Ten years ago, the US Empire honed its sights more intently on a profitable region of the world–the continent it once ravaged as a captain of the slave trade.

A new massive military command, AFRICOM was born. Its footprint includes an array of drone bases, camps and compounds, carrying out the American tradition of training and arming proxy militaries responsible for flagrant human rights abuses, and a variety of black ops. Far from a low-intensity war on the continent, AFRICOM averages several missions every single day.

Every Empire has longed for ownership of Africa for the same reason: it’s unimaginable treasure of minerals and raw materials. Much of that buried wealth is concentrated in Africa’s south, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

Taking into account it’s untapped minerals, it’s considered the richest country in the world, with reserves worth $24 trillion dollars. The DRC has 10% of the world’s copper, 30% of the world’s diamonds, and 70% of the world’s coltan. And it produces over 50% of the world’s cobalt.

Among Congolese who literally risk their lives working in cobalt mines, tens of thousands are children, working 12 hours a day for one dollar. Paying local militias to illegally dig, Western mining giants make millions off this criminal, enterprise, including Adastra Minerals and Bechtel Incorporated.

On this episode of The Empire Files, Abby Martin is joined by Kambale Musavuli, spokesperson for Friends of the Congo, to look at the DRC’s resource curse and how empires have pillaged the region for over a century.

How the World Runs on Looting the Congo

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Dubbed ‘The School of Dictators’ by human rights activists, the US Army School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, has produced some of the world’s most notorious torturers, drug traffickers and war criminals. The spectre of their crimes still haunts much of Latin America—from Argentina to El Salvador.

In El Salvador, the human rights abuses were beyond the pale–from the public assassination of bishop Óscar Romero to the raping and killing of four American nuns. 

Some of the school’s well known graduates include Jorge Videla, military dictator of Argentina from 1976 to 1981, who caused the deaths of at least 9,000 people and disappearances of an estimated 30,000 others. Another star pupil of the school was CIA agent, Vladimiro Montesinos, who went on to become Peru’s counterintelligence head. Montesino directed an anti-communist death squad called the Colina Group which committed numerous horrifying massacres of peasant farmers, trade unionists and alleged leftists.

The brutal crimes being committed in our names and with our tax dollars led a man named Father Roy Bourgeois to form The School of the Americas Watch, an organization dedicated to closing down the school.

Join Abby Martin in this edition of The Empire Files as she uncovers how the US funded right wing death squads and intentionally uprooted democracy across Latin America.

The US School That Trains Dictators & Death Squads

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Indigenous scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of an ‘Indigenous People’s History of The United States’, joins Abby Martin for this week’s episode of The Empire Files to give insight on the history and present-day struggle of native peoples.

Native society, despite pervasive mainstream mythology, was rich in agriculture and was advanced to such a degree that they were appropriated by colonialists. These civilizations were turned into slaves, bought and sold on the market and taken to work in mines and forcibly displaced so they did not have their housing or food supplies. The desire of the colonial forces was to weaken and control native populations so that could occupy and control the land, and use natives for slave labor.

Dunbar-Ortiz discusses not only the intention of colonial forces, which included killing off cultural ties and languages, but how native people have survived despite widespread terror campaigns. Armed settlers had to fight against native people in order to maintain dominance. The Plains People, for example, had to endure a “food fight” involving their buffalo. The primary goal of a food fight was to kill off the food supply of civilians so that they starve or give in to the demands of occupying forces.

Native resistance today has taken new, creative form—aimed at disrupting normalized dehumanization by the military establishment, sport establishment and school industries, all of which carry names and caricatures of natives which are deeply colonial and racist: from things like Tomahawk missiles to the Redskins sports team.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Abby Martin break down the colonialist fabrications which have long permeated our history books and follow through with how we can join the fight to amplify native voices.

Native American Genocide and Resistance with Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz

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The incident spurred outrage across the media, resulting in Obama having to apologize for the grave error.

If only one could expect the same apology for the thousands of drone victims across the Muslim World since the advent of the War on Terror, most of whose names were never so much as uttered by those who sealed their deaths.

In today’s globalized world almost everything is interconnected. When it comes to war, conflicts are often interlocked in disturbing ways. For example, every death by way of drone wouldn’t be possible without turning a blind eye to the ongoing genocide from resource wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC.

While people rightly demand that “Black Lives Matter” in America, black lives have been forgotten in the Congo, where nearly six million people have died just in the last fifteen years.

Media Roots Radio is joined by Kambale Musavuli, Spokesperson for Friends of the Congo, to talk about how Congo’s resource curse feeds the military industrial complex and why anti-drone activists need to organize with the Congolese to disrupt cobalt extraction.

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Kambale came on Breaking the Set to discuss the cobalt connection to the civil war in the Congo, and Media Roots covered this issue in depth. He also visited BTS during the last Africa Summit to break down backlash against US military policy in the continent.

How the US Military Took Over the African Continent

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Many DRC soldiers are trained and equipped in the United States. Breaking the Set expands upon a UN report bringing to light crimes against humanity committed by a US-trained Congolese battalion.

US Sponsors Rape in the Congo

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This Media Roots podcast is the product of many long hours of hard work and love. If you want to encourage our voice, please consider supporting us as we continue to speak from outside party lines. Even the smallest donations help us with operating costs.

Listen to all previous episodes of Media Roots Radio here.

Follow Abby @abbymartin & @kambale.

http://www.friendsofthecongo.org/

That narrative has persisted despite the fact that a great deal of evidence shows that Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) did much of the killing and has committed extraordinary levels of violence in neighboring Congo since invading that country not long after seizing power.

The recent BBC telecast of Rwanda: The Untold Story indicates that the truth about Kagame may finally be penetrating the mainstream. Rwanda: The Untold Story presents much information that contradicts the official narrative, specifically that the dramatic escalation in violence began not in April 1994 but in October 1990 when the RPF invaded from its outposts in Uganda; that RPF forces killed tens of thousands of people in the 42-month period from the invasion to April 1994; and that the RPF is responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand more Rwandans during the three month period of bloodshed in 1994.  

In contrast, the spinners of the Kagame the Hero tale have put the entire responsibility on the Hutu-controlled government and armed Hutu mobs. The RPF’s 1990 invasion, meanwhile, has been completely written out of history in the official narrative, as has RPF responsibility for the shooting down of a plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana. It was immediately after the murder of Habyarimana that what has been known since as the Rwandan Genocide began.

Another part of the official narrative that was exposed long ago by Edward Herman, Robin Philpot and others is that the US didn’t do enough to stop the killing. In fact, Kagame was an imperial operative as early as the 1980’s who trained at Fort Leavenworth and the US was closely allied with the RPF even before the 1990 invasion. Throughout the spring of 1994, the Clinton administration was proactive in blocking the UN from taking measures that might have prevented much of the killing. Former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Gali, for one, has put the entire blame for what happened in Rwanda in the 1990’s on the United States.

In addition, while the Rwandan government and France, its primary ally, supported international action to stop the killing, Kagame was so determined to take complete control of the country that he eschewed a ceasefire and negotiations. The inescapable conclusion is that the mounting deaths on both sides were acceptable to Kagame and, by extension, the US, so long as the end result was complete victory and the ascension of the RPF to power.

From the outset, both Hutu and Tutsi survivors, UN officials and numerous investigators have presented an entirely different version of events. Those stories, which have been fortified by population studies and other means, reveal that both sides are each responsible for hundreds of thousands of killings. These dissident voices have been ignored and, in the case of several studies by human rights groups and the UN, suppressed – at least until the airing of Rwanda: The Untold Story.

Perpetrators and supporters of empire who have never seen a US war crime they didn’t like have attacked critics of the official narrative and obfuscated who really benefits from the ongoing warfare. It’s a neat trick practiced regularly: falsely accuse dissidents of denying atrocities and deny imperial atrocities, all the while obscuring the billions in US business profits made possible by Kagame’s invasions of the Congo.

Western plunder of the region dates to the murderous rule of Belgian King Leopold II. No sooner did the Congolese independence movement succeed in 1960 than Congolese reactionaries and their Belgian and CIA helpers overthrew and eventually murdered Patrice Lumumba, the nation’s first elected Prime Minister. Eventually installed in Lumumba’s place was US puppet Mobutu Sese Soko, who for 30 years served US business interests as zealously as Kagame has. And much as a succession of US administrations hailed Mobutu as a great man, Clintons, Madeline Albright, George Bush II, Samantha Power and Susan Rice hail Kagame as “the man who ended the Rwandan Genocide.” Never mind the millions of Congolese who have been killed or died from starvation, disease and other causes traced directly to Kagame’s invasions.

The unraveling of the official Rwanda story has global implications, as the US has invoked “preventing another Rwanda” to justify invasions of the former Yugoslavia, Libya and large swaths of the Middle East. With a population increasingly alarmed by endless wars of aggression, the fact that the foundation for those acts is one big lie brings us closer to the day when we can end forever imperial ambitions and war.

Andy Piascik of Bridgeport writes for Z Magazine/Znet

Photo by flickr user DFID