Yolisa Dalamba – BASICS Issue #19 – May/June 2010
On April 3, the body of Eugene Terre’Blanche, white-supremacist leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, better known as the AWB, was found at his home in Ventersdorp where he was pronounced dead. It is alleged two of his workers killed him over a wage dispute. However, more recent news updates report that Terre’Blanche is being accused of sexual assault, which may have led to the attacks that killed him death.
Terre’Blanche became prominent in the 1980’s when he campaigned for a separate white homeland and the preservation of apartheid where he and his white supremacist movement mounted a bombing campaign to fight for the maintenance of apartheid.
For centuries Afrikans endured unimaginable levels of violence at the hands of white farmers. Later, apartheid policies gave farmers the right to oppress workers, often turning a blind eye to incidences of extreme abuse, even death at the hands of systemic racism and white supremacy. There has always been little regard for workers and trade unions have spoken out about this for decades in Azania (which is the name given to South Africa by the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) in 1959). The PAC rejected the current multiracial neo liberal status quo in South Africa and firmly believed in a liberated socialist Afrika.
by Ajamu Nangwaya
The following unpublished Letter to the Editor from the summer of 2009 was written by Ajamu Nangwaya, a Toronto-based union activist with Canadian Union of Public Employees. It is being reproduced here to provide the social and economic context of the recent assassination of the white supremacist in South Africa, Eugene Terreblanche. The title to this letter is our own. -BASICS Editor
“South Africa is an instructive example of the idea that political democracy will remain a farce, if it is not accompanied by economic democracy”
Dear Editor:
A recent strike by the South African Municipal Workers Union [late July / early August 2009] and protest action by members of the working class who live in the slums around around wealthy cities in that country have exposed the fact that the collapse of the walls of apartheid has brought little economic benefits to the poor. The faces looking up from the bottom of the economic well of prosperity in South Africa are those of the African rural and urban working class. We should pardon them, if they believe that they are still living in the nightmare of the apartheid regimes of the past. Read more…
Western Imperialism’s Genocidal Wars in the Great Lakes Region of Africa
By presenting the Rwandan genocide as a tragedy that could have been prevented by Western intervention, not only have imperialist states built up a humanitarian cover for future acts of foreign aggression – such as in Somalia and Sudan – but in the case of Rwanda they have also rewritten the history of their role in catalyzing the Rwandan civil war and the genocidal onslaught that ensued in the Great Lakes Region of Africa after 1994.
Let’s revisit some of the basic facts of this history to illustrate just how instrumental Western imperialism has been in these conflicts.
In 1986, the U.S.-backed National Resistance Army in Uganda, under the leadership of Yoweri Museveni, succeeded in establishing a dictatorship. Under this regime, Uganda would go on to become the World Bank and IMF’s model African state for its rigorous implementation of the impoverishing and socially-destructive Structural Adjustment Policies. Next, in September 1990, Uganda was used as a staging ground for the invasion of Rwanda, which at the time was a country firmly in the sphere of French imperialism. Within two and a half years of the invasion of Rwanda by part of the Ugandan army – by then calling itself the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) led by CIA-trained Paul Kagame – almost a million ethnic Hutu Rwandans were displaced by the RPF in northern Rwanda and tens of thousands had been killed (a part of the “Rwandan genocide” narrative never told to Western audiences).
When the Rwandan government attempted to repel the invasion and arrest collaborators with the occupation it was denounced by the “international community” for human rights abuses. With diplomatic pressure building up from the non-French Western imperialists, the Rwandan government under the Presidency of Habyarimana buckled under international pressure and signed the Arusha Accords of July 1992 – a peace agreement that would legitimize and entrench the brutal occupation of Kagame’s RPF.
Year by year leading up to 1994, the brutal and unpopular RPF, backed by its friends in Washington and Ottawa, was consolidating its power in Rwanda. Then came the fateful day on April 6, 1994, when President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down by the RPF, igniting what we have come to know as the “Rwandan genocide”.
What the Western media has depicted to us about the three months that followed April 6 is a period of genocidal reprisal led by machete-wielding ethnic-Hutu “genocidaires” against the poor and defenseless Tutsi ethnic group. Show trials around the world have been established to exclusively try “Hutu extremists” for their role in this 100-day period, including right here in Canada with the recent trial and conviction of Desiré Munyaneza in Montréal. However, that Kagame’s RPF was responsible for a great share of the deaths during this period, if not the majority and mostly Hutu, is an inconvenient truth for those forces interested in maintaining a certain slant on the “Rwandan genocide” narrative. And that Paul Kagame, along with Uganda’s President Yoweri Musaveni, proceeded to establish their occupation of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and to kill millions upon millions more is also conveniently papered over in imperialism’s narratives about Rwanda.
When the Tutsi-dominated RPF prevailed in the Rwandan civil war in July 1994 and brought the “Rwandan genocide” to an end, the stage was only just being set for the real genocide. With Western imperialism now firmly in control of its two client states in Rwanda and Uganda, these two client states made their move into one of the most resource-rich regions on the planet: the eastern region of the DRC.
The Ugandan and Rwandan invasions of the eastern region of the DRC in 1996 and 1998, along with their constant interference in the region ever since, have triggered the deaths of some 6,000,000 Congolese. And when they weren’t directly occupying and ravaging the region, Uganda and Rwanda were supporting their proxy forces to do it for them, such as the National Congress for the Defense of the People, or CNDP, formerly led by Gen. Laurent Nkunda.
There is no doubt that the long-term project of Western imperialism in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, via its Rwandan and Ugandan client states, has been and will continue to be the plunder of the DRC’s precious and highly strategic natural resources. That millions of lives have been taken means little to the imperialists who profit magnificently from the plunder, and should clearly demonstrate to regular people that Western governments not only do not care about humanitarian disasters – in fact, they are the cause of them!
We must expose the “Responsibility to Protect” arguments for what they really are – neocolonialist trash – and demand an end to the plunder of the DRC, the repatriation of Africa’s stolen wealth, and justice for the remaining victims of Western imperialist genocide.
