Rwanda, DRC and the New Scramble for Africa (Part 4): Africa’s Israel and the BRICS/NATO Punch and Judy Show

AFRICA, 25 Nov 2024

Rusere Shoniwa | A Plague on Both Houses – TRANSCEND Media Service

Zoom Afrika X account: No Congo = No Apple

27 Oct 2024 – The early formation of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) as an underground movement was as close in character to a mafia family as it was to a political and military movement. Members took an oath on joining: “I solemnly swear, before everyone present, that I will work for the RPF family, that I will always defend its interests, and that, if I divulge its secrets, I will be decapitated like any other traitor.”[i]

The subtitle of Do Not Disturb is: “the story of a political murder and an African regime gone bad”, which is problematic because there is nothing in the author’s account to suggest that it was ever good. By her own account, it simply continued to rule in the moral vacuum from which it sprang.

The “plan for Zaire” – Rwanda goes straight to work for the boss of bosses

“Congo is arguably the most resource-rich nation on earth, so rich that it’s been called a ‘geological scandal’.” – Congolese journalist Akilimali Chomachoma.

Christopher Black, the Canadian lawyer whose work I referred to in Part II, unearthed a letter hidden in the ICTR prosecution files. Dated August 1994, the letter is from Paul Kagame and refers to his and Museveni’s “plan for Zaire”. Black recalls, in his own words, the contents of the letter in which Kagame states that “the Hutus are in the way of that plan but that, with the help of the Americans, British and Belgians, the plan would go ahead”. That is Black’s paraphrasing of the letter. As Black surmises, correctly in my opinion, “the war in Rwanda was just the first phase for the greater war in the Congo that was planned probably as far back as 1990.”

One clue that Black’s deduction was right on the money comes from a Newsweek piece in May 1997 that referred to the invasion of Zaire in 1996 by Rwanda and Uganda as Washington’s African move. Reading more like a leaked State Department memo than the usual opaque mainstream reporting on empire meddling, one gets the impression that the media in 1997 was more transparent than it is now. “What does America stand to gain?” the article asks. “The new Zaire offers a bonanza to U.S. investors, who already are flocking into rebel-held territory.”

The inevitable consequence of dispersing some 2 million Hutus, including members of the former government’s army, into refugee camps in Zaire was that they would reform to attack the RPA (the RPF’s military wing), now renamed the Rwandan Defence Force (RDF). These attacks on Rwanda’s border with Zaire began in October 1995 and provided NATO’s new client state with the pretext that it needed to overthrow Zaire’s government and take control of its vast mineral wealth. A Congolese frontman going to seed in Tanzania, Laurent Kabila, was selected as NATO’s proxy for overthrowing Mobutu in Zaire to make it look like an internal civil war.

Both Kabila and his rebel force were feckless, and the RDF made no secret of the fact that they were the military force behind the operation that overthrew Mobutu. In the process, the RDF conducted ruthless reprisals against the Hutu refugees in eastern Zaire, making no distinction between armed Hutu militias and innocent civilian refugees.[ii] So transparent was the RDF’s role in this operation that, at the end of it, the Rwandan general (James Kabarebe) who secured the operation’s success, was made chief of Kabila’s army in the new Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).[iii]

By April 1998, the first Congo war was over, and the RPF controlled critical swathes of the DRC’s mineral resources around its eastern border with Rwanda. The DRC is one of Africa’s most resource-rich countries. It is vast; the flight distance between its western- and eastern-most points is roughly equivalent to that between London and Moscow. Its untapped deposits of raw minerals are estimated to be worth in excess of U.S. $24 trillion.

Despite the value of Do Not Disturb as an important antidote to a distorted official narrative, the book is suffused with an unwavering respect for the guardrails of mainstream power analysis, and thus a total blindness, or perhaps loyalty, to the ultimate source of power in this geopolitical struggle. The author, Michela Wrong, displays her naivete by what she doesn’t say, despite her own facts screaming at her, as well as what she does say. For instance, she believes that “the altruistic Department for International Development (DFID) was born under the inspirational leadership of Clare Short,” and that the US was “bighearted enough to send troops to distribute food in Somalia”.[iv] [emphasis added] Relieved that I had read those sentences on an empty stomach, they nevertheless did induce a dry heave.

In her power analysis of the first Congo war, Wrong deploys an analogy of wooden Russian dolls to describe the power hierarchy: “inside Julius Nyerere [Tanzania] had nestled Yoweri Museveni [Uganda], inside Museveni lay Paul Kagame [Rwanda], inside Kagame nestled Laurent Kabila [DRC].” At no point does she entertain the possibility that, as I will argue, the giant doll housing all these smaller ones is the US-NATO empire to which the lion’s share of the spoils go after its street dealers have taken their cut. Wrong frustratingly doesn’t  convert facts and good information into realpolitik interpretations of how the world actually works.

Judi Rever, on the other hand, has been inside the sausage factory, and is revolted by, and crucially understands, what she saw. She has followed the money when drawing conclusions about the prime motivating force of geopolitics. Her book, In Praise of Blood, refers to Rwanda and Uganda “feeding off the [DRC’s] resources”[v], and US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney advocating, in the midst of the DRC bloodshed, for a “public-private partnership” to instil a “strong business climate” in the DRC.[vi]

Rever’s perspective, based on interviews with and information supplied by those involved in business dealings in the Congo, provides compelling evidence of intense US government and corporate positioning in the midst of the Rwandan- and Ugandan-inflicted bloodshed in the first Congo war that began in 1996. Her Wall Street Journal source confirmed that Bechtel, a US company, had helped the rebels unseat Mobutu by providing satellite data for military purposes. Bechtel had also drawn up a “master development plan” for the Congo and had commissioned NASA satellite studies and infrared maps showing mineral potential. Rever revealed that “in exchange, Bechtel, which designs and builds projects for mining companies, became the first in line to win contracts.”[vii] There’s your public-private partnership right there.

Rever also provides compelling evidence (reported in the Boston Globe) that US special forces participated in the fighting in eastern Zaire and had provided training to the Rwandan government.[viii] In the same way that the US had intervened in the RPF’s favour in 1994 to allow it to capture Kigali, it also participated in covering up Rwanda’s genocide of Hutu refugees in Zaire during the first Congo war to ensure achievement of its military objectives of overthrowing Mobutu and installing a US-friendly client in Zaire/DRC.[ix]

Gregory Stanton, who worked for the US State Department’s Human Right’s Bureau, concluded:

“I think the American government helped plan the invasion of Zaire.”[x]

The second Congo war, launched in August 1998, was sparked by Kabila’s insistence that Rwanda’s army should leave the DRC and allow the Congolese to run things for themselves. That flew in the face of the Kagame regime’s plan to serve its bosses in Washington and Wall Street, and to be ‘repaid’ for putting Kabila in power. And so the RDF quickly went to work to uninstall Kabila and install another proxy, Ernest Wamba dia Wamba. As things turned out, it was not Wamba dia Wamba who took over, but Kabila’s son Joseph who had led a rebel unit against Mobutu in the first Congo war. Brimming with confidence from the first war, the Rwandans and Ugandans went it alone, which did not meet with the approval of neighbouring states. Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia and Chad sent troops to support the Congolese government, resulting in a setback for the RDF, from which it eventually recovered. The RPF assassinated Laurent Kabila on 16 January 2001, and his son Joseph was sworn in as president of DRC ten days later.

In an unexpected turn of events, Rwandan and Ugandan troops turned on each other in Kisangani, DRC’s second most important inland port, in what could be described in blunt terms as a gangster’s turf feud. Despite being accomplices since the inception of the RPF, Rwanda and Uganda don’t always see eye to eye.

The upshot of Rwanda’s and Uganda’s criminal intervention in DRC is an estimated 5.4 million excess deaths between August 1998 and April 2007, arguably making it the world’s most deadly conflict since World War II. Using local rebel allies as fronts, Rwanda and Uganda are plundering the DRC’s resources, shipping them across the border and rebranding them as Rwandan and Ugandan produce.[xi] Wrong describes the role of the protagonist of her story, Patrick Karegeya (then chief of Rwanda’s external security services), in the systematic looting:

“One of Patrick’s most controversial jobs had been running Rwanda’s Congo desk, funnelling gold, coltan and diamonds from occupied DRC East through Rwanda.”[xii]

In a 2002 report, a UN panel of experts issued a report laying out the economy of war in the DRC. It estimated that up to 70% of coltan exported from DRC was mined under direct RPF supervision and transported to Rwanda.[xiii]

The Rwandan regime invests heavily in reputation management, and that includes management of economic data. Wrong recounts the experience of one of many Rwandan exiles, David Himbara, former economic adviser to Kagame. Economists had been wondering for some time what could possibly be driving Rwanda’s purported perennial stellar economic growth, apart from illegal mineral exports pillaged from the DRC. Ministers had told Kagame in a meeting that the economy had grown by 11% in 2008. When asked by Kagame for his assessment of that figure, Himbara replied that such growth was highly unlikely in light of a decline in demand for tea and coffee. He advised that reporting such an unrealistically high growth rate would not be “an easy sell”.

He was fired on the spot, but not before being told by Rwanda’s emperor that he was “an arrogant son of a bitch.” The dismissal came with Kagame’s standard condition that the sacking should not be interpreted as freedom to actually leave the country and seek employment elsewhere. It seems Kagame likes to keep dissenters on a short leash to prevent them from engaging in tarnishing his well-cultivated image. Himbara made his escape anyway but, on landing in Johannesburg, he received a message from Kagame: “Tell that dog to come back, whether he wants to or not.” Himbara’s response was: “You can tell the president, ‘This dog will never work for another dog again’.”[xiv]

The addendum to that anecdote about the reliability of Rwanda’s economic data is that, in December 2015, an anonymous group of World Bank employees wrote to the then bank president and vice-president for Africa warning that, by ignoring Kigali’s manipulation of economic statistics, the institution was running serious reputational risks.[xv]

Needless to say, the West’s political values, such as they are, have always subordinated human rights to wealth extraction, and even before it gave up on the pretence of democracy at home, the West began holding up dictatorships as exemplary models, provided they were ‘developmental’ successes. . Rwanda’s free pass from the West’s so-called democracies has thus been premised on its alleged developmental success, but Himbara has demolished this myth in short order.

Rwanda is the 26^th poorest country in the world. It has the highest population density in Africa, with 14.2 million people crammed into 10,169 square miles, compared to the DRC’s 905,355 square miles. Rwanda is land and resource impoverished, with 82% of the population rural-based and 90% employed in the agricultural sector. In this video presentation [time stamp 1:35:00], David Himbara walks through Rwanda’s socio-economic indicators, one of the starkest of which is that 91% of the population languishes in the informal sector, struggling to make a living. Rwanda is an economy which runs a chronic balance of payments deficit, and therefore permanently relies on IMF balance-of-payments support.

Despite this dictatorship’s failure as a developmental model, it has one of the most efficient and well-equipped armies in Africa. And yet hardly anyone in the West questions this anomaly. The disconnect makes perfect sense once you face up to the reality that Rwanda’s primary service to the West is the policing of wealth extraction from the DRC, and we taxpayers are footing the bill for all the blood spilt there.

Major Western intelligence agencies including MI6 and FBI were supplied with hard evidence, in the form of taped conversations, of the Kagame regime operating an external assassination network targeting the regime’s dissidents all over the world.[xvi] The tapes were handed to the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera. All refused to air them.[xvii] A story of the Rwandan regime’s attempts to assassinate dissidents in London was eventually leaked by a British civil servant only because, in his words, he was “so pissed off at the thought that the Foreign Office knew Rwanda was quite ready to take out exiles living in London, but was planning to keep that information to itself, that I let the press know.”[xviii]

Wrong notes that, despite this, “no major donor moved to sever aid or impose sanctions, or considered exposing Kigali’s plots to public view”. Her naivete of course lies in her failure to explain why this brazen criminality is tolerated. All of Rwanda’s crimes, deceit and propaganda are not merely issues that the UK and US ‘turn a blind eye to’. Rather, they are the clues to the whole purpose of the relationship. Kagame’s RPF is on quite a long leash as long as its patrons’ operations are turning a tidy profit. And what Kagame does is no different in principle to what the US and UK has been doing for decades on a much larger, more professional, and more clandestine scale.

According to the World Bank, a whopping 74.2% of Rwanda’s central government expense is donor funded. Britain, even before gifting £290 million to the Kagame dictatorship in a completely worthless asylum seeker processing scam in 2022 and 2023, was giving £55 million per annum in aid money that Rwanda is allowed to spend in any way it sees fit.[xix] The vast bulk of our hard-earned money is being laundered through a sophisticated global criminal syndicate that we happily accept as legitimate because it has the label “Government” stuck on it. The only perplexing thing about all of it is the general public’s ignorance or acceptance of it. Far more perplexing are media outlets that should know better but actually cheer on the scam.

In February, the EU signed an agreement with Rwanda to “nurture sustainable and resilient value chains for critical raw materials.” That’s what the EU and Rwanda jointly call the pillaging of the DRC’s wealth. The world’s most talented comedy script writers could not come up with that shit if you paid them the entire annual Rwandan central government budget as an hourly rate, but the average moron in the EU bureaucracy can spin lines like that on their tea break.

If France, the US and Britain are all partners in the same transnational deep state criminal syndicate, why did they fight over Rwanda and the DRC? Well, vultures don’t eat each other, but they do fight over the carcass. The switch from the French-backed Habyarimana regime to the US-UK backed Kagame regime was merely a managerial change within the US-NATO empire structure. Kagame’s well-resourced army has since provided services to protect French oil interests in Mozambique from Islamist sabotage, and Rwanda’s troops are frequently used in ‘peacekeeping’ missions in Africa. For all France’s sulking over its ejection from Rwanda, Kigali and France are now the best of enemies. In the final analysis, Rwanda is the US-NATO empire’s battering ram in central Africa. But for how much longer?

The Empire’s Israel in Africa, but for how much longer?

The parallels between Rwanda and Israel drawn in Do Not Disturb are obvious and entirely plausible, if only because they are endorsed by the RPF leadership itself. The Tutsi leadership often refer to themselves as the Jews of Africa, primarily drawing on the political capital of victimhood. But there is more to it than that.

Wrong records Patrick Karegeya’s explanation of Rwanda’s strategic defence policy under an RPF-led government:

“We are a small and densely populated country…So we have no space for another war…Because of that every threat will be dealt with pre-emptively and extraterritorially…We will never leave the DRC, for example, until there’s a government in Kinshasha we can trust…Never again will we allow anyone to lay a finger on a Tutsi head. There are two countries in the world that have this doctrine, us and Israel. This is how Israel sees things, how Mossad acts, and this is how we see it. We will never allow our enemy to land a blow on us and remain standing.”[xx] [emphasis added]

Missing from this macho bluster is another crucial similarity shared by Israel and Rwanda. Just like Israel, Rwanda is a paper tiger whose strength, which is purely military, is derived from the sponsorship of the world’s current godfather. That can’t last forever. How much longer will Rwanda remain the US-NATO empire’s battering ram in Africa?

The meaning of the new Scramble for Africa – the BRICS vs NATO Punch and Judy show

James Corbett recently provided a handy snapshot of what is happening in the new Scramble for Africa.

How’s team BRICS doing? Russia has muscled in on Niger and is offering a protection-for-resources deal; China is deeply entrenched in Zimbabwe, extracting as much lithium as it can for what Corbett aptly describes as the “accoutrements of the net zero hoax”; China is doing loans-for-oil deals with Niger and Angola, and infrastructure-for-resource deals with Ghana.

How is team NATO doing? The US is signing deals with Kenya to tighten up the screws on the global digital gulag under construction. The technical term for it is “establishing interoperable privacy regimes and facilitating trusted cross-border data flows”. Both Google and Gates are investing in AI platforms in Africa. The WHO has helped set up Africa’s first mRNA ‘vaccine’ technology transfer hub, and Rwanda is the first African country to host an mRNA ‘vaccine’ manufacturing facility. This is against the backdrop of the world coming to terms with the global covid ‘vaccine’ atrocity – the latest chapter in what is undoubtedly the greatest medical fraud in history, namely ‘vaccines’.

The absurdity of Rwanda hosting an mRNA ‘vaccine’ manufacturing facility is laid bare by some simple economic truths exposed by Rwandan-Canadian economist David Himbara:

“1.7 million residents of Kigali dispose of liquid waste in pit latrines and septic tanks; open raw sewage flows into the rivers and the marshlands of Kigali; daily, more than 300 tons of garbage are irresponsibly deposited into the city’s open landfills, which are located on hilltops above residential areas and schools”.

At any rate, the scrap between BRICS and NATO is all very confusing. Who’s winning? Both of them really. It’s a Punch and Judy show, just like every single election that takes place in every single so-called liberal democracy in the West. Both teams are ultimately managed by the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC). Remember the “plan for Zaire”, and how Rwanda went in there and did a first-rate job for team NATO? Well, since then most of the cobalt ownership in the DRC has mysteriously been transferred to China. 70% of the world’s cobalt comes from DRC and China owns 88% of cobalt mines there. Which, when you get right down to it, makes perfect sense if China is manufacturing all the “accoutrements of the net zero hoax”.

I warned at the beginning of Part I that this was going to be a complicated story. In trying to understand who is to blame for the violence in the DRC, Ann Garrison, interviewing Congolese journalist Akilimali Chomachoma, asks him:

“Do you think China is as responsible as the US and the rest of the West?”

To which he replies:

“No, I can’t say that, because China is a new actor in Africa and in DRC. China is not a power like the UK, France, Germany, or the US. China has some responsibility for sure, because it’s also an important country involved in this area, and it is controlling some companies here, but most of the countries who are financing this war are from the US and Europe.”

Right… so let’s get this straight. China is controlling some companies there…erm actually 88% of the cobalt output…but the US and EU are financing the mineral wars. That’s a cosy little set-up, isn’t it? But, according to Chomachoma, China’s not to blame. They’re just the new kid on the block. Yeah, right. They’re up to their necks, or wallets, in it. Most Africans don’t need any lessons on what the US-NATO empire is all about, and they want out. But sadly, they’re jumping into the arms of a new empire, or at the very least, going into new deals with eyes wide shut.

Let’s take another stab at this. In January 1961, the CIA orchestrates the assassination of Zaire’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, to install the compliant satrap Mobutu. In the 1990s, it then installs its Rwandan puppets, who uninstall Mobutu and install their DRC puppets. All this installing and uninstalling is to control the DRC’s vast mineral wealth. And after decades of installing and uninstalling in Congo, the US corporates vacuuming up the mineral wealth then sell their shares in their mineral companies to China, with which they’re supposedly locked in a geostrategic battle for said mineral wealth. Are we really to believe that China was in a position to threaten the US into selling its valuable mining interests in the DRC after everything that the US has done to secure its position there? I mean, China is not the one backing a proxy rebel army in DRC, and it does not have a military presence there. Its only military base in Africa is located in Djibouti.

Oddly enough, the largest US military base in Africa is also located in Djibouti. That’s also very cosy. Little Djibouti just seems to hand out military bases to whoever wants one, and if global arch enemies China and the US have to share the tiny strategic space in Djibouti, so be it. Djibouti is entirely fair in its military base dealings, and there’s absolutely nothing the US or China can do about it. So they play nice and share. But I digress. Back to DRC.

So it’s not exactly clear why the US would sell its mineral interests in DRC to China, and then continue to fund wars to police the mineral extraction and ensure that DRC doesn’t get any silly ideas about controlling its own wealth. This analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute provides some insights into how China wrested control of the Congo’s critical minerals:

“In 2016, China Molybdenum bought out the holdings of US mining group Freeport-McMoran using very similar means to those used by the Nixon administration to gain control of the DRC’s mineral resources in the 1960s. Despite an avowed concern to end the US dependence on China for supplies of critical minerals, both the Obama and Trump administrations stood aside, allowing Freeport to hand control of the world’s largest cobalt mine to China Molybdenum with the sale of its nickel and cobalt operations in the DRC. The Chinese were assisted in their purchase by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter… A Freeport legal executive alerted an Obama administration national security adviser, General James Jones, about the imminent sale but was told, ‘There’s no one that’s going to be interested in that.’ The deal was facilitated by a US private equity firm in which Hunter Biden was a director…

When Freeport last year pinned a ‘for sale’ sign on its last remaining asset in the DRC, believed to be the world’s richest undeveloped cobalt deposit, China Molybdenum was again ready with US$550 million. The New York Times reports there was again no discussion of the sale within the Trump administration… Chinese interests now own 15 of the 17 cobalt operations in the DRC.” [emphasis added]

Not only did successive US administrations stand by while China gobbled up the DRC mineral interests, but the Chinese were assisted by President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. If you follow the money, it leads you to the top of the criminocracy. It’s the OCGFC.

The Prague Security Studies Institute reports in shock-and-horror tones that there is evidence for a “disturbing entanglement between Wall Street and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” and that “leading financial institutions in the United States have formed partnerships with state-controlled banks in China, thereby becoming intertwined with, and increasingly beholden to, China’s economic and geopolitical agenda.” Well I never, stone the crows, and shut the front door! The OCGFC’s arrangement, as far back as the late 1970s/early 1980s, to make China the world’s shop floor was in essence a deliberate technology transfer, and now people are surprised that Vanguard and Blackrock are getting their piece of the pie in China.

Groups like the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA) are pushing back on this, issuing reports on how Wall Street funds the CCP and PLA. The CPA hopes that Congress will issue stern warnings to BlackRock and Vanguard on how they should worship Mammon in a way that doesn’t harm Uncle Sam. The idea that Congress would actually dare to bite the arms of the giant vampire squids that own it is of course laughable.

Admittedly it can get confusing when one tries to disentangle horizontal nation-to-nation conflict from the vertical power exercised from above by the OCGFC on all nations. Mistrust between nations does manifest in geopolitical tensions. These tensions do result in the exercise of power by national power structures that view their survival as being tied to the survival of the nation. But these conflicts are, by and large, mediated by the OCGFC. No major conflagration takes place unless the OCGFC approve of and benefit from it, and the CIA (and by extension the entire Western transnational deep state) is the primary means by which Wall Street projects military power.

Zelensky has expressed his heartfelt gratitude to BlackRock, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and others, for their continued “support” amid Ukraine’s dismemberment and the decimation of its young male population by the US-NATO empire. “Support” here means the financiers laying claim to the country’s farmland and making deals to profit from the post-war rebuilding.

An interesting question that has arisen in my research for this section of the article is how one should interpret BlackRock’s chief executive, Larry Fink, issuing a warning to China that BlackRock has the power to curb financial flows to China. There seems to be a genuine frustration with Russia’s intransigence in Ukraine, and since China, as Russia’s main trading partner, is a “fundamental supporter of the Russian economy”, the BlackRock bankster has called on financial institutions to reassess their investments in China as a means to hurting Russia. BlackRock itself has a significant presence in China. It will be interesting to see how this vertical power play unfolds. But it is unquestionably an illustration of the vertical power the ultimate global hegemon, the OCGFC, possesses over nation states.

In the final analysis, the goal that the OCGFC is working towards is the complete usurpation of petty nation state rivalry by a global fascist authoritarian corporate technocracy, with the banking industry at its apex. That is the vision of the New World Order and that is what the UN’s Pact for the Future is all about, helpfully translated by James Corbett into plain English here.

In 1994, Rwanda was the subject of an imperial managerial transfer from France to the US and UK. Moving up one step, we are now seeing a managerial transfer from NATO to BRICS within the ultimate global hegemon, the OCGFC. The West has been in a state of managed decline since the 1980s, going through phases of:

· off-shoring the productive sector to China;

· financialisaton of the Western economy and inflating a debt bubble that has benefited the banking mafia, and now;

· controlled demolition of the expired monetary and financial system.

The show must go on and the world will still need stuff, but that stuff is going to come increasingly from BRICS not the West. Baked into this massive economic shift is a social shift to a totalitarian technocracy to ensure that the ruling class of the OCGFC remain in control in perpetuity.

The rise of the BRICS and the fall of the West is a Punch and Judy show; the smoke and mirrors that will provide the drama and the social and economic pretexts for a step change in control of the many by the few as humanity is being transitioned, against its will and better judgement, to a dystopian New World Order. The mindless mainstream left seems broadly in favour of the managerial transfer to BRICS but are never able to explain why they think economic and military subjugation of the world by Russia and China is the correct answer to the problem of economic and military subjugation of the world by the US-NATO empire.

While China’s projection of military power in Africa is not on the scale of the US’s, we don’t yet know what kind of military strategy China will adopt in Africa as it becomes increasingly dependent on it for resources. The US didn’t start rolling out its global CIA-led regime change projects until after it had won the Second World War and formally accepted the global empire baton from Britain. The West, China and Russia all have one very important feature in common – at the core of their economic systems are corrupt authoritarian oligarchies in the service of the OCGFC. So expecting fairness and brotherly love from China and Russia in Africa is, to put it politely, not rational.

Political Mpox and the DRC

Most readers of this blog would have interpreted the recent Mpox hysteria emanating from an outbreak in the DRC as the usual pandemic planners’ shenanigans. Their soulless, empty lives have no meaning unless they’re screeching maniacally about a global plague, and generally taking another great leap forward towards a global fascist biosecurity technocracy. But I’m not so sure that the WHO was as ambitious about Mpox as we think it was. There may have been something else going on. Monkeypox was a damp squib in 2022, and, having failed miserably the first time around, I struggled to see how they would make it fly two years later simply by taking the ‘monkey’ out of the pox and replacing it with a big, serious, grown-up ‘M’ to give it more gravitas. Mpox is still too…what’s the right word…exotic? Not something that the average Normie in the West would happily wet their pants to.

It would appear that the pandemic industry is now putting all its eggs into the bird flu basket. Birds and flu are two things the entire planet can understand and get behind with gusto. They’ve just had the obligatory plandemic dress rehearsal at the International Bird Flu Summit, so the shiny happy pandemic planners have… a plan! And this time they might get to kill two birds with one stone – the crisis-addicted little control freaks might have the power to order a global chicken cull while simultaneously calling for the entire planet to be injected with a turbo-charged version of the last Clot Shot. Is it any wonder that the little Hitlers in that photo gallery are grinning ear to ear? I confess to having doubts about the Madad woman, posing as she is with the affected ennui of Madame Bovary. Not quite what I expected a Chief Biopreparedness Officer to look like, but then again, what should a person with a title as absurd as ‘Biopreparedness Officer’ look like?

At any rate, this video presentation by African geopolitical commentator P D Lawton explains how the Mpox outbreak could be exploited in the DRC by the US-NATO empire.[xxi] The bit in the video that interested me (timestamp 1:10:00) is an observation that the power struggle within the DRC could be set to take a turn in the form of the exploitation of either a somewhat manufactured Mpox outbreak, or the horrific refugee crisis in the Ituri and Kivu provinces on the DRC’s eastern border with Rwanda and Uganda.

Samuel Philips, applying the most basic rule of anti-establishment resistance – follow the frikkin money –  has written a piece worth reading about Mpox and the DRC. In his piece, he recalls seeing a TikTok post that asked: “why is it that when HIV Aids happened, they said it came from the DRC. Now Monkey Pox is becoming a thing and they are also claiming it came from DRC. Why is it DRC always?”

Phillips’ street-smart response:

“It is because the DRC sits on 24 trillion dollars’ worth of natural resources”.

When Phillips notes that “it’s painful to know that some Africans are part of this evil that has subjected the people of Congo and the African people in general to centuries of servitude and anguish”, he is, in my opinion, referring to the authors of garbage like this who call for investments in mRNA ‘vaccine’ plants as the solution to Africa’s public health problems, as opposed to an end to war, and an improvement in basic living and nutritional standards.

P D Lawton speculates that we shouldn’t be surprised to see the declaration of an Mpox or other humanitarian related disaster in the eastern Congo that entails sending in a UN ‘peacekeeping’ contingent comprising Ugandan and Rwandan army regulars donning blue helmets. The effect of that would be to remove Congolese sovereignty in the area, thus preventing local DRC troops from trying to gain control over the mining operations there, and allowing the UN peacekeepers to take over that function to ensure continued ‘stability’.

Rwanda’s proxy rebel group in eastern DRC (North Kivu) is called M23 and the pretext for its presence there is the protection of persecuted ethnic Tutsis in the Congo (Banyamulenge). The Banyamulenge are thus a vehicle for Rwandan expansion in the DRC under the guise of preventing minority persecution. Congolese journalist Akilimali Chomachoma explains that:

“Rwanda and Uganda are not just behind the M23. They are the M23. Rwanda has said they’re here to protect the Congolese Tutsis and the Banyamulenge, but this is a false pretext for attacks on the Congolese and the seizure of territory and resources, most of all mineral resources…What is astonishing in DRC is the fact that, despite all the evidence of what Rwanda is doing here, political and financial support for Rwanda is coming from countries around the world. It’s astounding how the world can turn a blind eye and deaf ear to what Rwanda is doing in DRC.”

There’s that ‘turning of the blind eye’ again.

Rwanda has 4,000 troops in the DRC fighting alongside 3,000 of its M23 militias, all acknowledged by the US. Lawton claims that the ultimate, and frightening, goal of the Rwandan regime is to annex the resource-rich regions of the eastern DRC. She is not alone in this speculation. Ann Garrison, writing in Black Agenda report, also alludes to the possibility of Rwanda playing a role in “balkanising” the DRC. Michela Wrong writing in Foreign Affairs raised the possibility that Kagame is manoeuvring to set up a puppet administration in North Kivu, staffed by Congolese Tutsis, and backed by a Tutsi M23 army that is really an extension of the RDF. If that’s his end game, that too looks like a balkanisation and annexation of the DRC. So, as outrageous as this seems, it is not a remote possibility, and a UN aided ‘humanitarian’ intervention could be the first move in executing such a diabolically ambitious vision.

The future for Rwanda

“I tell my wife, Rwanda is a bit like a painted grave. Nice on the outside, nothing but bones on the inside.” – Theogene Rudasingwa[xxii]

To be sure, Do Not Disturb is a book of many stories. One element of the story is that of a group of men who, tired of being shoved around and having nothing to lose, joined a violent revolution in Uganda to place themselves on the delivery end of the violent power equation. Surprised by the power of their own violence, and with the backing of the most violent entity on earth, the US-NATO empire, they decided they could have it all. They decided to retake the country their group had ruled over for centuries, the country they believed was theirs to rule as they pleased.

As with all struggles whose primary means is violence, it is not the most intelligent, but the most ruthless, who rise to the top. In Rwanda’s case, it was a Machiavellian high-school drop-out for whom blood is simply the currency of power. The steeper the climb to the pinnacle of power, the more blood to be shed. For men like Kagame, the Rwandan genocides inside their own borders were not enough. The vast riches of the DRC would soon provide more fertile ground to satisfy their bloodlust.

Ultimately, it is the story of a bitterly divided people forced by fate and accidents of migration to share the same tiny plot of land. It is also a story of the age-old battle to control the future by controlling the past. Paradoxically, those seeking to thwart ‘revisionists’ are desperately attempting to re-tell the past in the hope that a revised history will shape the present to their advantage.

With Kagame still at the helm after thirty years of dictatorship, there is no reason to be optimistic about Rwanda’s future. Quoting political scientist Rene Lemarchand, Wrong sums up Rwanda’s dilemma:

“Where two communities within the same state believe themselves to be victims, the stage is set for endless conflict.”[xxiii]

In Rwanda, it remains to be seen whether re-writing history will write a new script into the hearts of people. It also remains to be seen what kind of whirlwind will be reaped from sowing the wind in the DRC.

NOTES:

[ii] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 13, pg. 296-302

[iii] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 13, pg. 302

[iv] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 18, pg. 385

[v] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 3, pg. 45

[vi] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 1, pg. 23

[vii] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 1, pg. 25

[viii] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 2, pg. 41

[ix] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 2, pg. 41-43

[x] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 2, pg. 43

[xi] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 15, pg. 328

[xii] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 2, pg. 44

[xiii] Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood, Vintage Canada, 2020, Ch 3, pg. 47

[xiv] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 21, pg. 428

[xv] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 21, pg. 430

[xvi] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 3, pg. 77

[xvii] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 3, pg. 78

[xviii] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 3, pg. 85

[xix] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 3, pg. 83

[xx] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 12, pg. 280-281

[xxi] A disclaimer about the viewpoints expressed in this video if you intend to watch it: I do not subscribe to Lawton’s viewpoint that the Hutu-Tutsi divide is a “total construct”, which I believe is rooted in an understandable but quixotic desire to paint ordinary people on the ground as powerless innocents manipulated by the evil empire. Not only does this ignore the complexity of the relationships, but it also contradicts other key parts of her narrative because ethnic division was an obvious catalyst in the two key Rwandan 20^th century historical events – the 1959 Hutu revolution, and the 1994 double genocide. If you’ve arrived here in Part IV and are interested in why this is not “a construct”, hopefully Part III should flesh it out.

The attachment to the ‘construct’ paradigm of ethnicity may be why Lawton completely glosses over the exodus of the Tutsi ‘fifty-niners’ in the 1959 peasant revolution, failing to explain why Tutsis were exiled to Uganda. The Tutsi exodus was caused by ethnic violence; they would not have fled Rwanda had there not been a very real threat to their lives. Similarly, the returning RPF-led Tutsis in 1994 could not have taken power if they themselves had not cynically exploited the ethnic divide. There are other aspects of the historical context that the discussion does not articulate satisfactorily, so if you decide to watch the video in full and still end up confused, I’m hoping my Part I, Part II and Part III will help to make sense of it.

[xxii] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 21, pg. 441

[xxiii] Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb, 4^th Estate, London, 2021, Ch 21, pg. 440

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READ: PART 1 – PART 2 – PART 3

Rusere Shoniwa is founder of A Plague on Both Houses, a non-ideological analysis of the dystopian reality we’re living in. Ideas for understanding and resistance. Promoting the Great FREEset.

Go to Original – plagueonbothhouses.substack.com

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