The Congo: A Forgotten Holocaust

This was originally supposed to be published in the Fall issue of Islamica Magazine, but for whatever reasons their editors did not include it. It only reinforced my belief that people the world over could give a rats behind about dead black people. An article on Islamic art is more important apparently than an article on 4 million dead Africans. If it was poorly written then they could have at least sought out a more prolific writer to address this important subject.

The Congo: A Forgotten Holocaust

July 2007

One of the most prominent advertising campaigns currently being waged in downtown Boston is geared towards awakening Bostonians to the atrocities occurring in Darfur, Sudan. The ads on the poster board size frames ask commuters if they are aware of their investments being associated with the atrocities in Darfur. It is an eye catching advertising campaign to say the least. The calamity in Sudan has drawn great attention recently both in the United States and internationally. It has been labeled as a case of genocide by President Bush, while grassroots campaigns in the U.S., like the one mentioned above, were created in order to help end the conflict through divestment. Sadly, the situation in Darfur is far from being the worst of atrocities being carried out on the continent of Africa. For nearly a decade a far worse humanitarian situation has been underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The International Relief Committee estimates that over 4 million people have perished in Congo since 1998, thus dwarfing even the large body count accumulating in Sudan.[1] Yet, for all of the awareness that has been raised about Darfur there has been nary a whisper in the American media about what has occurred in the Congo. Political and economic reasons are likely attributing factors for the neglect of Congo’s suffering in the U.S. press.

The U.S. government has a long and ominous history in the Congo, dating as far back as when the Congo was under the colonial grip of King Leopold of Belgium. American and Western corporations have dominated the Congo politically and economically for decades. The Congo has been a client state of the United States since it gained its independence in 1960. Sudan, on the other hand, is not an American ally, unlike the Congo, while it also holds close ties economically with China, another nation not particularly close to the United States. Sudan’s abysmal relationship with the United States make it easy for President Bush to label it a perpetrator of genocide and so it does not take much courage on the part of mainstream news agencies in the U.S. to report on the atrocities occurring in Sudan. Congo, on the other hand, and its neighbors Rwanda and Uganda, have been U.S. client states for decades. Many U.S. corporations are actively involved in gutting the Congo’s rich reserves of minerals for their own advantage. This has been going on for decades as well. Reporting on the situation in Congo, and the millions who have perished there over the last decade, would not be a popular subject for the many American. corporations currently doing business in Congo. “Only the slaughter in Darfur has been named as genocide. So there is obviously a politics around this naming,” says Columbia Africa History Professor Mahmood Mamdani.[2] The United States government also economically backs the regimes in charge of Rwanda and Uganda, the two nations responsible for the holocaust occurring there. Therefore, logically it seems, the Congo’s misery remains out of the mainstream American press altogether.

As mentioned above, the United States has had a long history in the Congo. The Congo was taken as a private colony by King Leopold of Belgium in 1885. The United States was the first nation to recognize Leopold’s newly acquired territory. The U.S. government and businesses would be implicated in many of Leopold’s tyrannical business ventures where torture and mutilation were common forms of punishment for unruly Congolese slaves. The United States’ influence over the Congo increased sharply as the Congo gained independence from Belgium in 1960. The newly created nation-state now consists of a population over 60 million divided into hundreds of different ethnicities where over 70% of its inhabitants live rural lifestyles. Democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba became the first leader of the Congo upon gaining its freedom from Belgium. He was highly independent and sought a course that would steer his nation away from the influence of Western nations and on an independent, non-aligned track. Despite his best attempts to demonstrate his non-aligned position, the United States viewed him as a communist sympathizer. The Eisenhower administration set its targets on Lumumba and he was subsequently assassinated through a CIA initiated plot, which placed the Congo at the mercy of General Joseph Mobutu in 1965. Mobutu was the United States’ strong man in Africa, assigned to subdue the entire country and its massive population for Western interests. The United States viewed the mineral rich nation as not only a wealthy resource for highly prized minerals, but also as a launching pad for potential Soviet infiltration of Africa. The ideological threat to the Congo was essentially non-existent, but was needed by U.S. policy makers as a means to justify the reign of Mobutu in the Congo in order to maintain control over its resources.

Under Mobutu, the Congolese lived under a military junta where Mobutu was nearly always the only name on the ballot for president. He enjoyed support from France, Belgium and the United States. Rebellions occurred sporadically against Mobutu and when he could not handle his angry constituents then his Western allies felt compelled to send in troops to ensure that their friend in the Congo would remain in power, and Mobutu would be more than happy to open up the resources of his nation for economic exploitation by his Western friends. Mobutu’s other achievements were to hold close relations with every U.S. president that was in office until he was removed from power in 1997, a collection of Swiss bank accounts that were estimated to be in the billions of dollars that came from his robbery of the country he ruled, and to practice nepotism in order to keep loyalty throughout his bureaucracy. The U.S. State Department practiced a thesis it devised to describe the Congo: “Mobutu or chaos.” The State Department argued that Mobutu was the only leader capable of holding all of the diverse ethnicities of the Congo together, therefore supporting him was essential towards stabilizing the country for Western interests. After thirty-two years of rule, many critics have pointed out that Mobutu was chaos.

Mobutu was finally removed from power in 1997. What followed in the Congo after the conclusion of Mobutu’s reign was more exploitation of the Congo’s resources as well as possibly the worst humanitarian situation since World War II. Mobutu was removed from power by a collection of Congolese resistance movements aided by external African nations, such as Rwanda, Uganda, and Angola. The late Laurent Kabila, the father of current DRC Prime Minister Joseph Kabila, was placed in power by these external actors. The power vacuum led both Rwanda and Uganda to invade the Congo for “security” reasons from the east with Kabila acquiescing to their demands because of his lack of a domestic power base. In the late 1990s, Rwandan and Ugandan forces occupied some eastern areas of the DRC and proceeded to exploit the rich resources there, but more importantly exterminated thousands upon thousands of civilians as they consolidated their rule over those sections of the DRC that they controlled. Angola and Zimbabwe intervened in response to the Rwandan and Ugandan invasion, resulting in a stalemate where Rwanda and Uganda had control over eastern provinces rich in valuable minerals, while Angola and Zimbabwe took control over the Western areas of the Congo. With no real central government to protect its civilians, the occupying nations worked with Congolese warlords to exploit the resources of the Congo by making deals with transnational corporations, while simultaneously repressing the local population. The Congo’s economy and health services collapsed and this contributed to more violence and the deaths of millions of Congolese.[3] As said above, the body count has gone into the millions and the attention of the international community to this calamity has been minimal at best.

Besides the obvious humanitarian concerns, readers should be aware of how Western consumers are indirectly taking part in the exploitation of the DRC’s resources. One of the most valuable minerals found in the Congo is coltan. Congo has the world’s largest reserves of coltan. Coltan was heavily relied upon in the making of Sony’s Playstation 2 as well as in cell phones during the beginning of this decade. More recently it has been used in computers and in MP3 players, such as the iPod. The awareness of “blood diamonds” from the movie with the same name led to a greater awareness in the United States of how African nations have been looted by indigenous warlords working with Western corporations. Unlike diamonds, cell phones and electronics are in far greater consumption by Western consumers. Raising awareness of the economic exploitation of the resources of the Congo and the suffering of millions of its inhabitants should be a top priority for anyone concerned with the humanitarian situation there.[4]

The prospects for peace in the Congo can only be realized through intervention by an outside force as Joseph Kabila’s regime is far too weak to remove the occupying forces on his territory. The ruling regime will also have to develop greater strength in order to push out foreign corporations robbing the Congo of its own resources. The violence in the Congo continues on though where militias in the east of the country persist in their plunder and slaughter. In late May of 2007, up to15, 000 Congolese civilians evacuated with the help of international relief organizations as militias raided their homes with machetes leaving dozens dead. The lack of help for the Congolese people has not been unknown to the United Nations. The UN has its largest concentration of peace keeping forces in the DRC, but their role has been largely inconsequential and at times detrimental. It was reported recently that the UN has probed allegations by Human Rights Watch that Pakistani peace keeping forces were involved in a gold smuggling scheme where weapons were exchanged to local warlords for gold.[5] While the UN has stated that the case is closed, HRW has pointed out that a simple confirmation of the smuggling is not enough, a deeper investigation is needed. The UN’s inability to keep peace in the Congo as well as its own corruption demonstrates the need for a more dynamic solution to the crisis in the DRC.

Despite such crimes occurring, there is some hope in the DRC. In July 2007, a great step forward was taken when the UN Development Program (UNDP) announced that three of the main militias operating in the Congo had agreed to disarm and either rejoin civilian life or be integrated into the armed forces. It is hoped that this move will lead to greater stability in the Congo. In addition, on the economic side it was announced recently that the DRC plan’s an audit of its oil sector to ensure the state is receiving a fair share of revenues. The off-shore oil reserves of the DRC are considered to have great potential. This good news demonstrates that the situation in the Congo is not without hope. Greater awareness of the suffering of the Congolese by Western citizens as well as increased international aid will go a long way towards helping the people of the Congo. The campaigns launched on behalf of the victims of Darfur by Americans are a potential road map for bringing peace to the DRC. The steps being taken by the government of the DRC as well as the militias operating there are signs that hope is on the horizon in the Congo.

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[1] http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/TBRL-74TMQW?OpenDocument. The IRC’s survey found that more than 3.9 million people died as a result of the conflict between August 1998 and April 2004, with 98 percent of deaths being due to easily preventable and curable diseases.

[2] http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/04/1334230&mode=thread&tid=25

[3] http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5094

[4] http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12971

[5] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6912740.stm

Pakistan: 60 Years On

September 2, 2007

The 60th anniversary of Pakistan was celebrated in lavish style back in the mother land last week on August 14. Over here in Miami local Pakistani Americans held a large festival at Bay Front Park in order to celebrate the anniversary. Kids went on stage singing patriotic songs, adults gave speeches discussing how far Pakistan has come in its short history, and all filled their bellies on a spicy array of South Asian food that surely left most of the uncles and aunties reaching for their preferred anti-acid reliever.

One of my closest friends is a Bengali American who I grew up with in South Florida. We went to the same local Islamic weekend school, played sports together as kids, and this past year we shared an apartment together as I was going to grad school in Boston and he was working. One of the main principles of the religion of Islam is the stress on unity through diversity. By staying with people who think like you do, who eat what you eat, who think the way you think, your world can be a very limited and intellectually unfulfilling place. My faith has taught me that interacting with people of different stripes can lead myself and others to achieve greater understanding of both ourselves and the world we collectively live in. It has also taught me that everything I may have learned may be up for criticism and revision.

As a Pakistani American child I learned, through my adult relatives' conversations mostly, that Pakistan was a great regional military power that had fought and defeated India multiple times in warfare. Pakistani soldiers, I was told, were Muslim heroes who strapped grenades to themselves in the face of Indian tanks and laid down in front of the tanks in order to take out the more powerful Indian military. They sacrificed their lives for Pakistani freedom. I believed all of this, more or less, never really thinking twice about what I was told. I was never interested in Pakistani history in general for the compelling reason that I believed my parents' former home to be a dump after repeated visits to the country as a youth. Why study Pakistani history when I lived in the most powerful nation in the world? Why waste time on insignificant Pakistan? I'm an American and a Pakistani second, if at all. That was my own rationale anyway. What I knew of Pakistan was always informed by my childhood memories of Pakistani military power, sacrifice, and religious devotion.

Anyone reading this obviously knows how warped my view of Pakistan was and knows that I had a very limited understanding of my parents' old home. The fact that I didn't care of my own history, as a child of Pakistani immigrants, made my world view limited in scope and susceptible to justifiable criticism. My old Bengali friend enters the picture here. It's not that he taught me anything I didn't already know, but it was his own family history and his own history as an individual coming from a different background that allowed me to understand the limits of my own historiographical interpretation of Pakistani history. His parents were in East Pakistan when the military clamped down on protestors fighting against election results not being honored by the dominating Pakistani military (and its powerful intelligence apparatus). He told me they never even speak about what happened there. It was that bad. But as a student of history I had to do my own digging. What I found made me realize how right I had always been about my approach to history specifically, but life in general. The rule I followed was that whatever I may have thought about something or whatever I believed to be true, I must always be open to other possibilities. A simple enough rule, but one that I have seen too few people actually follow and that leads to rigid, dogmatic understandings of the world's vast issues.

The Pakistani military, under General Yahya Khan, literally massacred hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Bengalis in 1971. There were millions of ethnic Bengalis, Muslim and Hindu, who fled across India's border seeking protection. India came to the rescue of the Bengalis as India was actively encouraging armed Bengali resistance movements, likely using the opportunity as a means of striking a major blow to Pakistan. The Pakistani military capitulated quickly and was forced to sign a humiliating treaty. The Pakistan experiment of having two separate geographical areas was over. The Bengalis gained their own country much to the chagrin of the Pakistani military.

The importance of this historical episode to me and my friend actually made us closer. I understood much more clearly what happened in 1971. It was not a stab in the back as many Pakistanis still claim. It's what you deserve when you cheat and kill. You deserve to be humiliated, put down on your knees, and tarred and feathered when you treat people like garbage, especially when you claim to be a pious Islamic republic. Pakistan was not a republic when it decided to ignore the democratically elected party of Mujibar Rahman and it was not Islamic when its military decided to slaughter protestors, professors, and civilians, men, women and children.

Celebrating a nation's birth should not be limited to its successes. It should include even more forthrightly the missteps and follies it carried out and supported. The lows need to be focused upon in order that future generations do not foolishly believe that national honor was lost because of failure to defeat the Indians in 1971. National honor was relinquished when Pakistan, as a Muslim nation, decided to murder its fellow brethren in faith over politics. As an American I can wag my finger at Pakistanis for being so blind due to their nationalism, but I too have a responsibility that involves my own country, the United States. Yahya Khan's rampage could not have been carried out without American support, in the form of a wink of an eye and a nudge by President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger. Letters from American staff working in East Pakistan at the time clearly demonstrate that Nixon and Kissinger could care little for the brutality that was being carried out in East Pakistan in spite of the fact that many American officials resigned as a result. The National Security Archive has released these files. They demonstrate how Nixon and Kissinger gave a green light to Yahya Khan to crush the Bengali resistance in order to secure their own political interests in Pakistan. "Yahya is a good friend," Nixon mentioned. Much like Musharraf is now.

On a personal note, my views and interpretations on this subject have not been well received by Pakistanis here in America. Despite the ample historical evidence that points the finger at Pakistan and the Pakistani military more specifically for the genocide that occurred in East Pakistan, many Pakistanis have not come to terms on this issue. Bengalis are deemed sellouts and Hindu-collaborators. The loss to India and the effects this loss had upon the conflict over Kashmir only exacerbated the discontent and anger many Pakistanis had for Bangladesh and India, even till today. If these people would only be so wise as to take a step back and get another perspective, such a dogmatic outlook would likely burn away when the light of the evidence would shone upon it.

6 Iraqi Civilians Killed in US Airstrike

http://www.pr-inside.com/u-s-military-11-iraqis-including-at-r261277.htm

This never makes the news on CNN, MSNBC or FOX News. Why? Because it's bad for empire when you kill innocent people. The way to solve such problems is through censorship. If you google "iraqi civilians killed" you get a few stories from American sources, but none from the top news sites, such as the above mentioned three or the NY Times.

We kill innocent people: no problem.

Our enemies kill people: top news story.

It's not a joke. It's very sick. Our society in America is censored, so much in fact that people cannot even comprehend the idea that we're censored. Chomsky has pointed this out many times, as has Edward Herman and David Falk. All of these men work at prestigious universities, too, but they never make it on to TV to tell regular people this basic understanding of American society. Power in this country will not allow them to. It's detrimental to the power structure, that's why.

When only 50% of the population votes, you don't live in a democratic society, or at least in any meaningful sense of the word democracy. We pretend we have democracy and we pretend we have free speech over the TV/radio waves. This allows us to sleep at night. We also pretend to help people over seas, like in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The worst thing I think that I hear when Americans provide reasons for leaving Iraq is when they say our troops are dying. How many US troops have given their lives? Less than 7,000?? How many Iraqis, innocent ones, have been taken because of our country's illegal (under international law and our Constitution) invasion? Around 600,000 (based on the findings of
Lancet).

Oh yea, our soldiers are in peril. 600,000 versus 7,000. That's how we value human life. What a deranged society we live in where no compassion is shown to those whose lives and land we are responsible for taking.

Holy Land Foundation

Three cases the Bush administration has brought to courts have failed. In Florida, Chicago and now in Texas, the terrorist charges have led to nothing. I wonder when Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes and the rest of these failed academics and commentators will update their web sites exonerating HLF and all of the "co-conspirators" involved with this case, such as ISNA and CAIR.

Alhamdulillah, justice still reigns in this country. And I hope the government does attempt to retry the case just so they can lose again, God willing.

Islam and Women - David Horrowitz Video

I just finished watching David Horrowitz's Youtube video on Women in Islam. Two things struck me:

The first was that there are many terrible problems in the Muslim world. The society that existed after the death of the Prophet (pbuh) was the culmination of Divine wisdom and Prophetic guidance. Muslim societies have receded since then and dramatically so. The pre-Islamic practices of treating women like dirt have become prevalent again. There is no denying that. Honor killings, female circumcision, beatings, rape, have all become prevalent in the Muslim world. Much of this stems from lack of education. The Muslim world is largely run by ignorant men who interpret the Qur'an and sunnah for their own benefit or based on unsound premises.

What is the cure for such problems? The cure is a concentrated effort by true scholars of the deen to embark on missions to these towns/villages and teach people the proper practices of the Prophet and his rightly guided followers. Umar used to cry when he thought of how before he became Muslim he buried his daughter alive out of shame that he had a daughter. The Companions who came from Mecca saw how the women of Madinah controlled their husbands and then they too became accustomed to being subservient in many respects to the wishes of their wives.

The only way, as I see it, that these problems can be resolved is through education. These people need to be taught and it has to be through Islam. It cannot be Muslims from the West coming into those towns and villages and telling them that in the West women are free. Women are not quite "free" in the West either. These people will listen though is they are taught vis a vis the Qur'an and sunnah. God willing, I think that is a practical endeavor that can be accomplished by Muslims living in those countries.

As for these right wing, anti-Islam videos: look at your own society first. The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network says that over 190,000 American women were either the victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault in 2005 alone. A 190,000!!! They estimate that every two and a half minutes a person in America is sexually assaulted. In addition, 44% of victims are under the age of 18. I just googled this web site and it's amazing to see the hypocrisy being demonstrated in this country.

The problem with such videos is they are not designed to bring awareness about such atrocities. Horrowitz and his ilk could care less about Muslim women and how they are treated because it is fairly obvious based on the stats I cited in the above paragraph that if they cared about women at all they would start helping them out in their own country first. These anti-Islam groups have a different agenda: to smear Islam. It's fairly obvious because they equate any horrible thing done in the Middle East to Islam. The Qur'an, as it is translated in English, mentions that the last resort of a husband to admonish a disobedient wife (and disobedience, according to Gibril Haddad, means adultery) is to "beat" her. Why do I place quotations around the word beat? Because the Arabic word in that verse from the Qur'an does not mean "beat" as Westerners might think. The ruling, according to Haddad, means it is permissible (not even recommended) to touch the wife the same as one would when they were washing their own face - meaning lightly touching. And the face of a woman is not allowed for such an action.

The entire debate can be settled through one hadith: "Could any of you beat his wife as he would beat a slave, and then lie with her in the evening?" This hadith is from both Bukhari and Muslim.

Muslim men have a lot to live up to and they have a deep hole to pull themselves out of in regards to their treatment of Muslim women. Western men, like Horrowitz, are really no different in regards to their treatment of women. As an American, I'm astonished to know how many American women are victims of rape and sexual assault: one out of every six, according to RAINN. There is a lot of work to do on both sides of the Atlantic.

Blogosphere

Salaam,

Bismillah.

I've joined the blog world. I want to restrict this to news about the American Muslim community, but I can no doubt see foreign news filtering into this blog because anything that goes on over seas almost always affects Muslims in America. With that, welcome and God willing this blog will be of use to many people.

Omer Subhani