Hello, everyone. Good morning, afternoon or evening, and welcome to this edition of Elsewhere in Focus. You can find all the articles in the series here (along with my other diaries).
Remember the Democratic Republic of Congo where minerals are being stolen and extracted by China, Rwanda and other actors? Where Rwanda and Uganda are meddling to keep their hold on critical minerals? It appears the United States has had some hand in the conditions there too. So, it is DR Congo again today. We will learn about US involvement in DR Congo’s troubles along with US attempt to arrest those troubles today.
Most of this might be old news to the readers but it helps to revisit that history.
Democratic Republic of Congo: The United States in DR Congo
The Crisis of the Congo, the Coming of a Dictator, and the United States
In 1960, the Belgian Congo became independent. A crisis followed as Congolese soldiers mutinied against Belgian officers because of preferential treatment and the province of Katanga with support from Belgium declared independence.
This piece from Stuart A. Reid for the Washington Post gives a brief overview (24 October 2023).
On June 30, 1960, after 75 years of Belgian rule, Congo became an independent country. At the helm as prime minister was Patrice Lumumba, a former postal clerk and beer promoter turned nationalist politician who had won the most votes in elections that May. But within days of his taking office, the country fell apart: The army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened without permission and a separatist province, Katanga, broke loose.
Lumumba turned first to the United Nations, which sent in a massive peacekeeping operation but failed to end the secession of Katanga. After asking the United States for help and threatening to kick out the U.N., he approached the Soviet Union for assistance. In the context of the Cold War, that was too much for Washington.
On Aug. 18, 1960, Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first U.S. president known to order the assassination of a sitting foreign leader. During a National Security Council meeting, an official note taker saw the president turn toward Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA. Then, the note taker recalled, President Eisenhower said “something — I can no longer remember his words— that came across to me as an order for the assassination of Lumumba.”
The US supported Mobutu Sese Seko (Joseph Mobutu)’s coup on the government after a constitutional impasse—due to disagreements between President Kasavubu and Prime Minister Lumumba—followed by a fragmentation of the country.
After Lumumba escaped from imprisonment, he was captured and handed over to rebel forces in Katanga who under Belgian officers executed Lumumba. The CIA Section chief Larry Devlin was involved in the entire process.
Devlin urged the country’s president, Joseph Kasavubu, to orchestrate Lumumba’s removal as prime minister. The CIA station chief also bribed members of the senate, laying the groundwork for a no-confidence vote that would get rid of the prime minister. As part of what came to be known as “Project Wizard,” the CIA subsidized at least two opposition senators, and the agency received White House authorization to pay the president as well. CIA cash also paid for anti-Lumumba radio propaganda and street protests. The pressure succeeded, and on Sept. 5, 1960, Kasavubu fired Lumumba.
Nine days later, Congo’s young army chief of staff, Joseph Mobutu, announced that he was taking power. As Church Committee staffers summarized after interviewing Devlin, Mobutu’s coup “was arranged and supported, and indeed, managed, by the Central Intelligence Agency.”
It was the beginning of a long relationship between Mobutu and the CIA. The agency financed him and other members of his illegal regime and recommended that he arrange for Lumumba’s “permanent disposal.” When Lumumba escaped from house arrest, it helped Mobutu search for and eventually capture him.
When Devlin learned that Lumumba was about to be sent to his death, he offered no dissent to Mobutu and the other Congolese power brokers who regularly sought — and followed — his advice. Instead, he actively kept his superiors in Washington out of the loop. The Kennedy administration was just days from taking office. By now, the CIA had shelved the assassination plan, and the State Department had made it clear that no major policy decisions could be made during this period of transition. Devlin worried that Washington might ask him to save Lumumba, and so he said nothing. This silence sealed Lumumba’s fate. Late at night on Jan. 17, 1961, the 35-year-old former prime minister was shot dead in a remote clearing in the Katangan countryside.
The Congo meanwhile convened Parliament again and elected a new Prime minister, Cyrille Adoula. The UN managed to bring the secession from Katanga to an end leading to the formation of a unity government. There was once again rebellion, intervention by Belgium and the US, a constitutional impasse due to disagreement between the President and the Prime minister followed by Mobutu’s coming to power in a coup.
This time the coup lasted decades.
From Afoaku, Osita G. “THE U.S. AND MOBUTU SESE SEKO: WAITING ON DISASTER.” Journal of Third World Studies 14, no. 1 (1997): 65–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45193674.
The administration of Moïse Tshombe (1964-65) pursued a contradictory policy of nationalizing foreign private holdings in Zaire while assuming liabilities for financial obligations ($536 million) incurred by the colonial state. The Western powers finally found a friend in Kinshasa when Mobutu launched his political career in 1965 through a military coup. U.S. role in bringing Mobutu into power not only addressed the specific Cold War concern of keeping the Soviets out of Zaire, it permitted American private interests to break Belgium's monopoly over the Zairian economy and helped extend U.S. influence into central and southern Africa.12 Despite Mobutu's nationalist pretensions, he generally maintained a conducive environment for Western interests through his domestic and foreign policies.1
After he came to power, the US and other Western powers (such as France) supported his regime of repression and corruption for the next thirty years.
Both Mobutu's survived instincts and his government's efforts to take on political/security roles in a region regarded as chronically unstable served as critical resources for wooing U.S. policy makers. These include Zaire's military interventions in Central African Republic (1979), in Burundi (1972), in Angola (1975-76), and in Chad (1981 and 1983).14 Zaire acted as conduit for U.S. military aid to the UNITA guerrillas, which allowed Mobutu to act as a broker between UNITA and the Angolan government. Zaire was also valued as a moderating force vis-a-vis the South African situation, a role Mobutu played by maintaining military and economic relations with apartheid South Africa (when Pretoria was supposed to be iso lated by the international community, especially by the OAU) while, at the same time, courting the ANC leadership. Mobutu's regional role further included efforts to act as mediator in the Sudanese and Rwandan civil wars.15 As a member of the United Nations Security Council, during the Gulf War, Zaire supported the U.S. position in the crisis, an action Kinshasa orchestrated with dramatic renewal of relations with Kuwait.16
U.S. -Zairian relations also included cooperation in trade. As Forbes Pachter has shown, after consolidating Zaire's territorial integrity under a friendly government, the "United States played a crucial role in improving the investment climate in Zaire"; this included settling disputes over Mobutu's nationalization policy, arranging for an IMF stabilization plan that would liberalize the economy, and writing an investment code that would guarantee the security of American investors.17 Zaire subsequently became important as a reliable source of strategic minerals needed by the Western military- industrial complex.18 In comparative terms, U.S. involvement in the Zairian economy might seem insignificant. However, as table 1.1 reveals, the U.S. and its European allies have been Zaire's principal trading partners.19 Economic and political relations reinforced one another, significantly raising Mobutu's strategic value to the West.
On the other hand, the Mobutu dictatorship has survived partly due to his diverse roles (not necessarily limited to anticommunism) as a client of Western powers. In return, the Mobutu government benefitted substantially from U.S. support in spite of public outrage at home and abroad concerning its dismal human rights record, economic mismanagement, and corruption. In spite of Jimmy Carter's human rights campaign and the decline in East- West tension, the U.S. played a critical role, in conjunction with France and Belgium, in suppressing political insurgence in Shaba province in 1977 and 1978.20
The US benefited from its support for Mobutu in the Congo (renamed Zaire during Mobutu’s time) as it had before Congo’s independence as well. It was only in the 1990s when Mobutu seemed too much of a liability that US stopped propping him up. Instead, the US financial interests supported the Rwandan, Ugandan and Angolan forces that invaded Congo and deposed him. Later, when Laurent Kabila asked Rwandan and Ugandan forces to get out of his country, US supported Rwanda’s second invasion of DR Congo.
US, Rwanda, and DR Congo
The Second Congo War is called Africa’s World War due to the number of African countries that were involved in the war. The African countries however were not the only countries intervening in DR Congo. The United States was too. This article from New Internationalist team gives the details (2 May 2004).
Kabila’s unwillingness to be a tool of the West was his undoing. On 2 August 1998, with the consent of the international community – in particular the US, who monitored the whole operation and sent Special Forces into the east – Rwanda and Uganda launched another war. This time their purpose was to overthrow the non-compliant Kabila and replace him with a ‘reliable’ power that would be submissive to their financial interests. But due to the unforeseen resistance of Kabila and, above all, the military intervention of Angola and Zimbabwe who backed him, their attempt to remove him failed.
Once again, the country’s resources financed the war and became the real stake. The east of the country was ransacked and pillaged by Rwandan and Ugandan forces.
Between September 1998 and August 1999, according to UN experts: ‘The occupied zones of the DR Congo have been plundered of all their stocks: stocks of minerals, of forest and agricultural products, of livestock... Troops from Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda and soldiers of the RCD Goma commanded by an officer, visited farms, factories and banks... Orders were given to soldiers to load up products and goods on their armed vehicles.’2
The United States government trained and provided military support to Rwanda during this war. The story is described in this documentary from 2011.
Hmm… I don’t think it was age restricted when I saw it a couple of days back. Age restriction is one way to reduce visibility of a video. I do wonder.
Be that as it may, the video, after giving a general outline of the conditions in DR Congo in 2011, tells the story of how Bill Clinton provided support to Paul Kagame. As per Jonathan Beloff’s piece for the Conversation (3 August 2022),
Before the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, the country fell within France’s sphere of influence. Washington did not view Rwanda as a strategic partner.
But America’s relations with Rwanda changed after the genocide, based on a desire to help support the new post-genocide government. The result was the forging of close diplomatic relations, a process described by Robert Gribbin, a former American ambassador to Rwanda (1996-1999), in his book, In the Aftermath of Genocide: The US Role in Rwanda.
Gribbin sets out how the US developed close relations with the post-genocide government and the victorious Rwanda Patriotic Front. This included providing military training for soldiers and commanders, which still continues.
Thanks to the efforts of Susan Rice, the former assistant secretary of state for African affairs (1997-2001) under the Clinton administration, the US became a close ally of Rwanda.
The US and other countries such as Germany and the UK thus has a lot to atone for in DR Congo.
The Potential for Western Action Against Rwanda
A flip side to all this attention is that you can also use it to benefit.
In the late 2000s, as stories of human rights violations in DR Congo started to gain attention, Senator Obama sponsored a bill to protect DR Congo’s mineral resources from plunger. If applied, the interviewees in the video believe that it can protect Congo.
President Obama did apply it in 2012.
Dainiel Levine-Spound and Ari Tolany had written about the time when Obama applied it in 2012 for Just Security (13 April 2023).
Following the M23’s 2012 takeover of Goma, the United States played a critical role in pressuring the Rwandan government to halt support for the group. Although the U.S. is among Rwanda’s largest bilateral donors, its security cooperation activities with Rwanda have been limited. Congressional concern over Rwanda’s support to the M23, however, led to the inclusion of Section 7043 in the FY2012 Consolidated Appropriations Act (CAA), requiring that Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programming for Uganda and Rwanda be suspended if the secretary of state has “credible information” that either country is providing support to armed groups in the DRC who have violated human rights or are involved in mineral exportation. In a break from previous policy, the Obama administration publicly criticized Rwandan support for the M23 and suspended FMF as section 7043 required. In October 2013, the administration suspended more military aid to Rwanda under the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA), citing Rwandan support for the M23, which had abducted and recruited children as soldiers.
While the amount of military aid cut was relatively small, U.S. actions likely encouraged European donors – including the European Union, Germany and Sweden – to follow suit, some of which similarly halted aid to Rwanda. Critically, the U.S. rationale for restricting security cooperation was narrowly tailored, focusing specifically on Rwandan support for armed groups in Congo. When the Rwandan government ceased providing support to the M23, the Obama administration subsequently waived many restrictions on security cooperation activities.
There were multiple factors behind the M23’s defeat in 2013, including a reinforced U.N. peacekeeping mission fighting alongside the FARDC, changing regional dynamics, a reorganization of the FARDC leadership, and significant dissensions within the M23 itself. It is clear, however, that pressure from the United States and other international actors led, at least in part, to Rwanda’s suspension of support to the M23, which in turn contributed to the group’s rapid collapse. Without Rwandan support, the M23 crumbled in the face of Congolese and U.N. military pressure.
But a decade after its initial defeat, the M23 is once again benefiting from Rwandan assistance, including the deployment of RDF troops. And while the United States and other international actors have publicly demanded that Rwanda cease supporting the M23, the results have been minimal.
The authors call for US to sanction Rwanda. President Biden may already have done so as per Romain Gras and Julian Pecquet writing for the Africa Report (4 October 2023).
The Joe Biden administration has suspended military assistance to Rwanda as of this week over its alleged support for the M23 rebels in eastern Congo.
The aid freeze is a consequence of Rwanda being added to the blacklist of countries found to violate the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA), a 2008 law that seeks to eradicate the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict.
The land-locked country joins the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Mali, Somalia and South Sudan among other African nations on the list for the fiscal year that started 1 October.
“The United States uses the Child Soldiers Prevention Act [CSPA] list to publicly hold countries to account where we have credible information of the recruitment or use of child soldiers by government security forces or government-supported armed groups,” a State Department official tells The Africa Report.
But clearly, more could be done given that the few hundred thousands in aid forms a limited part of overall US aid to Rwanda. Plus, there is the trade in stolen minerals.
As discussed in my story earlier, the potential for government actions do not involve just actions against Rwanda and Uganda but also actions to regulate trade and investment that profits off the exploitation of the people of DR Congo.
I hope that we will continue to create awareness and agitate for such rules and regulations despite challenges and setbacks; setbacks such as a US court’s decision to throw out a case brought by activists against Apple and other companies for their activities in DR Congo. If the court does not think phone and electronics companies profiting off exploitation in DR Congo illegal, it is maybe time to ask for a law that regulates such activity.
That is it for today. Sorry for the delay, everyone.
Until, next Wednesday. Take care. Stay safe. Be well.
May we be able to stop the countries of the world from exploiting each other. So that everyone may be free.
