DRC: The Challenge of Piecing Together a "Failed State"

Moyiga Nduru

PRETORIA, Mar 12 (IPS) - This weekend sees a new military operation underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Reports from the central African country say about 800 United Nations troops have been deployed in the north-eastern Ituri region to disarm local militias held responsible for the death of nine peacekeepers last month.

The militias, from a faction called the Nationalist and Integrationist Front, have also attacked local Congolese, prompting 70,000 to flee their homes over recent weeks.

Approximately 60 fighters were killed by U.N. troops in an operation launched after the ambush that claimed the lives of the Bangladeshi peacekeepers. These soldiers formed part of more than 16,000 troops serving in the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo - Monuc.

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"Congo is a failed state - its internal structures are very weak," says James Malanda, head of diplomacy at the Congres Panafricain (COPAN), a pressure group formed by young Congolese in the diaspora. "Whenever there is a problem, say in (eastern) Kasai province, they fly in someone from the capital, Kinshasa, to bring a solution. Often, that person doesn't even know what Kasai looks like."
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In 2002, their proven reserves were about 1.5 billion barrels. Enough to keep the world going for a month or so.

http://www.capitals.com/rankorder/2178rank.html

Must be something else. "Rev." Pat Robertson might know...


JEWELS FOR JESUS

ZAIRE: MOBUTU AND PAT ROBERTSON

BY ANDREW PURVIS/KINSHASA

What do televangelist Pat Robertson and a ruthless dictator have in common?

Diamonds, for one thing

TIME Domestic
February 27, 1994 Volume 145, No. 9

Who would expect to find diamonds on the souls of evangelical American missionaries in Zaire? Situated in the bull's-eye of Africa, Zaire has 43 million citizens scratching out a living on roughly $500 a year apiece. Zaire's cruel, old-style dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, however, does not subsist on $500 a year - he has many millions stashed away, and right now he makes a decent income off his country's roughly $300 million-a-year diamond trade. Now, with Mobutu's permission, Zaire's diamond business has a new entrant - Pat Robertson, the American televangelist and ex-presidential candidate.

Backed by the CIA, army general Joseph-Desire Mobutu took over the Republic of the Congo in 1965 and later called himself Mobutu Sese Seko. In 1971 he renamed the country Zaire. Throughout his rule, Mobutu has dealt brutally with opponents, civilian and military. His country's mineral wealth and location kept Mobutu valuable to Western interests for years, but when the threat of communist expansion disappeared, his worth diminished. By 1993 his horrific human-rights record and his refusal to yield the throne had led to an economic squeeze of Zaire by three major trading partners - the U.S., France and Belgium. Largesse from lenient banks dried up. Desperately casting a net for new friends, Mobutu found Robertson. Makau Mutua, projects director of the Human Rights Program at the Harvard Law School, says that currently "Robertson is Mobutu's biggest American catch."

The association of dictator and preacher began with a Robertson relief group, Operation Blessing, a branch of which has botched a corn-cultivation project on a 50,000-acre farm outside the capital, Kinshasa. Last year during the Rwandan refugee crisis, Operation Blessing expanded its humanitarian efforts to Goma but was criticized for spending too much money on transportation, pulling its workers out too soon and proselytizing. "They were laying on hands," an American aid worker recalls, "speaking in tongues and holding services while people were dying all around." Many relief agencies are notorious for mismanagement and backbiting, but even considering that, Operation Blessing drew a considerable volume of negative reviews from fellow Samaritans.

Another Robertson organization working in Zaire is the African Development Co. Around the world, Robertson has substantial business interests (in the U.S. he controls TV's Family Channel, the Ice Capades and KaloVita, a venture selling vitamins and skin creams from the Holy Land), and ADC is a private enterprise formed to look into investments in mining, lumber, agriculture, transportation and power generation, with an eye to plowing the profits back into humanitarian efforts. A nascent diamond-mining operation in Zaire is a project of the ADC. Located on a river southeast of the boomtown of Tshikapa in the heart of Zaire's diamond country, the project uses state-of-the-art dredges and diving equipment. Robertson is also exploring gold interests on the upper Zaire, or Congo, River, and assessing the hardwood logging potential of four great swaths of rain forest.

CONTINUED...

http://www.davidicke.net/religiousfrauds/evangelists/jewels.html

Either way, the poor Congolese don't have a chance against the Pox of Greed.