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CLARE SHORT SPITS ON THE VICTIMS OF GENOCIDE IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO
By A.R. Lokongo
The former British Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, stunned an important gathering of students, academics, journalists and humanitarian workers when she told them that “only a few people have died as a result of the five-year-long war of aggression in the Democratic Republic of Congo”.
Speaking at a seminar organised on 18 September 2003 by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) on the theme: “Divided Nations, Can the UN help?” - in other words is the UN still relevant the world’s trouble spots - Ms Short severely criticised Britain and America for having invaded Iraq without a proper UN Security Council mandate and explained that that is why she resigned as Secretary of State for International Development.
Ms Short stressed that these two superpowers now faced a stiff Iraqi resistance, the cost of the occupation is proving to be astronomical, some countries are not committing their troops to go and help the British and the Americans, casualties among British and American troops are mounting by the day, General Tommy Franks, the overall American commander in Iraq faces accusations of war crimes, and above all, Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) which led us to war, have not been found. And now you find Britain and America helplessly asking the UN for help.
“That must tell us that unilateralism does not work and that the UN is still a relevant multilateral body which can steer international relations in the right direction,” Ms Short concluded.
It was at that point that we reminded Ms Short that it is today in the Democratic Republic of Congo where the UN has deployed its biggest contingent ever since the country’s independence in 1960, under the UN Mission in Congo known as Monuc, its French acronym. Despite this UN presence, massacres and looting of Congo’s natural and mineral wealth still go on unabated. Those heinous crimes are being committed by troops from Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi – Congo’s neighbours in the east who are still occupying chunks of Congo’s territory today, very much against international law and various toothless UN Security Council resolutions which ordered them to leave. They never withdrew. More than 4.7 million Congolese have been massacred by those troops of occupation and their congolese rebel puppets since 2 August 1998 – the biggest genocide ever since World War II, according to the International Rescue Committee, itself an American human right organisation.
We said that the war of aggression and occupation – not a civil war as Western media portray it - has been orchestrated, sponsored and supported by Britain and America. Proof? A documentary recently aired by Channel 4, titled “Congo’s Killing Fields” revealed that Tony Blair’s government gives Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi 60 million pounds ($90 million) per year respectively, under the disguise of “bilateral aid”, even as these countries have their troops occupying Congo. So, Britain is subsidising their military budgets as long as Congo’s wealth flow to the West through its multinationals which very much milking the Congolese cow on the trail of occupying troops: timber, gold, diamond, fauna and flora, and especially coltan out of which mobile phones, computers and everything high tech is made.
We said that the documentary was also broadcast in Ireland and that country has now threatened to cut off its $45 million per year bilateral aid to Uganda, until it ceased its terrorist activities in Congo.
We added that it was unjust and unfair for the people of Congo having to pay the price the 1994 genocide in Rwanda because they are not responsible for it. Rwandans – Tutsi and Hutu – slaughtered each others, some survivors fled into Congo and we welcomed them in our land. The refugees were mixed up with the Interahamwe who organised and carried out the genocide. The UN which administered the refugee camps refused to sort the Interahamwe from the civilians whom the Interahamwe basically held hostage and prevented them from returning to Rwanda. Why should the people of Congo pay the price for their hospitality? And when Rwanda helped Laurent Kabila overthrow the dictator Mobutu in Congo, Rwandan troops took revenge and slaughtered many refugees in the camps in eastern Congo indiscriminately, despite Kabila’s opposition.
We further explained that the Rwandan President Paul Kagame – whom Clare short described as “so sweety” - and some members of his entourage are being shielded from accountability by britain and America for their role in the shooting down of the plane which led to the killing of Rwandan Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Twagiramira (an investigation is still being carried out in France) in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in the massacres of Hutu refugees in Congo in 1997, and now in the genocide of more than 4.7 million Congolese. Proof? The Swiss Magistrate Carla Del Ponte, genocide prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha, Tanzania, was sacked for Rwandan President Paul Kagame. She officially asked the UN Secretary General Koffi Annan that she should relinquish her post as prosecutor at the Hague involving Mlosevic’s case so that she can concentrate her time and efforts in investigating the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the war crimes that followed the genocide and imputed to Kagame and his RPF movement, which in taking power in Rwanda put an end to the killings. Since Del Ponte insisted that no stone should be left unturned even among the current ruling elite she was forced to relinquish her position in Arusha by the UN Secretary General Koffi Annan because she had a showdown with President Kagame of Rwanda last year. In her first ever interview since her dismissal, Madame Del Ponte told the Italian daily, La Republica how Mr Kagame screamed at her “as if he was giving me an order”, telling her that it was up to the government to investigate the military and up to her to investigate the genocide.
“This work of yours is creating political problems for me,” she quoted Kagame as warning her. “You are going to destabilise the country this way.”
To wind up, we told Ms Short and the audience a story reported by the Guardian on 10 April 2003, according to which Richard Dowden, a respected Africa hack, once asked Ms Short why Rwanda needed to occupy Kisangani, a diamond-rich town 700 miles into Congo to protect its borders, she threatened to throw him off her “fucking plane”.
Then we asked Ms Short: “Would you then agree that this government has perhaps directly or indirectly sponsored terror and looting in Congo and whether an international criminal tribunal for Congo will be set up?”
To be frank, Clare Short was very surprised. She never expected anybody, let alone a Congolese stand up to her and challenge the Labour Government record or involvement in Congo’s tragedy.
And so, obviously, she started by denying any involvement of the British government in Congo’s tragedy and threw the ball into Congolese’s own camp.
“I don’t know why Rwandans are subjected to a kind of anti-semitism in Congo, whereas the problem in Congo is that it has always been ungovernable,” she said.
“What you describe as tragedy in Congo stems back from the time of King Leopold II. But it is mainly the legacy of Mobutu’s long dictatorship and kleptocracy. If there trouble in the Great Lakes region today, it is because Mobutu messed it up. He welcomed and supported the forces of 1994 Rwandan genocide [the Interahamwe] in what was then Zaire. These people had to be neutralised because they posed a danger for Rwanda’s security and stability. Kabila then came along [well, Kabila did not simply come along. The people of Congo were fed up with Mobutu and rose up in support of Kabila. it was a popular revolution irrespective of external support] and with Rwandans and Ugandans’support, he chased away Mobutu from power. But not all forces of genocide were eliminated but the danger has been minimised and Rwandans and Ougandans have left Congo in 2002.”
But it hurt even more to hear Ms Short say: “I don’t believe at all that 4.7 million Congolese have been massacred by troops from Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, as you will have us believe. The death toll of the Congon war is very small. Of course a few people have died but only as a result of hunger and diseases [therefore there is no need for an international criminal tribunal for Congo to be set up?].
“There is now an inclusive transitional government of national unity in place in Congo and we hope that it will lead to democratic elections.”
Unable to shallow this insult to the memory of more than 4.7 million Congolese who have been literally massacred, we could not take it anymore, and so we interrupted Ms Short and told her that “there was no anti-semitic feelings against Rwandan in Congo. We are not against the people of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi as such. We are against the dictatorship and the boot-licking politics of President Kagame of Rwanda and Museveni of Uganda vis-à-vis Western superpowers and the interests of their multinationals to the detriment of Congo. That is why the Great Lakes region is in such a turmoil”.
“There is no dictatorship in Uganda and Rwanda. Museveni was democratically re-elected last year and Kagame has just been democratically elected with a huge majority,” Ms Short retorted.
“As a citizen of Congo who knows better the situation in my country and who has just lost a mother in Rwandan-occupied part of The Democratic Republic of Congo,” we continued, “I would like to assure Honorable Clare Short and this gathering that Rwandans and Ugandans troops are still operating in broad day light my country. A list of the post of commands still controlled by Rwandan and Ugandan generals has been presented to William Swing, a former American ambassador to Congo and now head of the UN Mission in Congo (I sent the list to Honorable Clare Short by post). Addressing a conference in South Africa, Mr Swing has just denounced Congo’s neighbours’interference in Congo’s internal affairs, including a new rebellion that they are now trying to foment, headed by some military officer who escaped after being found guilty of taking part in the assassination of the late President Laurent Désiré Kabila.
This is endangering the actual “peace process” made in America via South Africa. You have a new transitional government within which looters, rapists, killers and traitors are rubbing shoulders with each other, all non-elected! President Joseph Kabila who faces a coup d’État (according to the Belgian daily Le Soir, Mobutuists are ready to pass into action, an American mercenary has already been recruited, a Stinger ground to air missile to be used for shooting down Joseph Kabila’s plane has already been purchased from London) accepted to share power with Rwandan and Ugandan-masterminded Congolese rebel leaders if that is the price that we have to pay for peace but he is adamant that the first democratic elections since the savage murder of Patrice Lumumba by CIA agents and Belgian secret services - the only elected leader in Congo so far – must be held in two years’time. That is why he faces such a hostility from those who have always held the people of Congo hostage.”
A woman stood up from the audience and told Clare Short that “to say that the toll of the people who have died in Congo as a result of this war is negligible is in itself ‘morally untenable’.”
Another woman called on Western governments to “change their foreign policies, stop propping up dictators like Mobutu and Saddam Hussein and when they fall out with them because they no longer represent their interests, they fight them as dictators, costly wars of which ordinary people bear the brunt”.
Imperialists indeed have no permanent friends, they only have permanent interests. Nevertheless, irrespective of the fact that charges of genocide and looting are hanging over his head, Clare Short will support Paul Kagame till cows come home.
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