Three Americans Arrested in Congo Coup Plot

Three Americans Arrested in Congo Coup Plot
26 Security Workers Suspected

By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, May 24, 2006; 1:27 PM

JOHANNESBURG, May 24 -- Three Americans were among at least 26 security workers arrested and jailed last week in Congo on suspicion of plotting a coup in advance of national elections in July, officials and news services reported Wednesday.

Fifteen of the suspects are employed by a South African security company, Omega Risk Solutions, which has offices in Pretoria, the South African capital. A company official, Christo Roelefse, said the Americans who were arrested work for two U.S. companies that are arranging security and logistics for the campaign of a presidential candidate in Congo. The other suspects are Nigerians.

From Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, Interior Minister Theophile Mbemba told the Associated Press that 32 men were arrested Friday with military gear. "It is clear that they were military personnel with political plans. . . . They were part of a coup attempt, and they will face justice in Congo."

A spokesman for the South African Foreign Ministry, Ronnie Mamoepa, said the arrests were made on the grounds of "alleged destabilization of government institutions" but that no charges have been filed.
(snip/...)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/24/AR2006052401591.html

My bad.

then we're plotting coups all over the world. We're a force of

Instability and chaos, everywhere.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cmoore.php?articleid=6649

The Politics of 'Creative Destruction'

by Chris Moore
International Herald Tribune columnist William Pfaff recently reported that the Bush administration's new Bureau of Reconstruction and Stabilization, a State Department subgroup, has been tasked to prepare for a frighteningly expansive future of warfare.

"The bureau has 25 countries under surveillance as possible candidates for Defense Department deconstruction and State Department reconstruction," writes Pfaff. "The bureau's director is recruiting 'rapid-reaction forces' of official, nongovernmental, and corporate business specialists. He hopes to develop the capacity for three full-scale, simultaneous reconstruction operations in different countries."

Pfaff notes that this ambitious undertaking "occurs at the same time American military forces still are unable to pacify Iraq or Afghanistan, agricultural societies of less than 25 million people each, both largely in ruins."


....more

Is it the People's Republic of the Congo? Or the Democratic Republic of the Congo? On an unstable continent, it's probably one of the most unstable countries.

It's name changes over the years are more than enough to keep me thinking of "Life Of Brian", and the two revolutionary palestinean groups.

for decades due to the west's desire for diamonds, coltan, and other natural resources. The country has a lot of valuable resources, yet the people of Congo reap no benefits from it. Their farms are ruined, their livelihood is ruined so that we can have engagement rings, cell phones and laptops.


Foreign corporations and gov'ts prop up corrupt regimes and the people have no control or recourse. And like so many other conflicts, it is virtually ignored by the western world.

Westerners generally don't like to talk about this sort of thing, since it challenges our status quo.

Truth hurts :(

Iraq? I seem to remember a thread, about the out-of-control SA mercs.

http://www.omegasol.com/
google search comes up with some interesting stuff about them.

10/04 2 South African contractors with ORS killed in Iraq.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__national&articleid=139702

Simply amazing. We were completely unaware of that one.

The link to their website shows their "code of conduct" page, which seems a little hard to swallow.

Thanks for adding some info.

It would be very interesting to know how they came to be involved, and whose idea it was.

On a side note, everytime I hear "Homeland" security, I cringe due to S.African reminders.

WE don't need to look very far back in our own history to find so much ugliness: hatred for indigenous populations all over the world.

Republicans: what the hell ARE they?

Cellphones fuel Congo conflict
Cellphones may have revolutionized the way we communicate, but in Central Africa their biggest legacy is war.


Nearly 3 million people have died in Congo in a four-year war over coltan, a heat-resistant mineral ore widely used in cellphones, laptops and playstations. Eighty percent of the world's coltan reserves are in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The mountainous jungle area where the coltan is mined is the battleground of what has been grimly dubbed "Africa's first World War," pitting Congolese forces against those of six neighbouring countries and numerous armed factions.
The victims are mostly civilians. Starvation and disease have killed hundreds of thousands and the fighting has displaced 2 million people from their homes.


more...

http://www.seeingisbelieving.ca/cell/kinshasa/

The infrastructure's much easier to set up, since you just need broadcast towers and the like as opposed to thousands of miles of copper wire. The wire is also likely to end up stolen when it's strung in more volatile places.

but I am not sure what that has to do with the article I posted, which is about the global market for coltan, not the local phone service in the Congo. I would recommend reading the whole thing.

It is absolutely devestating.

Guns, Money and Cell Phones
By Kristi Essick
The Industry Standard Magazine
Issue Date: Jun 11 2001

The demand for cell phones and computer chips is helping fuel a bloody civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The offer turned up a few weeks ago on an Internet bulletin board called the Embassy Network. Among the postings about Dutch work visas and Italian pen pals lurked a surprisingly blunt proposal: "How much do you want to offer per kilogram? Please find me at least 100,000 U.S. dollars and I will deliver immediately."

The substance for sale wasn't cocaine or top-grade opium. It was an ore called Columbite-tantalite - coltan for short - one of the world's most sought-after materials. Refine coltan and you get a highly heat-resistant metal powder called tantalum. It sells for $100 a pound, and it's becoming increasingly vital to modern life. For the high-tech industry, tantalum is magic dust, a key component in everything from mobile phones made by Nokia (NOK) and Ericsson and computer chips from Intel (INTC) to Sony (SNE) stereos and VCRs.

Selling coltan is not illegal. Most of the worldwide tantalum supply - valued at as much as $6 billion a year - comes from legitimate mining operations in Australia, Canada and Brazil. But as demand for tantalum took off with the boom of high-tech products in recent years, a new, more sinister market began flourishing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, warring rebel groups - many funded and supplied by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda - are exploiting coltan mining to help finance a bloody civil war now in its third year. "There is a direct link between human rights abuses and the exploitation of resources in areas in the DRC occupied by Rwanda and Uganda," says Suliman Baldo, a senior researcher in the Africa division at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based nongovernmental organization that tracks human-rights abuses worldwide.

The slaughter and misery in the Congo has not abated since the country's president, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated in January. (Kabila's son, Joseph, was quickly appointed the new head of state.) Human Rights Watch researchers, working with monitors in the Congo, estimate that at least 10,000 civilians have been killed and 200,000 people have been displaced in northeastern Congo since June 1999. Rebels have driven farmers off their coltan-rich land and attacked villages in a civil war raging, in part, over control of strategic mining areas. The Ugandan and Rwandan rebels "are just helping themselves," Baldo says. The mining by the rebels is also causing environmental destruction. In particular, endangered gorilla populations are being massacred or driven out of their natural habitat as the miners illegally plunder the ore-rich lands of the Congo's protected national parks.

The link between the bloodshed and coltan is causing alarm among high-tech manufacturers. Slowly they are beginning to grapple with the possibility that their products may contain the tainted fruits of civil war. A similar controversy, after all, wracked the diamond industry in the late 1990s, when global demand for the gems helped finance civil wars in Sierra Leone, Angola and Liberia. Since then, the international community has clamped down on the diamond trade, imposing tougher import and export regulations.

more...

http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/Articles/TheStandardColtan.asp

KINSHASA (Reuters) - The international community is overlooking the world's worst humanitarian disaster in Democratic Republic of Congo, where 10 million people need life-saving assistance, a U.N. official said on Sunday.

With 1,200 people dying every day in the vast central African state, the United Nations launched an appeal three months ago for $682 million (361 million pounds) to provide water, food, medical assistance, shelter and protection to those at risk.

That equates to just $0.18 per person each day.

So far, donors have provided just 13 percent of that, the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement.

"While international attention is currently focused on other crises, the DRC remains the world's deadliest humanitarian catastrophe," Ross Mountain, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Congo, said in the release.

more...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060514/wl_nm/congo_democratic_un_dc_1

"We are not concerned about this, it appears to be a case of political manipulation by Congo's government," said Jean-Tobias Okala, a U.N. spokesman in Kinshasa, according to the Associated Press. "We have almost 18,000 troops here to achieve our goal of peaceful and transparent elections."

Implication that the arrests were to keep somebody from being able to campaign. Guess we have taught the world well at how to run a democracy.