Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

16 Years of U.S. Genocide in Congo
12 Dec 2012
🖨️ Print Article

 

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

The U.S. tells the world it can’t figure out how six million people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo – while Washington writes the checks and arms the perpetrators to the teeth. Like Mafia Dons pretending to be honest businessmen, successive U.S. administrations subsidize and direct the worst genocide since World War Two.

 

16 Years of U.S. Genocide in Congo

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“For 16 years, Uganda and Rwanda have done the bidding of their paymasters and arms suppliers, the American and British governments.”

The United States has financed and given overall direction to the worst genocide since World War Two, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since 1996, Washington has drenched Congo’s eastern provinces in the blood of over six million people. The governments of Rwanda and Uganda, the direct perpetrators of this holocaust, are in every sense of the word agents of U.S. foreign policy, who operate with impunity under the imperial umbrella.

A growing number of voices now charge that the Obama administration, like the Bush and Clinton administrations before it, has “protected” Rwanda and Uganda in their de facto annexation of eastern Congo and its mineral riches. But the actual relationship is more like that between a Mafia Godfather and his murderous henchmen. For 16 years, Uganda and Rwanda have done the bidding of their paymasters and arms suppliers, the American and British governments. If the Nuremburg rules of international justice were in force today, the highest officials in London and Washington would face death by hanging for their monstrous crimes – and only later would Presidents Kagame of Rwanda and Museveni of Uganda take their walk with the executioner.

When Congolese women and children screamed in agony, United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice said, literally, that the U.S. should “look the other way” – knowing full well that a people were being annihilated. She is no different than the high Nazi officials who were hanged for waging aggressive war and the slaughter of millions, almost 70 years ago.

“If the Nuremburg rules of international justice were in force today, the highest officials in London and Washington would face death by hanging for their monstrous crimes.”

And now, after 16 years of unspeakable carnage, the world’s greatest military power, equipped with the most sophisticated means of information gathering ever devised, whose soldiers train and equip the Rwandans and Ugandans who are responsible for tens of thousands of murders a month, claims to have only the most limited knowledge of how six million people wound up dead – half of them children below the age of five.

During hearings this week at the House Subcommittee on Africa, Johnnie Carson, an avuncular Black man who’s filling Susan Rice’s old shoes as assistant secretary of State for African Affairs, performed his own sickening dance of death, admitting that the so-called M23 “rebels” that have been rampaging through eastern Congo “would not be the threat” they are today “without external support.” But Carson would still not say directly that Rwanda is the real power behind M23, and he tried to absolve the government of Uganda of complicity. Steve Hege, who coordinated the UN Group of Experts whose report Susan Rice tried to suppress, testified that “Rwanda, in fact, orchestrated the creation of M23,” and that “senior Ugandan officials” were deeply involved in M23’s operations.

Johnnie Carson and Susan Rice are not motivated to lie by loyalty to African military strongmen. They are loyal to U.S. government policies that they have both played a role in formulating. Just because Susan Rice qualifies as a person of the lowest human order imaginable – an accomplice to genocide – does not make her a rogue element. Far from it: she is a “good German” soldier, following her commander-in-chief’s orders, oblivious to the agony of dying Africans, whose lives don’t count for anything in America, anyway – including, it appears in much of Black America, where Rice is applauded as yet another Black face in a very high place. For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.



Your browser does not support the audio element.

listen
http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20121212_gf_USPolicyCongo.mp3

More Stories


  • The Problem with Juneteenth
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    The Problem with Juneteenth
    15 Jun 2022
    Juneteenth was a people's holiday with deep meaning for the descendants of enslaved people. But the declaration of an official federal holiday has turned it into an opportunity for corporate…
  • Hubert Harrison, Tribune of the People: Part Two, The Voice of Harlem Radicalism
    Sean I. Ahern
    Hubert Harrison, Tribune of the People: Part Two, The Voice of Harlem Radicalism
    15 Jun 2022
    Hubert Henry Harrison was one of the foremost Black socialist and nationalist thinkers of the early 20th century. He was known as "the father of Harlem radicalism." This is the second of of a…
  • EXCERPT: On the Pan-American Congress, José Martí, 1889
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    EXCERPT: On the Pan-American Congress, José Martí, 1889
    15 Jun 2022
    José Martí’s account of the 1889 Pan-American Congress offers lessons for last week’s failed Summit of the Americas.
  • The Trend Toward a Multipolar World is Defined by Class Struggle
    Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
    The Trend Toward a Multipolar World is Defined by Class Struggle
    15 Jun 2022
    The emerging multipolar world is the result of struggles for national sovereignty and self-determination, which are connected with the world wide class struggle.
  • Democrats Aren’t the Only Game in Town for Ethiopian American Voters
    Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Democrats Aren’t the Only Game in Town for Ethiopian American Voters
    15 Jun 2022
    Teddy Fikre is an Ethiopian-American independent candidate for Congress in Virginia. He discusses the challenges that his community faces in advocating for their homeland through U.S. electoral…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us