Africa ignored

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Africa ignored

(Tuesday 04 November 2008)

JEREMY CORBYN


JEREMY CORBYN on what the crisis in the Congo says of the West.

THE tragedy in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) goes on. The most marginalised people on Earth continue to suffer as a result.


Over five million people have already died from the fighting and its fallout over the past decade, yet this tragedy is barely reported by most of the media.

Even at the height of fighting around Goma, the capital of the eastern North Kivu province, the BBC was still leading with the nonsense surrounding Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross's prank phone calls. The following day, with the honourable exception of the Morning Star, every daily paper splashed on this BBC navel-gazing.


The media's treatment of the Congolese is a stark reminder of the way in which Africa is ignored and sends a clear signal that, in the eyes of Western broadcasters, Africans are less valuable than Europeans or US citizens.


But responsibility for much of the current situation lies in the West.
The DRC was a creation of colonial greed in the 19th century and mining, logging and mineral interests continue to create huge wealth globally.


In 1884, the country became the personal colony of Belgian King Leopold.
It gained independence in 1961, but iconic prime minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated within two years. Successive dictatorships then took over, before the election of President Joseph Kabila and a national assembly two years ago raised hopes of peace.


But this remained elusive and the corruption-ridden army has proven itself incapable of controlling the situation in the east. The tragedy of poverty, rape and murder continues.


North Kivu province contains huge mineral wealth. Mines run on technology that would have been out of date in Europe 200 years ago, extracting coltan and other valuable metals which are eventually sold on to metal dealers and finally exported to the rest of the world to be used in the manufacturing of mobile phones and high-tech equipment.


These mines are run by militias or the Congolese army and are sustained by money from the West, underlining the direct link between the killing of thousands of civilians and the "respectable" metal exchanges of western Europe and north America.


Western countries have also happily sold arms and military equipment to Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi.


Nkunda's forces are relatively well equipped and have proved to be more than a match for the Congolese army. The UN has managed to broker a temporary ceasefire, but nothing more.


So, millions continue to live in fear and poverty amid massive potential wealth.


The DRC manages to provide education for only half of its children and minimal health care. The streets of the capital Kinshasa are dominated by disabled victims of the years of fighting and thousands of orphan children simply trying to survive.


Thousands of men have been killed in fighting and large numbers of women have been raped and mutilated as a weapon of war.


A refugee camp that I visited there last April was completely ravaged by forces loyal to Nkunda last week. The tens of thousands of people that lived in it have fled to the hills and forests, where there is little food and no medicine. Without urgent aid, these people will die.


The absolute and immediate priority must be ensuring that the UN can get sufficient food, medicine and water purification facilities through to the former inhabitants of the refugee camps and the displaced. But the eventual solution has to be political.


It is essential to create a stable society where militia members do not believe that their security lies in continued civil war.


The appointment of former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo as the UN mediator for the region must be followed up by sustained economic aid and help so that the crisis of the last three weeks does not return in a few months.


And it's about time that the world's media rethought its news agenda and started looking at the lives of people in Africa.


Channel 4 News has produced some excellent reports on on the Congo. The BBC, though, needs to look very carefully at its own output.

Learning it the hard way

THE Prime Minister and Chancellor Alistair Darling are finding out the hard way that, despite investing £37 billion of public money in the major banks, these institutions are refusing to change their behaviour, pass on interest rate cuts or restart mortgage lending.


Mysteriously, the Treasury has now announced plans to set up an independent holding company to manage its massive level of public investment in the banks along private-sector lines.


Public investment is meant to be for the public good, yet Brown and Darling appear to have decided that the priority is to save the banking system in its existing form rather than forcing it to refocus on social priorities.
There is an urgent case for introducing socialist principles into government policy.


The Tories offer nothing more than a return to 1980s Thatcherism. Now is the golden opportunity for Labour to embark on an era of true social justice.


GORDON Brown had a strange weekend. He spent it travelling around the Gulf states trying to persuade them to put money into the IMF to bail out the European economy. It appears that the needs of the world's poor majority are being ignored as the IMF refocuses itself on bailing out the West.

Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North. He can be contacted at corbynj@parliament.uk


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[Thinking Man's Idiot]

DRC rebels warn UN of return to fighting

(Sunday 30 November 2008)






HARSH WORDS: UN envoy Olusegun Obasanjo meeting with DRC warlord Laurent Nkunda.



DEMOCRATIC Republic of Congo rebel leader Laurent Nkunda threatened renewed fighting on Saturday if the government does not negotiate with his forces, despite his breach of a ceasefire.

The renegade general made his comments following a farcical meeting with UN special envoy and former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, which was filmed by the UN and released to journalists.


Mr Obasanjo and Mr Nkunda met for more than an hour on Saturday in the rebel-held town of Jomba near the Ugandan border.


The footage showed Mr Obasanjo berating Mr Nkunda for starting an offensive along the border with Uganda last week, thus breaking a ceasefire in the middle of peace talks.


Since the first round of peace talks on November 16, Mr Nkunda's forces have clashed with the army several times and rebels captured two border posts and a town last week.


On Friday, the top UN human rights official called for urgent action to stop the killing, rape and looting in eastern Congo.


"You are making me a laughing stock," Mr Obasanjo told Mr Nkunda. "What has happened in the last 14 days has not made me happy."


He added: "If there is anything that will make you make a move against a self-imposed ceasefire by you, you should let me know. When I finished my first round of talks, I reported to you. You haven't built the same confidence in me and I feel disappointed."


But Mr Nkunda claimed that the ceasefire he had declared in October had only been meant to apply to the Congolese army.


"We agreed for a ceasefire with government forces, not with negative and foreign forces," he said, referreing to fugitive Rwandan ethnic Hutu militias who he accuses of attacking Tutsis in the DRC.


"They are not allowed to be here," he said. "And I have to fight them wherever I can."


Following the negotiations, Mr Nkunda threatened: "If there is no negotiation, let us say then there is war.


"I know that the government has no capacity to fight, so they have only one choice - negotiations."


He added: "We asked for a response as to where, when, and with whom we are going to do these talks. For us, we propose Nairobi and for the mediator we proposed chief Obasanjo."

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[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Congo rebels quit border town, urge govt to talk
Thousands have fled to Uganda to escape fighting in the area


• Europe hesitant, divided over force for east Congo
• U.N. Human Rights Council condemns abuses in Congo

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

NIGERIA: Aid agencies struggle to cope after Jos carnage
Aid workers say they are struggling to cope with the fallout of violent clashes between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria's central city of Jos, which killed and wounded hundreds of people and displaced some 10,000.

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Nigeria political violence leaves 300 dead

(Sunday 30 November 2008)






UNEASY calm returned to the Nigerian city of Jos on Monday after political violence over the weekend had left at least 300 people dead.

The fighting began among supporters of the region's two main political parties following the first local election in Jos for more than a decade.
On Thursday, angry crowds gathered after electoral workers had failed to post results at ballot collation centres, prompting suspicions of fraud. The riots erupted on Friday.
Police said that they had arrested hundreds of people after military units moved into the city and reinforced roadblocks.
By Saturday, at least 300 bodies had been brought to the city's main mosque for prayers before burial, but the final death toll could be much higher when Christian victims are counted.
Witnesses said that a mass burial of 238 bodies had taken place in the early morning.
Local ethnic and religious leaders made radio appeals for calm and streets were mostly empty by Saturday afternoon after troops had been ordered to shoot rioters on sight.
Hundreds of fearful women and children carrying plastic jerrycans, who had been trapped in their homes, ventured out and searched the streets for functioning water taps while thousands of people could be seen cowering in schools and police and army barracks.
The clashes are the worst in Nigeria since 2004, when as many as 700 people died in Plateau State, in sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims.