Congo genocide

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

The new agreement in the Democratic Republic of Congo – which has already been violated by U.S.-allied forces – would field a peace-enforcement mission. However, “if the U.S. and the Europeans pay for this nominally African force, and train and equip it, as they do in Somalia, then the U.S. will actually be running the show in Congo.”

NAACP Image Awards Targeted for Protest

Benton Harbor, Michigan, activist Rev. Edward Pinkney plans to lead hundreds of pickets at the NAACP’s Image Awards ceremonies on February 1, in Los Angeles. “Our main objective is to wake up the NAACP, and show that they are out of touch with the community,” said Pinkney, longtime leader of the civil rights group’s local chapter. Pinkney charges the NAACP collaborated with a Whirlpool Corporation scheme to take over the Ben Harbor NAACP, in return for financial support. The Los Angeles protest will send the NAACP a message, said Pinkney: “We need you to stop taking these corporate dollars.”

White House and Republicans Play Fiscal Tag Team

The Obama administration and Republican congressional leaders “are pushing essentially the same solutions” to the so-called fiscal cliff problem. “Nobody on either side is talking about the military budget” or “serious taxation of billionaires; in fact, both sides are talking about cutting corporate taxes,” said David Swanson, publisher of the influential website War Is a Crime. “You don’t really have opposition between these two parties, you have agreement,” he said.

Arne Duncan Must Go

Black and progressive educators should push for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to be replaced early in Obama’s second term, said Dr. Sam Anderson, of New York City’s Independent Commission on Public Education. The concept of education as a “human right is historically rooted in our struggle to be free in this country, as Black people,” said Anderson.

Bill Clinton Most to Blame for Congo “Holocaust”

Millions of Congolese have died since 1996 due to policies set in motion by President Bill Clinton, said Prof. Yaa Lengi, of the Congo Coalition. Neighboring Uganda and Rwanda “are always coming up with schemes to foment chaos in eastern Congo” in order to exploit the region’s mineral resources. “Cell phones, lap tops, flat screen TVs – all those gadgets need the minerals of the Congo,” said coalition organizer William Misezuel.

More Bad News for Congo: Oil

“Of late there’s been a major oil discovery in Congo, which makes it even more attractive” to outsiders, said Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Houston. “The United States needs to put more pressure on the Rwandan and Ugandan regimes,” since Washington “is the puppeteer” of the relationship. Dr. Horne spoke on Regent Radio’s Saturday Morning Show, in Toronto, Canada.

UN Fails Haiti on Rights

A report by the Paris-based Federation of Human Rights charges the United Nations with failing to take responsibility for causing the cholera epidemic in Haiti, and with inflicting other human rights violations on the occupied nation. In addition to spreading cholera, UN troops have “violated Haitians’ rights in various ways, from rapes to extrajudicial killings,” said Dan Beeton, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington. The UN recently extended its occupation troops’ mandate for another year.

Abolish – Don’t Tweet – Stop-and-Frisk

As popular anger rises against New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s draconian policing policies, “we must avoid being sidetracked by politicians, preachers or anybody else who might want to lead it into sit-downs and negotiations with the mayor and the police commissioner,” said Carl Dix, a founder of Stop Stop-and-Frisk. “The challenge” is to reject “some surface reform, some tweets, to a racist, illegal policy,” he said. Stop-and-frisk, “a pipeline to mass incarceration,” has to go.

Contemptible: Holder, Obama and the Congress

“We can openly admit that this attorney general and this president are Black and the congressmen going after them are a bunch of racists,” and still “condemn abuses of power” by President Obama and Eric Holder,” said David Swanson, publisher of the influential website WarIsACrime.org. The House committee that charged Holder with contempt in a gun trafficking scheme acted “hypocritically,” said Swanson. However, “you have a president who has been claiming state secrets powers in courts…to protect himself and his predecessors and their corporate allies, far and away beyond anything Bush or Cheney ever tried.”

A “Human Rights” Approach to Public Schooling

“Parents and communities and students must participate in all decisions that affect the right to education,” said Ellen Raider, of ICOPE, the Independent Commission on Public Education, in New York City. High drop-out rates violate the “human right to the full development of each child, to its fullest potential. It’s the new Jim Crow, as Michelle Alexander says.” Charter schools have been “used as a wedge to separate parents in Black and Latino communities,” said Raider. Meanwhile, the Coalition for Public Education has established the Paul Robeson Freedom School, in Brooklyn, to provide “education for liberation,” said spokesman Rodney Deas.

A U.S. Chapter for ILPS

Twenty-eight United States organizations have become the newest country-chapter of the International League of People’s Struggle. “We cannot succeed, either as an anti-war movement or as a movement against injustice in this country, without being united with our sisters and brothers around the world,” said U.S. chapter spokesperson Bill Dores.

Congo President Shares Blame for Genocide

Evidence mounts of Rwandan complicity in violence that has killed six million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1996. However, DRC President Joseph Kabila is also part of the problem, said Jacques Bahati, policy analyst for the Africa Faith and Justice Network, based in Washington. If Congo had an “efficient and effective government, they could set up an army to secure its borders,” said Bahati. Rwanda gets away with destabilizing Congo because “it has a very good army” and is a close ally of the United States.

Western Heads of State, Including Obama, Guilty of High Crimes

The Pan-African Solidarity Hague Committee, comprised of activists from throughout the Diaspora, delivered a petition to the International Criminal Court charging the heads of state of the U.S. and other NATO countries with war crimes and crimes against humanity in Libya, Ivory Coast, Haiti, and in the “targeting and persecution of Black people in the United States,” said human rights lawyer Roger Wareham. “We have no illusions that the ICC is going to take our evidence, which is rock-solid,” said Wareham. “Of the 26 case that are before the Criminal Court, all involve Africans.” The ICC “has become a tool for the West to recolonize Africa.”

Backwards Logic: Obama’s “We Got Your Back” Black Campaign Ad

The Obama 2012 campaign’s radio ad, in which a chorus of Black voices assures the president that “We got your back,” implies a “reciprocal relationship” between Blacks and Obama – “that we’re all in this together,” said Dr. Johnny Williams, professor of sociology at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut. However, “there’s been very little that he’s done directly for Black people to show us that he’s got our back.”

Why Wisconsin mobilization and Occupy movement “Faltered”

The “biggest ongoing labor rally since the 1930s got shunted into electoral politics…because there wasn’t also the pursuit of independent movement building,” said Arun Gupta, co-founder of the Occupy Wall Street Journal. The problem, said Gupta, was not simply that Democratic Party and labor union “honchos” steered the movement into an unsuccessful bid to unseat Republican Scott Walker. Rather, the Wisconsin mobilization and the Occupy movement, “despite their potential, have been faltering because of…a lack of organization, a lack of discipline, and a lack of strategy.”

Medicaid for All Would Have Passed Constitutional Muster

President Obama could have avoided constitutional problems if he had chosen a health care plan that “most people have long supported” and which is “constitutionally safe”: Medicare for All, said political analyst and author Paul Street. “All you have to do” to create a single-payer system ”is to go into the Medicare bill and take out the clause that says its for people over 65 – and just say its for everybody.” Instead, Obama pushed a bill that guaranteed price-setting power to the drug and insurance “mafias.” The U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule on Obama’s health care legislation, which requires people to purchase private insurance.

Obama Violates His Own Law on Congo Killings

Friends of Congo is circulating a petition demanding that Washington cut off funds to nations that “destabilize” their neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Executive director Maurice Carney notes that the law was authored by Sen. Barack Obama and co-sponsored by Sen. Hillary Clinton, now U.S. Secretary of State. Rwanda and Uganda are both guilty of destabilizing the DRC, “resulting in the death of millions of Congolese,” said Carney. Both Rwanda and Uganda are close allies of the U.S.

No Compromise with Capitalism

“You have to have, as an objective, overturning the system of capitalism, itself. And to do that, you’ve got to be organized,” said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, founded in 1972. Yeshitela was speaking at the national convention of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, in Philadelphia.