Kongo och den västerländska rovkapitalismen

Uppmärksammar här några artiklar på ZNet av journalisten Keith Harmon Snow. Han skriver om denna i medierna totalt bortglömda konflikt och den västerländska rovkapitalism som härjat i Kongo sedan, ja sedan Kung Leopolds tid! Man kan inte påstå att denna utsutgning och exploatering avtagit eller förändrats märkvärt.

Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in the Congo. Från denna artikel:

The British medical journal Lancet recently took greater notice of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) than all western media outlets combined. A group of physicians reported that about 4 million people have died since the “official” outbreak of the Congolese war in 1998 (1). The BBC reported the war in Congo has claimed more lives than any armed conflict since World War II (2). However, experts working in the Congo, and Congolese survivors, count over 10 million dead since war began in 1996—not 1998—with the U.S.-backed invasion to overthrow Zaire’s President Joseph Mobutu. While the western press quantifies African deaths all the time, no statistic can quantify the suffering of the Congolese.

Some people are aware that war in the Congo is driven by the desire to extract raw materials, including diamonds, gold, columbium tantalite (coltan), niobium, cobalt, copper, uranium and petroleum. Mining in the Congo by western companies proceeds at an unprecedented rate, and
it is reported that some $6 million in raw cobalt alone—an element of superalloys essential for nuclear, chemical, aerospace and defense industries—exits DRC daily. Any analysis of the geopolitics in the Congo requires an understanding of the organized crime perpetrated through multi-national businesses, in order to understand the reasons why the Congolese people have suffered a virtually unending war since 1996.

THREE CHEERS FOR EVE ENSLER?: Propaganda, White Collar Crime and Sexual Atrocities in Eastern Congo. Från denna artikel:

Further, these feature articles express some very white supremacist thinking about rape in Congo. “Because there has been no justice,” Eve Ensler states, “because so few perpetrators have been held accountable for the crimes that they're committing, it's becoming as Christine [Schuler Deschryver] said to me when we were there, like a country sport: rape.”

So, according to this description, Congolese men are universally castigated for “rape as sport,” no matter that this is committed by armed forces backed, armed, and licensed by the West to commit massive sexual atrocities, or that Congolese men are killed outright when militias enter villages. As shown below, the Congolese militias and National Army serve a deeper, hidden, Western corporate agenda: organized white-collar crime. They are paid in kind for services provided to maintain and insure natural resource plunder and the acquisition and control of vast tracts of Congolese territory.

Snow skriver mycket och med berättigad ilska mot den västerländska exploateringen. I den första artikeln är det svårt att hänga med i svängarna i alla namn och västerländska företag som omnämns. Företaget Metalor som han nämner som svenskt tror jag är schweiziskt. Att de aldrig kan lära sig skillnaden på oss och schweizarna! Den andra artikeln är väldigt lång och hade kunnat vara mer fokuserad, men det finns bra avsnitt i den också.

Bloggar om: Kongo, Keith Harmon Snow, rovkapitalism, exploatering, Afrika