was intervening. Not in the way you or I might prefer.
When policy and profit converge
"This is a western syndicated proxy war and, like Sierra Leone, Angola and Sudan, it is war-as-cover for the rapid and unrestricted extraction of raw materials, and war as a means to totally disenfranchise the local people," said Keith Snow, freelance writer and journalist who supplied investigative reports for the panel.
Diamonds, gold, cobalt, manganese, petroleum, natural gas, timber and possibly uranium, he said, are just a few of the major spoils being pillaged behind the scenes as war destroys Africa. "Some of these minerals are almost solely found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo," Mr. Snow said.
One of those minerals, columbium tantalite, or "Col-Tan", is a primary example of the role strategic minerals play in sustaining war. This scarce mineral is found almost exclusively in Eastern Congo and used by western nations in everything from aircraft engines to computer chips.
"Economic interests are a significant factor in the fighting in the DRC," said Bill Hartung, of the World Policy Institute in New York. In his co-authored report "Deadly Legacy Update: U.S. Arms and Training Programs in Africa," the researcher acknowledged the significant role economic interests play in the fighting in the DRC and throughout Africa.
"Africans need western technology, investment and cooperation to transfer minerals. Africans do not process these minerals; they are processed in the west. Africans are not dependent upon minerals used in high-tech industry, sophisticated defense projects, or materials used in space exploration. The west, and particularly the United States, is dependent upon the availability of strategic minerals, many of which the U.S. does not produce. Africa does not have a vibrant market for diamonds, which are cut and distributed in the west," he said.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=116Central Africa's Ongoing Genocide
Paul Kagame's Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, launching a four-year campaign of guerrilla warfare. Open support for Rwanda's then-Hutu-led government from French paratroopers failed to prevent the RPA victory of August, 1994, following the coordinated genocide of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis by hard-line Hutus, Force Armee Rwandaise (FAR) and affiliated Interahamwe (Hutu) militias from April to July. Critics such as Wayne Madsen, author of Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999, assert that Kagame and the RPA orchestrated the April 6, 1994 assassination of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi -- shooting down their plane on approach to Kigali airport with SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles taken from Iraq by France in 1991, then delivered by the US military to Uganda, the base for RPA guerrilla operations against Rwanda prior to 1994.
Evidence was provided at a special hearing held by then Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney at DC's Rayburn House Office Building on April 6, 2001, the seventh Anniversary of the assassinations. Journalist Charles Onana of Cameroon, author of The Secrets of the Rwandan Genocide, also aired claims of RPA involvement in the incident, and was sued for defamation by Paul Kagame. A Paris court found in favor of Onana. Meanwhile, of course, defense attorneys working at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) maintain that the standard figure of 800,000 Tutsis killed in the 1994 genocide is grossly inflated.
Paul Kagame has been a regular visitor at Harvard University, at the James Baker III Institute in Houston Texas, at the White House and the Pentagon. Kagame visited the Pentagon in August 1996, just prior to the Rwandan/Ugandan/US invasion of Zaire. US, European and South African military interests have continued to support various factions in Central Africa, arming militias and rebel groups through proxy armies from Uganda (UPDF), Rwanda (RPA), Burundi and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in south Sudan.
Terror continued in Rwanda under the new RPA government of Paul Kagame, with Amnesty International documenting a pattern of assassinations, arbitrary imprisonment and "disappearances." Nearly all political opponents -- Tutsi or Hutu -- have been labeled "genocidiares", and Amnesty has protested that some trials and executions of accused genocidiare collaborators have been tainted and politically-motivated.
The first Rwandan invasion of its huge neighbor to the west occurred in 1996. According to the influential Africa Confidential newsletter, Major Gen. Paul Kagame visited the Pentagon in August of 1996, conferring with Washington prior to setting in motion a grand plan to unseat Mobutu Sese Seko. While the US public was consumed with the 1996 presidential elections, Rwanda was preparing its war against Zaire -- and it began with the shelling of Hutu refugee camps in eastern Congo with Katusha missiles, killing noncombatant men, women and children. RPA joined with Ugandan People's Defense Forces (UPDF) and the guerilla army of Laurent Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (ADFL) in the "War of Liberation" that subsequently ended the decades long reign of President Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo (Zaire). Sources in DRC quickly add that American military personell were seen on the ground advising the joint UPDF/RPA invasion which swiftly moved across the vast forested territory of Zaire. Wayne Madsen reported that the US established major communications and listening stations in Uganda's Ruwenzori Mountains. Witnesses interviewed in Kampala, Uganda's capital, support this claim. Communications equipment was also seen on Idjwe Island in Lake Kivu, on the DRC-Rwanda frontier.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/congo/2004/1210secretwar.htmAnd a lengthy document here:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD111A.htmlI've read all of these and much more. I know what is happening here and the so-called yet very real humanitarian crises are never going to be resolved by those who are causing the crises.