DRC and Iraq wars linked

The first event was the publication by the United States of
those African countries which have endorsed the US-UK war of
aggression against Iraq, despite the fact that these same countries
were present in Addis Ababa and Kuala Lumpur, when the African
Union and the Non-Aligned Movement respectively denounced US-UK
aggression against Iraq.

These countries — Mozambique, Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda
and Uganda — did not speak out against the unanimous positions
of the AU and NAM at the respective meetings. They simply went
back home and instructed their UN representatives to endorse
the US-UK aggression against Iraq.

The second event is the fanfare over the signing of the DRC
peace accord in Sun City, South Africa, where the countries which
refused to contribute troops to the defence of the Congolese
people against proxies of the "New Reich" in the Great Lakes
region are nevertheless taking front positions in negotiating
and celebrating the resultant peace settlement. In Shona these
countries are called "vana muchekedzafa".

They want to be associated with the success of a regional defensive
intervention now which they expected to fail when the call came
to save the Congo from a Rwanda-like holocaust.

The question whether or not Africa understands the Anglo-American
"New Reich" arises because an astute African leader would not
celebrate the successful defence of the DRC while at the same
time endorsing the US-UK aggression against Iraq, because the
two wars are linked.

The US and the UK supported the aggression against the DRC and
the US and the UK are recolonising Iraq.

The recolonising of Iraq because it is rich in petroleum means
that we have not yet seen the end of the imperialist struggle
to recolonise the DRC for its strategic minerals.

The peace accord is only a short break; and the African countries
supporting the US-UK aggression against Iraq may be used both
to divide the African Union and to endorse US-UK efforts to recolonise
Africa.

The means will be different but the objectives will be the same
in Africa as in the Persian Gulf. That is why Anglo-American
interests call Central and Southern Africa "the Persian Gulf
of minerals".

One way to illustrate the need for African leaders to read the
world context of Iraq properly is to step back to the 1930s at
the time when the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United
Nations, was about to collapse.

l Hitler was setting up what came to be known as the Third Reich,
the Nazi regime. He had won an election to become Chancellor
of Germany, but he was contemptuous of democracy and elections.
The fact that he came to power through elections gave him credibility
in the eyes of unsuspecting leaders around the world.

* Hitler has also announced his programme for world domination
through a book called Mein Kampf. In that book and in another
unpublished manuscript, it was clear that Hitler’s faction and
the people advising him saw themselves as extremist outsiders
to power, who had to struggle against old liberal insiders whom
they saw as having failed to propel Germany towards a new imperial
destiny.

* If we now glance at the United States and Britain, we see some
similarities. The Plan for a New American Century (1977) and
a book called The New Right: We Are Ready to Lead (1980) are
the modern US announcements of a new vision for world domination.
The two American documents were supplemented by the first ever
visit of the entire US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in
January 2000, to the UN Security Council, where the then chairman
of the committee, Senator Jesse Helms, made an unprecedented
speech which also stood out as his Mein Kampf against the world.

In Britain the same phenomenon is presented not as the New Right
(New Reich) but as New Labour and its biggest proponent is Robert
Cooper.

* In the US, the faction around George W. Bush also see themselves
as extremist outsiders coming from the New Right and dislodging
old liberals from power who are mostly from the Eastern US.

The new hawks are, however, clever enough to adopt a president
with an old establishment name, George W. Bush, son of a former
president and son of a former central intelligence director.
But they see their faction as a once marginalised force in US
politics, a force representing the new wealth of the empire based
on oil, military hardware, construction industries and high-tech
communications.

* The rise of the New Right in the 1980s and 1990s in the US
is similar to the rise of the Third Reich in terms of context
as well: a long-running global economic crisis forcing nations
to be preoccupied with domestic economic and social upheavals
at the expense of the global climate of international relations.
This upheaval has even convinced some that the UN should be reduced
to a welfare organisation.

But there was much more than inward looking in the 1930s; one
historian on the period says the approaches of most political
leaders to the threat of Fascism and Nazism and to Hitler in
particular "were characterised many leaders of the South and
East today. The extent to which these leaders are still regurgitating
neoliberal slogans from London and Washington against a starkly
contrary reality is shocking.

We hear of good governance, transparency, accountability, peer
review, dialogue, governments of national unity, democracy, human
rights and the rule of law as values which have been imported
from Europe and America, values whose adoption and supervision
Europe and America have the right to monitor on a daily basis
through their ambassadors and NGOs. But Europe and America do
not observe the same values in Afghanistan, Iraq or Yugoslavia.

* The rise of Hitler’s Third Reich was also characterised by
an extraordinary amount of lying through the media and on a global
scale. The same historian says " . . . in pursuing his goals
Hitler has never allowed himself to be deterred by verbal professions
to others." In other words, words and pledges were only means
to an end, not promises to be honoured and kept.

Interestingly, Paul Krugman of the New York Times on 25 February
also characterised George Bush’s New Right administration as
one which makes promises and pledges as fast as it breaks them.
Among those who feel betrayed by the US-UK alliance are:

* All the countries who endorsed the UN Security Council Resolution
against terrorism which was then abused in the war against Afghanistan

* The President of Mexico, who was asked to support Bush’s election
in exchange for having Mexicans working in the US illegally given
an amnesty and naturalised.

* Those who urged Iraq to disarm itself in the belief that the
US and UK were really concerned about disarmament, when in fact
the US and UK wanted Iraq disarmed so that they could commit
genocide against its people with minimum resistance.

* Even more striking is the fact that Hitler’s Third Reich emerged
from the outset with a list of nations it wanted to invade and
destroy. Adolph Hitler in June 1933 said "I will grind France
to powder," and indeed this was done a few years down the road.

Likewise, George W Bush and his New Right team emerged from
the outset with a hit list of nations which had to be destroyed
and remoulded through "regime change." These included Iraq, Iran,
North Korea, Libya, Zimbabwe, Cuba and others.

* While France, Poland, Belgium and Czechoslovakia were among
Hitler’s primary targets, one of the first to be invaded as a
rehearsal ground was Spain in 1936-1937.

Hitler encouraged Italian Fascist dictator Mussolini to attack
Ethiopia and force the League of Nations to dwell on that issue
while he and Mussolini were in fact more interested in Spain.

In other words, the Italian attack on Ethiopia in 1936 was used
to divert attention from Spain and other targets, just as Afghanistan
was also used to divert attention from Iraq as the prime target.
The American documents in 1997 and 2000 mentioned Iraq and other
countries but it was Afghanistan which was attacked first, just
as France was announced as a target in 1933 but Spain was attached
first, in 1936-37.

Hitler and Mussolini intervened in Spain to create a "regime
change" which later installed the fascist dictator Francisco
Franco and overthrew a left-wing Republican government.

They accused the Republicans of being communists. The so-called
communists had popular support around the world and people demonstrated
in their support and against Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.

But the major powers in the League of Nations were so pre-occupied
with other problems that the only support the legitimate Republican
government received from the world were volunteers.

The same thing is happening in Iraq. The world seems so distracted
and confused that only volunteers so far are going to Baghdad.
Yet what is needed is a counter force against the most bloated
and lethal military machine in world history.

Hitler, Mussolini and Franco also used ethnic chauvinism to
divide Spain. The Basques of Northern Spain were treated the
way the Kurds of Northern Iraq are treated and that division
helped to weaken the democratic forces of the Spanish Republic.
Bush and Blair are using the same tactics in Iraq, turning the
Sunni Moslems against Shii’te Moslems and the Kurds against the
rest.

But the main purpose of the joint German-Italian invasion of
Spain was to rehearse the plan for world conquest. Hitler said
he sent his air force to Spain in order to present "a lesson
to our enemies," so that the enemies could see German’s capabilities
demonstrated.

Herman Göering called the intervention "an opportunity to try
my young air force and for [military] personnel to gather [practical]
experience.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are serving the same purpose
today.

As Sarudzai Kamba of Harare wrote last week in response to the
ZBC programme on the US-UK invasion of Iraq:

"If Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq are recent additions to
a trail of chaos that the Americans and the British have unleashed
over the period, the question as to who will be next must not
be allowed to arise. The record speaks for itself. Everybody
is the next target.

Everybody should therefore be asking what to do with the Americans
and the British."

In this regard, the first step Pan-Africanists would expect
from African leaders is a clear condemnation of the barbarism
we are witnessing in Iraq.

The second step would be a wake-up call to the people of Africa,
showing that African leaders understand that the Anglo-American
unipolar world is not about democracy, human rights, transparency,
good governance and rule of law. Rather it is a world of greed,
lies and genocide.