U.S. a factor in 6 million Congo deaths

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.peoplesworld.org/us-a-factor-in-six-million-congo-deaths/

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, writing for The Guardian of London, called it "the most important assassination of the 20th century." He was referring to the murder of the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo ("DRC" or "Congo&quot , Patrice Lumumba, on January 17, 1961, through the combined efforts of the United States and Belgium. The assassination took place less than seven months after Congolese independence from Belgium. The Congo has yet to recover from this tragic event.

In his Guardian article, Nzongola-Ntalaja explained that Lumumba's murder - "the country's original sin" - was motivated by the U.S. desire to control the Congo's resources:

"With the outbreak of the Cold War, it was inevitable that the U.S. and its western allies would not be prepared to let Africans have effective control over strategic raw materials, lest these fall in the hands of their enemies in the Soviet camp. It is in this regard that Patrice Lumumba's determination to achieve genuine independence and to have full control over Congo's resources in order to utilize them to improve the living conditions of our people was perceived as a threat to western interests."

<snip>

And so, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, U.S. President Bill Clinton began to pave the way for a giant resource grab in the Congo - the most resource-rich country on earth, and also the poorest, with the very lowest Human Development Indicator of the 187 countries ranked by the United Nations. Thus, as we learn well from the work of Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, most notably in The Politics of Genocide, the U.S. in the early 1990s backed forces led by Paul Kagame, who was trained in intelligence at Fort Leavenworth, in their takeover of Rwanda.

And then, in 1996, the U.S. backed Kagame, who had become president of Rwanda with U.S. help, in his invasion of the Congo. The result has been the greatest mass killing since WWII, with around 6 million killed in the Congo since that time.

<snip>

[dipsydoodle]

1. True

Like it or not.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. "The most important assassination…" Wow, that's saying something!

Maybe it's just my Eurocentrism showing, but I thought maybe the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, which touched off the First World War (which most historians see as leading almost inevitably to the Second), or the killing JFK, which may have laid the groundwork for both the Vietnam War and the end of liberalism in America…

So, Wow!

[indepat]

3. We remember the assassination as if it were yesterday, for it occurred on our first-born's first

birthday.

[Taverner]

4. We ordered the killing of Patrice Lumbumba...

Nuff said