much more carefully before the EU makes a decision."
Labels: BELGIUM, DIAMONDS, SANCTIONS, ZMDC
Read more...
Editorial Comment: Belgians crave Marange diamonds
Sunday, 24 February 2013 00:00
The latest act of aggression by the European Union against Zimbabwe’s diamond industry is nothing short of a circus. European governments, dazed by an unrelenting recession that has significantly weakened many economies, have run out of ideas and are now terribly divided on how to handle the discredited sanctions.
There have been heated debates in Brussels on Zimbabwe. In fact, the discussions have been so vigorous that a visitor from Mars would be forgiven for assuming that this African state is a member of the troubled EU. Belgian foreign minister Didier Reynders and Britain’s William Hague were locked in fierce exchanges last week as temperatures shot up.
The protagonists in this political drama are a curious mix. London, lurching from one disaster to another as horse meat and an imploding economy create a deadly tailspin for clueless policymakers, is failing to read the changing times — and the British economy is paying dearly for the ineptitude of political leaders.
Strong-arm tactics, a remnant of the colonial era where Britain was master of the world, will not go unchallenged in the 21st century. You have to question the thinking of British politicians when they choose to expend their energies on sabotaging Zimbabwe’s economy instead of focusing on their own economy which is gasping for oxygen.
Just yesterday, the rating agency Moody’s downgraded the British economy from a top AAA to a telling AA1. To the average Briton, this signals a serious national emergency that demands decisive intervention from the chaps who roam the corridors of Whitehall. But London’s political fat cats would rather meddle in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs than repair one of the worst economies in Europe.
A showdown of titanic proportions played out last week in Brussels — the seat of the EU — when the British government sought an extension of the illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe. What they thought would be a routine formality turned out to be anything but.
The Belgians, unhappy with Britain’s obsession with the senseless sanctions, clearly told other EU members that London was behaving unreasonably. The British were stunned and, for a while, they realized that sanctions were no longer a sustainable instrument of foreign policy on the Zimbabwe issue.
The Belgians are opposed to the British-instigated sanctions for one clear reason: the sanctions are sabotaging Belgium’s economic interests while furthering London’s political interests.
For centuries, the city of Antwerp commanded the world’s largest diamond market. The shrewd dealers who run the Antwerp market have known for several years now that Zimbabwe will soon become the world’s biggest producer of rough diamonds. Where cents and dollars are concerned, the logic was straightforward. If the Belgians were serious about remaining the biggest market, they had to do business with Zimbabwe. But here was the problem: the EU sanctions, imposed on Zimbabwe at the instigation of Britain over a land reform grudge, made it difficult for Antwerp to benefit from the Zimbabwe gems.
Once Zimbabwe attained full certification to mine and export diamonds under the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), Britain’s hardline stance became increasingly untenable. The KPCS greenlight meant that Zimbabwe could now freely export the Marange diamonds — even though the EU sanctions precluded the European market as a trade destination. It simply meant that Zimbabwe had to look elsewhere, and countries such China and India came into the picture. India is buying Zimbabwe’s rough stones and China is mining locally here.
India has done particularly well with rough stones, and the city of Surat is swiftly overtaking Antwerp as the world’s biggest diamond centre. Although volumes and prices fluctuate, diamond production in the world is estimated at $18 billion per year and India imports some $11 billion worth of rough stones per annum. Whichever way you look at it, this is hefty capacity.
Despite crude attempts by the EU and the United States to intimidate buyers of Marange goods, the Indians have refused to be cowed and are gladly doing business with Zimbabwe’s diamond producers.
What makes the British government’s hostile stance untenable is that the KPCS committee which gave Zimbabwe the go-ahead to mine and export diamonds is headed by officials from the EU. On that score, it is patently scandalous that the British are disrespecting the findings of a KPCS team headed by one of their own. The Belgians have noticed this, and they are not the only ones who are outraged by such insincere conduct.
The time has come for the KPCS, currently chaired by South African diplomat Welile Nhlapo, to defend the honour of the organization by condemning Western governments that are playing cheap politics with Zimbabwe’s diamonds. The EU is a member of the KPCS. The European bloc must shoulder collective responsibility for all the binding resolutions passed by the diamond grouping and stop behaving like lawless pirates on the high seas who respect neither the law nor moral values.
To their credit, the Belgians are refusing to be intimidated by British politicians who are peddling the lie that there is civil war in Zimbabwe. London is making money in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Is there “democracy” in those countries?
The Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation recently announced that the nation aims to more than double its output of diamonds from 8 million carats last year to 16.9 million in 2013. The EU says it is making Zimbabwe a diamonds-for-democracy offer. Sanctions on Marange diamonds — says the European bloc — will only be scrapped if Zimbabwe holds free and fair elections later this year. Surely, the British government does not expect the Belgians to sit back and lose out while Surat, Shanghai and Dubai get all the Marange diamonds. More importantly, Zimbabwe’s fully certified diamond sector cannot be expected to shut down and appease a racist cabal in London.
Labels: BELGIUM, DIAMONDS
Read more...
EU to decide Zim sanctions Monday
17/02/2013 00:00:00
by Staff Reporter
EUROPEAN foreign ministers will on Monday discuss lifting sanctions against the country following President Robert Mugabe's announcement that a referendum on the new constitution would be held mid next month.
The
EU sanctions expire on Wednesday and a decision on the way forward has been delayed because of a
disagreement between Britain and Belgium over lifting a ban on gold and diamonds mined in the country.
According to the UK's Telegraph newspaper, crisis talks between British and Belgian diplomats went on into the weekend over Belgium's insistence that the state-run Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC), a major diamond and gold mining company, should be struck off the sanctions list.
If agreement cannot be found, the EU's current sanctions against Zimbabwe, targeting 112 individuals including President Mugabe and 11 companies, will expire.
The row over gold and diamond mining is the only barrier to lifting measures targeting around 20 Zimbabweans covered by an assets freeze and travel ban to be removed from the list.
Rights groups claim violations continue at the Marange diamond fields but Belgium, home to Antwerp, the world's largest diamond trading centre, has insisted that conditions have changed and sanctions on ZMDC are no longer justified.
Britain is concerned that it is too early to lift the key economic sanction before elections and that allowing the lucrative diamonds trade could be used to fund Mugabe's Zanu PF party.
Global Witness, a human rights campaign group, has warned that diamond revenues could be used to fund violence in this year's election.
"The Belgian government is claiming concern for the Zimbabwean people; however its true interests are closer to home in the diamond markets of Antwerp," said Emily Armistead, a spokesman for the group.
[And Britain's interest is...? - MrK]
The constitutional referendum, set for March 16, will lead to new elections to end the coalition government between Mugabe and long term rival Morgan Tsvangirai, currently Prime Minister.
Despite deep divisions over policy between Zanu PF and Tsvangirai’s MDC-T party, the coalition government has been credited with helping ease political tensions and nursing the country’s economy back recovery.
Both Mugabe and Tsvangirai have also repeatedly called on supporters to ensure a peaceful vote and to desist from the violent clashes experienced during the inconclusive 2008 ballot.
Labels: BELGIUM, DIAMONDS, EU, SANCTIONS, UK, WILLIAM HAGUE
Read more...
Belgium wants Marange blockade lifted
13/02/2013 00:00:00
by Gilbert Nyambabvu
BELGIUM is pressing the European Union (EU) to remove sanctions against companies operating at Marange in a development that has riled human rights groups which claim the diamond money could be used to fund election violence .
Industry watchdog, the Kimberly Process, lifted restrictions on global trade in Marange gems last year, but the United States and the EU maintained sanctions against companies partnering the State-run Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC) at Marange.
The ZMDC runs five joint venture operations in the area and only Anjin Investments, a partnership with the Chinese, is not subject to the sanctions.
ZMDC produced 8 million carats of gems last year, generating about $685 million in exports. Officials however say the country could have realised more from its diamonds but for the US and EU sanctions.
Belgium, a major diamond trading centre, this week broke ranks with other EU countries and called for sanctions against ZMDC to be lifted arguing the restrictions reduced the amount of money filtering down to ordinary Zimbabweans.
But the move has drawn fire from human rights organisations who accused the country of taking a self-serving position aimed at promoting its key diamond industry at Antwerp.
Said the US-based Global Witness group Tuesday: “Global Witness’ investigations point to a serious risk that diamond revenues could be used to fund violence in this year’s election.
“The Belgian government is claiming concern for the Zimbabwean people; however its true interests are closer to home in the diamond markets of Antwerp.
“EU members seeking to promote democracy and stability in Zimbabwe should avoid a ménage-à-trois with Belgium and its diamond dealers this Valentine’s day.”
The EU is set to review sanctions against Zimbabwe next Monday with diplomats expecting another partial relaxation of the measures to reward progress made in the country’s constitutional reforms.
EU officials in Harare have however, indicated that a full lifting of the sanctions would depend on the successful holding free and fair elections later this year.
Global Witness insisted that restrictions against ZMDC should be maintained and demanded the addition of Anjin Investments to the embargo.
“Relaxing measures against Zimbabwe’s diamond sector now could mean a serious cash injection for security forces with a track record of voter intimidation and violence, just months before the 2013 election,” said the groups’ diamonds campaigner Emily Armistead.
“The EU should hold a steady course, and restrict trade with diamond mining operations in Marange until free and fair elections have taken place.”
Finance Minister Tendai Biti, who has led charges that diamond revenues were likely being diverted from the coalition government, has since conceded that the sanctions have not been helpful.
Meanwhile, Belgium’s call follows increasing concern over the global supply of diamonds amid reports of huge declines in production at leading miners such as De Beers as well as other companies in Canada and Russia.
Gem processors in India recently said they would be looking at Zimbabwe to help plug the gap in global supplies.
"As the rough diamond production at the world's leading mines is on the decline, Zimbabwe is the only hope for Indian diamantaires. It is only Surat, which has the skill to cut and polish the Zimbabwe stones,” industry analyst, Aniruddha Lidbide, told an Indian publication recently.
Labels: BELGIUM, DIAMONDS, SANCTIONS
Read more...
Why the West killed Lumumba
Monday, 06 February 2012 00:00
Later this year, the Belgian Parliament is due to report on the murder of the Congo's first prime minister after independence, Patrice Lumumba, in January 1961. The circumstances of Lumumba's death have been shrouded in mystery for 40 years, but as the Congo's vast mineral wealth is once again becoming a focus for imperialist rivalries,
documents long hidden in official archives have been brought to light. Last year, the BBC ran two documentaries on the tragic history of this central African state.
"Who Killed Lumumba?" was screened as part of the channel's Correspondent series.
It drew heavily on the forthcoming new book by Belgian historian Ludo de Witte ("The Murder of Lumumba", Verso Books, ISBN: 1859846181, published June 2001).
De Witte has put together the facts of the case from official Belgian archives and the documentary also used archive film footage and interviewed surviving witnesses, to show that Lumumba was murdered in a plot masterminded by Western governments.
Mobutu, from the BBC's "Storyville" documentary series, reveals how the Western powers put Joseph Sese Seko Mobutu in power after the death of Lumumba, keeping him there for 32 years while he systematically looted the country. Mobutu became the West's main Cold War ally in Africa, and the Congo formed the staging post for CIA operations against Soviet-backed African regimes.
The film reveals the very close personal and political relationship that existed between Mobutu and several Western leaders. We see film clips of Mobutu being embraced by Jacques Chirac (then President of France), and sitting next to the British Queen in the royal carriage.
For many years, until he fell out of favour at the end of the Cold War, Mobutu remained a friend of the Belgian king, but his closest friends were President George Bush (Snr) and his family. Between 1885 and 1908, some five to eight million people fell victim to King Leopold of Belgium's personal rule over the Congo, under a barbarous system of forced labour and systematic terror.
[Try closer to 10 million, out of a population of 20 million. A true genocide that killed 50% of the population, in a country the size of Western Europe. Source: King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild. - MrK]
In 1959, the Belgian government finally decided to grant the Congo independence. The first elections brought Patrice Lumumba to power as Prime Minister. But his government was an unstable coalition of regional interests, and collapsed within a week.
Sections of the army mutinied and the mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded.
"Who Killed Lumumba?" featured important new material about the Katanga secession.
Ludo de Witte has uncovered documents in the Belgian archives showing that Moise Tshombe, who led the secession, acted on orders from the Belgian government, which has always claimed that it only sent troops into Katanga to protect Belgian lives and property.
De Witte's research has shown that the Belgians plotted to dismember the Congo. US Documents released last August reveal that President Eisenhower directly ordered the CIA to assassinate Lumumba. Minutes of an August 1960 National Security Council meeting confirm that Eisenhower told CIA chief Allen Dulles to "eliminate" Lumumba.
The official note-taker, Robert H Johnson, had told the Senate Intelligence Committee this in 1975, but no documentary evidence was previously available to back up his statement. Larry Devlin, the CIA's man in the Congo at the time, told the BBC filmmakers how he had been told to meet "Joe from Paris", who turned out to be the CIA's chief technical officer, Dr Sidney Gottlieb.
"I recognised him as he walked towards my car," recalled Devlin, "but when he told me what they wanted done I was totally, totally taken aback."
Gottlieb gave him a tube of poisoned toothpaste, which Devlin was to smuggle into Lumumba's bathroom. He claims he never did so, because "I had never suggested assassination, nor did I believe it was advisable". Instead, "I threw it in the Congo River when its usefulness had expired."
The "usefulness" of the poison expired rather quickly because Lumumba was murdered very soon afterwards, at the hands of Belgian agents.
Eisenhower was not alone in coming to the conclusion that Lumumba must die. A British Foreign Office document from September 1960 notes the opinion of a top-ranking official, who later became the head of MI5, that, "I see only two possible solutions to the (Lumumba) problem.
"The first is the simple one of ensuring (his) removal from the scene by killing him."
What steps, if any, were taken to put this plan into action remain unknown. De Witte's work reveals the steps that the Belgian government took to remove Lumumba. Belgian military chiefs made nightly visits to Mobutu, then head of the army, and President Kasavubu, to plot Lumumba's downfall.
Colonel Louis Maliere spoke of the millions of francs he brought over for this purpose. The plot to kill Lumumba was called "Operation Barracuda" and was run by the Belgian Minister for African Affairs, Count d'Aspremont.
The Belgium government ordered Kasavubu to sack Lumumba, who turned to the new Parliament and won two votes of confidence. Mobutu then led a coup d'état and Lumumba was placed under house arrest, from which he escaped only to be captured by troops loyal to Mobutu. Contemporary film shows UN troops standing by while Lumumba is first beaten in front of Mobutu, then paraded through the streets of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) and finally beaten again.
When taken to Thysville prison, he almost provoked a mutiny among the guards. Count d'Aspremont ordered him to be taken to Katanga Province and certain death. On the flight there, he and two supporters - Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okite - were beaten so badly the pilot complained the plane was in danger of crashing. All three were shot by a firing squad commanded by Belgian officers and watched by Moise Tshombe. The Belgian commander of the Katanga police force, Gerard Soete, was given the grisly job of destroying the bodies. Enlisting the support of a friend, they chopped up the corpses before dissolving them in acid. Soete recalls that they were drunk for the two days because, "We did things an animal wouldn't do."
Both these films do a valuable job in bringing to the attention of a wider audience the new evidence about Lumumba's death and in revealing the way in which the imperialist powers supported Mobutu's dictatorial regime.
However, what neither of them fully explains is why the West acted as it did. They present the assassination of Lumumba and the installation of Mobutu as simply part of the Cold War rivalry between the West and Moscow.
The central mystery of Lumumba's death remains. Why was he killed? Why was the might of at least three Western powers bent on eliminating this one man - even as he was held prisoner, reviled and beaten by his captors and was without military or political power?
Some say the answer is that he posed a threat to the West because he was a committed Pan-Africanist, and since his death he has certainly taken on the status of a Pan-African martyr.
By late 1959, Britain and America had concluded that, far from representing a threat, Pan-Africanism offered the best chance for preventing revolution in Africa.
Pan-Africanists of much longer standing than Lumumba, such as Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Nyerere, Obote and Azikiwe had also come to power around this time. The experience of the Congo, with its million-strong working class - the largest on the continent outside South Africa, was a powerful factor in bringing them to that conclusion.
When strikes and demonstrations broke out in 1959, as the mineral boom ended, the Belgian government decided to grant its colony independence.
Their repressive apparatus was geared up to brutalising a divided and dispersed rural population, not an increasingly well-organised working class that was losing its local and communal loyalties.
When Lumumba showed that he could not be relied upon to control the Congolese working class, his fate was sealed. The West decided to make an example of him to the masses and to other African leaders, to show what would happen if they opposed imperialist dictates.
Mobutu, who had impressed the CIA on his brief visits to Brussels as Lumumba's secretary, was chosen as the better candidate to safeguard Western interests.
Through a mixture of brutality and political guile, Mobutu succeeded in ensuring that the Congo (renamed Zaire) did not become the flashpoint for an African socialist revolution.
- Project Africa/Southern Times.
Labels: BELGIUM, COLONIALISM, NEOCOLONIALISM, PATRICE LUMUMBA
Read more...
Lumumba: From a mere man to a lasting symbol
Mabuto Sese Seko
Monday, 09 May 2011 19:48
Patrice Lumumba is one of the few African leaders who are still remembered 50 years after their death. Yet he only ruled for three month months! And he died at the young age of 35! So why is he still so fondly remembered? Cameron Duodu examines the phenomenon.
I can still remember it like yesterday - the day, 50 solid years ago, when Ghana's president, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, made a special broadcast to announce solemnly to the nation that he had "received information" that Patrice Lumumba, the Prime Minister of Congo, had been assassinated.
Lumumba had been arrested, first by Mobutu's troops, and then sent to Katanga province, where his worst enemy, Moise Tshombe, and his secessionist forces reigned supreme, despite the presence of United Nations troops in the area.
President Nkrumah did not disclose his sources, of course, but anyone who knew that he had excellent contacts with the USSR, whose intelligence service at the time were second to none, would have been a fool to doubt that his information was absolutely reliable.
Nkrumah went as far as to say that a "Belgian policeman" had been charge of the deed.
This was an incredible bit of prescience: it was not until the 2001 publication in Belgium of The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba by Ludo De Witte, that the exact circumstances of the assassination became widely known.
And they tallied exactly with the information Nkrumah gave his countrymen nearly half a century ealier.
Ghanaians were stunned. For Nkrumah had involved the whole nation in trying to save Lumumba and his country from the machinations of the Belgians.
As will be seen later, Ghanaian troops were sent to Congo - the first time soldiers form an independent African country had gone to the service of another independent African country.
But more than that, all sorts of skilled Ghanaians also went to Congo - doctors, artisans, even journalists. (Edward Armah, a veteran of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, was, attached to the Ghanaian contingent to enable the soldiers to send messages to their families back home, and his colleagues in Accra contacted some of the families to send messages back to the soldiers. Special, powerful transmissions - "Interactive transmissions" - were carried out to enable this to occur.)
How did Lumumba, an obscure politician, who made his public outing on the international scene only when he attended the All-African People's Conference in Acra in December 1958, become an African icon, whose place in history is at the very top of the tree on which African heroes perch, where he will stay for ever?
Indeed, Lumumba is next only to Nelson Mandela in terms of being the all-time unblemished figure who most readily comes to mind when Africa is discussed in relation to struggle.
Even Mandela had lesser enemies to contend with: Lumumba was chased around by both the CIA and its Belgian subsidiary, with whom it co-operated through Nato!
Not only that - Mandela suffered tremendously. But he won.
Lumumba, on the other hand, lost - he lost power, he lost his country, and in the end, he lost his life.
All were forcibly taken from him by a combination of forces that were probably the most powerful ever deployed against a single individual in history.
In his book, Ludo De Witte calls Lumumba's murder "the most important political assassination in the 20th century."
The amazing thing is that Lumumba had done absolutely nothing against those who wanted his blood!
They just saw him as a threat to their interests; interests narrowly defined to mean, "His country has got resources. We want them. He might not give them to us. So let's get him".
I submit, though, that he should not be seen only as a victim of forces too powerful for him to contend with.
On the contrary, he should be seen as someone who fully recognised the power of the forces ranged against him and fought valiantly with every ounce of breath in his body and with great intelligence to try and save his country.
If Lumumba's fate contrasts with that of Mandela, who was imprisoned for tangible acts against South Africa's apartheid regime, we see that, in the history of the African people's struggle in the 20th century, Mandela and Lumumba represent different ends of the spectrum of activity.
We can say too that the two men represent the beacon of the light that shines sharply to bring absolute clarity into the evaluation of a history often mired in obfuscation and mendacity.
To those who say, "How wonderful it was to see in Mandela, the issue of oppression so peacefully resolved", we need only point to that picture of Patrice Lumumba, a torturer's hand in his hair, as he was brutalised in a truck by black Kantangese soldiers at Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi).
In that picture of Lumumba, serious students can spy unseen hands, steered by a "heart of darkness", bribing, mixing poisons, assembling rifles with telescopic sights, and finally propping an elected prime minister against a tree in the bush and riddling his body with bullets.
And then - could even Joseph Conrad, in his worst nightmarish ramblings, have imagined this?
First, burying Lumumba's body, then exhuming it a day later because the burial ground was too close to a road, and then hacking it to pieces, and shoving the pieces into a barrel filled with sulphuric acid, to dissolve it.
And would Joseph Conrad have been able to picture the murderer making sure to break off two front teeth from Lumumba's jaw, to keep as a memento to show off to the grandchildren in Brussels in years to come? As well as one of the bullets that killed him?
If Shakespeare could write black comedy, we might have got dialogue like this: "Grandpa, what didst thou do in the Congo?" "I exterminated Lumumba - and mark thee, that's why I live in comfortable retirement and, never ye forget this - that's wherefore ye went to such expensive schools. Here - see? Two of his very teeth that I broke off and brought home! And this - the bullet that finished the job!!"
A Belgian, nearly 60 years after Conrad published his Heart of Darkness - and 57 years after Roger Casement and E D Morel had made what they hoped was a definitive exposure of the crimes King Leopold II of Belgium had committed against the Congolese people - could still engage in such barbarities against a leader elected on the basis of a constitution signed into law by Leopold II's own grandson, King Baudoin I.
That sordid crime in the bush near Elizabethville 50 years ago was the logical conclusion of a bitter and vigorous campaign that Belgium, aided by the US, waged in Congo in 1960 to ensure that Lumumba would never get a chance to rule the country that elected him to be its leader.
Because of the action of Belgium and the USA, we actually do not know whether Lumumba would have made a good ruler or not. Which makes him even more important to history: for he was not assassinated merely as a person, but as an idea. What was that idead?
It was the idea of a Congo that was fully independent, non-aligned, and committed to African unity.
Lumumba's party, the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC-L - L for Lumumba), was the only one in Congo to organise itself successfully as a party that saw the country as one and indivisible, not as a conglomeration of ethnic groups. Thus, it gained 33 out of the 137 seats in the Congolese Parliament.
From this relatively strong base, Lumumba was able to inspire others with his vision and thereby to hatch alliances that enabled the MNC to command an over-all majority of the seats in the parliament.
When he was appointed Prime Minister by Brussels, many of the Belgians in Congo and in Belgium itself thought the heavens had fallen in. For he was not the Belgians' first choice!
They tried other Congolese "leaders" (such as Joseph Kasavubu) and it was only when these failed to garner adequate support that they unwillingly called on Lumumba.
The magnitude of the achievement of the MNC in organising its elf as a nationwide party, and managing to hatch viable alliances is not often appreciated, because few people realise that Congo is as big in size as all the countries of Western Europe put together!
As for Belgium itself, it is outrageous that it should have wanted to run Congo in the first place - Congo is 905,563 square miles in size, compared to Belgium's puny 11,780 square miles.
In other words, Belgium arrogated to itself the task of ruling a country almost 77 times its size! Not only is Congo huge, but think of a country the size of Western Europe that does not have good roads, railway systems, telecom facilities or modern airports.
And a Western Europe in which political parties are legalised only one year before vital elections - say, elections to put into power the parties that would decide whether there should be a European Union at all, or not!
The only thing to add is that in Congo, the first nationwide local elections held in 1959, which saw the emergence of the MNC, were even more crucial, for it was those elections that were to assess the strength of the various "parties" (in effect, ethnic movements) that would take part in deciding the future constitutional arrangements under which the country would be governed.
Who knew - perhaps the independence that Ghana (1957) and Guinea (1958) had achieved, might even come Congo's way and those elected might become ministers, who would form the first government of a new, independent Congo, after nearly 100 years of the most brutal colonial rule inflicted on an African country by a European ruler.
By the time the Belgians felt the need to call a constitutional conference in Brussels to decide how the new Congo was to be ruled, Lumumba was in prison.
Again! He had earlier been imprisoned on a charge of embezzlement while he was a postal clerk. It needs to be pointed out that the charge was brought against him while he was away in Brussels, touring the country at the invitation of the Belgian government. Was someone trying to blight a future political career?
The charge on which he went to prison a second time was more in line with colonial practice. "Inciting a riot"!
Ha - where have we heard that before?
Those who know African history can immediately see the parallels with what happened in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi: it was precisely the same colonial criminal code that had put Nkrumah in prison in Ghana in 1950, and in a slightly more tortuous manner, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya in 1953, and Kamuzu Banda in the then Nyasaland (Malawi) in 1959.
Again, like Nkrumah in Ghana, Lumumba's party, the MNC contested local (provincial) council elections in 1959 while its leader was still in jail, and surprise, surprise, it too won a sweeping victory, as the electorate made no mistake in recognising why the leader had been jailed. In its main stronghold of Stanleyville (today's Kisangani), Lumumba's party obtained no less than 90 percent of the votes.
So, when in January 1960, the Belgian government invited all the Congolese parties to a Round Table Conference in Brussels to discuss political change, i.e. write a new constitution for the country, and the MNC refused to participate unless Lumumba was released and put at its head, the Belgian government had no choice but to release him and fly him to Brussels.
It was at this conference that Lumumba showed his mettle - rising above the divisive politics that the Belgians wanted to promote among the various ethnic groupings and uniting them on one central objective - independence. And he managed to get a date agreed for independence - 30 June 1960.
Lumumba returned from Brussels to contest the national elections that were held in May 1960: a mere one-month to independence. I draw your attention again to the size of Congo and the absence of anything in the country that resembled adequate infrastructure.
This made it well-nigh impossible to campaign for elections on a national scale and of the 50 parties that put up candidates only two - Lumumba's MNC-L and the Parti National du Progrès or PNP - fielded candidates in provinces other than where their leaderships originated from.
Here is how the larger of the 50 parties performed in the May 1960 general election: MNC-L was strongest in Oriental Province (Eastern Congo).
It won nearly a quarter of the seats in the lower house of parliament (33 out of 137) - thus garnering the highest number of seats for any single party.
In the province of Léopoldville, the Parti Solidaire Africain or PSA (led by Antoine Gizenga) narrowly defeated the ABAKO party of Joseph Kasavubu.
In Katanga province, the Confederation des Associations Tribales de Katanga or CONAKAT, led by Moise Tshombe, won narrowly over its main rival, the Association Generale des Baluba du Katanga, or BALUBAKAT, led by Jason Sendwe.
In Kivu, the Centre de Regroupement Africain, CEREA of Anicet Kashamura, won but didn't obtain a majority.
MNC-L came second there. MNC-L also won in Kasai, despite being obliged to fight against a splinter faction that had become MNC-K (under the leadership of Albert Kalonji, Joseph Iléo and Cyrille Adoula).
In the Eastern province, the MNC-L won a clear majority over the PNP, its only major adversary.
Finally, in the province of Equateur, PUNA (led by Jean Bolikango) and UNIMO (led by Justin Bomboko) were the victors.
But, as stated above, it was not Lumumba who, based on his performance at the elections, was first called upon by the Belgians to try to form a government.
That honour went to the ABAKO leader Joseph Kasavubu.
He failed, and it was then that Lumumba was asked to form a government.
To the Belgians' surprise, Lumumba succeeded in doing so.
He clobbered together a coalition whose members were: UNC and COAKA (Kasai), CEREA (Kivu), PSA (Leopoldville) and BALUBAKAT (Katanga).
The parties in opposition to the coalition were PNP, MNC-K (Kasai), ABAKO (Leopoldville), CONAKAT (Katanga), PUNA and UNIMO (Equateur) and RECO (Kivu).
It was at this stage that Lumumba demonstrated how far-sighted he was.
He convinced his coalition partners that the opposition parties should not be ignored and he proposed that they should elect Joseph Kasavubu, the ABAKO leader, as President of the Republic. Lumumba's coalition partners agreed, and the deal was announced on 24 June, 1960.
But unfortunately, Lumumba signed his own death warrant in appointing Kasavubu out of the best of intentions. In doing so, he implanted a poisonous Belgians spy into his bosom.
Lumumba's action was acclaimed as an act of statesmanship and was endorsed by a vote of confidence in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.
However, the Belgians began to use what would have been Lumumba's political strengths against him.
They now cultivated Kasavubu, filling his head with sweet words about how Lumumba was young and inexperienced, whereas Kasavubu was experienced and sagacious, as recognised in Brussels.
He must not allow any "impulsive" acts of the young Prime Minister to go unchallenged.
And they backed their flattery with massive sums of money.
Even more important, the Belgians planted into the Office of the Prime Minister (Lumumba) as his principal aide, a former soldier called Joseph Mobutu.
He had been recruited as an agent by the Belgians, while attending the Exhibition of Brussels, following which he stayed on in Belgium as a student of "journalism".
With his military background, it would not have been difficult to teach him the tricks of espionage instead. - New African
Labels: BELGIUM, COLONIALISM, DRC, KWAME NKRUMAH, MOBUTU SESE SEKO, NEOCOLONIALISM, PATRICE LUMUMBA
Read more...
AFRICOM Backs Bloodshed in Central Africa
by Keith Harmon Snow
Kimpa Vita readings
April 15th, 2010
The eastern Congo remains awash in bloodshed due to western mining companies and their proxy armies, the military regimes of Paul Kagame (Rwanda), Yoweri Museveni (Uganda), and Joseph Kabila (DRC), all hidden behind reams of western newsprint blaming Congolese victims for their own suffering. Across the continent a new rebellion in western Congo has reportedly engaged Belgian paratroopers and UN “peacekeepers” in alliance with the DRC government.
With massive casualties and more than 200,000 civilians forced to flee western Congo the United Nations and western media have covered up the new rebellion. Meanwhile, AFRICOM under the Obama administration has major base constructions and secret deployments across Central Africa, with NATO, Dyncorp and Special Operations Command shipping Ugandan grunts to the U.S. wars in Somalia, Afghanistan, Darfur and Iraq.
With the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) engulfed in bloodshed and terrorism due to the secretive occupation and expansion by the Rwandan regime of Paul Kagame, Congo’s President Joseph Kabila has received support from Belgium and the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) to crush a growing rebellion sparked by resistance forces in far Western Congo. But the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC) has downplayed the new rebellion and hidden massive military and civilian casualties.
*Are Belgian Paratroopers Fighting in Western Congo?*
A rising alliance calling themselves “The Resistance Patriots of Dongo” (Patriotes-Résistants de Dongo) spread in western Congo over the past six months after Congolese people learned that Congolese resistance forces tired of the corrupt regime of Joseph Kabila were fighting against Rwandan troops in the little frontier town of Dongo.
Sources in Congo’s capital Kinshasa reported that an emergency “crisis” meeting was convened in Brussels on Nov. 28, 2009, after a distress call was sent by Congo-Kinshasa President Hypolitté Kanambe, known to the Western world by his alias, Joseph Kabila Kabange, and the Belgian military attaché in Kinshasa was instructed to deploy a detachment of elite Belgian Armed Forces (BAF) paratroopers to Congo.1
Sources in DRC claimed that Belgian troops joined the Kabila COALITION forces, backed by AFRICOM and allied with Rwanda, and engaged the RESISTANCE forces in Equateur province in January.
Interests competing with President Joseph Kabila’s Congo (including U.S. and Israeli minerals cartels, weapons dealers and money-laundering operations) support the new western Congo RESISTANCE forces. These interests operate through regional power brokers, e.g., in Gabon, Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, Rwanda, Uganda, and South Africa.
In mid-November President Joseph Kabila secretly airlifted a battalion of Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) across Congo to crush the rebellion. Comprised of former Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels who overthrew the government of Juvenal Habyarimana in Rwanda (1990-1994), the RDF joined Kabila’s COALITION, which includes MONUC troops from the international “peacekeeping” mission and Tutsi Rwandan soldiers infiltrated by Rwanda, with the Kabila government’s support, into Congo’s national army, the FARDC. RDF forces, moved to Congo from Rwanda exclusively for the operation, were uniformed as Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC).2
Thus western Congo is awash in bloodshed involving COALITION forces backed by AFRICOM, Belgium and Israel Amongst the biggest Kabila supporters are the U.S.-Israeli Dan Gertler, Moshe Schnitzer and Benny Steinmetz families, also holders to Congo’s most lucrative (copper/cobalt) mines.
*MONUC Hides Equateur Conflict*
The Tutsi forces in the FARDC include infiltrated Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF, formerly Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army) and “ex-”CNDP forces from the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), the extremist terrorist militia that sprouted out of the Kivu Provinces but is heavily backed by Rwanda and infiltrated with thousands of extremist Tutsis.
The secret infiltration and official integration of Rwandan forces into Congo was a strategic maneuver championed by Rwandan general James Kabarebe and Paul Kagame, both wanted for war crimes by the Spanish and French courts. Rwanda’s Kagame is the primary cause of the massive destabilization of Eastern Congo.
The leaders of the rebellion in western Equateur Province have reportedly forged an alliance with General Dunia, a Mai Mai leader operating against the joint operations of the Kabila COALITION in South Kivu, eastern Congo, and site of Canadian BANRO Gold Corporation’s massive illegal gold concessions. Mai-Mai forces in Congo are highly nationalist Congolese. In late 2009, Mai-Mai leaders issued a communiqué and declaration of war against Joseph Kabila and his foreign and corporate allies.
South Kivu human rights groups have documented BANRO’s links to local terrorism, yet not one mainstream western media source has reported or even named the pivotal western mining interests—including BANRO, Moto Gold (Walter Kansteiner), Mwana Africa, Heritage Oil & Gas—behind the war and plunder in blood-drenched eastern Congo.
Many Congolese people have long since known that the president of their country has supported a secret extremist “Tutsi” alliance that seeks to dominate Central Africa. His real name is Hypolitté Kanambe, formerly a junior Rwanda Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A) officer plucked from the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) forces.
It is widely supported that Joseph Kabila reported directly to RPF/A commanders James Kabarebe and Paul Kagame in the Pentagon-backed AFDL “rebellion” that overthrew President Joseph Mobutu in Zaire (Congo); there are also claims that Kabila was a soldier in the RPF/A during the multiple genocides orchestrated by Kagame’s extremist Tutsi RPF/A in Rwanda (1990-1994).
The term “extremist Tutsi” applies only to the elite secretive organization, formerly the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A), which exists in parallel with the parliamentary government of Rwanda.3 ,4 ,5 ,6 RDF are not exclusively Tutsi, but are controlled by the extremist Tutsi network maintained by Paul Kagame, General James Kabarebe and others of the 40 top war criminals indicted by the Spanish court on Feb. 6, 2008.
After seizing power in July of 1994, the extremist Tutsi network continued to perpetrate atrocities, including massacres, assassinations, tortures and disappearances, and the network moved into Congo-Zaire in 1996. The modus operandi of the Kagame terrorist network is to perpetrate crimes and blame them on victim populations (Hutus, FDLR, Mai Mai, Congolese civilians, even Tutsi dissidents). The western media plays along.
A major source of ongoing conflict in the DRC’s Kivu provinces, Rwandan Gen. Bosco Ntaganda, was rewarded in January 2009 for playing along with the Kabila COALITION charade of “arresting” Rwandan war criminal Gen. Laurent Nkunda, another perpetrator of war crimes who received Washington’s blessings for several years. One of few points to their credit, the U.N. Panel of Experts, in their report of November 2009, exposed the appointment of Gen. Bosco Ntaganda as CNDP-FARDC commander, which Kagame and Kabila officially denied.
The International Criminal Court indicted General Bosco Ntaganda for war crimes committed in DRC in May 2008. The ICC is a political instrument used to selectively target certain individuals and militias, while ignoring more substantial state sanctioned actors like Paul Kagame, James Kabarebe, Yoweri Museveni, Maurice Templesman, or former U.S. National Security Council member Walter Kansteiner, all deeply behind the war and plunder in DRC.
Gen. Ntaganda commanded CNDP-FARDC units responsible for massive war crimes under the joint “Kimia” operations launched with MONUC backing in eastern Congo in January 2009. Ntaganda’s role is to work from the inside to destabilize eastern Congo in exchange for Kabila and Kagame protecting him from the ICC.
The current death toll in the eastern provinces of Congo alone stands at some 1,000 people per day, with at least ten million dead in Congo since the U.S. invasion of 1996, with millions of refugees in the Great Lakes member states. Rwandan allied forces in DRC are perpetrating genocide at present in North Kivu, and the western media and “humanitarian” agencies have remained silent. More than 15,000 IDPs were registered between December 2009 and January 2010, with thousands more IDPs reported hiding in North Kivu forests.
Violence in eastern Congo is universally and falsely blamed on the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), but in fact violence is primarily due to Rwandan allied forces. Additionally, more than 168,000 people have been uprooted due to recent fighting in Western Congo.7
Congo-Brazzaville has harbored the ex-Forces Armées Zaïroises (ex-FAZ) since the overthrow of President Mobutu in 1997, and it harbors Rwandans that fled the AFDL genocide against Hutu refugees in Congo-Zaire (1996-1997).8 There may be some 300 ex-MLC (Movement for the Liberation of Congo) rebels and more than 10,000 ex-FAZ involved in the western rebellion.
Equateur Province is the site of major untapped petroleum reserves. Belgian, French, Portuguese, German and U.S. families and corporations control vast tracts under attack by industrial logging. There are also Western-owned plantations with modern day slavery involving tens of thousands of Congolese people subject to terrorism by state paramilitary services.9
*Resistance Patriots of Dongo*
In March 2009 the Western press reported a “tribal dispute” and “ethnic clash over fishing rights” in the little Western Congo outback town of Dongo. The dispute reportedly began between two different ethnic groups. However, the “Resistance Patriots of Dongo” claim that government agents manipulated the parties of the dispute and escalated armed hostilities.
In October 2009 President Kabila and top military adviser John Numbi dispatched FARDC troops under the command of Gen. Benjamin Alongaboni to Dongo to negotiate peace with resistance forces. Gen. Alongaboni, a Congolese son hailing from Equateur Province and the first FARDC officer on the scene, secured a negotiated peace with Dongo area combatants.
Soon after, however, President Kabila sent RDF forces—in FARDC uniforms—who enraged Congolese in the region and provoked hostilities by killing some local people and undermining peace negotiations. The Resistance Patriots of Dongo retaliated and Congolese FARDC troops under the command of Gen. Alongaboni defected.
Meanwhile, the “Dongo Crisis” blossomed into a full-blown Congolese rebellion against international occupation forces and the powerful Kabila-Kagame clique. Hundreds of Congolese Armed Forces (FARDC)—of ethnic Congolese origin—reportedly deserted and joined rebellion ranks with Congolese civilians and various military elements of past rebellions.
Bound for the Dongo rebellion in mid-November, Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) crossed Lake Kivu from Gisenyi to Goma, DRC, and were then flown from Goma to Kamina Air Base in Katanga, a military transport hub used for the Belgo-American-U.N. mercenary occupations during the Katanga secession (1960-63) and “Congo Crises” (1964–67). The RDF battalion was next flown to Bandundu Province.
The RDF troops were reportedly next moved onto the 42-acre campus of the U.S. Embassy-affiliated American School in Kinshasa (TASOK), near the notorious Camp Tshatshi military base, and then flown to Gemena airport in Equateur. The Colonel Tshatshi Military Camp in Kinshasa is the FARDC military command headquarters. The TASOK campus was used for RDF troops because Rwandans would not be welcome amongst Congolese-FARDC at Camp Tshatshi.
There were at least three round trips in some legs of the RDF flight plan reportedly using both MONUC and Hewa Bora Airlines, an airline 70 percent owned by Belgian arms trafficker Philippe de Moerloose. In the “leaked” November 2009 U.N. Panel of Experts Report on Illegal Exploitation in the Congo, Philippe De Moerloose and Hewa Bora Airlines were named for weapons shipments from Sudan to Congo in violation of the International Arms Embargo on the DRC.10 De Moerloose supplies Kabila with presidential jets and other war toys.
Attempting to discredit the High Court in Spain for its issuing of international war crimes indictments against 40 top Rwandan military officials, the U.N. Panel of Experts Report also falsely accused Spanish non-government organizations affiliated with the judicial war crimes investigations of backing “terrorist” groups in eastern Congo.
The Resistance Patriots of Dongo have inflicted high casualties on the Kabila Coalition forces dispatched to Equateur. MONUC issued one tiny press report on Nov. 26, after resistance forces shot up a MONUC helicopter that flew to Dongo to resupply the Coalition ground troops. Some 2000 of the coalition troops were reported killed in February and March.
A short Western media propaganda blurb titled “Armed group claims firing at UN chopper in DRC,” Agence France-Presse attempted to discredit the rebellion and cover for MONUC’s involvement in open military aggression against Congolese people.
The AFP described the conflict as purely tribal and framed it as ruthless savage Africans killing with machetes. The MONUC chopper apparently was attacked on Nov. 26.11
*Dongo War Not Connected to Eastern Congo?*
“The fighting is not related to the simmering conflict in the mineral-rich eastern borderlands,” Reuters wrote, “where the army – backed by thousands of peacekeepers – are attempting to stamp out local, Rwandan, and Ugandan rebels.”12
On Dec. 3, 2009, Belgian newspapers La Libre Belgique and RTLM reported that Belgium’s Foreign Minister Steven Vanackere and Defense Minister Pieter De Crem had responded to the communiqué of the Resistance Patriots of Dongo, circulated on the Internet on Dec. 1, which warned Belgium and Kinshasa that the resistance knew of the secret plan to dispatch paratroopers to Kisangani. The two Belgian ministries issued a joint communiqué denying denying the secret plan.13
According to Kinshasa sources, the MONUC-uniformed Belgians would be flown from Kisangani, Orientale Province, to Equateur Province’s northwestern frontier city of Gbadolite — the stronghold of former President Mobutu and rebel warlord Jean Pierre Bemba — and then to Gemena airport near Dongo.14
Soon after the Resistance Patriots of Dongo forces occupied the frontier city of Libenge, President Kabila dispatched 600 elite FARDC commandos trained by 60 Belgian Armed Forces instructors at Kamina Air base.
Sources in Kinshasa on Dec. 5 reported: “massive violent fighting in Libenge and Gemena areas,” involving 1,000 Congolese National Police (PNC) and 100 Ghanaian MONUC troops and two MONUC helicopter gunships.15
The MONUC “peacekeeping” enterprise in Congo is a $1 billion a year operation involving contracts with Lockheed Martin subsidiary Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE).
On December 14, 2009, the Spanish Press Agency SAPA and Agence France-Presse reported that DRC government troops fighting against ‘tribal forces’ had taken back the town of Dongo, with the tribal forces being “led by the animist priest Udjani.”16 The article maintained the ongoing silence about high casualties.
The international news media was completely silent after government forces that had reentered Dongo by December 14 suffered a crushing defeat when resistance forces sprang a trap: scores of Kabila Coalition troops (allegedly including ‘white’ mercenaries) were massacred.
On December 16, 2009, the MONUC spokesman in Kinshasa DRC announced that MONUC troops were deployed in Dongo in Equateur province “to sustain the joint PNC/FARDC operations aimed at re-establishing order [sic] and state authority…”17
MONUC transferred some 500 regular MONUC Ghanaian, Tunisian and Egyptian “peacekeepers” to Equateur province from the eastern Congo’s conflict areas in Orientale and the Kivus, along with Armored Personnel Carriers, weapons, and transport and combat helicopters. MONUC also deployed Guatemalan Special Forces to the Equateur region.
On December 22, New York’s *Bloomberg News* reported with a news brief deepening the racist mythology portraying this as African savagery and superstition.
“The Enyele leader is a mystic named Udjani,” wrote Michael J. Kavanagh, reporting for *Bloomberg* from Kinshasa (DRC) and Impfondo (Republic of Congo), referring to the Enyele tribe, “who claims to have a magical sword that can poison people and pass its powers to the curved machetes wielded by many of his followers, witnesses said.”18
Sources working for MONUC in Kisangani confirm that there are Belgian troops in Kisangani, with “one or two” Hercules C-130 Belgian military aircraft.
Resistance forces and Kabila’s Coalition forces engaged in major battles since January with many top military officers of the Kabila Coalition killed. Sources claim that Kabila Coalition forces have used incendiary bombs causing huge civilian casualties. A key intelligence source in Kinshasa insists that Belgian paratroopers were on the ground in Equateur and, unprepared for the organized resistance they encountered, were forced to retreat after some (unknown) number were wounded and killed. MONUC troops have also been engaged in the fighting, in continued violation of the U.N. “peacekeeping” mandate.
*Election Slogans and Empty Promises (Sound Familiar?)*
In the beginning, many Congolese supported President Kanambe, alias Kabila, ignoring his origins, hoping that he would share power, that he would develop the Congo, build roads and schools and, especially, that he would forestall and evict Ugandan and Rwandan agents, provocateurs, mining cartels and war criminals from the 1996-2001 war years. They were the usual empty promises made by the usual empty politicians.
The plan has all along been to colonize Congo through Rwanda. This involves eliminating as many Congolese people as possible to control their land, balkanizing the Congo and creating a “Republic of the Volcanoes” (Republique des Volcans) as Clinton-Bush official Herman Cohen has repeatedly called for since the U.S.-backed invasion of 1996.
For years now several high visibility Western intelligence organizations, in particular the groups ENOUGH, STAND, Genocide Intervention Network, and the RAISE HOPE FOR CONGO—created and funded by the International Crisis Group and Center for American Progress—have lobbied college students and Western governments to action. Legislation backed by these intelligence fronts includes the “LRA Disarmament Act” (Lord’s Resistance Army), the so-called ‘Blood Minerals’ legislation, and the “Violence Against Women Act” (Resolution 1888). The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is blamed for all terrorism in the northern Uganda region, which is awash in oil, thus shielding the organized war crimes of Ugandan President Museveni and his western allies, just as the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) are blamed to shield the Kagame terror networks.
William Jefferson Clinton’s former national security insider John Prendergast is the leading cheerleader for these groups, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s help, and with John Podesta, Tom Daschle and Madeleine Albright, behind the scenes. John Prendergast was the expert of choice for CBS *60 Minutes*’ “Blood Minerals” broadcast, nationally televised in the United States on Nov. 29, 2009, which was an advertisement for ENOUGH, the International Rescue Committee and so-called “humanitarian” organizations. These lobby and flak entities are working to displace and neutralize all true international grassroots efforts to help the Congolese people take control of their own resources and future, and they cover for hidden Western interests; they also advance military solutions over diplomatic or other peaceful solutions.
The Western media perpetually broadcasts the suffering in Congo, but the propaganda is simplistic disinformation, and the Western “news”-consuming public eats it up and dismisses the Congo, abandoning the people whose lives are determined in part by the raw materials stolen from them in a state of war and organized crime. These include diamonds, gold, columbium-tantalite, cobalt, copper, petroleum, germanium, tin, tungsten, palm oil, coffee and chocolate (sold in Whole Foods groceries stores). But the value of Congo’s greatest natural “resource” exceeds the value of all the above resources combined: the biggest western moneymaker in Congo is humanitarian aid, charity and international relief—Save the Children, CARE, UNICEF, UNHCR—a.k.a., and the misery industry.
In mid-March actorvist Ben Affleck launched yet the latest western “humanitarian” enterprise in eastern Congo. Affleck’s ‘humanitarianism’ operates behind the western disinformation campaign that charges Congolese men with using ‘rape as a weapon of war’—an agenda also pushed by Eve Ensler (of *Vagina Monologues* fame)—but fails to address the true perpetrators of crimes, including the many mining, private military, intelligence and other military interests involved in bloodshed and plunder. The ‘rape as a weapon of war’ framework facilitates western ignorance of the true perpetrators of war, including western agents, weapons brokers, mercenary companies, proxy forces, NATO and AFRICOM, and U.S. brokered military hardware (AK-47s, rockets, armored personnel carriers, tanks, grenades, surface-to-air missiles). Hillary Clinton’s denunciation of “rape as a weapon of war” in July 2009 covered up her negotiations with Joseph Kabila regarding the Clinton aligned diamond interests in DRC.
Affleck’s new Congo initiative is funded by Howard Buffet, whose powerful holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, has diverse business interests involved in the Great Lakes. Berkshire Hathaway has an 18.2% stake in the*Washington Post* and the Buffet’s agribusinesses in Africa are entrenching Monsanto’s genetically modified (GMO) crops. The Buffets are tight with Bill and Melinda Gates, all close business partners with the Clinton’s in Rwanda and Uganda. In September 2008, Bill Gates, Howard Buffet, Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni met at the United Nations headquarters to launch their GMO partnership “Purchase for Progress” with the UN’s World Food Program. Affleck also has his own private business interests facilitated by the Kagame regime in Kigali, and like Gates and Buffet he comes and goes from Kigali on a private jet. *Washington Post* reportage on Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and Sudan is a complete whitewash of western interests.
Rwanda has become the Pentagon’s main base and center of military operations in Africa, and this partnership involves Israel.
On January 28, 2009, sources in Congo reported that Joseph Kabila narrowly survived another assassination attempt, the third this year, with his bodyguard taking the bullet. Meanwhile, violent fighting continued in Equateur province into March, with Kabila coalition troops allegedly arresting and torturing civilians and accusing them of being rebels, including boys as young as 10, and widely committing summary executions. This is a massive violation of international law; AFRICOM and MONUC officials know it is happening; United Nations officials in New York know it is happening;19 and the western press is silent.
In Mid-March, at an exclusive United States Institute for Peace meeting in Washington, DC, AFRICOM spokesman Mark Swayne dismissed any AFRICOM involvement in these covert operations by responding that such reports are “irrelevant.” The USIP has funded pro-Kagame disinformation campaigns since the early 1990’s, shielding U.S. involvement in Central African war crimes and genocide. AFRICOM information campaigns exclusively project an image of U.S. troops being only involved in humanitarian and peacekeeping operations.
Curiously, at the same USIP meeting, Mark Swayne reportedly “apologized” for AFRICOM’s use of Ugandans in building the new AFRICOM base under construction in Kisangani, Congo. Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni—through his wife and brother Salim Saleh’s organized crime networks and the Ugandan military—are hated for more than a decade of plunder and terror in Congo. The Pentagon’s own web site identifies the elite U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) as ‘training’ Congolese troops in Kisangani, DRC, and Swayne did not reveal that the Ugandans are mercenaries likely affiliated to the western mercenary-linked oil companies (Heritage Oil & Gas, Hardman Resources, H Oil) operating in the Lake Albert basin on the DRC-Uganda border.
AFRICOM, NATO and private military companies Dyncorp and PAE (Pacific Architect & Engineers, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin) have also been training and flying Ugandan and Rwandan troops to the U.S.-European-Israeli wars in Somalia and Sudan (Darfur). There are some 300 Ugandans backing the US in Afghanistan and more than 10,000 Ugandans in Iraq, with more than 3000 Rwandans in Darfur.
In December 2009, a group of Congolese chiefs sent an open letter to U.S. President Barrack Obama proclaiming a “categorical refusal of your AFRICOM Project in the Congo.”
AFRICOM, NATO and private military companies Dyncorp and PAE (Pacific Architect & Engineers, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin) have been ‘training’ and flying Ugandan and Rwandan troops to the US-European-Israeli wars in Somalia and Sudan (Darfur). There are some 300 Ugandans backing the US in Afghanistan and more than 10,000 Ugandans in Iraq, with more than 3000 Rwandans reported to be in Darfur. An unknown number of Rwandan soldiers are also in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there are allegations that “peacekeeping” sorties sent to Darfur, Sudan, may actually serve as cover for military personnel and hardware actually bound from Rwanda to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, Sudan is exploding as you read this, and the huge Rwandan deployments might be behind new violence. These are Rwandan and Ugandan troops responsible for the most egregious war crimes in all the Great Lakes countries.
On April 4, 2010, rebellion insurgents crossed the Congo river and attacked the provincial capital of Mbandaka. Two MONUC troops were killed, and many more wounded after insurgents attacked the governor’s residence and took the Mbandaka airport. By April 9 the government FARDC forces and MONUC had regained the airport leaving three MONUC troops dead. The story finally broke onto the pages of the BBC, *New York Times*, *Washington Post* and other mainstream press, but all continue to hide deeper interests and distort the realities. The heavily populated city of Mbandaka was described as a “ghost town” and reporting ignored civilian casualties.20 ,21 ,22
1. See Keith Harmon Snow, “Congo’s President Kabila: Dynasty or Travesty? ”*Toward Freedom*, Nov. 13, 2007. [↩ ] 2. For this report these RDF-disguised troops will be designated “RDF” (Rwandan Defense Forces) to separate them from other FARDC troops with Rwandan allegiances. [↩ ] 3. See, e.g., Spain’s Feb. 6, 2008, indictments issued by High Court Judge Andreu Merelles charging 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials with serious crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism, perpetrated over a period of 12 years, from 1990 to 2002, against the civilian population and primarily against members of the Hutu ethnic group. [↩ ] 4. See, e.g., Davenport and Stam, “What Really Happened in Rwanda? ” *Miller-McCun*e, Oct. 6, 2009. [↩ ] 5. See, e.g., Keith Harmon Snow, “The Rwanda Genocide Fabrications ,” *Dissident Voice*, April 13, 2009. [↩ ] 6. See, e.g., Christopher Black, “The Truth About Rwanda,” SaveRwanda.org, December 29, 2010. [↩ ] 7. United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and OCHA. [↩ ] 8. Private investigations, Democratic Republic of Congo, July-August 2006 and February-March 2007. [↩ ] 9. The Elwyn Blattner Groupe plantation holdings are revealed in the 2008 documentary film *Episode III: Enjoy Poverty * by Dutch filmmaker Renzo Martens. [↩ ] 10. United Nations: Letter dated Nov. 9, 2009, from the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo addressed to the chairman of the Security Council Committee established pursuant to Resolution 1533 (2004), “leaked” November 2009. [↩ ] 11. Unsigned, “Armed group claims firing at U.N. chopper in DR Congo,” AFP, Nov. 26, 2009. [↩ ] 12. Joe Bavier, “Congo gunmen fire at U.N. helicopter, five wounded,” Reuters, Nov. 26, 2009. [↩ ] 13. Belga, “La Belgique dément tout projet d’envoi de troupes en RDC,” RTBF, Dec. 3, 2009. ["Belgium denies all project of sending of troops to DRC."] [↩ ] 14. Bemba Saolona’s company, Scibe CMMJ, was implicated by the U.N. in smuggling weapons to UNITA during the Angolan Civil War: Johan Peleman, “ The logistics of sanctions busting: the airborne component,” (PDF file), p. 303. [↩ ] 15. In 2006-07, Police Nationale Congolaise were outfitted with high-tech radio communications, funded by the United Nations Development Program, purchased from New Zealand. [↩ ] 16. “DR Congo troops take back town from tribal forces: Govt.” SAPA-AFP, December 14, 2009. [↩ ] 17. “Equateur [DRC]: An extra 500 MONUC troops being deployed to Dongo,” MONUC Press Briefing, December 16,2009. [↩ ] 18. Michael J. Kavanagh, “Thousands Flee Northern Congo Insurgency Inspired by Mystic,” Blomberg.com. [↩ ] 19. Direct communications with high-level United Nations officials in New York confirmed in late January 2010 that UN officials in New York were discussing the Equateur conflict, but that there were (paraphrased) “conflicting interpretations of the facts.” [↩ ] 20. Unsigned, “Troops Retake Mbandaka Airport,” BBC, April 5, 2010. [↩ ] 21. Reuters, “Fighters Kill Peacekeeper in North Congo Attack ,” *Washington Post*, April 4, 2010. [↩ ] 22. Katrina Mansen & David Lewis, “UN Failed Civilians During Rebel Attack ,”*Washington Post*, April 9, 2010. [↩ ]
Keith Harmon Snow is an independent human rights investigator and war correspondent who worked with Survivors Rights International (2005-2006), Genocide Watch (2005-2006) and the United Nations (2006) to document and expose genocide and crimes against humanity in Sudan and Ethiopia. He has worked in 17 countries in Africa, and he recently worked in Afghanistan. Read other articles by Keith , or visit Keith’s website .
– [image: Share/Bookmark]
Post Published: 14 April 2010 Author: Kimpavitapress Found in section: Activism , articles , news
*Previous Topic:* The Rwanda Hit List: Disturbing Questions By David Kayumba Leave a Reply
Labels: AFRICOM, BELGIUM, MONUC, NEOCOLONIALISM, RESISTANCE PATRIOTS OF DONGO
Read more...
