A CYNICAL STATEMENT? Hillary Clinton Tells Congo to “Turn the Page”; Congolese Intellectual Answers
This declaration was made by American
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday 10 August
Goma on 6 August 2009, Hillary Clinton asked the Congolese to turn the page on
their past war of aggression waged from Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi with the
backing of Great Britain and the USA (under Hillary Clinton’s husband’s
administration).
The journal “Le Potentiel” published an
article under a headline that is, in my opinion, ill conceived: “First declarations encouraging. Hillary Clinton asks the Congolese to turn
the page.”
I challenge the
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexis Tambwe Mwamba, to go to
York
and take the same line: to ask the Americans to turn the page on 11
September 2001, the page that launched
the “war on terrorism. ”I defy Alexis Tambwe Mwamba to go to Washington or
Israel and take the same line asking the Jews to turn the page on the Shoah
[Holocaust], and to go to Kigali and ask the Rwandans to turn the page on the
1994 “genocide.”
Why is it that such a declaration uttered
in the Congo can be classified among “encouraging declarations” and be
applauded? Why do we applaud so
easily? What is encouraging in this
declaration? Is it the call to erase
from our lives reference to a past war of aggression fought on our soil by the
those who champion a travesty of democracy and the rights of man in order to
exploit our strategic mineral resources? Or is it rather the wish of the USA to work with an amnesiac Congolese
population?
Today in Germany, more than 50 years after
the Nazi crimes, a former Nazi officer has been sentenced to life
imprisonment. “On Tuesday a German court
sentenced Josef Scheungraber, a former Nazi officer living peacefully in Bavaria,
southern Germany, to life imprisonment for a massacre which left 14 dead in
Tuscany (central Italy) in 1944. The
presiding magistrate in the Munich court emphasized that Josef Scheungraber,
90, was “the only officer” of the German army company which killed 14 civilians
on 26 June 1944 at Folzano di Cortona in reprisal for an attack by
partisans. According to the magistrate,
he was recognized as the person responsible for the death of 10 of the people
in this village between Arezzo and Perugia.”
Here, Mrs Clinton asks us to turn the page
on a past with more than 5,000,000 dead. She tells us:
“We wish to work with people for a better
future and not with people who refer to the past.” But has our past become history? The fires in our villages and the massacres
continue. Humiliations continue. Kagame’s de-mobbed army and the false FDLR
have raped our daughters, our wives, our mothers and our grandmothers, and now
they’re raping the men. And if we refer
to this ever present past, the
threatens not to work with us! Who wants
to work with whom? What does it mean
wanting to work with us? Does it mean
pillaging our strategic mineral resources, arming bandits trained in the
extract them, sell them and then deposit the money in the same banks that our
own armed bandits use. Does it mean
taking a few crumbs of this money to lend us to pay the military or the
American and British experts who train them? And is claiming this money back later at incredible rates of interest
working with us, or is it organized theft? Is it working with us to ignite the powder and come back to the scene of
the crime crying crocodile tears without any regrets for the past? Is it working with us to insist that the
rapists armed by the USA and their allies should be brought to justice, but not
the American administrations and multinationals involved in the war of
aggression in the Congo also being brought to justice? Is it indispensable that the Congo should
work with the USA? Is it out of the
question that another Congolese leadership might decide, tomorrow, to follow
the route of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, a network of
strategic alliances with the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, calling into
question the classic partnership which has caused only misery in the Congo for
an eternity.
On the Internet page on which the journal
“Le Potentiel” publishes Hillary Clinton’s “first encouraging declarations”,
there is another headline: “Reply to Hillary Clinton. Zimbabwe: Mugabe accuses the western states
of racism and division.” This article
quotes several declarations by Mugabe, such as this: “The West seeks to divide
us and disrupt our peace. If it does not
wish to treat with us, should we continue to seek its aid?” Robert Mugabe adds: “Zimbabwe does not need
to be dependent on any other country on the planet, and least of all on old
imperialist and racist colonizers.” He
also added: “We are not part of Western Europe and the United States…”
considering that “the great nations” were built on their own talent and not on
foreign aid” (which is only a blind).
Reading this article, I said to myself:
“There is the courage lacking in some of us.” That of calling a cat a cat. Formatted in a spirit of spiritual, cultural, intellectual and material
dependence, many of us believe in the western miracle, capitalist and
philanthropic at the same time. Stupid! The accumulation of
riches in the North goes hand in hand with the dispossession of the South – and
with crime. The argument about the respect
of human rights and the arrest of rapists is often part of the “doctrine of
good intentions” dear to the USA. (Read
on this subject N. Chomsky, The Doctrine of Good Intentions, Paris, Fayard,
2006). It is stronger than the
ideologies of individual administrations. It crosses them. It is part of
“the way of America.”
Countries which know the American way and
have gone along it no longer believe in “the beautiful arguments” of the
Yankee. They organize in large get
togethers and break with all the moribund imperialist instruments of the
USA. A few days ago Castro told the
press that the United States may attack Venezuela from Colombia in pursuance of
its “war on drugs.” That is to say, to
punish the leading country in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas for
cutting the umbilical cord and taking several other Latin American countries
with it on the way to spiritual, material, cultural and intellectual autonomy.
“We want to work with people for a better
future and not with people who refer to the past.” This declaration of Mrs Clinton’s is full of
cynicism. To speak to the Congolese in
these terms is a way of denying them all memory. A people without memory is a people without
history, and a people without history is doomed to its loss. It is to that point that our adventure with
our tormentors of yesterday, who want us to renounce our past, could lead us:
to our loss, to the negation of our humanity.
No! No! We will write our history,
conserving all its pages so that future generations in our dear and great
country cannot repeat our past of war perpetrated by nations who call
themselves civilized.
But this history, which is already writing
itself, is written with the tears of blood at Rutshuru, Goma, Minembwe,
Kananga, Mbuji-Mayi, Kisangani, Shinkolobwe, Likasi, Masina, Luozi, Kikwit,
Maniema, Mbandaka, etc. It will not be
the history that Washington, Paris, London, Brussels, and Berlin have always
dictated or wish to dictate. The
watchful protectors of the collective memory of our people are ready to give
their blood in order that the writing of this history be ours. Without falsification.
No! Nobody, but nobody, will come between
us and our history and the demand for true justice. If these demands are not satisfied for the
living, future generations will take care of it. Germany has just condemned a Nazi more than
50 years after his crime. Why not the
Congo?
J-P Mbelu