The Democratic Republic of The Congo



Part One of a Series.
*note. I obtained many sources from Lexus-Nexus...thus the lack of links. I did cut and paste them all however, and if you want to see them, email me and I'll be happy to send them to you.


BACKGROUND

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has a sad and bloody history. The resource rich Central African nation, a nation nearly the size of the US East of the Mississippi, has been tortured, robbed blind, and wracked by war.
Formerly a Belgan colony, Leopold II abused the Congolese and millions are believed to have died due to slave labor at the hands of the Belgan colonials.

When the Congo became a nation in 1960, with Patrice Lumumba as President, widespread violence broke out forcing the UN to send in troops. Lumumba was murdered in 1961. It is believed (and I am searching for verification other than the typical conspiracy theory sites) that due to Lumumba's socialist stance, the CIA had him murdered to further Cold War containment aims. Other reports place the blame on Katangan seperatists who were egged on by a mining company.

Mobutu came along in 1965. To make a long story short, he robbed Congo (then called Zaire) blind.

Now, Mobutu was deposed in 1997 by Laurent Kabila, who quickly alienated just about everybody. He was assassinated January of 2001, and succeded by his son Joseph.

WHY THE VIOLENCE?

Officially, the government based in Kinshasa only controls half the country. Rebel groups, supported by Uganda and Rwanda (nations with their own horrors) control the rest. In 1999, the warring parties met in Lusaka, Zambia and attempted to forge a peace (known as the Lusaka Accords). Obviously this didn't work.

The DRC has a vast mineral wealth in diamonds, jewels, and other precious metals. The DRC also has fairly sizable gas and oil fields. It is this mineral wealth that the DRC's neighbors covet, and what the central government in Kinshasa needs to control and exploit to get the nation on its feet.

At the same time, it is this mineral wealth that fuels this conflict, despite many international embargos on them. Western companies in a variety of nations, including the United States are complicit in the horror of the Congo. Be careful of the diamonds you buy--they may have funded a child soldier who then was drugged up and sent off to massacure a village of pygmies.

The silence of the West is horrifing. In the three years since violence broke out, some three to five million people have been killed...either through violence, starvation, or disease. It is the deadliest conflict the globe has seen since World War II. Entire regions of the Congo are depopulated.

Three to five million men, women, and children. Dead. While the West watched. A virutual holocaust in Central Africa. My ire and anger, however, is hurled at the Congressional Black Caucus, who has not said a thing about the horror of the Congo.

Part Two will focus on the violence itself, and the complicty of the West.

*Sources used were--

CIA World Handbook (available online at www.cia.gov)
World of Buisness Information Intelligence Report: Democratic Republic of the Congo (available thru Lexus-Nexus)
World Almanac and Book of Facts (2001)
A global soul; Empires of Profit: commerce, conquest and corporate responsibility by Salil Tripathi contained w/in The New Statesman, 5/19/2003. (yea, i got this off lexus-nexus also...i'm addicted to this thing!)