Day: December 12, 2004

THE PETROLEUM COMMONS: Local, Islamic, and Global

by George Caffentzis

1. All land and natural resources (including mineral resources) within the Ijaw territory belong to Ijaw communities and are the basis of our survival.

2. We cease to recognise all undemocratic decrees that rob our peoples/communities of the right to ownership and control of our lives and resources, which were enacted without our participation and dissent. These include the Land Use Decree and The Petroleum Decree, etc.

–The Kaiama Declaration (December 1998)

Introduction: Oil and Water

The struggles over the ownership of the two most important political liquids of this era, petroleum and water, have had different fates. Though water has been claimed to be either private, state or common property throughout history, the novel feature of this neoliberal period has been the move by corporations to totally privatize it. The powerful struggles against this corporate privatization of water from Cochabamba in Bolivia to Soweto in South Africa have focused world attention on the question: Who owns water? The consequent efforts to keep water as a common property on a local and global level are now some of the most important initiatives of the anti-globalization movement.

Petroleum, on the other hand, has in the last hundred and fifty years been considered exclusively as either private or state property. The pages of the history books on the petroleum industry have been filled with "magnates" like John D. Rockefeller or government "leaders" like Saddam Hussain and Winston Churchill. Thus the "struggle over oil" has been largely seen as a struggle between oil companies and governments, since its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century.

But over the last fifteen years there has been a major shift in the physiognomy of the protagonists in the oil struggle. No longer do national governments and huge energy conglomerates dominate the scene so exclusively. The new protagonists include: "peoples" like the Ijaws, the Ogoni, the Chiapanacos, the U’wa, the Cofan, the Secoyas, the Huaorani, the Sumatrans; border-transcending social movements under the star of Islam and subscribing to "Islamic economics"; elements of the UN system like the World Bank, claiming to represent "global governance" of the "global commons." These peoples, movements and global entities have entered into the struggle for the control of oil production, legitimizing themselves with a new (and yet, at the same time, quite archaic) conception of property–common property.

Why is the notion of a petroleum commons emerging now, and what are its consequences for the oil industry?

There are three levels of claims to petroleum as common property, correlating with three kinds of allied communities that are now taking shape, for there is no common property without a community that regulates its use:

*First, some local communities most directly affected by the extraction of petroleum claim to own and regulate the petroleum under its territory as a commons

*Second, Islamic economists claim for the Islamic community of believers, from Morocco to Indonesia, and its representative, the 21st century Caliphate in formation, ownership of and the right to regulate the huge petroleum fields beneath their vast territory.

*Third, UN officials claim for the "coming global community" the right to regulate the so-called global commons–air, water, land, minerals (including petroleum) and "nous" (knowledge and information). This imagined global community is to be represented by a dizzying array of "angels" that make up the UN system, from NGO activists to UN environmentalist bureaucrats to World Bank "green" advisors.

These claims and their legitimizing discourse are displacing, with different results, the monopoly hold of governments and corporations over the ownership and regulation of the planet’s petroleum. There is much in common in these conceptions of the petroleum commons, but they are also often in conflict. These conflicts will determine how the struggle over the ownership of petroleum and the regulation of its extraction and use will be transformed by the entrance of the "commoners" into a field dominated for over a century by nation states and global corporations.

The Local Petroleum Commons: Nigeria, Chiapas, the Amazon

One of the most important areas where the petroleum commons is emerging as a political reality is the Niger Delta. This area is located in a crossroads of the world market. Three centuries ago the region from Escarvos to Calabar was the main storage and transshipment point of African slaves bound for the plantations of the Americas. This trade poisoned the Delta people’s social relations then. Today the Delta people are caught in the middle of the global oil industry that is poisoning them physically and economically as well as socially. They have been struggling against this fate with great courage and originality, taking a political road that began with a demand for reparations for past damages caused by the oil companies, and has evolved to the declaration of a petroleum commons in the Delta.

This story begins in the early 1990s, when the Ogoni people decided that the time was ripe to transform what had been a long-fought but largely unknown and parochial struggle against both the Nigerian government and the global oil companies into an internationally-recognized one. The Ogonis are a relatively small ethnic group in Nigeria (with a population of less than a million), but they have been in the middle of oil production in Nigeria from its beginning and have suffered greatly for it. Some Ogonis realized that if they had to fight a global oil company–in their case, Royal Dutch Shell–to get reparations, they had to become global themselves. But how was a relatively small, impoverished ethnic group in the midst of an "obscure" part of Africa to "globalize itself"?

Parochial ethnic politics had to be transcended to make clear that the Ogoni struggle was part of the worldwide ecological struggle against the major oil companies. On the heals of the "No Blood for Oil" struggle against the first US-Iraq war, the Ogonis pointed out that they too had suffered to fuel the profits of Shell and the industrial machines of Europe and the US. And with the help of one of their leaders, playwright Kenule Saro-Wiwa, who had built up an international audience with his writings, the message made a connection with environmental groups around the planet.

The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) helped stimulate a "recomposition" of the anti-capitalist movement, since it made it clear that the Ogonis’ demands for reparations for Shell’s destruction of their environment were an integral part of the wider demand that the total costs of capitalist development be recognized and paid for by corporations everywhere. In 1995, Saro-Wiwa was arrested and hanged on false charges of murder by the Nigerian military regime of Gen. Sani Abacha–actions Shell was complicit with. In response, Greenpeace and other environmental groups organized an effective worldwide boycott of Shell, protesting the blood being painfully exchanged for oil in Nigeria as well as the Middle East. Ken Saro-Wiwa paid with his life for connecting the Ogoni with a world environmentalist movement, but his organizational model has been used again and again by other small ethnic groups throughout the world.

The high cost the Ogoni paid for their struggle was noted by other militant groups in the Niger Delta, which have de-emphasized the internationalization of their struggle and focused directly on negotiations with oil companies and the Nigerian government based upon their capacity to hinder or halt production or shipment of oil. These groups, however, have pushed the demands of the struggle to a new level–instead of demanding reparations as MOSOP did, they are claiming ownership of the petroleum underneath their territory as common property.

Thus the most prominent movement in the Delta after the MOSOP effort was the Movement for the Survival of Ijaw Ethnic Nationality (MOSIEN). The Ijaws form one of the largest ethnic groups in the Delta (with a population of approximately eight million), and their struggle has largely rejected non-violence and resurrected the militant symbols and memories of their collective past. The cult of Egbesu, their traditional war god, has been the recruiting ground for young militants who have liberated their leaders from government prisons, taken over oil installations, and kidnapped oil workers.

MOSOP was formally a non-violent organization. Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other Ogoni leaders believed that it was folly to think that a small ethnic group could directly confront the might of the Nigerian army–which was then controlled by a military government. The Ijaw armed resistance has rejected this path, even though it has faced devastating attacks by the Nigerian military–including the horrendous Christmas massacre at Odi in 1999 that left 2,000 dead. This shift in tactics put into question much of the international support that the Ogoni struggle and Saro-Wiwa’s martyrdom had engendered for struggles in the Delta.

There were other important changes in the struggle beside the turn to armed confrontation with the government and oil companies. These included the Kaiama Declaration, that formally claimed the petroleum within Ijaw territory as the common property of the Ijaw community. This notion of the petroleum commons has become the ruling discourse in much of the armed resistance in the Delta. A good example of this is the reply a former president of the Ijaw Youth Council and current militia commander, Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, gave to a Financial Times reporter when asked about much his men take from pipelines each day, "As much as we can. It’s free." Another is the graffiti left behind after the Odi massacre by invading soldiers: "Na you get oil? Foolish people." ("Does the oil belong to you? Foolish people.")

Another dramatic political development was the entrance of women’s organizations into the struggle for a petroleum commons. Local women from the Ijaw and Istkeri ethnicities remembered the old tactic of shaming soldiers by appearing before them collectively naked–which was used to effect in the Aba Women’s War of 1929 against the British. After being brutally beaten by oil company guards in November 2002, one group of women protesters in the Delta threatened that "within 10 days from today, if our hospital and rehabilitation bills are not paid, we will all come out en masse fully naked, and we shall occupy not only their gates but their flow stations throughout the Niger Delta…"

What was more threatening to the oil companies and the Nigerian government than the presence of thousands of naked women occupying their oil installations, however, was the fact that women from different, often conflicting ethnic groups had come together at all. For the most powerful weapon the government and the oil companies have in escaping paying reparations and recognizing the Niger Delta communities’ communal ownership of the petroleum under their territory is the division between the groups themselves. However powerful ethnic ties are in strengthening the will to resist, they are also extremely divisive, resulting in thousands of deaths in the last decade. The fact that women from the oft-warring Itsekiri, Ijaw, Ilaje and Urhobos groups could join in a united front indicates that at least they have understood the secret of power. Whether their unity will set the pace for the petroleum commons movement in the Delta is still an open question.

Just as the early 1990s was a crucial turning point for the first step to a petroleum commons on the Niger Delta, that time also saw the organization of indigenous peoples around similar demands in Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia. We know that at that time the Zapatistas were organizing an armed rebellion in Chiapas, launched on New Years Day 1994–the precise moment NAFTA took effect. The Zapatistas’ Subcommendante Marcos frequently pointed out that when the indigenous cut firewood for their homes they are arrested and fined. But when the oil developers cut huge swathes through the forest for their roads and blow down trees with their dynamite, they are congratulated for their productivity!

But as fate would have it, post-rebellion Zapatista communities are often located near or directly over oil deposits. Consequently, the San Andres Accords–the main document arising from the peace talks between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government–included the recognition of the indigenous communities’ "collective right to evaluate federal and state plans to exploit strategic resources in their region in order to determine those plans’ effects on indigenous territories." This provision which, in effect, gave the indigenous communities a veto over oil exploration and exploitation, was certainly one of the main sticking points that prevented the approval of the Accords.

Similar developments took place in Ecuador in the early 1990s. Although oil exploration and extraction began in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1960s, it took some time for the indigenous peoples most affected by the industry’s pollution of their environment and the disintegration of their social life to organize: first to demand a clean-up and compensation, and then to claim the oil as a common resource whose disposition depended upon their will and not the state’s or the oil companies’–up to and including "The Right To Say, ‘No.’"

The Right To Say "No" became extremized in the struggle of the U’wa people in Colombia against Occidental Petroleum’s attempt to explore for oil in their territory, beginning in 1993. The U’wa threatened to commit collective suicide if Occidental Petroleum, which was granted exploration rights in U’wa territory by the Colombian government, actually drilled in their territory. The oil company had estimated over a billion barrels of oil there, and was anxious to verify the estimate. But a combination of law suits in Colombian and international courts, shareholder resolutions, demonstrations in front of its California offices and the home of its CEO carried on by the U’wa and their allies–as well as the threat of mass suicide by the entire U’wa community–somehow almost magically managed to "hide" the oil from the exploratory drills’ reach. Occidental Petroleum then pulled out of U’wa territory without making the second try which is usually standard procedure. Not surprisingly, these failed efforts by Occidental to penetrate the U’wa resistance have been followed by the exploration activities of Ecopetrol, the Colombian state oil company–which will face similar resistance and similar defeats.

The U’wa are one of many local peoples throughout the planet that are going beyond the position of supplicants demanding compensation from the oil industry for the harm oil extraction has caused. The growth of these non-corporate, non-state actors who claim communal ownership of petroleum is remarkable, and is having a decisive impact on the development of the oil industry. This is especially true of the expansion of oil exploration into the "margins"–areas that had previously been too distant from the main centers of the oil industry. It is exactly there that the oil industry is continually confronting people who still have a sense of the commons, since they often have common property resources such as land, and methods to regulate them. Consequently, the state and market paradigms of oil ownership are clashing with dozens of new, often "small," local movements and communities that, when integrated across the planet, are beginning to have an impact on the legal status of oil ownership.

The Islamic Petroleum Commons: From Morocco to Indonesia

Another notion of a petroleum commons has developed in Islamic economic theory and political practice since the 1970s. It claims that petroleum found beneath Islamic territory is the common possession of the world-wide Islamic community and neither state nor private property. This conception is challenging the relations that have been worked out between global oil companies and Islamic nation-states since World War I.

A key event in the development of the global oil industry was the destruction of the last Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, at the end of World War I. A Caliphate requires a secular military-political entity that is pledged to defend the world-wide Islamic community, and the Ottoman Turks had been performing this role of the "defenders of the faith" since the fifteenth century. Their imperial lands included Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Saudi Arabia–i.e., the center of the main oil reserves of the planet. In order for the petroleum industry to operate on a completely capitalist basis, the large international oil companies and major imperialist powers at the end of World War I (US, Britain, France) tore up the Ottoman Caliphate and created a number of rentier states that were largely under their control.

This antithesis between a Caliphate and the regular for-profit operation of the oil industry is simple. An Islamic Caliphate had to recognize certain redistributive economic principles (including the notion of a petroleum common owned by the ummah, the entire Islamic community) that are problematic to the kind of total corporate control envisioned by the founders of the oil industry in the Middle East in period between 1918 and 1945. A genuine Caliphate would have had to invest in ways that would have made it autonomous from the directives of the imperialist powers (governmental or corporate). Finally, a genuine Caliphate would have had worldwide reach, and be committed to intervening in areas where the Islamic community resided. These areas were often essential parts of the empires of Britain, France and Holland. (e.g., India, Algeria, and Indonesia).

What is called Islamic fundamentalism, or political Islam, or Islamism, is an effort to revive the Caliphate almost a century after its end. This is what gives these social movements their "global reach," for they claim to unite and to "protect" the Islamic community–which presently stretches from Morocco to Indonesia and, via immigration, into the heart of Europe and North America.

Whatever the ultimate fate of this type of patriarchal politics and whatever its class composition, this drive to a Caliphate is an important reality for the oil industry since both are operating at the center of the major oil reserves of the planet. Indeed, if one correlates the nation-state members of the Organization of Islamic Congress with the oil reserves that are estimated to lie in their territories, one sees that nearly two-thirds of the world’s petroleum is "Islamic." Such a drive, of course, is toward an "imagined community"–but then again, what community except the most intimate is not imagined?

Along with the revival of Islam as a political force has come the development of an "Islamic economics" that has a number of tenets relevant to the oil industry. First, since oil is a sub-soil resource, it is seen from an Islamic perspective as a gift from Allah and hence a community good. Although Islamic economics respects private property–after all, Islam is a religion founded by a merchant–it also recognizes the role of communally shared resources. Islamic economics accepts the standard division of private, state and common property, and oil is definitely included in the category of common property. It is now traditional to repeat at this juncture the famous statement of Mohammed: "The people are partners in three things: water, pastures and fire [today, petroleum]." The recognition of an Islamic petroleum commons is seen as a first step in the realization of an Islamic economics.

It is true, of course, some common property must be mined (like oil, gold, silver, and iron), but the minerals themselves remain the common property of all Muslims. The Caliphate might mine them itself or sub-contract their collection, but all revenues gained from their sale should be kept in the Bait al-Mal–the same treasury that the zakat or redistributive tithe, is destined for.

The second principle of Islamic economics is the redistributive one. Islam, for all of its respect of private property, instituted from its beginning a system of income transfers. Even non-Muslims know of the zakat, but there are many other redistributive mechanisms (e.g., the prohibition of charging interest) that make doctrinaire neoliberalism literally anathema in Islamic discourse. For a Caliphate is duty-bound to fund the poor, the needy, the travelers, the debtors and jihad from the funds in the Bait al-Mal. This is especially true of revenues derived from oil production, since they are directly derived from the sale of a communal good. Thus the charges of corruption hurled against the Saudi Arabian elite by Islamists are especially damning, since the Saudi elite’s extravagant ways are literally denying bread to the mouths of poor Muslim babes that Allah destined it for.

The third principle of Islamic economics is one based on the prohibition of waste and the concern for conserving scarce resources. Indeed, if the conspicuous consumption and self-protective expenditure on military hardware of the present elites are stopped, there would be an imperative to leave more oil in the ground. Such an economic policy would have an enormous impact on the pricing of oil, since it would not be considered a state or corporate commodity to be sold to the highest bidder; it would be a common good whose conservation is of value in itself.

Common property in the Islamic tradition is often not emphasized in typical academic expositions of Islamic economics, where the pride of place is taken by a symbolic zakat and a banking system that denies a role to interest. The works of Pakistani social thinker Sayyid Abul-Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), martyred Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) and Iraqi writer Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (1931-80)–the intellectual progenitors of Islamic economics–are often taken to task for trying to impose unrealistic constrains on the development of capitalism in the Islamic world, instead of heeding the free market wisdom of Frederick Hayek! But while critics cite the zakat and prohibition of interest, in fact their doctrine of the petroleum commons that would certainly have a much greater impact on world economics, if it were actually put into place throughout the Islamic world.

This oil doctrine is the theoretical basis of economic planning for an Islamic world of more than a billion people. If a number of Islamic nations actually transformed their petroleum resources into a commons, then three important, perhaps even revolutionary, changes would follow. First, it would lead to a tighter control of the pace of extraction and a willingness to exercise the "Right to say ‘No’," resulting in a much higher oil price. Second, the surplus of the commons would immediately flow into redistributive projects in the Islamic world and not into the financial systems of Europe and the US. Finally, of course, the whole basis of the neo-liberal program for the Middle East (as outlined in George W. Bush’s plan for the outcome of the Iraq war) would be definitely challenged.

The Global Petroleum Commons and the UN System

If we put together the local petroleum commons claims with those of Islamic economic theorists, then more than 70% of the oil on the planet is notionally claimed to be a part of a commons. Yet, there is still a third notion of petroleum as a global commons that incorporates all oil deposits, whether discovered or not. The proponents of this notion argue that the consequences of the exploration, extraction, distribution and consumption of petroleum are so problematic for "humanity" that they cannot be left to the devices of private companies or nation states. There is, in this view, a global petroleum commons that needs an appropriate regulative community. But what is this community in its present incarnation? The most prominent contemporary answer is: the United Nations system.

Indeed, the concept of a global commons has stimulated the revival of the UN system’s legitimacy in the 1990s–since the system had an identity crisis after the end of the Cold War. For the UN system is increasingly claiming to be the surrogate for a truly global community of humanity that clearly does not yet exist. On the basis of this official representation of the future global community, the UN system has negotiated a number of accords with mining and energy companies that promised these companies ideological legitimacy. These include the Global Compact and the Global Mining Initiative as well as, of course, the Kyoto Accords. This makes the UN system–which includes the World Bank and IMF–the global "partner" to and regulator of the oil, gas and coal companies of the planet.

It is crucial to understand why in the last fifteen years the UN system dares to claim the right to regulate petroleum as a global commons. During this time the extractive industries, with special emphasis on mining and oil, have been in crisis. This was not due to their reaching the absolute limits on supply of minerals or oil. It was due to the refusal of billions of people around the planet to accept the social and environmental impacts of their destructive activities. What appears to be the "natural" limit of extraction (as explained by either the Club of Rome’s "asymptotic depletion curves" or by M. King Hubbert’s "peak oil" graphs) is simply the resistance of an ever-wider circle of people to suffering the consequences of private or state mineral or oil extraction with no compensation or redress. Global warming, environmental pollution and illness, hazardous working conditions have increasingly been the source of anxiety about, protest against and disruption of operations in the extractive industries. Inevitably these responses and the problems they address–not the difficulty of finding new fields of coal, copper or petroleum–have led to these industries’ long-term loss of trust. The extractive industries needed some "legitimate partner" to negotiate with that would not pose the immediate threatening demands that organizations of workers and local communities increasingly present.

Just as the extractive industries were undergoing their crisis, the UN system was facing it own. After all, it was set up to negotiate the conflicts of Capitalism vs. Communism and Colonialism vs. Anti-Colonialism. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and collapse of apartheid in South Africa, what was the UN system to do with itself? Here is where the call of the extractive industries, especially the oil industry, became one of its lifelines. Its identity crisis could be resolved by becoming the "partner" of the extractive industries and regulating them as a representative of the coming global community.

The difficulties of such a surrogate global community has been brought to every one’s attention after more than a decade of the anti-globalization movement’s critique of the UN system’s most powerful elements besides the Security Council–the World Bank and IMF. Instead of the inherent problems of the nation state being transcended by the rise to a global level, the experience of the neo-liberal turn of the World Bank and IMF demonstrates that the UN system often just magnifies the problems of nation-state capitalism. This UN-based "coming global community" once again poses the classic solution to all distributive problems: "What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine." Thus this "virtual community" (actually composed of the UN-system and its satellite NGOs) feels free to demand, for example, that indigenous people in the South respect "ecological zones" or "conservation regions" it designates even though the actual indigenous community has no real power to control the behavior of this imaginary global community actually substituted for by the UN system. Indeed, the global petroleum commons as defined by the UN system can be seen as merely a preemptive strike against the local and Islamic commons.

The Petroleum Commons as Conflict and Opportunity

The entrance of "commoners" (indigenous peoples, Islamists, or UN officials) into the world of oil ownership and production on the three levels discussed here is undoubtedly creating major changes in the oil industry worldwide. The logic of both market and state rationality is increasingly losing its compelling power to determine the future of oil extraction and, with it, the whole system of capitalist production it energizes.

Critics of capitalism, however, cannot be complacent about the rise of the petroleum commoners. This social reality also poses political problems that can easily divide the anti-capitalist movement as well as make neoliberalism stumble. Every local commons requires a regulatory community with insiders and outsiders, and the outsiders might rightly demand to become insiders, with all the attendant possibility of conflict. Similarly, the regulation of the Islamic petroleum commons can conflict with the rules of local communities and their claimed commons. Finally, the demands of the global commons have already conflicted with the needs of local communities and with the Islamic ummah. But whatever the results of these conflicts, actual or potential, the assumption that petroleum is a different political liquid from water has been put in doubt by the demands and struggles of the petroleum commoners. Will petroleum be as common as water one day? Perhaps.

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This article is based on the text of a talk given at the Fusion Arts Museum in New York City on Nov. 7, 2004

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George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. With the Collective he has edited two books, both published by Autonomedia: Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973-1992 and Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War. Midnight Notes is online at: www.midnightnotes.org.

For more on Nigeria and the Shell boycott, see:
http://www.essentialaction.org/shell/issues.html

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 10, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW4Report.com

RWANDA’S SECRET WAR

U.S-Backed Destabilization of Central Africa

Special Report from Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

by keith harmon snow

KINSHASA — Following days of repeated threats by President Paul Kagame to send Rwandan Defense Forces to attack Hutu rebels based in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), television stations in Kinshasa, DRC’s capital, began broadcasting alerts Nov. 26 that Rwanda’s invasion was underway.

Belgian and US military sources in Kinshasa said that at least five battalions (1,500-3,000 troops) had penetrated the provinces of North and South Kivu from five different points.

"This is a sizeable advance force for the Rwandan army," said one military source in Kinshasa.

With Rwanda’s government continuing to deny their invasion, some 6,000 Rwandan troops had reportedly penetrated eastern DRC by December 4, making this tiny Rwanda’s third major invasion of its huge neighbor to the west. According to the DRC government, troops of the Armed Forces for the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) have clashed with the RDF at numerous locations. The Monitor newspaper in Uganda Dec. 6 reported that RDF troops passing illegally through Ugandan frontier areas have clashed with Ugandan soldiers. The Monitor reports thousands of Congolese refugees fleeing into Uganda.

Thousands of Congolese civilians, especially women and children, were fleeing North Kivu province as of Dec. 6, according to IRIN, news network of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, with civilians claiming executions and massacres as RDF troops burned and looted everything in their path. NGO staff in the region are bracing for the flood of tens of thousands of internally displaced persons.

The claims were echoed by Rwandan guerilla groups based in DRC. "According to our sources five Rwandan batallions are already in the DRC ready to create chaos," reported Jean-Marie Higiro, former leader of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). "Kagame’s regime maintains its sponsorship to rebel DRC forces. Under all kinds of tricks, Kagame’s regime is able to continue to pull the strings in the DRC."

He also rejected claims that the Rwandan military is acting in self-defense from DRC-based guerillas. "Rwanda and its proxy armies in DRC maintain an absolute cordon sanitaire at the Rwandan-Congolese border," Higiro says. "How can Hutu rebels break through this cordon sanitaire and strike Rwanda, then retreat into the DRC without being intercepted?"

Rwanda’s latest bid to annex DRC’s Kivu provinces was called the "Third War of Occupation of Eastern Congo" by Congolese students who took to the streets of Kisangani in protest on Dec. 4.

Despite Rwanda’s official denials of aggression, Rwandan leaders had actually issued unambiguous warnings in recent days. "You have to make war to have peace," Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame told United Nations peacekeeping forces on Nov. 23.

"We are preparing to return our forces to the DRC," Rwanda’s Regional Cooperation Minister Protais Mitali said on the 25th, according to Reuters. "We cannot watch as these extremist forces advance onto our territory."

Reuters correspondent David Lewis in Kinshasa reported Nov. 26 that the Congolese army has told the United Nations that its soldiers had clashed with Rwandan troops inside Congo. UN peacekeepers found no signs of any fighting, according to Lewis’ U.N. sources. Lewis also reported that clashes had taken place earlier in the week.

United Nations Observer Mission in Congo (MONUC) sources and NGO workers contacted in Goma and Bukavu were unable to confirm the presence of Rwandan troops or the engagement of Rwandan and DRC soldiers.

In Kinshasa, long-time Mobutu opposition party leader Etienne Tshisekedi from the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) issued a communique Nov. 26 warning that if Rwanda has again invaded DRC then the Congolese people must demonstrate against MONUC.

May and June 2004 saw major demonstrations across DRC where MONUC vehicles and homes rented by MONUC personell were destroyed in protest of MONUCs perceived failure to defend the city of Goma from the invading forces of pro-Rwandan rebel groups in Congo.

It is true that Rwandan and Ugandan guerilla groups continue to maintain a presence in eastern DRC, including the ex-Force Armee Rwandais (ex-FAR, the former Rwandan army), Interahamwe (the militia largely responsible for the 1994 genocide), Allied Democratic Forces for Uganda (ADF). The DRC government and international community have failed to implement the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) process called for by international peace accords.

Rwanda has repeatedly threatened to invade DRC to attack Hutu rebels accused of genocide — Interahamwe and ex-FAR. The "genocidiares" fled Rwanda in 1994 and established themselves in Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire (as DRC was then known), with the help of the French intervention force Operation Tourquoise and support from Zaire’s 32-year dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Rwanda also claimed that it must defend the Banyamulenge — Congolese Tutsis — from ongoing genocide.

MONUC entered DRC in 1999 after peace agreements signed in Lusaka, Zambia. Subsequent peace accords in Sun City, South Africa, and negotiations with rebels and militias in eastern DRC, ushered in a peace process under a transitional power-sharing government, implementing a joint UN/DRC program of "DDR," and the promise of elections in 2005.

The DDR program has largely been an empty promise. The DRC was formally cited at the UN Security Council on Nov. 23 for its lack of cooperation in the arrest of people accused of taking part in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In a UN press statement, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Hassan Bubacar Jallow from Gambia, told the Security Council that 14 indicted people were still at large and "the bulk of the fugitives continued to be based in the Democratic Republic of Congo." The press release stated that the US ambassador to the UN John Danforth called upon the DRC and Kenya to arrest fugitives accused inciting conflicts in the Great Lakes region on the border of DRC and Rwanda.

Impunity for government soldiers and guerillas alike remains endemic in the eastern DRC provinces of Orientale, Equateur and the Kivus. According to a recent alert by Survivor’s Rights International, reports from isolated areas across the country indicate that populations continue to suffer wholesale extortion, racketeering, theft, rape and other violence.

Rights groups accused all sides of exploiting ethnic conflict in the region — including Rwanda’s government. "Relations between the Banyamulenge and other Congolese groups have been strained and are frequently manipulated by politicians in both Rwanda and the DRC," wrote Human Rights Watch in a June 2004 report, War Crimes in Bukavu. "The past six years of war have contributed to hostility against them as they are increasingly identified as ‘Rwandan’ by other Congolese. Rwanda has often justified its presence in DRC in part as an effort to protect the Banyamulenge people, though this was challenged in 2002 when they attacked the Banyamulenge homelands killing scores of Banyamulenge civilians, shooting some of them from Rwandan helicopters."

Central Africa’s Ongoing Genocide

Paul Kagame’s Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, launching a four-year campaign of guerrilla warfare. Open support for Rwanda’s then-Hutu-led government from French paratroopers failed to prevent the RPA victory of August, 1994, following the coordinated genocide of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis by hard-line Hutus, Force Armee Rwandaise (FAR) and affiliated Interahamwe (Hutu) militias from April to July.

Critics such as Wayne Madsen, author of Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999, assert that Kagame and the RPA orchestrated the April 6, 1994 assassination of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi — shooting down their plane on approach to Kigali airport with SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles taken from Iraq by France in 1991, then delivered by the US military to Uganda, the base for RPA guerrilla operations against Rwanda prior to 1994.

Evidence was provided at a special hearing held by then Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney at DC’s Rayburn House Office Building on April 6, 2001, the seventh Anniversary of the assassinations. Journalist Charles Onana of Cameroon, author of The Secrets of the Rwandan Genocide, also aired claims of RPA involvement in the incident, and was sued for defamation by Paul Kagame. A Paris court found in favor of Onana. Meanwhile, of course, defense attorneys working at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) maintain that the standard figure of 800,000 Tutsis killed in the 1994 genocide is grossly inflated.

Paul Kagame has been a regular visitor at Harvard University, at the James Baker III Institute in Houston Texas, at the White House and the Pentagon. Kagame visited the Pentagon in August 1996, just prior to the Rwandan/Ugandan/US invasion of Zaire.

US, European and South African military interests have continued to support various factions in Central Africa, arming militias and rebel groups through proxy armies from Uganda (UPDF), Rwanda (RPA), Burundi and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in south Sudan.

Terror continued in Rwanda under the new RPA government of Paul Kagame, with Amnesty International documenting a pattern of assassinations, arbitrary imprisonment and "disappearances." Nearly all political opponents — Tutsi or Hutu — have been labeled "genocidiares", and Amnesty has protested that some trials and executions of accused genocidiare collaborators have been tainted and politically-motivated.

The first Rwandan invasion of its huge neighbor to the west occurred in 1996. According to the influential Africa Confidential newsletter, Major Gen. Paul Kagame visited the Pentagon in August of 1996, conferring with Washington prior to setting in motion a grand plan to unseat Mobutu Sese Seko. While the US public was consumed with the 1996 presidential elections, Rwanda was preparing its war against Zaire — and it began with the shelling of Hutu refugee camps in eastern Congo with Katusha missiles, killing noncombatant men, women and children.

RPA joined with Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) and the guerilla army of Laurent Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (ADFL) in the "War of Liberation" that subsequently ended the decades long reign of President Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo (Zaire). Sources in DRC quickly add that American military personell were seen on the ground advising the joint UPDF/RPA invasion which swiftly moved across the vast forested territory of Zaire.

Wayne Madsen reported that the US established major communications and listening stations in Uganda’s Ruwenzori Mountains. Witnesses interviewed in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, support this claim. Communications equipment was also seen on Idjwe Island in Lake Kivu, on the DRC-Rwanda frontier.

Interviews with survivors across the country document crimes against humanity and acts of genocide committed against Congolese civilians by all sides in the ensuing war.

"In May 1997, hundreds of unarmed Hutu refugees were massacred in the town of Mbandaka by soldiers of Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (ADFL), operating under apparent Rwandan Army (RPA) command," wrote Human Rights Watch in June 1998. In an October 1997 report ("What Kabila is Hiding: Civilian Killings and Impunity in Congo"), Human Rights Watch concluded that "Rwandan troops had a role in some of the killings of Rwandan Hutu refugees on Zairean territory."

Thousands of Hutu refugees may have been slaughtered in Mbandaka in May, 1997, on the day that the Allied Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Congo (AFDL) arrived there. One eyewitness told this reporter: "We ran down to the beach [port] because we heard the shooting. I saw two people shot but there were bodies all lined up on the beach. The soldiers were also throwing dead bodies in the [Congo] river. There were a lot of Tutsi soldiers but we couldn’t distinguish. I saw soldiers question one woman. The woman was not able to talk in [Congolese] Lingala. He said, yes you are among the Rwandais Hutus. He said to the woman, ‘Turn, face the river, prey your God, because you are about to meet your God.’ Then he shot her in the back with an automatic weapon."

"US special forces were involved," asserted one DRC army captain interviewed recently. The AFDL forces included UPDF, RPA and US military advisers, he claimed.

Colonel James Kabarebe, now Chief of Staff of the Rwanda Defense Forces, is said to have led a campaign to annihilate fleeing Hutu refugees. Kabarebe has been sited in UN reports for massive violations in Ituri. "Kabarebe was reportedly the biggest advocate of Rwandan support to [ethnic] militias," wrote UN investigators in MONUC’s Special Report on Events in Ituri, January 2002-December 2003. Rwanda armed, trained, and advised militias in Ituri, as it has in North and South Kivu provinces, the report found.

The RPA joined with the UPDF to invade DRC again in 1998 after ADFL leader Laurent Kabila rejected U.S. and Bechtel Corporation plans for the newly liberated country, annulled mining contracts signed with some powerful western companies before he had even taken power in Kinshasa — including the America Mineral Fields, based in Hope, AK, and said to be linked to then-President Clinton through "Friend of Bill" investors — and ejected the Rwandan and Ugandan military allies that brought him to power.

The Congolese government called it the "War of Aggression," but it was dubbed "Africa’s First World War" by the western press, as it involved six regional nations as well as arms and advisers from western countries. Troops from Rwanda and Uganda (now backing anti-Kabila rebels) as well as Zimbabwe (allied with the DRC government) worked with commercial agents pilfering DRC’s ivory, diamonds, gold, timber, cobalt and other natural resources. Foreign agents moved these plundered resources onto the international market, as militia groups raked in local profits.

At least 3.5 million people died due to warfare in DRC, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC) report on the region for the period from 1998 to 2001. From 1999-2001, through networks of Rwandan military and commercial agents, Rwandan interests aligned with the state earned some $120 million in the sale of coltan (columbo-tantalite) — a precious ore essential to Sony play-stations, laptop computers and cell-phones. In December 2000 alone, the main RPA-supported rebel group in DRC earned some $600,000 in coltan sales. Coltan moved through criminal syndicates to American, Swiss, Belgian and German clients. Rwandan syndicates continue to dominate the coltan trade out of eastern DRC, local sources claim.

Friends of the Earth and the UK-based group Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) filed a formal complaint with the US State Department on August 4, 2004 against three US companies accused by the UN Panel of Experts of fueling war in DRC. The UN panel’s three-year investigation implicated Cabot Corporation (Boston), Eagle Wings Resources International and George Forrest’s OM Group (Ohio) in collaboration with various rebel groups trafficking in coltan from DRC. Current deputy director of the US Treasury Department, Samuel Bodman, was CEO and chairman of Cabot from 1997-2001.

An Unraveling Peace Process

The DRC frontier with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi has remained the locus of instability and guerrilla warfare since before the first Rwandan invasion of Congo in 1996 and the rising insecurity and terrorism has not gone unnoticed by the local civilian populations. North and South Kivu provinces continue to suffer from widespread violence, and killings in the Goma and Bukavu areas are rampant. The Ituri region of Orinetale Province, bordering on Uganda, Sudan and Central African Republic, is cited as one of the bloodiest corners of the world by numerous human rights agencies. The UN Security Council’s Special Report on Ituri, January 2002-December 2003, outlines the history of conflict in Ituri, the role of Ugandan and Rwandan government forces in arming factions, bombing villages, massacring and torturing civilians, and provoking and, at times, abetting, acts of genocide.

Given the rising insecurity in Ituri in recent months, with assassinations and nightly shootings, the population in Bunia increasingly sees MONUC as a hostile and aggressive force of foreign military occupation.

Said one Bunia resident formerly employed by MONUC: "Public opinion is that MONUC has done nothing. People thought that MONUC came here to bring peace but to their surprise people find that MONUC is like a spectator in a football match. But people are dying in their presence. People are being terrorized in their presence. People are being killed in there presence. And MONUC is doing nothing."

"Firing incidents occur daily," admitted one public information officer for MONUC. "I don’t think there is any area except maybe in Bunia [town] where the human rights situation is improving."

Reports of MONUC personnel buying and transporting contraband goods — leopard and okapi skins, gold, ivory — are also widespread.

Arms continue to flow into the region. Uganda’s government newspaper the New Vision Nov. 23 reported that arms shipments reportedly destined for the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), a regional militia aligned with Rwanda, were seized by the Armed Forces of the Congolese People (FAPC), a rival Congolese militia in control of the lucrative Ituri Province customs posts in northeastern DRC. The story was picked up by a Chinese news service only.

"According to local sources, local government officials have delivered firearms to civilians in Masisi, North Kivu, long the site of conflict between different political and military groups," wrote Human Rights Watch on November 19. "Other shipments have been delivered to Ituri, another persistently troubled area in northeastern Congo. U.N. sources reported that some 300 Congolese high school students, refugees in neighboring Rwanda, abruptly left their schools and are said to be undergoing military training."

According to recent reports from northern Ituri, the FAPC has reportedly executed child soldiers seeking to enter the DDR process, and attacked the families and looted the homes of reintegrated ex-child soldiers.

"All armed groups in Ituri have integrated children into their ranks," wrote MONUC investigators in Special Report on Events in Ituri, January 2002-December 2003. MONUC conservatively estimated "at least 40 percent of each militia force are children below the age of 18, with a significant minority below the age of 15."

The MONUC investigation found that Ugandan and Rwandan military were frequently training children abducted and forcibly or willingly recruited into DRC militias. MONUC documented cases where hundreds of children were taken by road or plane to Uganda or Rwanda for military training. Child soldiers were sometimes "trained" by child soldiers. Some children have been passed from one group to another.

The UPC and the Front for National Integration (FNI) another militia, continue to extort a weekly war tax from citizens, persecute those who refuse to comply, and terrorize the citizenry. Said one witness, "The UPC is collecting money. They say, ‘either you pay 100 francs Congolese or we come at night.’ Then when they come they cut off your hand or violate women."

"Sexual violence is a national epidemic in DR Congo," wrote Survivors Rights International (SRI) in November, "involving all military factions, both current and past military forces involved in the internal affairs of the DRC, and it appears to be sanctioned by all levels of military command. SRI research completed in Equateur and Orientale (Ituri) from September to November 2004 indicates that the scale and frequency of sexual violence committed during the successive wars (1996-2004) is unprecedented and unquantifiable."

SRI also reported that the presence of hundreds of internally displaced girls and women currently resident in Mbandaka has spawned commerce in prostitution and survival sex involving both Armed Forces of Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) and MONUC troops. "FARDC further prey on female sex workers by forcing sexual relations, raping those who refuse, and universally robbing desperate females of their livelihood," SRI wrote. "FARDC soldiers in rural areas and population centers continue to steal and abduct the wives of civilians, and to abduct women and adolescent girls many of whom are impregnated and abandoned."

SRI called on the UN, MONUC and the international community to define and implement a new strategy for dealing with widespread and ongoing sexual violence, noting "that the societal effects will be long-lasting, and that accountability for sexual violence could be easily countered given greater international attention to gender violence in the DRC and a campaign to end impunity and bring the perpetrators to justice. The MONUC communications infrastructure installed nationwide in DRC (Radio Okapi) provides an excellent and functioning tool for raising the awareness of sexual violence and the growing campaign to hold perpetrators to account through the International Criminal Court."

On November 28, 2004, a group of seven young women arrived in Mbandaka — after trekking hundreds of miles from Orientaleís westernmost city of Lisala — reporting that they were raped in the past week by government soldiers (FARDC). Other girls are also being raped, the seven survivors said.

Secret Resource Wars

Rwanda and Uganda continue to benefit from high-level military arrangements with the United States. Entebbe, Uganda, is a forward base for US Air Force operations in Central Africa. According to the Global Policy watchdog, there are eleven US servicemen permanently stationed in Entebbe.

The Canadian mining firms Barrick Gold and Heritage Oil & Gas arrived with Ugandan (UPDF) and Rwandan (RPA) military during the "War of Aggression" to exploit mining opportunities in the north. Barrick prinicpals include former Canadian premier Brian Mulroney and former US president George H.W. Bush. Heritage has secured contracts for the vast oil reserves of Semliki basin, beneath Lake Albert, on both the Congolese and Ugandan sides of the border. Heritage is reportedly tapping the Semliki petroleum reserves from the Ugandan side, where a huge pipeline to Mombasa, Kenya, worth billions of dollars, is now in the works.

According to a petroleum futures report (Africafront), Heritage Oil was poised to exploit the northern Lake Albert basin, southern Lake Albert basin, River Semliki basin, and Lake George and Lake Albert basin areas in partnership with the Zhongyuan Petroleum Exploration Bureau (ZPEB) of China.

Ashanti Goldfields has reportedly secured a contract for the vast gold reserves at Mongwalu, north of Bunia. Ashanti has ties to the British Crown and some sources in Bunia report that the Ashanti interest in nearby Mongwalu is guarded by Nepalese Gurkhas, possibly of the Gurkha Security Group based in Britain.

Elsewhere in DRC, major foreign mining and logging contracts are underway.

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