Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

16 Years of U.S. Genocide in Congo
12 Dec 2012
🖨️ Print Article

 

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

The U.S. tells the world it can’t figure out how six million people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo – while Washington writes the checks and arms the perpetrators to the teeth. Like Mafia Dons pretending to be honest businessmen, successive U.S. administrations subsidize and direct the worst genocide since World War Two.

 

16 Years of U.S. Genocide in Congo

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“For 16 years, Uganda and Rwanda have done the bidding of their paymasters and arms suppliers, the American and British governments.”

The United States has financed and given overall direction to the worst genocide since World War Two, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since 1996, Washington has drenched Congo’s eastern provinces in the blood of over six million people. The governments of Rwanda and Uganda, the direct perpetrators of this holocaust, are in every sense of the word agents of U.S. foreign policy, who operate with impunity under the imperial umbrella.

A growing number of voices now charge that the Obama administration, like the Bush and Clinton administrations before it, has “protected” Rwanda and Uganda in their de facto annexation of eastern Congo and its mineral riches. But the actual relationship is more like that between a Mafia Godfather and his murderous henchmen. For 16 years, Uganda and Rwanda have done the bidding of their paymasters and arms suppliers, the American and British governments. If the Nuremburg rules of international justice were in force today, the highest officials in London and Washington would face death by hanging for their monstrous crimes – and only later would Presidents Kagame of Rwanda and Museveni of Uganda take their walk with the executioner.

When Congolese women and children screamed in agony, United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice said, literally, that the U.S. should “look the other way” – knowing full well that a people were being annihilated. She is no different than the high Nazi officials who were hanged for waging aggressive war and the slaughter of millions, almost 70 years ago.

“If the Nuremburg rules of international justice were in force today, the highest officials in London and Washington would face death by hanging for their monstrous crimes.”

And now, after 16 years of unspeakable carnage, the world’s greatest military power, equipped with the most sophisticated means of information gathering ever devised, whose soldiers train and equip the Rwandans and Ugandans who are responsible for tens of thousands of murders a month, claims to have only the most limited knowledge of how six million people wound up dead – half of them children below the age of five.

During hearings this week at the House Subcommittee on Africa, Johnnie Carson, an avuncular Black man who’s filling Susan Rice’s old shoes as assistant secretary of State for African Affairs, performed his own sickening dance of death, admitting that the so-called M23 “rebels” that have been rampaging through eastern Congo “would not be the threat” they are today “without external support.” But Carson would still not say directly that Rwanda is the real power behind M23, and he tried to absolve the government of Uganda of complicity. Steve Hege, who coordinated the UN Group of Experts whose report Susan Rice tried to suppress, testified that “Rwanda, in fact, orchestrated the creation of M23,” and that “senior Ugandan officials” were deeply involved in M23’s operations.

Johnnie Carson and Susan Rice are not motivated to lie by loyalty to African military strongmen. They are loyal to U.S. government policies that they have both played a role in formulating. Just because Susan Rice qualifies as a person of the lowest human order imaginable – an accomplice to genocide – does not make her a rogue element. Far from it: she is a “good German” soldier, following her commander-in-chief’s orders, oblivious to the agony of dying Africans, whose lives don’t count for anything in America, anyway – including, it appears in much of Black America, where Rice is applauded as yet another Black face in a very high place. For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.



Your browser does not support the audio element.

listen
http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20121212_gf_USPolicyCongo.mp3

More Stories


  • asdf
    Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
    Katrina Victims: Relocated or Forced into Exile?
    27 Aug 2025
    Black Agenda Report's late Executive Editor, Glen Ford, gave this interview a decade after Hurricane Katrina to explore how the narrative of "starting over" is being used to whitewash the forced…
  • asfd
    Glen Ford , BAR executive editor
    Katrina Victims: Relocated or Forced into Exile?
    27 Aug 2025
    In this 2015 Real News Network interview the late Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report co-founder and Executive Editor, analyzed why an article in The New Yorker marking the 10th anniversary of Hurricane…
  • Hurricane Katrina man on car
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Why We Remember Katrina
    27 Aug 2025
    Twenty years ago, the world witnessed more than the suffering of hurricane Katrina's victims. The United States was exposed as a failed state controlled by the cruelties of racialized capitalism.
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    ESSAY: This is Criminal, Malik Rahim, New Orleans, September 1st, 2005
    27 Aug 2025
    “It’s not like New Orleans was caught off guard. This could have been prevented.”
  • Jon Jeter
    From Jim Crow to Katrina to Gentrification, Tracing the Rise and Fall of New Orleans Working Class
    27 Aug 2025
    A forgotten history of cross-racial labor solidarity in 1890s New Orleans offered a glimpse of a potential future. Its deliberate destruction set the stage for the city's modern transformation into a…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us