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NEWS & LETTERS, February 2008 - March 2008EditorialGenocide in CongoA genocide is taking place in Congo. Not a normally understood genocide where one group is intent on annihilating another. Rather, an entire nation is being allowed to disintegrate as children, women, and men die in numbers not seen since World War II--5.4 million since 1996. In some places, especially the North Kivu Province, civilians are being killed with weapons of war--guns, knives, and machetes. Millions more are dying from what is called "war-related causes": starvation, cholera, malaria, diarrhea. The conflict has brought into the world a new level of brutality against women (see Congo: women's obliteration). All predictors say the situation is going to get worse. That grim future is forecast in how in the past year over 400,000 Congolese have been forced from their homes. In North Kivu 800,000 have become "displaced persons," and recent fighting in December and January added 60,000 more to the numbers. While, rightly so, today's headlines carry the alarming news of the deteriorating situation in Kenya, where the specter of ethnic cleansing has raised its hideous head and over a thousand have been killed and many thousands more driven from their homes, we still must ask, where is the outcry about Congo? The fact is that there is no will among the world's rulers to stop the bloodbath in Congo because Western capitalists and governments, as well as others including Russia, are profiting from its disintegration. Congo's lush and beautiful land contains, besides diamonds and gold, 30% of the world's cobalt, 10% of its copper, and, critically, all of 80% of the world's coltan, vital for cell phones and electronics. What Karl Marx wrote over a century ago in CAPITAL could, with a few name changes, have been written yesterday about Congo: "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation." Capitalism's inhuman momentum is starkly revealed by the situation in Congo. While the country is vastly rich in resources, it remains vastly undeveloped with 80% of the people living on 30 cents a day or less. Even the "hunting of black-skins" is accurate as all sides--be they the National Council for Defense of the People (CNDP), the Democratic Forces of the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), or the Mai Mai--have kidnapped children to use as child soldiers, taken women and girls to be used as beasts of burden to carry supplies or contraband through the bush, used as domestic labor, all the time raped repeatedly, and kept in bases in the forest for months. So horrific is the situation, so deep is the corruption, so extensive is the exploitation--and for so long--that the international community has been forced to respond. Congo has the largest UN peacekeeping military force in the world, 16,500, and consequently the biggest expenditure. Yet the country is so huge and the problems so endemic and intractable, the UN Congo initiative has not made a dent. Raya Dunayevskaya, writing about Africa in PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, pointed to the problem "that, even in prosperous times, the advanced countries do not have capital sufficient for the development of the underdeveloped economies. So long as the motive force of production continues to be the accumulation of surplus value (or unpaid hours of labor)--whether for private plants or for state spaceships--the straining of the ruling class to appropriate the full twenty-four hours of man's labor still fails to create sufficient capital to industrialize the 'backward' lands." What is the way out? Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, points to "the enormous energy of the people and their commitment to democracy, [shows] there is hope that we can start a sustained process of improvement." Dunayevskaya concretizes the direction the "enormous energy of the people" can take: "Thus, the law of value, as internal exploitation and external domination, cannot be broken except by those who are the exploited and the dominated. The laws lose their iron grip when, and only when, the greatest of all 'energizing principles,' free creative labor, takes destiny into its own hands." Capital, with all its wealth, all its guns, all its power, cannot solve the problem of Congo. The solution is a human one and to help unleash its power, we need to extend our deepest revolutionary solidarity to those in Congo who are fighting against war, rape, and the deepest poverty and exploitation. The time is now. |
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