Will America's Black political class join in the rape of Congo?

Last week Rwandan President Paul Kagame appeared in Atlanta for “Rwanda Day”. What Kagame said from the podium wasn't especially important. What was significant is that Atlanta and Chicago where he Kagame did a 2011 Rwanda Day are, after New York, the largest concentrations of black Americans on the continent, and that in Chicago he was greeted by Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, while in Atlanta he was billed with former mayor and UN Ambassador Andrew Young and Bernice King.

It's a marriage made not in heaven, but in the lucrative space where marriages of convenience are performed. The Kagame regime needs the best public relations it can buy to make up for the inconvenient facts. And there are a lot of inconvenient facts.

The PR says Rwanda is “Africa's Silicon Valley,” a land of neat villages and urban high rise buildings. In fact Rwanda is an informer-ridden, repressive police state where even small disagreements with the authorities can get you dispossessed or disappeared. Rwandan opposition political candidates are routinely imprisoned or murdered. Rwandan dissidents are hounded and pursued across Africa and Europe, sometimes assassinated; the journalists investigating the killings are publicly threatened using the president's social media accounts.

The PR says Rwanda's Paul Kagame ended the 1994 genocide. In fact, Kagame was trained in Uganda and by the US Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990 and brought the genocide with him, wading to power through the blood of hundreds of thousands. His forces, including child soldiers committed their fair share of Rwanda's 800,000 to 1 million murders in 1994, at least 10% according to Christian Davenport and Allan C. Stram. The "Hotel Rwanda Hutu­-on­Tutsi genocide" narrative was concocted to absolve Kagame's forces, to cover his tracks and those of his sponsors. The notion that the genocide occurred “because the West did not intervene” in Rwanda is laughably false. Paul Kagame and his army were themselves a “Western intervention.”

Soon after taking power in Rwanda, Paul Kagame's US supplied forces, along with the US supplied puppet armies of Uganda and Burundi, invaded neighbouring Congo, where they have remained ever since, despite the attempts of several other African countries and Congo's central government, to dislodge them. Rwandan and Ugandan forces and their militias, which often include child soldiers, have depopulated vast zones of eastern Congo, where a large share of the world's easily available diamonds, gold, timber, and other mineral resources including coltan, a compound used in every computer, cell phone, aircraft and automobile are found.

Despite the deaths of at least 5 million who have perished in Eastern Congo since the late 1990s, these resources are flowing steadily from Congo through Rwanda and Uganda mostly to Europe, North America and the West. By 2001, the UN had verified that Rwanda's and Uganda's rising exports of gold, diamonds, coltan, casserite, timber, platinum and more fueling those countries' growth were the proceeds of the genocidal rape and looting of the Congo. The horrific 5 million dead in Congo make it the largest single death toll since World War 2.

Far from the “Hotel Rwanda” myth, Rwandan president Paul Kagame didn't stop a pointless genocide in Rwanda. He is carrying out a far larger, and immensely profitable genocide in Congo to this day. His “Rwanda Day” stops in Chicago and Atlanta, where Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and Andrew Young appeared on his program, were part an open house, an overture to America's black political class and wannabees to cash in on the rape of the Congo. As a man with a bottomless hole in his soul, Rwanda's President Kagame is quick to spot the same disorder in others.

Paul Kagame urgently wants to connect with the hollow ghosts of America's old civil rights movement. He knows that America's own black political class is largely for sale or lease, ready to leverage its own brand for the interests of donors, whether banksters, charter and for profit schools, or telecoms, or whatever. Kagame has millions in lobbying money to spend and the black political class needs its cut. Global corporations looting blood soaked Congolese wealth through Rwanda and Uganda also need black faces to front for them on both sides of the water. The table is set. Everybody can get some.

The pictures of Rev. Jesse L. Jackson shaking hands with the bloody handed dictator of Rwanda in Chicago, of Andy Young pontificating on stage in Atlanta, are the clearest signals yet that America's black political class are being welcomed to join in the profits made at the Africa end of global supply chains, the profits of 5 million dead in Congo.

* Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, where this article was first published, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party.

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