Historical background to Congo crisis

Part 1: U.N. poised for broader intervention in Congo

Congo, which was also known as Zaire, after 1971, under the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko (1965-1997), has for centuries been the coveted prize of the European imperialist nations and the United States as a result of its vast mineral wealth and hydroelectric potential. The Mobutu regime had always been supported and subsidized by France, Belgium, Britain, Germany and the U.S.

Congo’s initial contact with Western nations took place during the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The Portuguese colonialists established trade, diplomatic and religious ties with the pre-colonial kingdoms of Alphonso I and Diogo between 1506 and 1565. Catholicism had taken root and penetrated through the reign of Alphonso I and continued as a major cultural force for centuries.

Congo became the subject of an international conference in Brussels, Belgium, in 1876 that was convened by King Leopold II. The purported reason for the conference was to foster cooperative multinational efforts aimed at the scientific exploration of the Congo area, as well as to enforce the abolition of the slave trade in Central Africa.

Another ostensible objective of the gathering was to promote and develop commerce between European nations through the systematic exploitation of the resources of this territory. However, the magnitude of potential wealth present in this section of Central Africa prevented the harmonious resolution of how this country would be “explored” and subsequently looted of its natural raw materials.

As a result of these conflicts, King Leopold II set out to rapidly control and extract wealth from the area on his own, absent of any official governmental recognition from the state of Belgium. In the aftermath of the ill-fated conference on the Congo in Brussels, Leopold II hired Henry Morton Stanley to return to the area with a mandate to negotiate treaties with the traditional leaders over the exploration and excavation of mineral resources.

According to African historian Joseph E. Harris: “This chain of events, set in motion by King Leopold’s efforts to carve out an empire in the Congo, represented a culmination of years of efforts by missionaries, explorers, merchants, and others to map out and assess various areas in Africa.

“Indeed, the Congo events dramatized and climaxed the conflicting interests of Portugal, France, and Britain, and led to the convening of the Berlin Conference in 1884-85. At the conference, the powers agreed that traders and missionaries of all countries should have free access to the African interior that the slave trade should be abolished and that European morality should be brought to Africans.

“It was also agreed that the Congo and Niger rivers should be open to all nationals. But more important than that was the stipulation that no new European colonies would be recognized unless they were effectively occupied, which meant that European officials had to establish visible and effective power in the areas claimed.” (Harris, “Africans and Their History,” 1972).

The Western European proclamation related to the abolition of slavery was merely designed to replace one form of exploitation and oppression with another more rational and profitable system, i.e., classical colonialism. Prior to 1908, Congo was known as the Free State and was controlled personally by Leopold and his functionaries.

The administrative structure of the colony represented an alliance between the Church, the monarchy and large-scale business enterprises. The king sought to maximize the economic exploitation of the territory by organizing massive slave labor camps heavily policed by royal and business overseers, who enforced astronomical quotas of ivory and rubber collection on Africans displaced by mining production.

Those Africans who did not meet the ivory and rubber quotas were subjected to beatings, torture, mutilation and execution by the Belgian administrators. Between 8 and 10 million Africans perished during the initial onslaught of Belgian imperialism between 1876 and 1908. (Thomas Kanza, “The Rise and Fall of Patrice Lumumba,” 1991).

After 1908, the monarchy in Belgium relinquished personal control over the Congo colony and allowed the administration of the territory to be controlled by civil servants and business elements. Resistance emerged and grew during the course of the early- and middle-twentieth century. By the late 1950s, when liberation movements began to gain strength on the African continent, the masses in Congo demanded national independence from Belgium.

Patrice Lumumba emerged as a national figure in Congolese political life during the mid-1950s when he headed several associations in the city where he grew up, Stanleyville, in Orientale Province. As chairman of the Association des Evolues, the colonial authorities began to consider him a dangerous threat to the status quo.

During this same period, Lumumba cultivated contacts and alliances among the more progressive elements within the European settler community who opposed the policies of the colonial regime. Some of his European friends had connections within the Belgian Socialist-Liberal Coalition government, which came to power in Brussels in the national elections of 1954.

By 1958, Lumumba had gained significant political experience and notoriety within the colonial capital of Leopoldville. That same year, he created a nationalist party known as the Mouvement National Conglais (MNC), which was in favor of a nonethnic approach to the African struggle for independence.

Lumumba’s international exposure during the All-African Peoples Conference (AAPC) in Accra, Ghana, brought the MNC leader to the attention of the Pan-African movement. The conference was held in December 1958 under the direction of the then Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and the Bureau of African Affairs director, George Padmore.

In the aftermath of the AAPC inaugural meeting, Lumumba gained the support of freedom-loving forces throughout the continent and the progressive world community of public opinion. On Jan. 4, 1959, rebellions erupted throughout the Belgian Congo, after a mass meeting was held by the MNC-Lumumba in the capital of Leopoldville.

The rapidity with which the transformation of political life swept the country was a phenomenon that captured the attention of the international community. After a series of negotiations, the La Loi Fondamentale sur les Structures de Congo was ratified by the Belgian Senate with the signature of King Baudouin.

When elections were held inside the country, May 11-25, 1960, Lumumba’s party won a majority of seats within the National Assembly. On June 24, 1960, a unity government was formed with Lumumba as prime minister and Kasavubu of ABAKO, a regionally based, ethnic-oriented party, as head of state.

The country was proclaimed independent on June 30, 1960. Two weeks after the ostensible transferal of power from Belgium to the Lumumba-Kasavubu government, mutinies and rebellions were occurring throughout Congo. Initially the problems within the Force Publique (Belgian colonial paramilitary police) were caused by the dashed expectations of the African rank-and-file members for an immediate improvement in pay and promotion comparable to their exclusively European officer corps.

In addition, the secessionist parties such as CONAKAT and MNC-Kalonji began a campaign of separation from the central government. On July 11, Moise Tshombe declared the mineral rich region of Katanga independent of the Republic of Congo headed by Patrice Lumumba. Belgian troops stationed in the region served as the decisive factor in maintaining the illegal Katanga rebellion for many months.

Tshombe requested and received the assistance of the then settler-colonial regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa, which provided extensive battalions of military troops. In response to this provocation, Lumumba requested the intervention of the United Nations in order to re-establish a modicum of civil authority inside the country.

However, this decision on the part of the Congolese leader proved to be his ultimate undoing politically. After the arrival of U.N. forces in Congo in mid-July of 1960, the secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, objectively sided with the political forces domestically and internationally who were in opposition to Lumumba’s policies.

With the failure of the U.N.-directed military forces to prevent the effective collapse of the post-independence government, Lumumba publicly appealed to the Soviet Union for material assistance.

Even though Lumumba traveled to the U.S. twice during 1960 in order to explain his position to the U.S. government and the U.N., he was targeted by the State Department for liquidation at the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency. In a 1975 congressional hearing chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church, one former National Security Agency staffer, Robert Johnson, testified about a high level meeting between President Eisenhower and top ranking intelligence officers where a decision was made to assassinate Patrice Lumumba.

When Kasavubu publicly broke with the governing coalition and dismissed Lumumba from the Congolese government on September 5, 1960, the stage was set for the eventual kidnapping and execution of the prime minister by the forces of Mobutu and Tshombe with the full backing of the U.S. and other colonial powers.

Mobutu had initially made a bid for political power in mid-September 1960 by announcing that he was neutralizing all political leaders in the country. Lumumba, along with two of his colleagues, Maurice Mpolo, the minister of Youth and Sports, and Joseph Okoto, president of the Senate, was brutally murdered on January 17, 1961, in Elizabethville, the capital of Katanga.

International outrage against his murder was felt throughout the continent and the world. At the U.N. headquarters in the U.S., African Americans violently disrupted the proceedings of this world body, blaming it for the murder of the Congolese leader.

With the recent announcement by the U.N. Mission to Congo (MONUC) that it is desirous of greater military involvement inside the DRC, the history of Western involvement in this country must be considered. During the collapse of the Mobutu regime in 1996-97, a broad-based coalition known as the Alliance of Democratic Forces for Liberation (ADFL) was formed under the leadership of the late former president, Laurent Kabila.

Kabila, who had fought alongside the Lumumbaist forces during the early and mid-1960s after the murder of the country’s first prime minister in 1961, later formed the Congolese People’s Revolutionary Party, which advanced a socialist solution to the post-colonial problem of the DRC. Kabila’s role is cited in several historical accounts of the 1960s, when revolutionary Cuba had sent a brigade of fighters to the country in an ill-fated effort to overthrow the pro-Western government.

Kabila, who had formed an alliance with the Rwandan and Ugandan governments during the war of 1996-97 that overthrew Mobutu, later broke with the governments in Kigali and Kampala, respectively. The U.S., which politically supported the Ugandan and Rwandan states, encouraged a military intervention to topple Kabila in 1998.

In response to this imperialist effort, the progressive governments of Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia in southern Africa sent in tens of thousands of troops to beat back the Western-backed invasion, creating a military stalemate that eventually created the conditions for a negotiated settlement in 2003. During this period, it has been estimated that three out of four Congolese lost their lives, numbering in the millions.

In regard to the recent upsurge in fighting since late September, the Inter-regional Information Network has reported, “More than 150,000 people have been driven from their homes in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) over the past two months by fighting on two fronts, with dissident Congolese and Ugandan rebels, the United Nations refugee agency reported.”

As long as the Western imperialist countries continue to utilize the Democratic Republic of Congo as a source for strategic minerals, the country will be subjected to renegade rebel incursions that are instigated by multinational corporations. The African Union, which is also a focal point for imperialist interference, must struggle to develop an independent foreign policy that upholds the right of its member-states to self-determination and sovereignty.

The solution to the problems in the DRC is representative of the post-colonial crisis in Africa and throughout the world. Despite national independence, the imperialist nations and the multinational corporations are continuing to seek dominance through the manipulation of various sectors of the population. As long as political instability can be maintained in the DRC and other regions of the continent, it will provide a rationale for the Western nations to militarily intervene directly or under the guise of the U.N.

Anti-imperialist forces inside the U.S. and the Western capitalist countries must study the history and contemporary situation inside the DRC. When the historical development of the country is taken into consideration, it becomes quite obvious that a political solution to underdevelopment and the failure of capitalist economic methods can only come about through a total break with neoliberal policies that are promoted by the International Monetary Fund and other agencies.

Only a noncapitalist path toward development can create the conditions for genuine national independence and economic liberation. The solutions to the Congolese national question will inevitably come from the African people themselves, with the assistance of other anti-imperialists and socialist forces throughout the region and the world.

Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire (panafricannews.blogspot.com). He has written extensively on the history and current situation inside the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).