TJ COLES

Ever since Belgium’s King Leopold II (1835-1909) established the Congo Free State in 1885, international powers have exploited the region’s vast resources. Leading a regime that went on to kill an estimated eight million people to plunder their gold, ivory, and rubber, Leopold reportedly described Congo as “a magnificent African cake.”

More recently, US President Biden’s International Trade Administration declared: “With total mineral wealth estimated in the tens of trillions of dollars,” what is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) “offers opportunities for American firms with a high tolerance for risk.” The role of the Africa Command is to reduce that risk. The US Department of Defense says that Africa “has a plethora of strategic materials, such as cobalt, chromium, tantalum and more. African resources are critical to 21^st century progress” (read: US corporate dominance).

From the late-1990s to the present, Euro-American mining, processing, and financial corporations have relied on the slave-labor of miners and the muscle of armed gangs to export rare earth metals, such as coltan and tantalum, to the West for vital components in computers, phones, missiles, etc. The rush to renewables ushers in a new era of competition for the rare metal, cobalt.

The US sets its sights on a mineral rich Congo

population of 93 million. The country’s entire gross domestic product is around $50 billion, making it one of the poorest countries in the world. As trillion-dollar companies like Apple, Microsoft and Tesla rely on DRC’s materials, seven in 10 Congolese survive on less than $1.90 a day. Life expectancy is 60 years, compared to 78 in the US, and infant mortality is 66 deaths per 1,000 live births compared to 5.6 in the US.

The Pentagon’s main interest in Congo began during the Second World War (1939-45). Owned by Belgium’s Union Minière, the Shinkolobwe mine in the southern Katanga province contained the purest known uranium ore, which the US Army Corps of Engineers used in the Manhattan Project launched in 1942 to construct the world’s first nuclear weapon. Ore from the mine was used in the subsequent manufacture of nuclear weapons.

By the 1950s, the US State Department planned to invest $660 million (around $7 billion today) to “develop” Congo’s infrastructure for corporate exploitation. In 1960, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba declared independence from Belgium, naming the country the Republic of the Congo (RoC), and making relatively mild overtures to the USSR. The politician Moïse Tshombé declared Katanga’s independence from RoC.

MI6 murdered Lumumba and the CIA replaced him with its asset, General Mobutu Sese Seko, who later renamed the country Zaire and ruled until his overthrow in 1997.

Mobutu (left) was a key CIA asset

Throughout the 1960s, the CIA essentially created and managed the Zairian Armed Forces (Forces Armées Zaïroises, ZAC), training special air units and hiring mercenaries to bolster Mobuto’s forces. Tshombé’s secession was crushed, as were intermittent struggles, such as the Simba Rebellion from 1963 to ’65; one of whose leaders was future President, Laurent-Désiré Kabila. The US reluctantly tolerated small Cuban and Chinese military contingents in Zaire because they did not affect mining operations. By the 1980s, Belgian, French, German, and Israeli personnel were also training the ZAC.

Washington plays innocent bystander while fueling intrigues

Geographical considerations, the involvement of neighboring states, international interference, the role of specific ethnic groups in particular conflicts, and shifting paramilitary alliances make the Congo Wars extremely complicated. What follows is a basic outline focusing on the largely-overlooked US role.

Since at least 1990, the US has used Uganda as a conduit to arm Zaire/DRC. Until Uganda’s role in the wars was exposed, the Bill Clinton administration’s African Crisis Response Initiative saw an initial round of US military training for the Uganda People’s Defense Force. Clinton’s International Military Education and Training programs continued regardless. Both programs worsened the Congo crises, as we will see.

The centerpiece of the First Congo War that began in 1996 was the overthrow of Gen. Mobutu, led by Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaïre, AFDL). The AFDL was supported by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), whose Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame, now the president of Rwanda, had been trained by the US at Fort Leavenworth. RPF personnel were trained by the Green Berets.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame

Described as a “visionary” by US Gen. George Joulwan, Kagame had honed his craft murdering Hutu during the Rwanda Genocide in 1994. Hundreds of thousands of Hutu fled into DRC, settling in the eastern regions where the mineral resources happened to be located. The RPF and its allied paramilitaries occupied DRC, initially to help build up Kabila’s Armed Forces, but also to avenge massacres of Tutsi and secure the mines.

We can plausibly assume based on chronicles of events that Washington’s role was to play innocent bystander while benefiting from the mining and supply-chain operations of the RPF, Ugandan military, and related gangs.

Foreign demand for rare earth minerals drives an unprecedented death toll

Even before Kabila seized power, international mining and infrastructure giants were negotiating contracts with his AFDL party.

American Mineral Fields landed a $1 billion deal to mine DRC. Bechtel hired NASA to provide satellite images of mineral-rich regions and allegedly acquire information on rebel movements for Kabila’s military. As Anglo-American, Barrick Gold, DeBeers, and other corporations signed mining contracts, Kabila created the Banque de Commerce, du Developpement et de l’Industrie to finance mining operations. The bank was based in Rwanda, from which untraceable coltan sourced from DRC conflict areas was exported to Western corporations, including Afrimex, Banro-Resources, and Union Transport.

The Second Congo War, from 1998-2003 and de facto to the present, has led to the deaths of an estimated 5.4 million people: most of them civilians who perished from war-related hunger and disease. The war was, in large part, an effort by different powers and factions to back or depose the Kabila family dynasty, seize control of resource-rich areas, and to settle long-standing rivalries. Unlike the first war, this one was explicitly driven by demand in Asia, Europe, and North America for rare materials.

The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that Kabila’s nationalizations “sent a worrying signal … to foreign companies that are eager to do business in this mineral-rich country.” Kabila soon fell out with his Ugandan and Rwandan backers, who in 1998 helped to form a new party: the Rally for Congolese Democracy (Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie, RCD). The anti-Kabila RCD splintered into militant rebel groups and advanced across the country. Troops from Angola, Chad, Libya, and Zimbabwe entered DRC to back Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001, leaving his son Joseph (b. 1971) to rule from 2003 until 2019.

As far as international investors were concerned, the myriad rebel factions were crucial for maintaining the supply lines of rare materials. Typically, they were smuggled to Europe-bound cargo planes via Rwanda.

From the Kony 2012 psy-op by the NGO Invisible Children

Kony 2012: a US psy-war op aimed at protecting a key proxy

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni was one of America’s top proxies in DRC, and a UN report Uganda as a main sponsor of the conflict. In his effort to remove Museveni, the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) led by the cultist Joseph Kony attacked Uganda from DCR. In 2006, the UN backed Uganda’s invasion of DRC to hunt for Kony. The newly-formed US Africa Command (AFRICOM) provided covert assistance to Uganda, including training and satellite phones, in a failed counterinsurgency war which caused the LRA to exacerbate their killings in DRC.

From 2011 to 2017, the US initiated the anti-Kony operation, Observant Compass. As part of the mission, the US Special Operations Command Africa established a task force “to command and control the operation that stretched from Uganda, through the eastern [DRC] into the Central African Republic, and across South Sudan.” Personnel from the fabled A-Team “served as advisors to [the] African Union Regional Task Force.”

Released in the eponymous year, the documentary Kony 2012 brought the atrocities of the LRA to international attention. But US Special Operations Command documents suggest that the film’s producer, the NGO Invisible Children, was unwittingly part of a US psychological warfare operation. Army Special Operations Forces name the Congolese and Ugandan militaries, as well as several NGOs including Invisible Children, as “partners” in their operations.

Unlike the first attempt, Observant Compass reduced the LRA’s numbers and notoriety.

As China fears rise, AFRICOM enters the fray – and atrocities ensue

Washington and various European “former” colonial powers shifted policy from indirectly backing proxies, like the Uganda and Rwanda-supported rebels, to “professionalizing” the central Armed Forces (Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo, FARDC). The George W. Bush administration introduced a DRC “security sector reform” program, which included hiring the private “contractor,” Camber Corporation.

The Bush administration’s urge to “professionalize” and “legitimize” the FARDC coincided with China’s growing activities in the country. A Fort Benning Training and Doctrine Command document bemoaned the fact that in 2007 “China signed an agreement with [DRC] in which China provides $5 billion for infrastructure improvements in exchange for rights to DRC’s natural resources.”

Now that China was in DRC, human rights and traceable supply lines suddenly became a concern for Washington. US advanced training of the FARDC coincided with the passing of Dodd-Frank 2010, which required the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to mandate companies to verify supply chains.

In the same year, AFRICOM facilitated the US-DRC military partnership. The objective was “to transform the [FARDC],” among other things for “internal security operations.” A new Light Infantry Battalion was inaugurated by US Ambassador William Garvelink at the Kisangani Base Camp in north-central DRC. Training was provided under AFRICOM’s Special Operations Command, led by Brig. Gen. Christopher Haas, and unnamed State Department “contractors.”

By September, 750 soldiers had graduated in what AFRICOM describes as “a model for future reforms within the Congolese armed forces” and reveals the creation of a new 391^st Commando Battalion. Commander of training at Camp Base, Maj. John Peter Molengo, said: “In 2006 our president [Bush] promised a transformation of the [DRC] armed forces. I see this as an important step.”

Within a few years, the “important step” was revealed for what it was. Members of the Battalion had been exposed by the UN looting villages, murdering civilians, and raping dozens of women and girls, some as young as six. Stars and Stripes reported: “AFRICOM declined to comment …, referring questions to the U.S. State Department.”

Uganda’s military spreads chaos

If adding to chaos is the goal, AFRICOM’s strategy is working. To date, there are 4.5 million internally displaced Congolese, over one million of whom lost their homes during fighting in 2016-17 alone.

Like the LRA, another rebel group – this time, Islamic – called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), bolted from the Ugandan military and based itself in DRC where it is now attempting to establish a caliphate. The UN Organization Stabilization Mission DRC is helping the FARDC. Operations that began in North Kivu in November 2019 wound up displacing 400,000 people. In a repeat of botched US efforts to conquer the LRA, FARDC tactics caused the ADF to enter previously peaceful territory.

Founded in the 1970s, the Cooperative for Development of the Congo (Coopérative de développement économique du Congo, CODECO) is an umbrella of militia based in Ituri province in the northeast. CODECO mainly consists of ethnic Lendu whose are engaged in long-standing conflict with the Hema people. Despite the July 2020 peace agreement, FARDC operations have exacerbated the violence.

Founded in 1969, the ethno-federalist Kongo-majority Bundu Dia Kongo (BDK) is a Christian cult that encourages violence against non-Kongo peoples, even setting up roadblocks to divide communities. The BDK faces crackdowns by the police and FARDC, which in April 2020 launched anti-BDK operations in Kongo Central and in the capital, Kinshasa.

Greenwashing the race for trillions in renewables profits

As the violence continues across much of the country, so do the exports to most of the world. Corporate profiteering from the global climate emergency has triggered a cobalt rush. The unreliability of DRC supply chains has also triggered a move to design cobalt-free renewables.

Concentrated among 3,000 companies, the so-called global green economy is worth $4.5 trillion; more than the international oil and gas sector. The renewables market alone is worth over $600 billion. Electric vehicles (EV) are valued at around $170 billion and expected to growth to $700 billion within the next five years.

Cathodes are an essential part of the lithium ion batteries (LiBs) that, until recently, had been ubiquitous but tiny, hitherto requiring small amounts of cobalt. The emerging EV market means that large 100 kilowatt-per-hour LiBs contain 20 kg of cobalt in their cathode components. The US Department of Energy explains that in addition to being mined, cobalt (Co) is obtained as a by-product of other materials and almost entirely sourced from abroad, making US businesses dependent on metal markets and exporting countries. American corporations are therefore “looking to secure sources of Co, to drastically reduce the Co content in LiBs, or both.”

At present, 255,000 Congolese mine for cobalt, mainly in the conflict-free south, earning less than $2 per day with no benefits in conditions that are both immediately hazardous (e.g., collapsing tunnels, dangerous tools) and carry long-term risk (e.g., respiratory, orthopedic). Some 40,000 cobalt miners are children.

Bolstered by their legal obligations to report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, numerous US corporations have attempted to greenwash their supply chains by claiming that they are sourced ethically. The Anglo-Swiss mining giant, Glencore, has a market capitalization roughly equal to DRC’s entire GDP. In recent years, it has signed partnership pledges with renewables customers to ethically source cobalt.

Other initiatives include Apple’s Supplier Responsibility Progress reports. BMW, Samsung, and others, meanwhile, have launched the Cobalt for Development Project. Tesla says that it will phase out cobalt from its lithium batteries and, in the meantime has, joined the Fair Cobalt Alliance. But a recent class action lawsuit on behalf of several injured Congolese miners alleges that Alphabet (Google), Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla are “aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children … to mine cobalt.”

Playing the blame China game

Despite the greenwashing, the cobalt mining, refining, smelting, and exportation industries remain dangerous, exploitative, polluting, and terrible for public relations. On the other hand, these conditions help to keep production costs low and profits high. The informal solution for many Western businesses and governments is to deploy media, NGOs, and the intelligentsia to point the moral finger of blame at China, whose corporations operate extensively in southern, cobalt-rich DRC.

For example, a recent article exposes the cruel working conditions in the town of Fungurume imposed on small and “artisanal” miners contracted by the big, so-called legitimate companies, like China’s Molybdenum. Describing a “slave and master” relationship, one of thousands of miners revealed how he works for $3.50 a day, eating two tiny bread rolls, with wages deducted for missing work.

A November 8, 2021 Guardian article sponsored by Pam Omidyar’s Humanity United

The report was funded by Humanity United, an NGO founded by eBay billionaire and Intercept owner Pierre Omidyar’s wife, Pam. Humanity United has received grant money from numerous sources, including the William J. Clinton Foundation. “This grant funded Humanity United’s continued contribution and membership to the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative.”

But such reports omit that China’s Molybdenum is owned by US institutional investors: JPMorgan Funds, Vanguard Total International, Vanguard Emerging Markets, BlackRock, and others. Amnesty International traces the “downstream” supply chain of Chinese-acquired cobalt to Asian, European, and US corporations.

Cobalt is typically smelted and refined by China’s Huayou and its CDM subsidiary, put into batteries by Amperex, BYD, LG, Samsung, Sony, and others, and sold as components in Apple, BMW, Dell, Fiat-Chrysler, GM, Microsoft, Tesla, and other Western products.

Weaponizing space to win the “Great Power Competition”

DRC is directly linked to Washington’s long-term efforts to rule the world by force. Just as King Leopold II described Congo as a “magnificent African cake,” ex-US Naval Intelligence Officer, Dr. Mir Sadat, Policy Director of the National Security Council, says:

“Great Power Competition in space is in some ways analogous to the Great Game of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries between Great Britain and Russia, which competed over access to resources and geostrategic positioning in Central and South Asia. Today, there is a similar great game brewing between China and other spacefaring nations led by the United States over access to potential cislunar [between Earth and Moon] resources and overall space dominance.”

But it wasn’t China that first declared its intention to rule space and therefore the world. In 1997, the US Space Command published its “full spectrum dominance” doctrine: to weaponize space by the year 2020 “to protect U.S. interests and investment” (read: corporate profits). Endangering us all, “full spectrum dominance” includes hypersonic missile drones and high-altitude craft that can strike Russia and/or China with “low-yield” nuclear weapons.

Like other products that emerged from taxpayer funding under the cover of military research and development (satellites, computers, the internet, etc.), space exploration is now commercialized through companies like Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company, while serving the Pentagon by, for instance, launching military satellites, as Elon Musk’s SpaceX has done. The Pentagon and other federal agencies describe this arrangement as the Space Industrial Base.

Sadat helped to establish the Space Force, which largely took over from the Space Command. Specifically naming cobalt and other rare materials as the “greatest” supply risks, a fear-mongering report about supposed lack of US influence, co-authored by Sadat and sponsored by the Space Force, says: “The United States must compete for global market share and leadership – currently dominated by China, Russia over terrestrial commodities – basic and manufactured – into the space economy.”

It may turn out that the millions of destitute Congolese sitting on tantalum and coltan, and the hundreds of thousands of slave-like and child miners toiling in hazardous conditions to extract these products are not the only victims. If the “Great Game” for “full spectrum dominance” continues without grassroots pressure to end it, escalating geopolitical “competition” between nuclear powers could annihilate the rest of the world as well.

thegrayzone.com

Inaccurate Assumptions About Algeria

Algerian President Bouteflika’s surprise about-face in going back on his previous decision to run for a fifth consecutive term in office has been the talk of Africa the entire week, with this announcement taking many off guard but nonetheless largely being met with universal applause as the most responsible recourse to avoid an outbreak of violence in this strategically positioned North African state. The country had been experiencing an unprecedented wave of peaceful protests in reaction to his originally declared candidacy fed by the majority-youthful population’s indignation at high unemployment and a stagnant economy, to say nothing of how insulted they felt that an elderly leader who is speculated to be physically and perhaps even mentally incapacitated after suffering a 2013 stroke would be put forth once more as the face of the nation by what are thought to be his powerful military-intelligence “deep state” handlers.

A lot has already been written about what might come next in Algeria, but most observers are either analyzing events in a vacuum or are making predictable comparisons to the 2011 “Arab Spring” theater-wide Color Revolutions, neither of which are entirely accurate because they both miss the fact that Algeria represents the eighth non-electoral regime change in Africa in as many years and is therefore just the latest manifestation of a larger trend that has hitherto not yet been brought to the public’s attention. It’s true that there are shades of the “Arab Spring” in what’s presently taking place in Algeria, but simply stopping there doesn’t do the country justice because it misleadingly implies that foreign powers had a predominant hand in guiding the course of events there. It also overlooks everything else of regime change relevance that took place in the continent over the past eight years and therefore inaccurately assumes that this is a one-off event unrelated to anything prior.

Rolling Regime Changes

For simplicity’s sake, here’s a breakdown of the most pertinent events apart from the Algerian one that was just described, including the two non-electoral regime change attempts that failed, two electoral ones that deserve mention for reasons that will be explained below, and a short international intervention in support of a mostly forgotten regime change operation:

* 2011-2012 “Arab Spring” Events In Tunisia, Egypt, And Libya:

The whole world is aware of what happened during that time so there isn’t much need to rehash it other than to point out the author’s interpretation of those events as an externally provoked theater-wide regime change campaign that was originally intended to replace long-serving secular governments with Turkish-aligned Muslim Brotherhood ones prior to the inevitable leadership transition that would eventually take place after their elderly leaders pass away.

The whole point in preempting this process and artificially accelerating it was to ensure that their successors would remain geopolitically loyal to the US, which couldn’t be guaranteed if this “changing of the guard” was “allowed” to occur “naturally”. Moreover, the US thought that it could weaponize the semi-populist appeal of political Islam in those countries in order to portray its proxies as having the “genuine” support of the public. This nevertheless backfired in Egypt but was ultimately manageable.

* 2014 Burkina Faso:

The sudden onset of progressively violent protests in response to long-serving President Blaise Compaoré’s attempts to change the constitution to run for yet another term quickly resulted in a regime change that was briefly challenged a year later by loyalist special forces in a failed coup. Some observers predicted that the “Burkinabe Revolution” would trigger an “African Spring” against other rulers who had been in office for decades and also were speculated to soon announce their intent to follow in Compaoré’s footsteps and change their own constitutions as well, though this forecast didn’t unfold as expected.

Still, the 2014 Burkina Faso regime change could in hindsight be seen as evidence that genuine (as in, not externally provoked, guided, and/or hijacked) protests are capable of unseating entrenched governments and the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucratic structures (“deep state”) behind them. It should also be noted that the international community recognized Compaoré’s resignation and subsequent decision to go into self-imposed exile (thought to be motivated by his desire to evade justice for his alleged corruption and other crimes by the post-coup authorities) whereas they were against the military coup attempt by his loyalists a year later.

* 2017 The Gambia:

Most of the world has forgotten about it and barely anyone paid much attention to it at the time anyhow, but a Senegalese-led ECOWAS military intervention toppled Gambian President Jammeh at the beginning of the year after he refused to step down from office following his electoral loss a month prior in December 2016. The leader of this tiny sliver of an African state was also becoming internationally reviled by the West even before the 2016 election because of his decision to withdraw from the Commonwealth of Nations and begin the process of doing the same when it came to the International Criminal Court. In addition, his 2015 declaration of an Islamic Republic also earned him the West’s consternation, not that they needed any other excuses given the aforementioned.

The Gambian case study somewhat mirrors the controversial French-led UN intervention that took place in the Ivory Coast in 2011 following a similarly disputed election a few months prior, though the Ivorian leader wasn’t as lucky as his Gambian counterpart in that he was captured by French-backed forces and extradited to The Hague, where he was charged with war crimes but eventually acquitted earlier this year. The lesson to be had from both the Ivory Coast and The Gambia is that international coalitions can be assembled to remove recalcitrant leaders from office who refuse to accept electoral results, though this is less of a “rule” and more of a trend, though one that might gain support at home and/or abroad if it follows highly publicized protests that give the intervention the pretense of legitimacy (whether genuine or not).

* 2017 Angola:

This rising power in Southern Africa experienced a democratic transfer of power that summer from revolutionary leader Jose Eduardo dos Santos to fellow MPLA member and designated successor João Lourenço in what was initially thought by many to be a carefully coordinated “shuffling of the cards” by the Angolan “deep state” but which eventually proved to be a “deep state” coup after Lourenço quickly went to work eradicating the power structure that his predecessor implemented and even going after the former “royal family” (in particular, his daughter [who’s also Africa’s richest woman and its first female billionaire] and son on corruption charges). Suffice to say, this was a shock for many, though generally a pleasant one for most.

The abovementioned events prove that sometimes the “deep state” is the most influential force driving regime change in certain countries, namely those with post-war revolutionary parties that still remain in power. It’ll turn out that Angola might have been an inspiration for what later took place in Ethiopia and just occurred in Algeria, albeit with both unfolding under slightly different circumstances and in varying ways, but the point is that the so-called “powers that be” might either be engaged in serious infighting among themselves and/or decide that the most responsible course of action in the name of national stability is either “shuffle the cards” or carry out a genuine regime change behind the scenes to preemptively or reactively quell (potentially) destabilizing (anti-corruption-driven or election-related) unrest.

* 2017 Zimbabwe:

The tail end of 2017 saw the Zimbabwean military carry out a de-facto coup against nonagenarian revolutionary leader Robert Mugabe during a period of rising civil society unrest in this economically destitute country. Barely anyone disputes that this was indeed a military coup, and one that was possibly partially inspired by Mugabe’s controversial grooming of his wife as his successor at the expense of the ZANU-PF political and military elite, but it wasn’t legally recognized as such abroad because otherwise the African Union and other actors would have been compelled to impose varying degrees of sanctions against the country in response.

This interestingly shows that some military coups are supported by the so-called “international community” while others such as the soon-to-be-described Gabonese attempt earlier this year aren’t, suggesting  that there might be certain criteria involved in determining whether such seizures of power (or attempts thereof) will be (even begrudgingly) accepted abroad or not. The 2005 and 2008 Mauritanian military ones and the 2010 Nigerien one weren’t endorsed by the world but serious actions weren’t taken to isolate them both because they uncontestably succeeded and also out of concern for destabilizing the security situation in the terrorist-afflicted West African region.

* 2018 South Africa:

Jacob Zuma was pressured to resign in early 2018 due to what many have interpreted as being a “deep state” coup against him carried out by a rival faction of the ruling ANC led by his eventual successor Ramaphosa. Party infighting heated up after the BRICS leader found himself ensnared in corruption scandals that may or may not have been tacitly facilitated by his rivals, with all of this occurring against the backdrop of rising anti-government unrest and the increasing appeal of opposition parties. Whether out of the pursuit of pure power and/or sensing that the party needed to change both its external branding and internal policies in order to remain in power, Ramaphosa eventually deposed Zuma and took the reins of this rising African Great Power despite the electorate never voting him into office.

The 2018 situation in South Africa showed that even the most outwardly stable of the continent’s countries and the one most highly regarded by the “international community” (both Western and non-Western alike, the latter in regards to BRICS) can experience a non-electoral regime change, albeit one that was mostly executed behind the scenes following an intertwined pressure campaign by the public and the ruling party’s rival faction that aspired to enter into power. In a sense, South Africa – which is generally considered to be one of Africa’s most vibrant democracies – set the tone for the rest of the continent because the message that it sent was that all of its peers could potentially do the same without any external criticism being levelled against them whatsoever so long as they pulled it off smoothly and labelled it an “internal affair”.

* 2018 Ethiopia:

Ethiopia captivated the world’s imagination after its post-war ruling party decided upon the relatively young 41-year-old former military intelligence officer Abiy Ahmed to be its new leader following the outbreak of violent unrest in 2016 that threatened to return Africa’s second most populous country to civil war. To make a long story short, Abiy is of the Oromo ethnicity that represents the country’s largest plurality but which has traditionally been underrepresented in its ruling class, especially following the rise to power of the Tigray-led EPRDF, but he swiftly got to work dismantling the party’s “old guard” in what can only be described as a “deep state” coup with overwhelming public support. Importantly, he also made peace with neighboring Eritrea and put the two fraternal people’s lingering tensions behind them as they jointly embarked on crafting a new regional future for the Horn of Africa.

Ethiopia set the precedent whereby large-scale unrest might serve as an incentive for responsible factions of the “deep state” to carry out a coup against their ruling rivals, building upon the Angolan antecedent in that the Southern African case didn’t occur in response to any significant protests or outbreak of violence like the one in the Horn of Africa did.  The events in Ethiopia are also evidence that even the most entrenched and militarily powerful “deep states” are comprised of diverse factions, some of which have radically different ideas than the ruling ones, as might turn out to be the case in Algeria too depending on how the situation there unfolds. The main point, however, is that “deep state” factions might use naturally occurring or externally provoked unrest as their pretext for rising to power behind the scenes and ultimately in public.

* 2018 Comoros:

It’s difficult to categorize what exactly took place last year in the island nation, but it can most objectively be summed up as a semi-popular and possibly externally influenced attempt to actively challenge the country’s regional center by a peripheral unit that felt disenfranchised by democratically instituted constitutional reforms that removed the coup-prone state’s rotating presidency clause. There was briefly fear that Anjouan would attempt to secede from the union once more and that this scenario might provoke another international intervention to restore national unity like what took place in 2008, but these were abated after the military quickly restored law and order after dislodging the couple dozen fighters who attempted to take over that part of the country.

What’s important to pay attention to is that intra-state regional disputes could dangerously create the pretext for nationwide or provincial regime changes depending on how the course of escalating political events develops. The Comorian President in this case is thought to have taken advantage of his home region’s demographic (and consequently, electoral) dominance to legitimize his bid to remain in power, demonstrating a variant of other reform methods that have been attempted elsewhere in Africa but custom-tailored to his country’s specific situation. Even though some members of the international community criticized last summer’s referendum, they still accepted it because his initiative did in fact democratically win, even if the odds were stacked in his favor per the demographic factor that was just described.

* 2018-2019 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC):

There was global trepidation for the past year after former President Kabila delayed his country’s first-ever democratic transfer of power for logistical reasons that he would try to change the constitution to remain in power indefinitely, something that his traditional Western  backers pressured him not to do while his new Chinese patron remained silent about on the basis that its political process is an internal affair (though its strategic cobalt interests there might have played a role in its position to stay on the good side of the government). The country gradually slid into an undeclared state of low-level civil war that could more accurately be described as a hybrid one and which could have exploded on command into a much larger conflict had he not unexpectedly reached a speculated deal with one of the opposition leaders to supposedly allow Tshisekedi to replace Kabila while the former strongman would remain the “grey cardinal” after his party came out on top in the parliamentary elections.

International media and local activists decried this stunt as a blatant undermining of what should have been a democratic transfer of power that some observers said would have rightly resulted in Fayulu winning had the vote truly been free and fair, but that candidate posed the greatest threat to the Congolese “deep state” that owes its lucrative existence to Kabila and was – as the narrative goes – sidelined in favor of Tshsekedi, the son of a well-known opposition leader. This can be seen as a hybrid form of both an “internationally recognized” election and a “deep state” coup, the former of which was universally recognized probably because of the multilateral interests involved in retaining stability in the mineral-rich country (at least for the time being) while the latter was suppressed in order not to sully the optics of the DRC’s “first-ever democratic transfer of power” (and consequently the soft power of those who endorsed Kabila’s cunning plan).

* 2019 Gabon:

As was touched upon earlier, there was a failed attempt to stage a military coup in the economically stratified and politically polarized country of Gabon where an ageing and ailing leader continues to rule as part of a political dynasty that’s been in power for over half a century. The regime change operation was quickly put down by the rest of the military forces that didn’t join in the coup, though the event succeeded in shedding global light on the underlying tensions prevalent in this OPEC member country. It also temporarily raised concerns about whether the French would use their in-country military forces to aid the embattled government and “restore democracy” if the rebels succeeded in seizing power from their proxy.

Because of its sudden onset and abrupt end, the international community had no choice but to reactively condemn it like they always usually do whenever something of the sort happens, but it might have been begrudgingly accepted just like the Mauritanian and Nigerien ones that preceded it earlier along this timeline if it succeeded without any serious resistance. That wasn’t the case in Gabon because it seemed like the military faction of the “deep state” is satisfied with President Bongo, possibly due to some behind-the-scenes patronage relationship, and therefore wouldn’t want to sacrifice their own self-interests even in the name of settling a still-lingering electoral dispute that sharply divided the nation a few years prior.

Key Variables

In view of the insight that can be gleaned from the abovementioned ten examples, it’s possible to identify the key variables that pertain to each targeted leader, the trigger event for the non-electoral regime change operation, and the determining factors behind its success or lack thereof:

Targets:

The typical target seems to be a long-serving elderly leader with speculative health concerns who represents a power structure (whether his own or inherited) that increasingly large segments of the population and/or a faction of his “deep state” has come to believe (whether on their own or with foreign infowar and NGO “nudging”) doesn’t support their interests. They’re also usually plagued by accusations of corruption (whether real, exaggerated, or false) that serve to incite unrest during periods of nationwide economic hardship caused by either systemic mismanagement, Hybrid War, and/or a drop in the price of primary exports (oil, commodities, etc.).

Triggers:

It’s usually the case that something directly or indirectly related to an impending “changing of the guard” or political transition triggers the non-electoral regime change movement, be it efforts by the incumbent to change the constitution in order to run for another term, declaring their candidacy for the x-consecutive time after already serving for many years, fears by a “deep state” faction that the incumbent will lose the next election and therefore lead to their successor possibly dismantling the power structure they inherit (usually on “anti-corruption” grounds for populist appeal), a disputed election, or in the case of the “Arab Spring”, the perception of so-called “regional momentum”.

Determinants:

Most non-electoral regime changes succeed because of factors beyond the public’s view, namely the state of affairs within the “deep state” and in particular the loyalty of the military forces that enjoy a legal monopoly on violence by virtue of their being. It’s important, however, that there’s some “plausible” public pretext for the regime change, be it protests, a corruption scandal, or a disputed election, and the unity of the “deep state” is also another important determinant because rival factions might abuse the aforesaid for their own purposes. Sometimes the threat of sanctions against the incumbent and their clique for using force to quell unrest could widen “deep state” divisions and facilitate regime change.

Who’s Next On The Chopping Block?

All of this begs the question of which countries might be next to experience their own non-electoral regime changes, with the following ones most closely aligning with the author’s model elaborated on above and being presented in alphabetical order:

* Cameroon:

President Biya won his sixth term in office late last year following a serious breakdown of law and order in the separatist Anglophone region abutting the Nigerian border, which came on the heels of Cameroon finally seeming to surmount the challenge posed by Boko Haram in the northern part of the country. The primary geostrategic consequence of his ouster under the possible scenario of a nascent Color Revolution in the cities merging with the Unconventional War in the rural periphery might be the destabilization of what the author described as China’s plans to create a “West-Central African CPEC”, though if managed properly by the “deep state”, it might contrarily stabilize this megaproject’s viability if the choreography succeeds in placating the population.

* Republic of the Congo:

The other less-discussed Congo located between the DRC and Gabon, this one is presided over by one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders who recently joined OPEC and also put an end to a simmering insurgency in the Pool region surrounding the capital. Unlike Cameroon, it’s less clear what the geostrategic consequences of a non-electoral regime change here could be, but it might potentially be a factor in whether the country continues to remain within the joint orbit of France and China or decisively pivots to one or the other. In this sense, it could change the “balance of power” in Central Africa and contribute to the gradual retreat of Françafrique in the face of overall Chinese gains in France’s historic “sphere of influence” and Russia’s recent ones in the Central African Republic.

* Chad:

Occupying the pivot space between Saharan and Equatorial Africa, President Idriss Deby came to power on the back of a coup in 1990 and has remained in office ever since, mostly relying on the fact that his country’s military is regarded as one of the strongest in all of the continent and has an operational reach as far west as Mali. He’s not without his domestic detractors, however, some of whom have led large rebel formations towards the capital in several unsuccessful coup attempts that were at times thwarted through the intervention of his French ally, such as last month when Paris bombed an anti-government convoy that crossed into northern Chad from Libya. For all of its faults, Chad seems to be “too big to fail” for France and it’s unlikely that the former colonizer will ever let this prized piece of real estate slip from its grasp.

* Equatorial Guinea:

President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has reigned for nearly four decades and survived numerous coup attempts, some of which were planned by mercenaries in this tiny but oil-rich island-coastal nation in the strategic Gulf of Guinea.  Being located where it is and with the resource wealth that it has, it’s an important piece of the African chessboard that France might want to pry away from its American ally in order to reinforce its policy of Françafrique that’s facing its greatest threat ever from China and Russia in Central Africa. Apart from the “friendly competition” between those two Great Powers, there isn’t really much else that can be said at this time about the possible outcome of any non-electoral regime change in Equatorial Guinea.

* Mozambique:

The incumbent leader has only been in power for a few years, but he represents the corrupt and increasingly reviled FRELIMO party that’s been ruling Mozambique since independence, though to their credit, the authorities have been progressively implementing what appears to be a “phased leadership transition” to incorporate the former RENAMO rebel opposition into the country’s “deep state” as part of a peace deal. That said, this responsible arrangement could always collapse at any time, and the country is nowadays threatened by mysterious jihadists who’ve been wreaking havoc along the northern borderland with Tanzania, so “black swan” developments that might trigger a non-electoral regime change are more likely here than in most of the other predicted targets, which could have an impact on global LNG geopolitics given its sizeable offshore reserves (coincidentally located in close proximity to where the new terrorist threat emerged) and regional security.

* Sudan:

Sudan is undoubtedly in the throes of a multifaceted Hybrid War that the author elaborated upon at length in a previous piece late last year and which should be skimmed for reference if one’s interested in the strategic nuances involved, but the latest update is that its “deep state” might be preparing for a “phased leadership transition” in a manner which seemed to have influenced the Algerian one that suddenly followed soon thereafter. Simply put, Sudan is indispensable to China’s Silk Road vision for Africa and is also Russia’s gateway to the continent, so its destabilization and possible “Balkanization” like President al-Bashir warned about a year and a half ago would inflict very serious damage to multipolar integration processes all across the continent.

* Uganda:

Finally, the country that most closely fits the criteria of the author’s non-electoral regime change model is Uganda, the military heavyweight in the transregional East and Central African space that’s been ruled by President Museveni for the last one-third of a century. During the last few years, however, his mostly-youthful population (which is also one of the fastest growing in Africa, notwithstanding the large amounts of migration [sometimes illegal] that it receives) has become restive and most recently (and one can argue, quite naively) placed their hopes in the singer-turned-politician Bobi Wine because they see in him a comparatively younger face of anti-systemic change. However a non-electoral regime change might unfold in Uganda, its consequences would change the entire “balance of power” in this strategic part of the world at the height of the New Great Game and modern-day “Scramble for Africa” in the New Cold War.

Concluding Thoughts

Using the latest events in Algeria as the lead-in to discussing the other non-electoral regime changes and attempts thereof that took place in Africa since the “Arab Spring”, it’s clear to see that three separate – but sometimes interconnected scenarios – have unfolded, be they Color Revolutions like in the aforementioned 2011 events, genuine non-externally-influenced people’s movements like 2014 Burkina Faso, or “deep state” coups such as what took place in 2017 Angola and which later structurally inspired the subsequent ones in Ethiopia and Algeria (both of which were driven in part by the first two scenarios). All countries have power structures (“deep states”), but some are more flexible than others when confronting bottom-up pressure (which may or may not be externally influenced – and in the future, possibly weaponized against China’s geostrategic interests), which usually makes or breaks the regime change operation and will determine whether the forecasted targets will survive if they end up on the chopping block too.

eurasiafuture.com

In mid-December, the United Nations granted Russia an exemption to the arms embargo on the CAR, paving the way for deliveries of weapons to that war-torn country that is still immersed in an internal conflict. The embargo is effective until Jan. 31, 2019.

The UN ranks the CAR as the least-developed country in the world despite its minerals reserves. Fourteen thousand UN peacekeepers are stationed within its borders, but the government, led by President Faustin-Archange Touadera, believes that that operation is ineffective. He has relied more on Russia’s help.

This agreement is part of that trend. Russia’s regional influence is increasing. The Democratic Republic of Congo has recently decided to revive its 1999 agreement on military cooperation with Russia. In April, Mozambique agreed to open its ports to Russian naval vessels. It was recently reported that Niger is interested in purchasing Russian helicopters and firearms, including grenade launchers. Russia and Guinea are working on a military agreement, which would include free access for Russian military ships to the country’s ports, training, and other security-related issues. Russia exports Mil Mi-8/17 and Mi-24/35 helicopters to Angola, Mali, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda.

The Russian Federation has military partnerships with Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Uganda, South Sudan, Mozambique, and Angola. In 2017, Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir asked Russia to protect his country “from the aggressive acts of the United States." All in all, Russia is responsible for 30% of all arms supplies to the region.

The military cooperation goes hand-in-hand with progress in other areas. In March, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went on a five-day African tour to visit Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. He signed trade agreements with Angola and Mozambique and also strengthened diplomatic ties with Zimbabwe’s new government.

Russian companies are exploring the Darwendale platinum deposit, one of the largest in the world. Russia’s Alrosa is present in Angola, a country rich in diamonds. Moscow and Luanda are engaged in talks over cooperation in hydrocarbon production. Last October, Russia signeda $20 billion agreement to construct two nuclear power plants in Nigeria.It recently established a special relationship with Rwanda toreconnect Russia with the East African community.

Benin, Ethiopia, Guinea, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia, among others, have all been recipients of Russian debt relief over the past decade. Russia is working with Zimbabwe's and Guinea's mining industries and also cooperates on nuclear power with Sudan.

Russia and the African Union (AU) are currently in the process of drafting a conceptual framework cooperation agreement. Moscow can offer its growingability to support peacekeeping operations and training for the African Union personnel, as well as the sharing of intelligence data about foreign terrorists with the African International data bank. The Russian Federation contributes to the UN peacekeeping operations in Western Sahara, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Liberia, Sudan, and South Sudan.

Russiashowcased African business at the 2018 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. It is set to host a Russian-African Union forum in 2019. According to Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov, the forum will roll out a comprehensive, strategic road map for more economic cooperation and a wide range of investment possibilities, plus effective ways of addressing regional security issues and improving public diplomacy in Africa.

Russia’s relationship with the Southern African Development Community is also on the rise.

The states of the region are seeking to diversify their foreign relationships. Moscow is helping them to achieve this goal, as it enjoys a reputation as a reliable and pragmatic partner that is able to weigh in on regional matters both diplomatically and militarily. It maintains good relations with everyone in the region, making Russia the right choice when seeking a partner for a peacekeeping operation. Russia’s burgeoning influence in sub-Saharan Africa is a part of broader picture, as its clout has grown immensely in the Middle East and North Africa.

Moscow has recently ramped up its military assistance to the Central African Republic (CAR) upon the request of the country’s government. Last month, Russian President Putin met CAR’s President Faustin Archange Touadera in St. Petersburg to hold talks on boosting bilateral ties, including military cooperation. It’s done in strict compliance with international law. In December 2017, the UN Security Council approved a deal allowing Russia to send arms and military instructors to that crisis-hit country. The UN was provided with the serial numbers of the transferred weapons to enable international observers to track them. The arms deliveries are gratuitous.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a traditional ally of the West, has begun shifting its foreign policy priorities looking for other partners. Last month, the DR Congo’s government announced its decision to revive the 1999 military agreement with Russia. It wants Moscow to deliver armament and train military personnel of the DRC. It also hopes to expand the bilateral economic cooperation, covering the mineral production, agriculture and humanitarian contacts.

In 2017, Russia signed a $1 billion defence cooperation agreements with Angola and Nigeria. Moscow and Luanda are in talks on increasing the scope of military ties.

Russian Rosoboronexport has long-term relations with Angola, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda, Zimbabwe and several other sub-Saharan nations that include arms sales and equipment maintenance. Since 2013, the construction of service centers has been in full swing. In 2017, Russian weapons were delivered to the following sub-Saharan African nations: Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, and Angola (Su-30K jets). A contract was confirmed with Equatorial Guinea for purchase of Pantsyr-S1 air defense systems. In August 2017, Burkina Faso ordered two Mi-171 helicopters. Russia is the leading arms importer to the region, accounting for 30% of all supplies.

Russia’s weapons are in high demand being cheap and effective as has been proven by their use during the Syrian conflict. The thriving military cooperation goes hand in hand with developing ties in other areas. Trade with African countries located south of the Sahara desert was $3.6 billion in 2017. For comparison, it was $3.3 billion in 2016 and $2.2 billion in 2015. Russia is involved in exploration, mining, and energy projects. ALROSA, a diamond-mining company, operates in Angola, South Africa, Sierra Leone and Namibia. The talks are on the way to reach an agreement with the African partners to avoid double taxation and protect intellectual property.

Transport and agriculture are promising areas for joint projects. The construction of nuclear science centers in Zambia and Nigeria, as well as a nuclear power plant in South Africa, a BRICS member, are on the talks’ agenda. In April, the government of Sudan invited Russia to take part in its energy projects. Khartoum and Moscow enjoy special relationship. Last year, Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir asked the Russian president for “protection from the aggressive acts of the United States." 28 out of 55 African nations have growing trade with Russia. Cooperation with Ghana, Tanzania has promising future. Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe are historical friends with experience of doing business with Russian partners. The relations with the African Union are considered in Moscow as an issue of special importance.

In March, FM Lavrov toured Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia and Ethiopia to boost multifaceted relationships. The same month, the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) was signed to open new horizons for economic cooperation. In January, the Single African Air Transport Market was launched to be made even more attractive with coming in force of the Protocol on Free Movement of Persons, the right of Establishment and the Right of Residence. Russian businessmen will get more information on new opportunities when they visit the first Intra-African Trade Fair to take place in Cairo on December 11-17, 2018. The program of Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) held in May included special sessions on business and investment opportunities within the framework of the “Russia – Africa Business Dialogue.” The SPIEF-2018 held two special celebrations to mark Africa Day and the 55th anniversary of the African Union.

The US influence in the sub-Saharan Africa is on the wane. In contrast, Russia is making strides to strengthen its position in the region. President Vladimir Putin announced the policy of boosting ties with the region in 2006 when he visited Sub-Saharan Africa. He kept his word. The region has become an essential vector for the foreign policy of Russia, which is becoming another major player on the continent.

Image: FARDC troops from the 1st integrated brigade on operations in South Kivu. 
Photo c. keith harmon snow 2006.

In the twilight hours of 2 June 2015 residents of the city of Goma, in Congo’s eastern province of North Kivu, were awoken after midnight by gunshots, mortars and heavy artillery fire, and battle tanks.  The fighting lasted several hours.  At daybreak most government offices, schools and businesses remained closed.  The fighting resumed around 11:00 AM, and receded to the Rwanda border as Congolese tanks pressed the attackers back to Rwanda.

We are in great stress since last night.”  An official in Goma who asked not to be named reports that this is the work of the regimes in Rwanda and Uganda. From about 1:00 to 3:00 in the morning there was a lot of firing inside the town of Goma and on the border with Rwanda: Simple and heavy guns and even war tanks.  Officially, we have no precision, but it’s known that Kagame’s forces entered Congo this night.  Eight Congolese soldiers were killed; I saw one of them with my own eyes in the Virunga quarter of Goma.   The Governor and Congolese military officers are keeping quiet. [1]

Gunmen attacked the airport in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s largest city, Goma, in an overnight raid in which four government soldiers and three suspected assailants were killed, a local official and a witness said on Tuesday.”  The Reutersnews syndicate produced the only report that appeared in western media venues on 2 June 2015.  Reuters reported that North Kivu governor Julien Paluku referred to the attackers only as ‘bandits’. “A Congolese security official involved in the clashes and a Goma-based diplomat said the assailants were Mai-Mai fighters, members of one of the dozens of armed militias that control large parts of Congo’s mineral-rich eastern borderlands. [2]

Later in the day on 2 June 2015, Agence France Presse attributed the attack to a criminal gang and called the war-torn North Kivu a ‘restless province’, suggesting that the province itself is inherently prone to permanent unrest of the African variety.  ”At least one soldier and a gunman were killed overnight when a gang raided the Goma airport in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo during an apparent robbery, officials said Tuesday.  ’Bandits got inside the airport area to try to steal from depots (storing goods) waiting to be loaded on to cargo planes,’ the governor of the restless North Kivu province, Julien Paluku, toldAFP.” [3]

By 3 June 2015 the supposed culprits had been captured, and the western news syndicates were regurgitating claims by Congolese officials that the ‘bandit’ leader of the ‘gang’ was ‘a criminal from the distant city of Butembo’ who had recruited other criminals and organized an attack on Goma airport.  The reportage is confused: the attack is blamed on both ‘criminals’ and ‘ethnic Mai Mai militia’ and the Reuters correspondent ignores the contradictions.

Soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo have captured the man suspected of being behind a deadly attack this week on the largest airport in the east of the country, the government’s spokesperson said on Wednesday,” Reuters continued.  ”At least four soldiers and three suspected assailants were killed in the gun attack at Goma airport on Tuesday that military and diplomatic sources said was the work of ethnic Mai-Mai fighters. [4]

“The region has seen years of conflict involving dozens of armed militia such as the Mai-Mai that control large parts of the mineral-rich eastern borderlands, but attacks of this kind are rare.

Reuters falsely spins this as an uncharacteristic attack atypical of war-torn eastern Congo, where Ugandan and Rwandan militias under the command of presidents Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame have perpetrated war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide since at least 1994.

Similarly, there is also no mention by Reuters of the vast tracts of mineral-rich land that have been acquired and cleared of Congolese people by western mining companies like Banro Gold Corporation [5], Metallurg [6], Casa Minerals [7], or Alphamin [8], the western mining firm that has captured massive concessions in North Kivu (see Map).

Government spokesperson Lambert Mende described the man captured as a ‘criminal’ from the town of Butembo, some 270 km north of Goma. [9]

This is bullshit!”  The (unnamed) Goma official is adamant.  ”How can a group of Mai Mai leave Butembo 290 km from Goma and come to attack the airport!  And for which purpose?  Everyone knows there is no food or weapons at the Goma airport.  The [DRC] government does not want to accuse Rwanda, but Congolese people are not stupid.[10]

The 3 June 2015 Reuters article also attributes the capture of the ‘criminals’ and ‘bandits’ to the friendly cooperative assistance of neighboring Rwanda.  ”The man was arrested in Goma thanks to information provided by three captured assailants and intelligence help from neighboring Rwanda, whose phone networks the attackers used, [DRC spokesman Lambert] Mende later told Reuters.” [11]

The assailants came from Rwanda and went back to Rwanda.” The unnamed DRC official in Goma is certain that the attack is part of the new Rwandan-Ugandan military thrust — the newly and euphemistically named Christian Movement for the Reconstruction of the Congo (MCRC) — in eastern Congo.  ”There were almost 20 Mai Mai being held [in advance] just to be accused in case the attack failed.  Congolese tanks fired in the direction of Rwanda and the retreating assailants.  These were Tutsi soldiers and they came from Rwanda.  We are afraid as we know the government is hiding the truth: people saw Rwanda troops coming into Congo.[12]

The Reuters story is further confused by the inclusion of a Associated Press photograph captioned: “Congolese soldiers visit territory retaken last week from M23 rebels near the Rwandan border Joseph Kay AP.”  The Rwandan/Ugandan backed M23 insurgency was named in recognition of the 23 March 2009 peace treaty that integrated the former Rwandan/Ugandan army, theNational Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), into the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo(FARDC).  M23 soldiers claimed that the Congolese government failed to honor the terms of the agreement, and so they launched another war.  The recycled AP photograph by Joseph Kay originated in an AP story of 6 September 2013, but has been used over and over for various and diverse disinformation.[13a]

Image: United Nations (MONUC) helicopter departing an eastern Congo airport. Photo c. 2007 keith harmon snow.

The real story is that Congo appears to be on the cusp of a new insurrection.  Like the RCD, CNDP and M23 occupations, this is yet another military thrust by Rwanda and Uganda to destabilize eastern Congo and seize absolute control.  The first objective: take control of Goma.

On 6 June 2015 the Rwandan ‘news’ venue Imirasire, one of the main propaganda/disinformation venues of the regime of Paul Kagame, run by the Directorate of Military Intelligence, published a very short clip claiming that the attack on Goma airport was perpetrated by “a new rebel group headed by a former politician.”  While naming the problem more accurately than Reuters or the Congolese government were willing to do, the Imirasire report is laughable in its pretensions about violence and minerals theft. [13b]

Some Mai Mai from the Cheka [armed] group infiltrated Goma from the bush,” says the unnamed official in Goma, “and soldiers came from Rwanda and both attacked in the night under heavy rain with hope to take the airport, but they failed because the FARDC they found there were Republican Guards, trained by the USA and Israel, the best soldiers we have in Congo.  The last noise from the fighting was in the area of ‘La grande barriere’ on the Rwanda border.  Workers at the Congolese border office and Republican Guards confirmed.  After they had failed, MCRC withdrew back to Rwanda.  Local authorities forbade TV stations to show the bodies of ‘bandits’ that were killed.[14]

THE WARLORD’S WARLORDS

For the past six years Rwandan General Laurent Nkunda has been hiding in Rwanda and Uganda, shielded from arrest or prosecution by Rwandan president Paul Kagame and Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and their western backers.

Is General Laurent Nkunda now moving freely between Rwanda and Uganda, organizing a new insurrection in eastern Congo’s Kivu provinces, directing a new guerilla movement that has already perpetrated human rights atrocities and destabilized the eastern Congo?

Other known Rwandan war criminals with deep historical ties to General Laurent Nkunda are on the move.  One of these is Rwandan Major General Vincent Gatama, one of Nkunda’s former comrades, now in charge of Rwanda’s military operations in Congo.  On the night of 17 November 2012 then Colonel Vincent Gatama led a Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) special forces unit in the 2012 attack on Goma.[15]  Soon after the Goma attack, Paul Kagame promoted Gatama from Colonel to Major General in support of war operations to infiltrate and occupy eastern Congo.

Another of these Nkunda-allied warlords is General Bwambale Kakolele, a former leader of one of the original Rwanda- and Uganda-backed ‘rebel’ armies from the 1998-2002 war, the Congolese Rally for Democracy, and later one of General Nkunda’s top commanders in the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) insurrection.

Born in the Congo to the Nande tribe of Orientale Province, Bwambale Kakolele is a former Forces Armee Zairois (FAZ) soldier under the Mobutu regime who originally joined the Rwandan-Ugandan war of 1996-1997 to help oust long-time CIA-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.  By late 2001 he was leading the RCD’s Movement for Liberation (RDC-ML) faction, and he was named by the United Nations for trafficking arms in violation of the wartime arms embargo.  After this Kakolele was part of theCongolese Revolutionary Movement (MRC), one of the scores of militias involved in the bloody Ituri conflicts of 2003-2008. General Nkunda and the CNDP joined forces with the MRC in 2006, and the MRC agreed to disarm in August 2007.

General Kakolele left the CNDP in 2008, and in 2011 was participating in DRC government activities that facilitated his being dispatched to north Kivu province.  The DRC government allegedly arrested him in 2013 in Beni, North Kivu, for blocking the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) process. [16], [17]

Like his military allies, General Kakolele is an opportunist who has pursued any profitable enterprise in war-torn Congo, no matter how ruthless and lawless, including diamonds, and he allegedly has deep long-standing ties to the Ugandan ‘rebel’ Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).  Like the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda, the ADF is on the U.S. government list of terrorist organizations.  Kakolele gains protection through his ties to various guerrilla armies backed by Rwanda and Uganda.

Image: RwandAir air waybill proving Rwandan government mineral shipments out of Bukuvu, DRC on RwandAir, a company tightly linked to the regime through Kagame business kingpin John Mirenge; the transport chain involves DHL International, SGS Laboratories, SwissAir and other international corporations. 

Third on the list of Nkunda allied over-achievers in Congo bloodletting is Ugandan Colonel Sultani Makenga, another warlord who was also involved in the 2012 invasion of Goma, and one of president Yoweri Museveni and his half-brother General Salim Saleh’s protégés in the region.  Makenga is said to be very sick with HIV, but, allegedly, he participated in May meetings in Uganda where the new insurrection was born.

Finally, there is the rogue warlord Mai Mai leader Ntabo Ntaberi, alias ‘Cheka’, who has been plundering and killing in the Walikale and Lubero districts of North Kivu.  In 2010 soldiers under Cheka’s command raped some 300 women in Walikale region.  In 2013, after the defeat of the Rwandan M23 army, the regime in Rwanda provided troop reinforcements and arms to Cheka.

Throughout 2013, 2014 and early 2015 the forces under Cheka have perpetrated massive human rights atrocities and crimes against humanity in a wide swath of North Kivu between Lubero and Walikale.  Cheka has been hunting civilians in their villages and fields, accusing them of being collaborators of FDLR and Congolese Mai Mai, and killing them.  Crimes include summary executions, rape, mass abductions, forced marches and other forced labor, and shooting of children.  Commander Cheka is one of the most ruthless and dangerous military commanders on Congolese soil and he runs his own militia namedNduma Defense of the Congo.[18]

Cheka rose out of the forests of North Kivu on a self-declared mission to gain justice for the Congolese people, and was originally allied with the FDLR rebels in Kivu.  Corrupted by power and private profit — plundering resources and waging brutal campaigns of forced taxation — Cheka has served Paul Kagame’s interests by hunting down and assassinating FDLR leaders in Congo.  In March 2015 Cheka’s forces attacked villages where the FDLR reside in the Lubero territory of North Kivu.[19]

“Kagame gave Cheka equipment and men,” says the official in Goma.  ”Cheka replaced Laurent Nkunda and Bosco Ntaganda of CNDP, and Makenga of M23.  Cheka operates in Walikale and Lubero, 200 to 300 kilometers from Goma.”

Even Human Rights Watch has called for the arrest of Ntabo Ntaberi Cheka.[20]  The HRW report of January 2015 documents the most brutal atrocities committed by Cheka and his troops, and their backing by Rwanda.

Former NDC fighters also told Human Rights Watch that Cheka received financial and other military support from Rwanda. They said that Cheka’s ethnic Tutsi wife travels regularly to Rwanda and acts as a liaison with Cheka’s contacts in the country. One former fighter said that ammunition was often sent into Congo from Rwanda via Goma and was delivered to Cheka on motorcycles in bags of beans.[21]

Image: Alphamin Resources maintains a clean, organized, shiny, operations base, accessed by helicopter
– a parallel economy to that of Congolese people who suffer extreme depredations.
Photo: Alphamin Bisie NI 43-101 Report.

There are allegations that Mai Mai Cheka has colluded with Alphamin Resources Corporation to displace artisanal Congolese miners.[22]  Meanwhile, several of the concessions stolen from Congolese people by Alphamin remain under ‘Force Majeure’ — a formal declaration, agreed to by the Congolese government in Kinshasa, establishing that the mining operations cannot proceed due to unforeseen circumstances.

Alphamin Resources Corporation is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and staffed with all white directors from North America, Europe and South Africa.  Alphamin controls vast tracts of North Kivu, mining concessions rich with tin, gold, coltan and copper, the largest of which is the Bisie Mine.[23]  The foreign control would not be possible without first neutralizing and/or eliminating the Congolese landowners.  Western mining companies achieve pacification and land control by any means necessary.

According to their own web site: “Alphamin, through its wholly owned subsidiary, Mining and Processing Congo Sprl (MPC), has full legal title (100 % ownership) over five exploration permits (No’s: PR 5270; PR 10346; PR 5266; PR 5267; and PR 4246) and an exploitation permit (PE 13155) in total covering 1,270 square kilometers in the North Kivu province. ” The Bisie Project falls on PE 13155.  Due to the current volatile security situation, three licenses (PR 5270, PR 5267 and PR 4246) are still under Force Majeure.

The Force Majeure was lifted at the Bisie Project in February 2012, and Alphamin Resources established a camp on the Bisie ridge and commenced exploration drilling in July 2012.

Image: Concesions “100% owned by Alphamin” in North Kivu.

Thousands of Congolese artisanal miners have suffered loss of livelihood or life due to the occupation of large mining concessions by Alphamin, and the concomitant pacification of the communities through direct violence.  Artisanal miners have attacked Alphamin mining operations, and Cheka forces have attacked artisanal mining camps, and artisanal miners have attacked Alphamin operations after being themselves attacked by Cheka forces (that they believe to be aligned with Alphamin).[24]

Of course, many local miners have to leave their communities since those big companies come with papers and authorizations from Kinshasa.”  The unnamed Congolese official has visited many Kivu mining areas over the past 20 years.  ”In North Kivu it is Mining Processing of Congo, and just like with Banro Gold in Twangiza in South Kivu: they claim the right to receive ‘security’ assured by FARDC.[25]

Like their commanders-in-chief, Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, these Ugandan/Rwandan commanders have directed assassinations of political and military targets.

WAR CRIMES, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY AND GENOCIDE

In September 2005 the Congolese General Military Prosecutor issued international arrest warrants against General Nkunda and Rwandan Colonel Jules Mutebesi charging them with the creation of an insurrectional movement, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.  Even Human Rights Watch, the selective U.S.-based human rights organization that has been notoriously slanted in favor of team-U.S. interests in the Great Lakes region, in 2006 briefly outlined the history of Nkunda’s crimes, including “numerous war crimes and other serious human rights abuses during the past three years… summary executions, torture, and rape committed by soldiers under Nkunda’s command, in Bukavu in 2004 and in Kisangani in 2002.” [26]

Over the years Laurent Nkunda and his allied commanders have committed the most egregious war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, dictating the life and death of millions of people. Their crimes rival those of Paul Kagame, Yoweri Museveni, General James Kabarebe, General James Kazini, General Salim Saleh, and other high-level Tutsi-Hima commanders from Rwanda, Uganda and Congo.  They have established formal networks of organized crime premised on direct violence: criminal racketeering, looting, taxation, gunrunning and minerals plunder.  Their troops have committed massacres, mass rapes and extrajudicial executions of the most inhuman kinds.

This time they are calling their terrorist enterprise the Christian Movement for the Reconstruction of Congo (Mouvement Chretien pour la Reconstruction du Congo).

Their histories of atrocities are ugly, brutish and anything but short.

They have organized and run insurgency and counter-insurgency ‘programs’ to neutralize any ‘infrastructure’ and all opposition (and potential opposition) to their elite Tutsi-Hima agenda.  The word ‘infrastructure’ here refers to Congolese chiefs (mwamis), legitimate rulers, politicians, diplomats, soldiers, human rights defenders, civil society members, and ordinary people.  The euphemism ‘neutralize’ means to drive off, exile, make to defect to their (own) cause, capture, torture, maim, sexually mutilate, kill, disappear people.  Beheadings, amputations and butchering of corpses are common.  They have incinerated bodies, dead and alive.  There is no language that can make clear the extremes of their pathological behaviors.

They use networks of paid informers to spy and inform on anyone and everyone.  They infiltrate agents into social networks, political structures, government agencies, and military organizations.  They sow fear, mistrust, divisiveness and terror through psychological operations and propaganda.  Some of them have been trained, advised, schooled and indoctrinated by the leading institutions of terror in the west, and — through the regimes inn Rwanda and Uganda — they have relationships to AFRICOM, the Pentagon’s Africa Command.

None of this is much reported in the mass media and if reported at all the atrocities and crimes are blamed on the victims, some of which include armed resistance forces with legitimate rights, legitimate grievances and very real claims.

The agenda of the Kagame-Museveni axis is to depopulate the homes, villages and territories of the eastern Congo (as they did in Uganda 1980-1986 and Rwanda 1990-1995) of their rightful owners and repopulate them with outsiders; to create large, destitute, traumatized populations of refugees on the run for their lives or herded into death camps; to control the extractive (minerals, timber, agricultural commodities, petroleum, natural gas) industries; to control taxation at regional, national and international borders; to fill their pockets and bank accounts with cash; to militarize their private kingdoms; to terrorize and destabilize and manufacture perpetual war.  The documentation of these crimes is plentiful and irrefutable.

The commanders of the new MCRC guerrilla insurgency have done the ‘dirty work’ for Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame since the very beginning.  And, like their patron-dictators, no matter the documentation, no matter the evidence, no matter the eyewitnesses and proof of their crimes, most of them remain terrorists at large.  Under the secret programs of these Rwandan and Ugandan agents due process has been nonexistent, impunity the rule.  Millions and millions of lives have been destroyed, and it is happening again now.

They have been protected and/or supported by the U.S. administrations of William Jefferson Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barrack Obama.  AFRICOM supports Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni directly, and has military bases in Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.

Image: General Laurent Nkunda in his ‘saviors’ costume for this AP photo c. Jerome Delay 2008.

And why is the MCRC’s first objective to take Goma?  The control of Goma would be used as leverage to manipulate the international community to recognize and accept the demands of the MCRC, and these are the objectives of the Kagame and Museveni regimes: to occupy, control and annex eastern Congo.  In this effort the Tutsi-controlled regime of alias Joseph Kabila in Kinshasa is complicit.  By controlling Goma, the former Rwandan and Ugandan ‘rebel’ soldiers that were integrated into the FARDC but remain loyal to Rwanda and Uganda would join the MCRC insurrection.  By controlling Goma, Kagame can openly (more openly than in recent years) send Rwandan Defense Forces into Congo without international intervention.

UGLY, BRUTISH AND NOT SHORT

First there was Museveni’s war in Uganda, 1980-1986, with Paul Kagame fighting for the National Resistance Army and Yoweri Museveni.  They committed massive war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, often blamed on the losers.  Then they invaded Rwanda, in 1990, and for the next four years they did the same thing, only more finely tuned, more sophisticated, and arguably much more brutal.[27]

The violence wreaked on Congo-Zaire by Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame was exported by perpetrators who first waged genocidal campaigns and coups-d’état that violated the most fundamental international covenants on state sovereignty first in Uganda, then Rwanda, then Zaire (Congo).  On 6 April 1994, they assassinated heads of state from Rwanda and Burundi, again the most fundamental and egregious violations of international law.  The U.S., U.K., Canada and Israel could not have been happier.

These first campaigns of Tutsi-Hima guerrilla warfare set the stage for unprecedented violence as the terror regimes of Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame tortured, slaughtered, raped, disappeared, assassinated, and terrorized millions of innocent non-combatant civilians from Uganda to Rwanda to Burundi to Congo (and in South Sudan). They had the backing of western intelligence and covert operations at the start. [28a]

Next came the covert operations in Zaire (Congo) by the special forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) from 1994 to 1996.  RPA hit squads were dispatched to the Kivu provinces in Zaire well in advance of the U.S.-backed invasion that formally arrived in September 1996.  From July 1994 to August 1996 RPA Special Forces employing hit-and-run terror tactics crossed the Zaire border to commit targeted acts of terrorism, including sabotage, bombings, psychological warfare, assassinations, massacres, disappearing.

One of their primary strategies has always been the sowing of terror through pseudo-operations: disguised as some ‘enemy’ faction (whether such faction has ever been involved in violence or not) the RPA (and UPDF) commit atrocities, generally under cover of night, which are then blamed on the enemy faction, and provide justification for RPA assaults, retaliation, and occupations. [28b]  Under this rubric, the victims are portrayed as the killers, and the killers are portrayed as the victims.

Then in August of 1996 came the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) invasion of Zaire.  The establishment narrative portrays the 1996 invasion of Zaire as a purely Congolese affair led by Laurent Desire Kabila and the Alliance for the Democratic Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL-CZ).  Similarly, the ‘rebellions’ — bloody illegal guerrilla warfare insurgencies — in eastern Congo are typically portrayed as purely Congolese affairs, at least until the truth can no longer be denied, and then they become the subjects of propaganda campaigns that are duplicitous and expedient: damage control.

The United States military, intelligence apparatus, and diplomatic sector were 100% involved in the invasion of Zaire-Congo 1996-1998, providing logistics, weapons, aircraft, intelligence, satellite communications, and Special Operations Forces (U.S. Special Operations Command: SOCOM).  These were heavily armed and outfitted black- and brown-skinned U.S. troops, fluent in regional languages, on the ground in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Congo. [29]

Not only did the invading forces ruthlessly hunt and terminate every Rwandan Hutu man, women and child they could find, they also slaughtered tens or scores or hundreds of thousands of innocent Congolese Bantu people.   They used bulldozers and logging equipment to disappear the bodies. They dumped corpses into the vast Congo River and its vast tributaries.  They went back months later to the Congo forests and swamps to scavenge every skeleton they could find and disappear these once and for all. There are plenty of eyewitnesses who survived. [30], [31]

Their campaigns of rape set the stage for the unprecedented sexual violence yet to come: sexual violence perpetrated by Rwandans and Ugandans but blamed on the Congolese.

Unable to control their proxy Laurent Desire Kabila, whom they chose to lead the Alliance for the Democratic Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL-CZ), and who then became president of the Congo (until his assassination in 2001), Rwanda and Uganda next used the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) and Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) to aggress the Congo in the manufactured ‘Congolese rebellion’ from 1998 to 2003.

After signing some peace treaties in 2003, Rwanda and Uganda next aggressed the Congo through an alphabet soup of warring guerrilla militias: RCD, RCD-Goma, RCD-K, RCD-ML, PFJC, MRC, FNI, FRPI…and many more.  From 2003 to 2006 some 26 militias operated in the Ituri sector of Orientale Province alone: Ituri became the bloodiest place on earth at that time.  Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian militias rampaged in the provinces of Orientale, North and South Kivu, and Maniema, ripping apart the last vestiges of social fabric, ripping out the timber and the minerals, littering fields with skeletons and skulls, and mass graves everywhere.

Image: Skulls & skeletons in Bogoro, Orientale Province, DRC. Photo: c. keith harmon snow 2007.

In 2006, Rwanda and Uganda took their aggression against Congo to new levels through General Laurent Nkunda’s new Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) insurgency.

An arrest warrant was issued against Nkunda for war crimes, crimes against humanity and insurrection months ago but the police and army have done nothing about arresting him,” reported Alison Des Forges, senior advisor to the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch, in 2006.  ”So long as Nkunda is at large, the civilian population remains at grave risk.[32]

Similarly, from 2006 onward, Rwandan General Bosco Ntaganda was wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in northeastern Congo in 2002 and 2003, including recruiting and using child soldiers, murder, rape and sexual slavery.  Ntaganda is also a former leader of the Rwanda-backed CNDP, and Ntaganda and his fighters were integrated into FARDC after the peace agreement of 23 March 2009.

The M23 guerrilla insurgency was more aggression by Rwanda and Uganda against Congo that began in March 2012 based on a FARDC mutiny led by Bosco Ntaganda and Sultani Makenga.  The rebellion took the name ‘M23′ in recognition of the 23 March 2009 neutralization of the Rwandan CNDP.

Rwandan M23 troops occupied Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu, on 20 November 2012, and the FARDC and MONUSCO did nothing to stop them. General Vincent Gatama commanded RDF Special Forces allied with M23 and both armies were involved in massive atrocities.

In March 2013, after the Ntaganda and Mukenga factions of M23 came to blows, Ntaganda surrendered to the U.S. embassy in Rwanda and was flown to The Hague to be tried by the International Criminal Court.

The defeat of the M23 by November 2013 came as a victory for the 18-month military campaign against them by the FARDC the MONUSCO Force Intervention Brigade, and supported by Congolese civil society and activists. The 3096 SADC Force Intervention Brigade forces (attached to MONUSCO) from Malawi, South Africa, and Tanzania quickly routed the Rwandan M23 troops. [33]

Rwandan commanders Paul Kagame, James Kabarebe, Laurent Nkunda, Bosco Ntaganda, Sultani Makenga, Vincent Gatama, Kakolele Bwambale and Hippolyte Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila) all hold titles to this long sordid pedigree of armed warfare sponsored, spawned, supported, spread and prosecuted by Rwanda, Uganda and their western backers.

Here is another way that Rwanda and Uganda and their western backers have advanced the elite Tutsi-Hima agenda to pacify, occupy and balkanize the eastern Congo, and create a Rwandan-controlled Republic of the Volcanoes: Demobilization, Disarmament, and Reintegration.  Since the first DDR programs begun around 2003, thousands of Rwandan and Ugandan Tutsi soldiers have been integrated (sic) into the Armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC): it is meaningless to say that Rwandan Tutsi soldier can be re-integrated into a Congolese army.

Through the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs funded by the World Bank and western donors, these hostile foreign soldiers have been infiltrated into the FARDC, creating a national army compromised by having thousands of enemy (Rwandaphone) soldiers within its ranks.  The DDR section of MONUSCO supports the Government of the DRC, which retains the primary responsibility for defining the DDR policies.

The FARDC has seen more than 29 top-level commanders drawn from the Rwandan / Ugandan forces in its command structure. Additionally, there are some 300 more or less Rwandan Tutsi Captains in the regular FARDC ranks.[34]

Under the leadership of President Hippolyte Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila) every peace treaty and joint DRC government / U.N. demobilization effort since 2003 has involved infiltration of hostile Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers into the Congolese military, national police, security services, parliament, government, governors offices, and more

This process of co-opting the Congo at the deepest levels began in 2003, when the decision was made to integrate some of the top war criminals into the Congolese power structure as Vice-Presidents of the transitional government; these included AzariasRuberwa (RCD); Arthur Z’ahidi Ngoma (RCD); and Jean-Pierre Bemba (MLC).  The Sun City ‘peace’ agreements declared amnesty to RCD combatants.

The Congo’s national army, FARDC, cannot conduct responsible military operations that serve the interests of the Congolese people.  The command structure is full of Rwandans and Ugandans aligned with Museveni and Kagame, with thousands of Tutsi soldiers in the ranks.  The command structure is disorganized, and this is due to the conflicting agendas, and the subterfuge of the Rwanda/Ugandan agents within.  There are parallel command structures dictated by military commander’s involvement in the illegal mining and taxation.  Many FARDC commanders, whether of Congolese or Rwandan origin, only seek to enrich themselves.  Embezzlement, racketeering, conscription of labor, combined with the routine entropy of a poorly paid and poorly managed national army, have created a culture of deception, manipulation and personal profit.  Finally, there may be as many as 14,000 Rwandans in the FARDC; soldiers of Rwandan and Ugandan origin that have been infiltrated into the FARDC desert at will, taking their weapons with them and turning them against the Congo.

Image: Troops of the first ‘integrated’ FARDC brigade in a training exercise led by the United Nations (MONUC)
in Bukavu, South Kivu, 2006. Photo: c. keith harmon snow 2006.

The government of Congo is also highly compromised by having many Tutsi politicians in in civilian ranks, not least of which is the president of the country.  President Hippolyte Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila) is a Rwandan Tutsi who marched across Congo-Zaire under the guidance of his uncle, RPA general James Kabarebe, one of the top 40 RPA soldiers indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in 2009 by the International Court of Justice, Audiencia Nacionale, in Spain. Kanambe surreptitiously serves the interests of Rwanda and Uganda, and the United States, Canada, the U.K., Belgium and Israel.  Alias Joseph Kabila is not the son of Laurent Desire Kabila, and he never was.[35]

IMPUNITY FOR RWANDAN AND UGANDAN WARLORDS

One of Laurent Nkunda’s primary tasks with the AFDL-CZ was to ensure the assassination of the Hutu and Bantu customary chiefs in the collectives on the Congo-Rwanda border so that Rwandaphone agents could replace them.[36]

Nkunda was a senior officer in the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy-Goma (RCD-Goma).  In 2004 he was named general in a new national Congolese army created from troops of the dissident forces at the end (sic) of the war.   He refused the post and withdrew with hundreds of his troops to the forests of Masisi in North Kivu.  In August 2005, Nkunda announced a new ‘rebellion’: the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP).

Rwanda’s Majar General Gatama worked with Nkunda during the aggression of the Rwandan rebel CNDP.  Gatama later worked with Rwandan warlords General Bosco Ntaganda and Colonel Sultani Makenga during the guerilla M23 Movement.  Gatama was on the front lines in Congo when M23 was defeated by the joint military operations of the Congolese army (FARDC) and the MONUSCO Force Intervention Brigade (FIB), sent by the South African Development Community (SADC).

Colonel Sultani Makenga is another Kagame henchman who was born in South Kivu (DRC) but joined the RPA invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990.  Later sent back to Congo for the various rebel insurgencies manufactured by Kagame and Museveni, Makenga was always a very close collaborator with Laurent Nkunda.  When Nkunda was ‘arrested’ in Rwanda by Kagame, Colonel Makenga and General Bosco Ntaganda continued Rwanda’s dirty work in the M23 insurgency.

After Makenga and Ntaganda had a falling out in 2013, with Ntaganda evicted, Colonel Makenga became the de facto sole military leader of the victorious faction of M23.  After the Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) defeated M23, Makenga left his command headquarters at Bunagana, which was also Laurent Nkunda’s base, and fled North Kivu to Uganda.

Although he has no ICC arrest warrant hanging over his head,” reported the BBC in November 2013, “the UN Security Council imposed a travel ban and asset freeze on him last year, accusing him of being responsible for the ‘killing and maiming, sexual violence, abduction, and forced displacement’ — a reference to the fact that some 800,000 people fled their homes during the 19-month [M23] rebellion. [37]

Reports say Colonel Makenga and about 1,700 fighters have been disarmed and are being held in a secret location,” reported the BBC on 7 November 2013.  ”The BBC‘s Catherine Byaruhanga in Kampala says Col Makenga poses a tough diplomatic challenge for Uganda… A Ugandan government spokesperson told the BBC a decision on whether to hand him over would have to wait until a peace deal is signed between DR Congo and the M23 rebels, which is expected this weekend. [38]

International press reports after September 2013 described how Col Sultani Mukenga ‘surrendered’ to the Ugandan government and his possible imminent extradition to Congo: it seems the regime in Kampala had no intentions, ever, of surrendering Mukenga to Congo.  The BBC does not perform a public service in advancing such propaganda.  Indeed, the press widely raised disingenuous questions about Makenga’s fate, and the ‘tough diplomatic challenge’ faced by the government of Uganda.

By November 2013 the western mass media was reporting that the M23 ‘rebels’ had ‘surrendered in Uganda’ or ‘turned themselves in’ in Rwanda.  This is a stale ruse, since one does not ‘turn themselves in’ or ‘surrender’ to the people that they work with and to whom they swear eternal blood allegiance.

The arrest of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s notorious rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda removes a major impediment to peace in one of the world’s most war-torn countries,” cheered TIME Magazine on 23 January 2009.  ”The fact that he was arrested in Rwanda also helps the government of President Paul Kagame restore a reputation severely tarnished last month, when the U.N. accused it of arming and supplying men to Nkunda and using him as a proxy inside Congo. [39]

TIME magazine has played a pivotal role whitewashing all western military and western corporate mining plunder in Congo, and it hammers the tired and false establishment narrative about genocide in Rwanda.  According to this narrative, which legitimizes the ongoing genocide against Rwandan Hutu people, Kagame invaded the Congo (Zaire) in 1996 purely “to stamp out the Hutugenocidaires sheltering in Congo.” [40]  The false narrative turns Hutu victims into killers, and the mass murder of innocent Hutu people into what is supposed to be a just and necessary punishment. [41]

Rwandan troops, RCD, M23, Ugandan army, CNDP, they all work together: these names like M23 and MCRC are meaningless.”  Jean Paul Romeo Rugero is a Rwandan born Hutu in exile.  In July 1994, at the age of 15, he fled Rwanda with his family and he survived the Rwandan Patriotic Army genocide against hundreds of thousands of innocent non-combatant Hutu men, women and children in Congo.  ”The soldiers in these ‘rebel’ armies know no borders.  They have been in all these armies: NRA, UPDF, RPA, RCD, CNDP, M23.  They don’t see any borders, they don’t see any countries; they just see one big Tutsi-Hima land and that is what they are fighting for.

THE FARCE OF HOUSE ARREST

In January 2009 the western press was blanketed with stories describing how General Laurent Nkunda had been arrested in Gisenyi, Rwanda, and was placed under house arrest by the government of Rwanda.  The prevailing wisdom said that Nkunda had become too much of a political liability to his boss, Paul Kagame, who was loosing funding from international donors that were worried about Nkunda’s impact on western mining operations in Congo.

With Nkunda’s arrest in 2009, one story after another provided Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni with the international fanfare they needed to distance their regimes from what was then the latest bloody insurgency in eastern Congo, led by Rwandan and Ugandan forces under the name of the ‘Congolese Revolutionary Army’, more popularly known as ‘M23′.

“The arrest of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s notorious rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda removes a major impediment to peace in one of the world’s most war-torn countries,” wrote TIME Magazine in January 2009.

 ”The fact that he was arrested in Rwanda also helps the government of President Paul Kagame restore a reputation severely tarnished last month, when the U.N. accused it of arming and supplying men to Nkunda and using him as a proxy inside Congo.”

Attempts by the government of Congo to extradite Nkunda to Congo for trial after his arrest in Gisenyi, Rwanda were blocked by Kigali, who claimed that Nkunda was being held under house arrest, the propaganda line widely parroted by the international media.

Rwandan dissidents claimed that Nkunda was living comfortably in Rwanda.

A year after his supposed arrest Nkunda’s defense attorney, Canadian barrister Stephane Bourgon began claiming that Nkunda’s rights were being violated.  Bourgon claimed that Rwanda was keeping Nkunda illegally in ‘no-man’s land’ without charge and that the Rwandan government was blocking access to his client. [42]

Stephane Bourgon is also a Royal Canadian Military College graduate who served in the Canadian Forces for more than 20 years as logistics officer and military legal advisor. [43]  (Canadian General Romeo Dallaire supported the Rwandan Patriotic Army invasion of Rwanda 1993-1994.)

“Former Congolese warlord Laurent Nkunda is ready to face trial for alleged war crimes or go into exile to end his detention without charge in Rwanda,” Bourgon reported in an interview with Reuters news service in 2010. [44]

In 2012, stories about Rwandan warlord Bosco Ntaganda — Nkunda’s rival and successor warlord running M23 — briefly captured the international spotlight, and most of these routinely mentioned that General Laurent Nkunda was being held under house arrest in Rwanda.

Image: Rwandan warlord Bosco Ntaganda with officers of CNDP/M23 in North Kivu. Photo: c. unknown.

In June 2012, Kagame responded to international criticism with threats to turn Nkunda loose on Congo.  Rwanda continued to refuse to hand Nkunda over to Congo to face charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and insurrection, with Kagame disingenuously claiming concerns that Nkunda would not get a fair trial and might simply be killed for his ethnicity.[45]

In July 2012, the US, Netherlands, Sweden and Germany withdrew or delayed disbursement of their budgetary support to Rwanda in protest of Rwanda’s alleged support for M23 Congolese rebels.

By late 2012 the subject of Laurent Nkunda has slipped off the international news scene.

ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

Beginning in mid-April 2015, hundreds of Uganda and Rwandan soldiers began infiltrating eastern Congo, crossing the border through the Virunga National Park and northern Lake Kivu region, to join the ranks of the latest Rwandan/Ugandan guerrilla occupation of eastern Congo.

As a result of the military conflict in the DRC, there are now 2.6 million displaced persons (in 2012 there were 1.8 million) (2), over half a million refugees and 6.4 million in need of food assistance and emergency agricultural aid. (3) As for the victims over the entire period of the conflict, according to various estimates they number from 3.5 to 5 million dead. 

The situation in DR Congo is one of the most complex in Africa; dozens of militant groups supported by several states at once are involved in the armed conflict. Among the main militant groups are M23, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), the Allied Democratic Forces and the National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (ADF-NALU), and Mai Mai Kata Katanga. 

DR Congo's main problem is the March 23 Movement (M23). With foreign support, it started plundering the natural resources of the DRC on a grand scale. At the same time, 2013 brought substantial changes to M23's situation. In March the group's leader, General Bosco Ntaganda, was overthrown and immediately transferred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. (4) Up until then Ntaganda and his M23 had enjoyed the support of Rwanda. However, as it turned out, the overthrow of Ntaganda was also organized by the Rwandan government, which had previously supplied Ntaganda with ammunition, but then supported the rebel general Makenga with weapons and soldiers. As a result Rwanda maintained its control of M23, and the majority of the missile strikes in the new flare-up of the war were made from Rwandan territory. This was accompanied by a provocation: M23 fighters, who had control of the territory of eastern DR Congo, shelled the territory of Rwanda, thus ensuring a missile «counterstrike» from the Rwandan army against DR Congo's territory. A similar provocation was organized before Rwanda's invasion of Goma in November 2012.

Kibati, where the attack took place, is the location not only of the UN mission to DR Congo, but of a unique UN division, the special Force Intervention Brigade (FIB). No other UN mission has such a division with such powers. The brigade was created March 28, 2013 by UN Security Council resolution No. 2098 (2013) as part of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). The resolution extended the mandate of MONUSCO until March 31, 2014. The brigade is to include three infantry battalions, one artillery battery and one Special Forces Company. The declared objective of the FIB is «contributing to reducing the threat posed by armed groups to state authority and civilian security in eastern DRC and to make space for stabilization activities». The task of the FIB is defined as «neutralizing» armed groups. The term «neutralizing», unusual for a UN Security Council resolution, means «carry[ing] out targeted offensive (emphasis ours. – A.M.) operations». Such operations are to be conducted independently or jointly with the armed forces of the DRC. (5)

Russia supported the deployment of the FIB, (6) stating that it ought to help «achieve a qualitative breakthrough in combating anti-governmental groups». On the whole, Russia's position on the Congolese crisis consists in demanding the immediate and total cessation of violence in the region. Russia decisively condemned the unlawful armed groups which have renewed military operations in eastern DRC, as well as foreign support of them. The Russian representative emphasized that the fundamental responsibility for establishing peace in the DRC belongs to the countries of the region themselves, with the assistance of the African Union and subregional organizations. 

The war in the DRC has been raging for several decades, and the question arises: who is encouraging it? A recently published report from a group of UN experts on the DRC asserts that the activities of M23 are financed «through a network of individual supporters and business dealings». (7) It is claimed that the main source of income for the movement is taxation of commercial trucks crossing at checkpoints in areas controlled by M23. (8) However, it is doubtful that «taxation of trucks» could provide financing for years of military operations by tens of thousands of well-armed fighters. In fact, the Congolese war is financed through the plundering of the country's natural resources, first and foremost gold. The plundering is carried out in the eastern part of the DRC via Uganda and Burundi. Tin, tantalum, wolfram and other metals are also objects of plunder. 

At one of the meetings of the UN Security Council at which the situation in the DRC was being considered, the president of the World Bank announced the allocation of 1 billion dollars for a program for the development of the DRC. (9) However, the profits from plundering the DRC are much greater than this amount, and if the plunder is not stopped, no «humanitarian» programs will help. The war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a war for resources. The new flare-up of military operations is linked with the attempt of numerous armed groups to secure the most advantageous positions in connection with the start of the formation of the UN Force Intervention Brigade with its new military powers, not only for defensive operations, but for offensive ones as well.

The complaint filed included UN reports dating back to 1994 concerning Kagame’s mass atrocities in Rwanda and Congo. These reports, two of which were suppressed by the UN and the prosecutors of the ICTR (4), are just a small sample of the extensive and overwhelming evidence which exists in the possession of the ICTR prosecutors that establish that serious crimes against humanity and war crimes were committed by Kagame and his Ugandan and western allies in Rwanda and Congo since 1990. The reports filed include the report of Robert Gersony of USAID who was tasked by the UNHCR in later 1994 with determining the conditions for the return of Hutu refugees who had fled the RPF forces into then Zaire that year. In his October 1994 report, Gersony states that the RPF forces committed systematic and sustained massacres of Hutus civilians beginning in April 1994 and that they were continuing. The UNHCR marked this report confidential and it was suppressed. However, it was placed in the hands of the prosecutor at the ICTR but the various prosecutors there have also kept it suppressed and even denied its existence.

The second report is that of Michael Hourigan, the Australian lawyer and Lead Investigator for Louise Arbour when she was Prosecutor.  She tasked him with the mission of determining who had assassinated the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi and the Rwandan Army chief of staff on April 6, 1994 when their plane was shot down over Kigali. She did so thinking those responsible were Hutu «extremists». However, Hourigan learned, and had the documentary evidence and testimony to prove it, that the Zero Network of the RPF shot down the plane on Kagame’s orders, with the help of a foreign power. When Hourigan presented this evidence to Arbour she ordered the investigation terminated and the file handed over to her. No further action has been taken on that evidence since. There is evidence that she stopped the investigation on the orders of the American government. This had three consequences; it hid the truth of who was responsible for the events in Rwanda in 1994 from the world, it made Louise Arbour an accessory to a mass murder, and at the same time, it established her value as a cooperative asset that the USA could use in the aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999 when she was told by Bill Clinton to prevent negotiations and prolong the war by charging President Milosevic with false accusations of crimes against humanity.

The third report included in the complaint is the Mapping Report of 2010 to the UN Secretary General that details the large-scale atrocities that were committed by the RPF and the Ugandans and the Congolese in Rwanda and Zaire (DRC) from 1993 to 2003. The final UN report is the Addendum report of the Special Committee of the Security Council (Group of Experts) on the situation in the Congo of June 2012.

These UN reports are supported by the evidence held by the Prosecutors at the ICTR and by the evidence presented by the defence in several of the trials as to what actually transpired in Rwanda from 1990 to 1994. This evidence is completely at odds with the accepted western version but has been studiously ignored by both the western media and academics and many so-called experts.

The UN Report giving the ICC jurisdiction over Kagame is known as the Addendum.  It is a supplement to a letter to the Secretary General of the UN submitted by the Group of Experts. Once again, it appears there were efforts to suppress this report as the United States tried to prevent its release. These documents present findings that provide a reasonable basis to conclude that crimes within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court have been and are being committed by Paul Kagame and others under his command and control and which could not escape the attention of an ICC Prosecutor who was dedicated to eliminating impunity for war crimes.  The documented evidence establishes that the Rwandan authorities, led by President Paul Kagame, and including, among others, his minister of defence, General James Kaberebe, General Charles Kayonga, the Rwandan Defence Forces Chief of Staff, and his Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence, General Jack Nziza, committed serious international crimes in the DRC by supporting the M23 «rebel» group.

Specifically the Addendum provides reliable and documented evidence that these officers are providing direct military assistance to the M23 rebellion inside the DRC including the use of children under the age of 18 as M23 combatants (5), and forced former enemy combatants of the Democratic Forces For the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) to serve with units sent by the Rwanda Defence Forces to reinforce M23 (6). The criminal responsibility of the President Paul Kagame and his subordinates for these crimes is based on Article 28 of the Rome Statute of the ICC concerning superior responsibility.

The Mapping Report of 2010, which covers the period 1993 to 2003, provides evidence that the crimes committed by Kagame and his allies amounting to genocide against the Hutu people in Rwanda spread into the territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, beginning in 1996 through to 2003, where the armed forces of Rwanda, Uganda and of the DRC committed genocide against the Hutu ethnic group in the DRC. One Hutu witness at the ICTR who fled 3,000 kilometers through the Congo forest to escape this attempted extermination called it the «genocide with no name and further testified, along with other witnesses,  that they observed UN and US spotter planes over them before each RPF attack». (7)  During the entire period of time in which these crimes were committed Paul Kagame had command responsibility over the Rwandan armed forces. (8)

The Complainants in the action of August 17 represent various civil society groups in Rwanda and Congo and include former senior members of the RPF government in Rwanda. This action is perhaps the first of its kind by Hutus and Tutsis acting in cooperation against the Kagame regime and provides a basis for optimism that Hutus and Tutsis can come to an accord and can lead Rwanda and its people forward together.  They have requested the Prosecutor to commence an investigation with a view to laying charges against Paul Kagame and any other person or persons complicit in the crimes set out in the Addendum and they have relied on the stated intention of the ICC, set out in its preamble, that no one has impunity for crimes committed within the jurisdiction of the ICC.

The Complaint also notes that there is a vast amount of evidence against Kagame in the hands of the Prosecutors of the ICTR and that, while neither this evidence nor that of the Gersony, Hourigan or Mapping reports provide the ICC with evidence of crimes within its jurisdiction, they do provide evidence that the crimes of Kagame are of a continuing and grave nature and reveal a systematic pattern and intention and add credence to the Addendum Report. The Complainants also note that this protection of Kagame and his allies from prosecution at the ICTR has had the direct consequence of giving him a sense of impunity and has encouraged him to commit more crimes.  An example of the evidence in the hands of the ICTR, (the Hourigan Report being another cited above) is the testimony of  defence witness Abdul Ruzibiza, a former officer of the RPF, who testified in the Military I trial that the assassination of the Rwanda and Burundi presidents in 1994 was planned and committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front under command of current President Kagame and that he was a member of the shoot down team. (9) In September of 2010, Ruzibiza died in Norway at the age of 40 under unclear circumstances and amid rumours of threats against him by the CIA.

This is not the first death of witnesses who gave testimony or others who were intent on exposing the crimes of the RPF and Kagame. Witness GAP, a prosecution witness in the Military II trial against General Bizimungu, the Rwandan army chief of staff, and who had recanted his testimony as false and extorted by threats of the RPF regime was recalled in 2009 to the ICTR to explain his recantation. He never reached the courtroom.  He arrived in Arusha and was placed in a UN safe house to await his testimony.  The day before he was due to testify he disappeared from the UN safe house and has not been seen by anyone since. Protests and a demand for an investigation by defence counsel about how he could disappear from a UN guarded safe house were ignored.

Seth Sendashonga, the former RPF Minister of Interior, was assassinated by an RPF death squad in Nairobi May 16, 1998, after he announced he was going to testify at the ICTR that the witnesses provided by the RPF to the tribunal were all forced to give false testimony by the RPF government (10). In December 2005, Juvenal Uwilingiyimana, a Hutu, and former Minister of Trade and Commerce, was found floating in a canal in Brussles, naked, with his hands cut off, after disappearing a few weeks earlier. He had been in contact with Steven Rapp and two of his investigators, who were pressuring him to give false testimony for the prosecution at the ICTR, according to a letter he had sent to the President of the ICTR prior to his disappearance. In the letter to the President of the ICTR and to Rapp, he said that Rapp’s two Canadian investigators had threatened to kill him and cut his body in pieces unless he cooperated. He refused to do so and refused to meet with them again. Shortly after that letter was sent he was murdered. Again, a demand by defence counsel for the suspension of Rapp and the two Canadian investigators pending an investigation into their possible involvement was ignored.

One of the writers (11), counsel to General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, chief of staff of the gendarmerie of Rwanda in the Military II trial, was himself threatened in July 2008 by a CIA officer working at the ICTR that if he did not watch his step he would be killed. This threat, echoing previous threats by the RPF, was reported to the President of the Tribunal but he was disbelieved. Scottish lawyer Andrew McCartan, Scotland’s foremost military lawyer, was killed in October 2003 when his car went off a cliff in Scotland just a few weeks after having told the same writer at a meeting in Toronto that he had tried to confront Bill Clinton about the US role in Rwanda and that he had learned secrets about the US involvement in Rwanda in 1994 and its control of the ICTR. Scottish police could find no cause for the car crash. In her memoirs the former Chief Prosecutor of International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Carla del Ponte, reported that Paul Kagame torpedoed the investigation of crimes committed by RPF and that the US government also put pressure on her to leave Kagame alone and when she refused to sign a document to that effect she was soon replaced. (12) To no one’s surprise the new Prosecutor, Hassan Jallow, immediately lost interest in the RPF and Kagame. In 2010, American defence counsel, Peter Erlinder was arrested by the RPF regime the day he arrived in Rwanda to try to defend FDU-Inkingi politician Victoire Ingabire, facing political charges by the regime, because he had merely repeated publicly what the evidence was at the ICTR about RPF crimes. He was only released after extensive intervention by other defence counsel and the reluctant intervention of the US State Department.

The Rwandan and Ugandan invasions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo beginning in 1996 created a severe problem for Africa. Year by year the situation became worse. In 1999 the Democratic Republic of the Congo initiated proceedings against Rwanda in the International Court of Justice. (13) That proceeding was later discontinued because of the Congo’s expressed belief in their ability to resolve the matter by negotiation. But in 2002 Congo was forced to institute new proceedings against Rwanda. Because of technical reasons (with very questionable argumentation) (14) the ICJ found no jurisdiction in the case, so the Congolese claims stay unanswered. (15)

The attempts by the NATO powers to indict heads of state for actions committed on the territory of foreign countries, using the UN as their tool, have become more and more frequent but the leaders targeted for this treatment are those who stand in the way of western interests, never those that bend to their interests. We can cite as examples the case against Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the alleged planning and fuelling of the war crimes in Bosnia, that against Liberian President Charles Taylor for his alleged aiding and abetting crimes committed in Sierra Leone, and finally the case against the vice-president of the DRC J-P.Bemba for the military assistance in CAR.

Kagame is an example of an American supported leader whose crimes go unpunished because he is useful to them and because they are party to his crimes. The Prosecutors of the ICTR have wasted 17 years protecting Kagame from his responsibility for the crimes he and his forces committed in Rwanda in 1994. The consequence has been a continuation of those crimes into the Congo, drowning the Great Lakes region of Africa in blood. Since the ICTR has refused to act on its responsibilities, it is now up to the ICC to take up the burden and to commence an investigation into the crimes set out in the Addendum report and the crimes committed by Kagame and others who support him since 2003, the date on which the jurisdiction of the ICC begins. The impunity given to Kagame and his allies can only come to an end, and with it the wars in the Great Lakes region, when his crimes and those of the powers that support him are exposed and brought to justice. It is not enough to study the consequences of these wars. It is necessary to understand the reasons and the causes for these wars. The August 17 action at The Hague is an attempt to start the long delayed process of bringing Kagame and his allies to justice.  Only when this is achieved can Africans begin the to create the conditions for the restoration of peace and the conditions necessary to develop Africa’s immense potential .  The August 17 action should be supported.

Christopher C. Black – Barrister, Counsel to the complainants in the present case (Canada).
Alexander B. Mezyaev – Head of the Department of International Law, Law Faculty, University of Management (Russia).

(1) Christopher Black
(2) The United Forces For Democracy in Rwanda (FDU), the Rwanda National Congress (RNC), le Reseau International des Femmes pour la Democratie et la Paix (RIFDP) – from Rwanda; and L’Association Pour la Promotion de la Democratie et du Developpement de la RDC (APRODEC) and Congonova, represent significant elements of the civil society of the Democratic Republic of Congo – from the DRC.
(3)Article 15 (1) of the ICC Statute states that «The Prosecutor may initiate investigations proprio motu on the basis of information on crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court». And article 53 of the ICC Statute requires the Prosecutor to «initiate an investigation unless he or she determines there is no reasonable basis to proceed…».  
(4) The report of Robert Gersony to the UNHCR of October 1994 and the report of ICTR Lead investigator for Louise Arbour of 1997 to the UN OIOS (Office of Internal Oversight)
(5) See Addendum (para 19). This action constitutes a war crime under Article 8(b)(xxvi) and 8(e)(vii) of the ICC Statute.
(6) See Addendum (paras 20-21). This action constitutes a war crime under Article 8(2)(a)(v) of the ICC Statute (that forbids compelling a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile power).
(7) Transcripts, Military II Trial, ICTR.
(8) DRC Final Report (the Mapping Report) of June 2010 (made to the Secretary-General of the United Nations by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights N.Pillay,). Paras 20-33.
(9) Prosecutor v. Bagosora et al., transcript of 9 March 2006. See also the book of this witness «Rwanda. L’Histoire Secret». Paris. 2005.
(10) Prunier, Gerard (2009) Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwanda Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe, Oxford
(11) Christopher Black
(12) C. Del Ponte, The Hunt. Me and the War Criminals.  2008, Oxford, Oxford University Press pp 366-367.
(13) Application instituting proceedings see on the official website of the International Court of Justice on the Internet: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/117/7071.pdf. The Livre blanc prepared of the Government of the DRC is available: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/117/13461.pdf.
(14) Two judges expressed their dissenting opinions and eight judges – separate opinions to the judgment.
(15) Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo (New Application : 2002) (Democratic Republic of the Congo v. Rwanda). ICJ Judgment of 3 February 2006.