Democratic Republic of Congo - February 24, 2024

Years of genocide in Congo

A brutal massacre, including children and women, is taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Imperialist transnationals plunder cobalt and coltan, under terrible conditions of super-exploitation, with slave labor, child exploitation, rape, massacres and outrages of all kinds. This is an open secret that governments, multinationals and even the media are hiding.
The transnationals, in search of natural resources for the manufacturing of cell phones, tablets and all electronic devices, enslave workers, women and children in "artisanal mining" at surface mines that accumulate great wealth that the lavas have thrown to the surface from the great depth of the Rift fault.
Both coltan and cobalt are extracted through this "artisanal mining". Thousands of children work long days for one or two dollars a day and are forced to extract the ore from the earth with their bare hands or rudimentary tools.

The imperialist powers dispute control of these deposits, which is why it has become a war zone. There are around 130 armed groups, made up of the security guard companies of the mining companies (as Agemira, company registered in Bulgaria, headed by Frenchman Olivier Bazin, and Congo Protection, composed of Romanians trained in the French Foreign Legion) and the armed wing of these multinationals, who kidnap children and women and take them to work in the mines at gunpoint. Unicef estimates that around 40,000 Congolese minors are forced to work in these mines.
To impose control over the population in mining areas, guerrillas resort to all types of violence and sexual abuse.
For 30 years, the Republic of Congo has been bleeding into armed conflicts that have cost the lives of 6 million Congolese. The Coltan Wars occurred between 1998 and 2003, which was followed by the Kivu War, a conflict that pits the north and south of this region bordering Uganda and Rwanda. It is precisely there that the coltan mines, the real cause for these conflicts, are located.
The region is guarded by the UN biggest mission and its blue helmets, MONUSCO, who have occupied the nation for years. However, no one has done anything against the conditions of the Congolese in these mines, that is, such an outrage is allowed to pass on the exploited, under the complicit gaze of the UN.

There is also “industrial mining”, which is the “legal” one, for which China has many contracts and thus it supplies raw materials from technology companies to transnational companies. But the majority of mining is done “illegally”, that is, “artisanally”, and is in the hands of imperialist powers, especially the US American and British ones, and to a lesser extent German. As we said, it’s done with the endorsement of the UN and the Congo government.

The big business of mining transnationals on the blood of the Congolese people

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has enormous wealth: 80 percent of the coltan and 50 percent of the cobalt come from its mines and concentrates 80% of the reserves of these minerals. The cell phone and tablet industry moves an incredible 3 trillion dollars business, which implies 4.4% of the world's GDP.
At the other pole, the Congo, according to the United Nations Human Development Index, is one of the world poorest countries, ranking 176 out of a total of 187 countries. Poverty reaches 80% of its population and a quarter of Congolese cannot eat regularly. While 6.9 million Congolese were forced to migrate, driven by armed conflicts.
Multinationals are which benefit from these minerals at low prices. The coltan mines have fallen into the hands of guerrillas led by Rwanda and Uganda, supported by the different imperialist powers. The war over minerals escalated when genocidal Rwandan troops withdrew from the DRC under the protection and cover-up of France.  Then the Somigl company was created, whose largest shareholder is the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) guerrilla led by Azarias Ruberwa, who at a conference in Europe declared that this group had 70 percent of the shares of this company. Companies like Somigl are which pay the guerrillas and resell the coltan to large multinationals from the US, Europe or Asia. For this reason, these multinationals that directly finance the rebel groups operating in Kivu, are responsible for the ongoing massacre.

Dozens of private armies on the payroll of transnational corporations, including official government troops, defend the businesses of imperialism with iron and fire.

M23 is attacking Kivu province in eastern Congo

The March 23 Movement (M23) is one of these private armies of the many imperialist companies that plunder the riches of the Congo. These private armies must not only defend the rich mineral deposits, but they must also control populations, that is to say, entire zones, to take women, children and men to work as slaves in the mines.
These are the real frontiers of the Congo, where even the Rwandan army intervenes directly, defending the transnationals that are in its territory and seek to expand.
One of the richest countries on the planet in minerals has been driven to misery, stagnation and slavery for centuries. Imperialism is reaction all along the line.

Of late, after the inauguration of President F. Tshisekedi, the armed group M23 attacked the region of North Kivu and is getting closer and closer to Goma, the capital of this province. In this region, the Congolese are cornered between the army of the Republic of Congo and the M23 armed group. Thousands of inhabitants are pushed into the streets, swelling the ranks of the millions of internally displaced persons.
A crisis compounded by stormy rains, floods that razed 100,000 houses; war, a cholera epidemics, famine, that's what the tormented Congolese are suffering.

Access to Goma has been cut or is being cut in three directions (south, west and north). While there are still no shortages in the markets, food prices are rising. This has been happening in recent years in all the mining and living labor force areas in the Congo.

With total cynicism, the United Nations met urgently and behind closed doors to condemn the M23 offensive and the armed groups operating in the country, while letting the massacre and looting with slave labor go on.
The black bourgeoisies of neighboring countries such as Burundi, Malawi and Tanzania have already sent soldiers to the Congo to defend the various British, Yankee, French and Belgian imperialist companies and even the big mines of the Beijing bourgeoisie, which has an urgent need for coltan and cobalt for the transnational companies producing in China.
The ANC government of South Africa did not want to be left out and, monitored by Anglo-American imperialism, has already sent between 800 / 1,000 soldiers as an advance on the 2,900 who will remain in the territory until December 2024, under the excuse of supporting the "peacekeeping operations". The presence of South Africa is doubly ignominious, since within its country artisanal mines also operate under the same conditions as in the DRC, also guarded by the black bourgeoisie at the service of the transnationals. The ANC government is co-author of the genocide of black Africa at the hands of the imperialist mining companies, at the same time that it poses as a "defender of human rights" as in the case of the Palestinian question.

The genocide in the Congo must stop now!
The traitorous leaderships of the workers' organizations have hidden the massacre of the black working class. Enough Is enough!

In the Congolese capital (Kinshasa) the marches against this genocide have already begun in front of the gates of the UN Mission, to the cry of "out with the band of hypocrites" and "the West is an accomplice of the Congolese genocide". In Paris, on February 11, a demonstration was also held in support of the Congolese people.

Stalinism, which controls trade union centers as in South Africa and other trade union bureaucracies of the region look the other way in the face of the genocide of the workers of Congo. Actually these leaderships guarantee the same plunder and exploitation accross all the countries of black Africa.
In the same way that the Stalinist parties silenced the genocide in Syria by supporting al-Assad and Putin, today they want to sweep under the carpet a genocide a thousand times worse than the tragedy that the Palestinian masses in Gaza are suffering at the hands of Zionism. How miserable!
In Palestine, in D.R. of Congo, in martyred Syria, in the Ukraine occupied by Putin's troops and plundered by the US imperialists, the task of the world working class is to clearly identify who are its allies and who are its enemies and to place itself at the head of the trenches of the exploited masses.

The working class of Africa, which moved the world with great revolutionary uprisings in the twentieth century, as it continues to do today in South Africa, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Senegal, must take into its hands the struggle to coordinate and centralize the anti-imperialist struggle of the working and peasant masses of the entire black continent.
The enemy is exactly the same: the imperialist transnationals that plunder all African wealth, and their partners, the new black bourgeoisies that have made fortunes in a sea of starving slaves.
The break of the masses with the bourgeois governments that are sustained here and there by Stalinism and the trade union bureaucracies, is the task of the moment for the black proletariat and its allies, the poor peasants.

The black working class in the U.S. in its struggle against Trump showed that it can be the vanguard of the struggle of the black workers' movement internationally, on condition that it breaks with the butcher Biden, a murderer of the Palestinian masses and chief of the plunderers of the oppressed peoples of the world.

Labor unions and confederations, organizations of the European working class, in the US and around the world have to fight with strikes, roadblocks and other different actions, to put an end to the genocide of their Congolese brothers. This is one and the same struggle against the transnationals that subsume martyrized Africa in a sea of misery, blood and plundering while attacking the conquests of the workers in the central countries.
This struggle in Africa against the imperialist transnationals to stop the genocide and plunder in Congo can only achieve victory as a unified struggle of the black workers of the whole martyred Africa and their siblings within the imperialist powers, above all in the U.S. It is the same class against the same enemy that enslaves us on both sides of the ocean, plunders our nations to fill their pockets and drowns our families in a sea of blood and misery. One same class against the same enemy!

Out with Imperialism from the African continent!

Coltan, cobalt, lithium, uranium, manganese, gold, oil, gas for their true owners: the working class and the poor peasants of Africa! We must expropriate without compensation and under workers' control all the transnationals, US, British, Belgians, French imperialisms that steal all African natural wealth and also the land!

We must disarm their fascist guards with which they massacre and enslave in Congo! For the generalized arming of the Congolese people to defend themselves against such bloodthirsty forces!

The national bourgeoisies have been all along the junior partners of the imperialists in the plundering of black Africa and continue to be so. We must defeat this bourgeoisie, vassal of imperialism and impose a black workers and peasants’ republic in RDC, and together with its siblings from Niger, Somalia, Senegal, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria, Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso etc., let's set up a Federation of Black Republics of Central and Southern Africa!

James S. for the WIL of Zimbabwe
Luisa Campos and Ana Negri for the Editorial Committee of “The International Workers Organizer”