60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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272 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness historical relationship with the West, from periods of exploration, to slavery, to colonisation. At the heart of most confl icts, violent or slow-burning, there also lies contestation over the use of, and control over, economic resources and economic conditions, which can create desperation, ignite or or lead to insane behaviour. It is tragic, therefore, that the economic dimensions of genocidal violence tend to be marginalised, as they are in the Genocide Convention itself. I would also like to note that not all mass deaths, including threatened extinctions of whole groups of people, arise from the violence of armed confl ict or even from physical violence. Many, often slowonset mass deaths are consequences of public policy or the neglect of the same. Therefore, do not be surprised that my comments are about more than deaths arising from physical killing and include the economic conditions triggering mass killing, especially conditions arising from public policy. Genocide in Africa is not an exclusively 20th century phenomenon. It dates back to the period of slavery. Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost, a true master-class, chronicles most vividly the horrors visited upon the people of the Congo Free State in the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children died, or suff ered amputations, were tortured and maimed owing to King Leopold II’s pursuit of rubber and other loot. Joseph Conrad, a young English sailor shocked by the brutality of Leopold’s Congo observed in his book, The Heart of Darkness, the ‘vilest scramble for loot that ever disfi gured the history of human conscience’. Mark Twain writes that between 1890 and 1910, and immediately preceding this period, Belgium’s brutality may have led to the death of 8 to 10 million Congolese. Estimates are of course always diffi cult to verify, but even if only half of these deaths occurred the scale was staggering, especially compared to the size of the total population at the time. This was of course the result of internal slavery. Whilst Leopold was lauded in Europe as an a abolitionist and benevolent king who brought progress to his African vassals, behind it he created a kingdom of slaves, of forced recruitment and conscriptions; of hard labour, driving people people armed with machetes and cutlasses to fi ght against people with rifl es and guns. And many of his soldiers were to write how endlessly they fought, month after month, with these folks coming in droves with sticks and cutlasses, mowed down by their rifl es. At the height of it, one of these soldiers wrote, ‘I cannot say that we are anywhere near even subjugating them. They simply preferred to die’.
ehind most mass violence lurk economic interests 273 The genocide of today in the Democratic Republic of the Congo may have been dwarfed by the genocide of the 19th century, but the dynamics remain the same – the consequences of a violent scramble for loot, in which foreign interventions exploit and exacerbate primordial identity politics with cunning, proxy armies, mercenary armies and full-scale invasions. But the villains of the DRC are not just gun-toting, bleary-eyed young men high on drugs, they are also besuited technocrats, a steaming fl ow of lawyers, accountants, surveyors – and World Bank ‘experts’. The World Bank in particular is crucial in legitimising the division and the grabbing of the loot and the spoils through contracts where no civil bases exist for such contracts. These legitimising contracts do not only result in unjust wealth extraction, they fuel the wars by encouraging facts on the ground, whereby minor companies force their way into mineral patches by paying local armed factions for protection or bringing their own in, if that is more convenient. The contracts supported by the World Bank create ‘legal’ rights and obligations in an illegal occupation reminiscent of the tactics of the Israeli government in Palestinian lands. The world must hold the World Bank to account for its role in the genocide, not just armed killers. There is a new old scramble for the continent. This scramble is old in the sense that the drivers are the same – the scramble for economic resources. It is new in terms of shifting emphasis on the nature of strategic resources. This time energy resources such as fossil fuels, bio fuels and water-based energy top the bill. With fossil fuel discoveries and extraction expected to peak globally in the coming decade, and no viable alternatives found to drive industrial and vehicular transport, the scramble is on to claim and enforce claims on known deposits. The implications are immense. Confi rmed deposits of oil of varying quality and gas have been found in about 70 per cent of the African countries. In the next few years, Africa is expected to provide 25 per cent of total US imports of petroleum. The Gulf of Guinea has become one of the hottest geo-political spots on earth, as evidenced by American military intelligence activity and the expressed desire of the United States to physically establish its African military high command (AFRICOM) on African soil. We also witness the expansion of foreign intelligence facilities in many African countries, including alleged expansion of the Khartoum CIA post into the key intelligence hub for North Africa and the Middle East, as well as the Sahara. Add to this mix, heightened military collaboration between France, Britain and the US in Djibouti
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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Page 262 and 263: In short, both the understanding of
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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