Bernhard Schaefer

Social Struggles, Genocide and World Market Integration in Africa.
Radical Investigation. Part 1, December 2001.
This paper is for discussion - - work in progress - -mail@materialien.org

 

Contents:

1. Introduction

2. The All-African Cycle of Struggle since the 1980s

3. The Failure of Western Development Policy

4. The 1990s Turn into Continental War: the Re-organization of Conquest

5. The Genocide in Rwanda as Population Policy

6. The War of the Entrepreneurs in the Congo and the Great Lakes Region

6.1. The Kinshasa Revolt 1991 and the Mobutu Termite's Hill

6.2. L'Afrique des comptoirs et l'Afrique inutile: Internal Recomposition

7. Reintroduced Slavery in Sudan and Somalia as Part of Capitalist Profit

8. The COMESA Project as Crucial Step into World Market Integration

9. On the route to emancipation

10. Some Proposals for Common Action

References
 
 
 
 

This is a period of economic revolution. Revolution through the opening up of the Black continent for the streaming through of world trade; revolution through the introduction of the exploitation of its precious raw materials and its agriculture; revolution through the introduction of modern currency; but revolution especially through the sudden mobilization of its sparse and isolated populations, who will be thrown into a colossal and glorious adventure against their will, into which nothing and no-one will prepare them and whose first stages are going to be very painful for them. (1)
 
 
 
 

"Shut your mouth! I don't want to hear any-thing about your politicians and their revolutions" replied an old man in a refugee camp when he was asked his opinions on politics. "It's your politicians and their politics that bring us to exile today. What good have we poor illiterate people got from your big book and politics? Is it not only death and hardship?"

old peasant in a Liberian refugee camp (2)
 
 

(1) André Lux 1962, Le marché de travail en Afrique noire, Louvain/ Lovanium du Léopoldville, p. 1

(2) Sherman Seequeh, 'Our Political Crisis: Revolutions or Holocaust?' Heritage 5-12 Nov. 1996, p. 9

1. Introduction contents
 
 

This paper is an attempt to analyze the ongoing brutal wars and massacres in a lot of African regions in order to understand the reasons for eradication, destruction and enslavement. It is an attempt to understand the strategy of imperialist forces acting in a sometimes less visible but very effective manner, in order to conclude strategic options for political action joining in the struggles of the dispossessed and addressing the immediate needs of the anti-war-opposi-tion. This short essay is part of a more thorough investigation which starts with the question why so many million lives have been wiped out in Africa in the 1990s ó also in areas where raw materials do not occur. Is it for the sake of forced state formation, for the sake of world market integration? And is the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone or the Hutu militia Interahamwe in Rwanda and the Kivu region leading a kind of class struggle against traditional aristocrats or are they deprived and mad or even an instrument of imperialist penetration? - To acknowledge the links and anticipate the dialectic in the enduring and large scale fighting would be very important with regard to the transnational global justice movements of our time. If the World Bank and IMF has to be abolished then because of the responsibility of their structural policy in the beginning, moderation and prolonging of these wars.

In this paper it is attempted to link the investigation of genocide, displacement and various forms of terror with recent capitalist accumulation in the context of social struggles of several regions in Africa. First I want to outline some theoretical points. Then we can recall the rise of social movements in the continent arising at the beginning of the 1990s. Two focuses are Togo and Cameroon. Main theses of research are stated referring to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, the Congo and the Great Lakes Region, the Sudan and the COMESA Project, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa. An in-depth analysis of the current wars from the mid 1980s through the 1990s still has to be written. Here it is attempted to draw certain parallels between the different theatres of war which are considered the most important.

Recent academic literature about the genocide in Rwanda and the civil wars in Liberia and Sudan is presented by the scientific and NGO staff advising diplomatic staff (Stephen Ellis 1999 on Liberia; William Reno 1998 on Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and Zaire/ Congo; Gerard Prunier 1995, René Lemarchand, Jean Claude Willame 1997, Filip Reyntjens on Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region; Dieter Neubert and Peter Uvin 1998 respectively for the NGO's). Most of the available literature refers to a "crisis in a certain state", plays on the "catastrophe of the breakdown of the state", or is even affirmative in a way that "civil wars" are considered ambivalent in such a way that though they bring death, they also "bring progress". The social background of insurgencies and refusal is denied. There is however everyday-resistance against expropriation and exploitation, opposition to war and militarism, attacks on warlords, but it is rarely known outside one country or local area. This is not to say, that this behaviour goes unnoticed. Analyses even stay half non-public. This has to change entirely.

In popular discourse and much of the media explanations for widespread violence, genocide and war are restricted to a narrow perspective up to now. Among the mainstream theses are:

- Refusal of power sharing of the old elite and power struggles among the elites

- The arms trade and lack of its controls, too cheap AK 47

- Poverty, seen as static object, from above, as consume restriction or growth failure

- Competition over primary resources, lack of education

- Breakdown of the state, and subsequently murder as a typical behaviour in chaos

Human rights activists often call the failure of democratization as among the primary sources of violence. While this is certainly true, it is not clear for which kind of violence in which direction. Is the president hit in the face for not be willing for democratic decisions or is a baby killed out of racism? Is the street protest violent or are whole villages slaughtered? Until now the debate on violence sterilizes social movements and community action. Non-violence is presented as a kind of an educational prevention concept of NGO's.

It is also said frequently that African political leaders resort into attacking the voter's basis of their competitors and in killing a large number of them they reduce the threat of losing elections. In a similar image, people like Hutu sometimes start chopping off Tutsi legs in order to correct or turn around the fact that Tutsi are taller. So this would be some kind of justice.

These theories are pure racism and help explain nothing. They come out of stupid minds labelling Africans as barbarians. They have even an aspect of tourist cynicism. All in all these "explanations" do not show any real interest in the reasons of genocide and the escalation of mass violence. As revolutionaries however, we can not at all ignore the problematic.

To give one example, from July to August 1997 in Brazzaville (Congo) 40.000 people have been murdered in an at hoc nightmare lasting 5 weeks (especially in the quarter of MíPila). How was this possible? It has been shown as an excess of the rivalry between election candidates Denis Sassou-Nguessou and Bernard Colelas. The thesis here is that this explosion of exterminatory violence is a kind of war against subsistence in the city, against sharing behaviour which has no worth to transnational capital, which is seen as outside the labour force potential and regarded as an unruly crowd of unproductive consumers who hide their survival strategies behind patrons of modern professions, the public sector and especially politicians with access to money. That would be to say that the weeks of murder in Brazzaville have been planned intentionally out of internal and external elitesí interests behind the scenes of so-called elections and so-called troubles to get rid of "surplus population". It is well documented that French Elysée networks and French multinationals like ELF-Aquitaine and their intelligence services have their big influence in this area. But I think it is more complex. We need to get to know the antagonist relationships behind the scenes. For this we need a radical investigation. The outcome could be a lot of new knowledge of the ways of class struggle, social struggles against the practice of capital. Even knowledge about complete unruliness.

As with all history the history of the recent transformation of Africa since 1980 is done through the establishment of facts from below and counter-facts from above. The history of ideas is just a reflection of material, social and institutional relations and forces. In line with this, science is mostly a reflection of the intention to reorganise domination and accumulation. We not only need a critique of science as a critique of ideology but a critique of science as policy advice for the destruction of Solidarity in Africa. First of all, slaughtering whole villages is not ambivalent, it is a nazi-like crime. We must not get used to crimes against humanity. This is why we need human rights reports.

It is our common responsibility to be vigilant on sharp community conflict, especially if it is not expressed in a language common to political activism of the left. We need impressions from the current struggles of re-appropriation from below and how social movements possibly generalize and extend. There might arise intense social revolutionary forces inside one region out of mass poverty, but if we don't get to know them we only get the news of the success of counter-insurgency later on. In Rwanda 1994 this was the case. As negative dialectic, the counter-reaction to these warfare-dispossessions can be the rise of new collective, cultural, monetary and political autonomies in all domains of society - and via migration, which is for itself a social movement. Reports might show how people make a good living. Let's act in line with the survivors, individuals, families, comrades in the fight for dignity and equal rights.

Theses

The black continent currently undergoes rapid change and severe transformation. The main thesis of this paper is, that this change is going on mainly through war, mass eradication, new enslavement, and mental deprivation. If we sum the estimates of the wars in Moçambique, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Sudan, Chad, Sierra Leone, Liberia and in the current Congo war we arrive at a number of 12 Million people who have died altogether. Africa is the terrain of contemporary holocaust. Millions more have been forced to flee and are internally displaced in fenced or road blocked refugee camps. It is genocide against social revolution.

To the imperialist regime war is productive, because the productivity building process lies in the eradication of all forms of subsistence, against the social bonds and affiliations of people which tied the land to the labour and the people and their labour to each other (Rosa Luxemburg, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital ed. Kenneth Tarbuck, London Allen Lane 1972 (1913) I read her as a great fighter). These ties have been reproduced personally, spiritually, mythically and in the orally consented local rights of clan based access to resources. In The Gambia, for example, large compounds with up to 100 people (the extended family) maintained the right to exist for each member in such a way as the better harvest of one group was brought in to share with a worse of others. The means of subsistence were collected and re-distributed in an average-like way, in disregard of oneís personal immediate productivity. Such structures are an offence to capital: either capital is able to destroy such collectivity or this kind of collectivity can absorb and level off accumulation. Hence the struggle process.

The brutality of the current wars in Africa have a certain functionality. This functionality lies in a kind of alternative, yet cruel path to modernization. It consists of rape, traumatization and mutilation as part of a strategy of capital to reorganize and regain control through weakening of the African proletariat after the old patterns of power and command structures have eroded from below. This violence is a way to organize behaviour: fears and frustrations are manipulated and collective aggression is mobilized in recruitment, indoctrination and instigation, and directed against those parts of society which are considered unproductive, hence worthless.

The transformative war is a war to disable subsistence. In cults of violence every individual and collective memory is to become damaged to enable alienation (Ken Wilson 1992). Thus, the more these social ties of care and support are refreshed to re-establish existence guarantees the more aggressive is the external stroke to break them up. Today child soldiers seem to reverse all social values from within. The use of the viewpoints "external" and "from within" might be confusing at first instance. I hope this can be made clear in the following.

One first aspect is that the colonial powers not only tried to restore order (as an answer to increasing precolonial migration and the dissolution of precolonial kingdoms) in the way of territorial conquest since the 1860s, they also made use of "traditional" institutions. As theorists and revolutionaries like Amilcar Cabral have pointed out, a programme of independence and equality also needs a reconsideration of all local customary institutions and constitutions to strengthen emancipation from below (see point 10).

So, it is absolutely wrong to consider current capitalist penetration as the way of modernizing African living conditions, enlightening the backward through development and NGO's and so on. To the contrary, for the sake of the protection of newly introduced private property not only the downtrodden French age old colonialism, but also the new US-American strategy for democracy-and-fair-elections ("trade instead of aid"; for a discussion see point 8) can resort into the meanest restoration of conservative populism (the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe and its use of class issues or Charles Taylorís rule in Liberia since 1997 are just two examples).

The issue is not "traditions" against "modernity", and barbaric backwardness against progress with "civil society"-commodities. It is rather the destruction of self-managed equal relations for the sake of barbaric progress, and the militarisation of the economy for the sake of alienation. What is in need is land, peace and freedom. What is in need is mental rehabilitation.
 
 

2. The All-African Cycle of Struggle contents
 
 

One key to an understanding of the conflict in Africa`s terror wars is to access its social roots. Let us begin with the immediate period before the outbreak of a number of wars, up to the continental escalation into war at the turn of the decade 1989-1991. At the end of the 1980s an All-African cycle of struggle emerged. Popular forces reinforced the wave of 1977-81ís struggles in a new wave which reached its height in 1991-92. Because the enduring mass movements were so strong and large, 16 African dictators had to resign. In the media these events were clouded by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the announcement of the end of Socialism in 1989. Actually, Africans were delighted with the fall of the Soviet union and really motivated to do the same! In Europe no-one noticed the magnitude of the All-African cycle of struggle. In Europe only experts noticed the movements for democracy, but denied the social issues and the independent forms of organization. Let us remember some steps of the struggle:

Especially countries known for their stability as suppliers of cheap tropical fruits and raw materials saw unprecedented and whidespread social unrest in the beginning 1990s. Togo is such an exporting country which is strongly backed by the French empire structure of corporations like Sucres et Denrees (SucDen), the Caisse Central pour la Coopération Economique CCCE and other monetary and policy coordination agencies of France in the CFA-Zone. Francophone Africans have named it La Françafrique. Since decades the Eyadema-Regime receives weapons from Germany and policy advice from the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation (KAS) of the German conservative party CDU. In 1985 dictator Eyadema established a free trade zone and invited Western investors to build a new export processing zone in 1989. To the investors Eyadema guaranteed a capital accumulation enclave without strikes and labour relationsí law suits.

In March 1991 a long winded struggle began and threw Togoís ruling elite into an unprecedented contest for power. On Saturday the 15^th March the police shot a 12 year old boy after a riot outbreak. In the following months, the trade unions declared a general strike in April a second one in November 1991 which lasted till March 1992. In these months the whole country saw demonstrations, large scale riots, extending from Lomé to all towns and cities, leading to weekly marches of ten thousands of people and more where frequently women led the struggle. The youth of Loméís popular quarter Bé collected huge stocks of stones and cut off barbed wire from the near Ghanaian border, carried it into the city to build barricades as self defence against the German equipped army. Strikes of taxi drivers and busses took turns. After Tavio Amorin, general secretary of Togoís Panafrican Socialist Party, was shot in an counter-insurgent army coup on 23^rd July 1991, the people reacted with general strike. Togo witnessed six general strikes in this period alone. Some said "We want weapons to bring down Eyadema, that they not shoot us!" On 11^th February 1992 a march of 50.000 led by a majority of women demanded the end of Eyadema rule and the release of the (young) prisoners. This was the climax of the insurrection and it was clear that almost all Togoish wanted Eyadema to go.

While fights like these rarely go round the world the democracy movement became more well known. Newly formed opposition parties allied in parliament to build a new democratic Togo via the National Conference. But the army staged a coup against the parliament twice and arrested many of the opponents. Togoís army is guilty for several massacres - justice has to be seen still. In February 1994 Togo saw parliament elections and in spite of the massive obstructions the opposition won the elections. Eyadema refused to accept the results. Some comrades turned into armed struggle against the Eyadema clique. Today many are in exile as refugees.

In Cameroon the upheavals began in April 1991 after extending turmoils and student protests over the previous year. Independent newspapers spread and criticized the government of Paul Biya. In July 1991 he banned all opposition parties and newspapers. A general strike was announced on 20^th June and followed widely. It lasted six weeks. The democratic alliance then accorded to start Operation Ville Morte, i.e. Operation Dried Out City: a large part of the population, especially small traders joined the campaign and closed down all shops five days a week in all larger cities, manned road blocks, and boycotted every link to the dictatorship to force it to resign. Operation Ville Morte lasted for 3 months.

Similarly in June 1991 Madagascar saw a wave of unrest with weekly demonstrations against the corrupt regime of Didier Ratsiraka. The unions announced an unlimited general strike on 8^th July. Opposition parties formed a counter-government and demanded Ratsirakaís resign. On Saturday the 10^th August 1991 a crowd of 400.000 people marched through the city of Antananarivo and gathered in front of the presidential palace. The national guard started to fire into the crowd leaving 138 dead and hundreds wounded of grenades. The crowd turned back into the city and burned several party leaderís houses. The alliance decided to continue "defensive but militant" and to squat all possible offices of the state apparatus. The general strike was to be continued until Ratsirakaís resignation. After enduring negotiations the leader of the opposition Albert Zafy was co-opted into a new power sharing arrangement.

In Zambia maize meal riots began in 1986 and 1990 against the IMF-imposed prize increases; they led to the fall of Kenneth Kaunda in 1991; in Kinshasa in Mai 1991 the insurgency destroyed large parts of the city, poor youth ran into quarters of the rich and looted, factory sites were attacked, and Mobutus soldiers changed sides and joined in the popular upheavals. Only French troops could restore order in October 1991 (see below under 6).

In the Sudan urban popular upheavals brought the Numeiri regime to fall in March/ April 1985. The guerrillas of Southern Sudan demanded autonomy from a regime turning more and more to Islamism (see point 7). For Somaliaís history we should not forget the years of mass autonomy until the fall of Siad Barre 1988-90 and the catastrophe of famine in 1991-92 during the US-German-intervention. There are new entities claiming independence: who profits from them?

Starting in 1962, Eritreans fought the longest independence struggle of modern African history. In April 1991 the Eritrean Peopleís Liberation Front EPLF and the Tigrean TPLF (later EPRDF) joined forces and they finally marched into Addis Abeba in 21^st of May 1991 and caused dictator Mengistu to flee. While Eritrea declared formal independence the US invited the Tigrean forces to take the socialist empireís capital. The background: Ethiopia lived through a real social revolution in the years of 1973-77 which dissolved the old empire of Haile Selassie mainly in the way of weakening feudal power, tax evasion and attacks on landlords and tax collectors. The capital however underwent a peculiar transformation: in 1975 the Revolutionary Council took power and issued land reforms. But soon the new military forces started to attack the students who still were part of the peasant revolution. This bloody years 1975-77 are known as the Red Terror. After this consolidation of power the new regime started to the first step in its so called modernization of the peasantry through the famous programme of mass relocation and forced resettlement of masses from the North into the South and vice versa. In the years of 1984-86 this programme triggered off a famine which claimed up to 500,000 deaths (for details see Alex de Waal Evil Days 1991). Seen from today this was an obvious attempt to recompose the population into one which is more dependent on central orders. A crude and brutal centralization measure. This only more intensified the civil war from the provinces. In March 1990 the regime renounced from economic centralism and announced the introduction of market capitalism; a new severe food shortage occurred and drove the poor once more into the struggle. In beginning 1991 the insurrection armies had gained control of the countryís granaries.

The drama of this most far reaching victory was that also in the months of 1991 it largely was a change of faces in power. Eritrea declared independence in Mai 1991 but became a bastion of US-imperialism since then, Ethiopia no less either. Eritrea has long since been a symbol of hope, until the sad outbreak of a new war in 1999 costing ten thousands of lives which is first of all fought out of competition about the natural resources in the frontier areas. While Eritrea with its access to the world sea has become focus to world market integration planning and was designed to become an export processing zone Ethiopia is dried out.

In contrast to Eritrea, Tigre remained overwhelmingly rural: 90% of the population are still peasants and Tigre misses strongly industry. After the end of the war many exilants returned to various parts of Ethiopia and Eritrea. The new war unleashed out of a situation of an internal "impasse" of development, like journalist Jean-Pierre Kapp claimed in 1993: seen from above, from a logic of capitalist planning, the labour force in Tigre and other parts of Ethiopia was not as productive as expected. With rebuilding their country people sought to rebuild their houses, gardens, their own structures, and "failed" to become modern labour power. Seen from below this hardly could be seen as an impasse, of course. As a Tigre saying goes "Where there is enough enjera (Tigreís most well known dish) for five, then it also serves for ten".

War can thus be one method to overcome this so-called impasse as it mobilizes those who were not to mobilize into new exploitative work. That would mean to say that capitalist agencies of world market integration planning started to drive energies of instigation in both countries against each other to weaken self-reliance possibilities at the social basis. According to press articles top US advisers like Anthony Lake have advised Zenawi as well as Afeworki to settle peace. Or did they actually instigate the parties against each other?

All these revolts rose out of mass poverty. And they rose out of the Eastern European sign of liberty, as the strikes and squats against deregulation in the Soviet union contributed to the empireís downfall. As elsewhere, the riots and campaigns in Africa confronted the IMFís policy directly. Together this pointed at freedom, self-rule and anti-capitalism at the same time. What is striking is the simultaneity of the moves of workers, inner city and rural poor and the better off office clerks. The way how the revolts developed show that there is no clear segmentation between the peasants and the proletariat, even not the well skilled "labour aristocracy" (a notion of the 1970s discourse). Beyond, when students in Lusaka started protests, in facing the police squads, they searched an escape route through the poor quarters of the city. Soon the malnurished youth joined the studentís side. In recalling the rebellions in several parts of Africa we clearly con recognize that the upheavals in no way came isolated. March to August 1991 saw an All-African cycle of struggle ó just to continue in November 1991!

It was through these strong campaigns that it became obvious that Africaís dictators mainly relied on French Bonapartism. They even depend on European backing. In Cameroon Biya organized elections too - only to manipulate them and to give himself more legitimacy. The imperialist crisis management pressured the opposition leaders, and, depending on the con-stellation of forces in the evolving movements they succeeded in bringing new servants into power like Nicéphore Soglo in Benin and Frederick Chilumba in Zambia, both IMF pupils, which one after the other replace French Power by US-imperialism or reinforce the latter. On the other side for the global management it is not easy to replace Eyadema with "democracy". If Eyadema resigns or is forced to flee the whole state ceases to exist because much is tied to his personality. Thus we see good governance rhetorics in an impasse.

The picture shown in the media is that the West pressurise on Africaís dictators to respect "checks and balances". Actually, when the masses really demand equal rights and transparent decisions the same imperialist powers become very reluctant to accept these demands. The masses soon understood that democracy meant freedom for everybody but the Western powers clearly saw how real freedom would endanger the whole basis of accumulation. All in all this is a potential revolutionary situation and the West mainly resorts in social and political containment. But the struggles continue to go on until now.
 
 

3. The Failure of Western Development Policy contents
 
 

The hardly observed but heavily contested crucial point is that subsistence is not tied to agriculture. Social obligations are mobile and move with moving people. With the increasing alienation of land, a rise in prizes for primary food and basic products more and more people relied on relatives in the cities, esp. in the civil service to maintain their standard of living or even to live a better life. In that period exchange between city and rural country intensified.

Since decades the situation in large parts of Africa remains a classical formal subjugation under capital. Marx once distinguished between formal and real subjugation. We can see that the production process in Africa is in the stadium of formal subjugation: labour is subjugated under capital in a way that leaves physical reproduction up to the family and gardening the harvest. Subsistence still occurs and is linked to cash markets by direct coercion (decree) and state controls. Primary accumulation consisted in extracting mining and exploiting peasant labour. To link this thought with the above example from Gambia the compound communities are linked to the world market via selling their produce, but their production process as well as their consumption is outside capitalist control. So they could withdraw more easily when prices are very volatile.

In contrast to that, real subjugation would be a later period in which the immediate production process as the core of accumulation is divided into many many small but specialized work steps of many separated individuals. Planning and execution of tasks are fissioned intentionally. And, as a recent post World War II development, real subjugation increasingly takes place in more and more realms of society, that is not only relying on money in almost any act of daily life but the application of the (e.g. Taylorist) production concept in all other realms.

The history of revolutionary Operaism (Potere Operaia meaning immediate worker power and militancy) has shown that worker's action is the origin of capital's crisis. Strike, absentism and footdragging, even sabotage and alternative use of factory tools is in the repertoire of day-to-day confrontation. South Africa for instance, has a very fresh history of Operaism hardly known outside the country. Worker power, e.g. in railroad unions and machine assembly plants, relied very much on the moral basis of the very poor from the "homelands". In short South Africa had an experience with worker power that limited profits and innovations, like in Italy in the 1970s. A similar story is told from Nigeriaís Steyr vehicle assembly plants. See the insightful Inga Brandall 1991 Workers in Third World Industrialization and Piet Konings Labour and Resistance in Cameroon 1993. Piet Konings new book Unilever Estates in Crisis and the Power of Organizations in Cameroon 1998 focuses on the perspectives of a new labour militancy and independent trade unions. This is not at all to say that Africaís path in history is determined in any way to a certain narrow outcome of social structure or form of production. It is only to show that there are also methods to analyze production relations which can be applied to every region in the world. History is open. Let the struggles decide.

Until today scientific management is very crucial in the fight of capital against worker's autonomies. Closely parallel to the real subjugation of industrial planning is agrarian planning in countries like Mali, Zambia, Kenya, Cameroon. This is not to reject nice aid initiatives but to point to systematic state introduced structural policy. Before the large scale escalation of war in the 1990s capital had its antagonist relations with the world proletariat in some kind of Development Decades. With its African counterpart especially.

The Development Decade of the 1960s and 1970s became more and more absorbed into subsistence needs. In many countries agriculture could not be mechanized, large scale export production sites were abandoned, the manufacturing industry failed to discipline a stable body of workers. At the same time capital (of the big multinational corporations) withdrew from the whole continent. A German professor of economics, Robert Kappel observed (in an article in 1994) a 70% reduction of external capital investment 1975-95.

The relations between the sexes were marked by patriarchal dominance and subalternity for a long time. However, in some areas gender relations were marked by mutual autonomy, for it is one's own gender within the lineage on which material security is based. During the years of aided development women became more dependent on men on the basis of cash and centralised production, land rights narrowed and women's rights became increasingly insecure. Almost everywhere womenís crops when profitable became menís crops. But women also acquired their own knowledge and found new ways of monetary independence. So these relations remained highly disputed but also more and more filled with sexist violence.

The academic volume well known to policy advisers The Precarious Balance. State and society in Africa edited by Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan in 1988 confirmed these developments and considered the growing mass autonomy at the end of the 1980s as a decreasing ability of the post colonial states to neither be relevant for their peoples nor being able to control their moves, e.g. tax evasion, smuggling, parallel economy, alternative paths of income, and so on. These political scientists had their close relations with the state export business.

To the end of the 1980s several African states turned into Termite hills, and several regions went out of control, i.e. regained self-control. Within this social process of increasing self-made self-reliance (and the clientelist use of patrons) the demokarasi movements articulated. Of course, most of poor people had enough of military parades, single party systems, and corruption. And, with the growing perception of Europeís way of life brought in through the cities and returning migrants expectations rose on what should be a good living. This is not to play on an image of a somewhat hybrid African with the TV on one side and the fetish on the other, but that people are quite open to new issues, understand new situations very soon and are still very conscious about justice, i.e. give-and-take. They engage in everyday contests for self-determination. As Jean-Marc Ela puts it: really poor are those who miss relatives, a poor man is a man with no friend. And, as a consequence, the family economy was the most sustainable form of resistance against the introduction of capitalism in Africa, says Ela, Cameroonian scholar living in Laval, Québec (Solidarity as subversion of development policy: The Modernity of Afro-Renaissance, in Monde Diplomatique Nov 1998, 11).

In the above quoted volume The Precarious Balance economist Timothy Shaw concluded however that Africans would be not ripe for communism, but for repression!
 
 

4. The 1990s turn into continental war: the re-organization of conquest contents
 
 

Of course this economistís consideration only reflected the core of a new set of strategies following out of the crisis of world capital in Africa. Several World Bank and policy adviser staff publications since 1989 give hints: public administration is immobile and personalistic, donor aid is consumed, manufacturing industries out of profit and population growth out of use. This had its reasons in the World Bank supported intensification of world market competition and a subsequent fall in prices. Hence the withdrawal from below into subsistence.

The new publications of capitalists, above all World Bankís Africa policy director Paul Collier, consider Africaís "comparative advantage" in the "abundant supply of labour" and export of materials. This is to show that there is still a quite massive interest in the black continent. "Africa" is not marginalized but its richness is plundered in the hands of multinationals. Connected to Colliers work is a large body of trade related research staff observing the interior.

This is not a trivial assumption compared to the above developments. In his Warlord Politics and African States (1998) US-scientist William Reno cited a World Bank official concerning Liberia saying "Corrupt officials are our problem here. We have to kill off the bureaucracies to shake them out. Then we can talk about building bureaucratic capacity" (p. 54). Reno himself went on to announce that "NPFL attacks on Liberian Mandingo and then in Sierra Leone constituted a more ambitious attempt to replace a vulnerable minority group and foreign traders as intermediaries and directly conduct commerce for the benefit of the NPFL fighters" (p. 98). In the first half of the war we saw NPFL fighters as sobels mainly looting for their own immediate survival. But since 1995 Taylor increasingly centralized this robbery business. In 1997 he was elected president - the 75% of the votes largely because of widespread fear of repression and/ or a continuation of the war. Charles Taylor from the start sought to monopolize trade with Firestone and with external multinationals in precious stones and sorts.

If we assume that the previous net of intermediary but stateless societies like Gio, Mano and dispersed traders like Mandingo also provided for a lot of their relatives, and if we assume that Taylors warlord-state now serves as intermediary for US-traders, we can grasp the logic of the war of capital against subsistence: what Reno calls an ambitious attempt is to break up previous social ties and mutual obligations and, else, to really starve a mass of dispossessed relatives! Renoís book is thus a chilling appeal altogether for the world wild war- and robbery capitalism ó challenging revolutionaries and humanists to respond on a new level.

In Liberia there was the putsch effort of Thomas Quiwonkpa in the same year- which ended in massive retaliation from the Doe regime. Liberiaís mass upheaval were the 1979 rice riots and the strikes of 1980s which brought Samuel Doe to power. The putschist soldiers and the Pan African Alliance PAL and PANAFU declared a social revolutionary programme and had their connections to a lot of West Africa, but it soon was betrayed in an ocean of corruption.

Neighbouring Sierra Leone - the Beautiful ó saw the Ndogboyosoi revolt in 1985 and 9 riots especially in the city of Freetown showed how far the country had gone out of government control. At the end of the 1980s it remains an open question what was the immediate situation before the outbreak of the war in both countries. Charles Taylor and Foday Sankoh easily mobilized the inner city youth, esp. street gangsters. The youngsters were motivated to get rid of the criminal dictators ruling their country and having assassinated their families ó but after Doeís ritual killing they wondered why the war is going on. Most of child soldiers plunder in order to eat. But the essential process is possibly conceivable on a more abstract level. One aspect of the presumably perverted insurrection is that the population in Sierra Leone and Liberia hinterland does not know and does not accept European notions of private property. Thus, as a conclusion we can interpret the RUF and NPFL movements as a form of banditry looting essentially peasants and starting a new way of accumulation in the form of a movement.

In his new and very well informed book on Liberia (1999) political and economic scientist Stephen Ellis concludes with the following apotheosis on the possible outcome of the war:

Young Liberians today are still part of the great web of society, but many want to move a comfortable distance away from their relatives in order to start a business or earn money whose profits they can use for themselves rather than support an endless string of social parasites. This does not imply an end to family life or kin relations, but underlines the strength of the Liberian proverb: "the family tree can bend but it cannot break" (Ellis 1999, page 311). With that Ellis summarizes the intense stress under which family economy and communities have been. While it would be even plausible to believe his vote for maintaining family relations as serious, the crucial point is that in his view it should not be a family economy as survival guarantee for the dispossessed any longer. As a source of social support for a new generation of traders and retailers kin relations are fine. This is in line with the words of social scientist Ramiro Monteiro, who rejected the way of life of the under class in Luandas Musseques as family parasitism (in Bettina Decke 1981 A terra e nossa, p. 89f). In Amilcar Cabralís theory exactly these poor in the cities who still had their close contacts and forms of exchange with their rural relatives ó but were not peasants no more ó could be mobilized most easily. Because of this it Cabral was convinced that it is one of the central conditions of the success of the path to social revolution to maintain and cultivate the links between rural and urban population and the proletariat especially.
 
 

5. The Genocide in Rwanda as Population Policy contents

The modern civil wars with their cults of violence and counter violence beginning in Angola and Mozambique in the mid 1980s, then in Somalia, and Liberia and Sierra Leone since 1989 are catastrophes of a counter-insurrection turning round the willingness to fight into banditry. Furious poor and landless youth is turned against their own communities.

The genocide on Rwandaís Tutsi and oppositional Hutu 1994 even shows that two decades of development investment into the poor under the Habyarimana regime can turn into the consideration that a mass of poor gone out of control has to be killed off altogether. This is imperialism: selection and eradication. Nearly one million people have been murdered in 100 days.

One of the cornerstones of the development strategies in Rwanda was the intensification of agriculture. Several methods introduced into Rwandan society aimed at the modernization of agriculture: anti-soil erosion dams, construction of canals, terracing of hills which reduces the absolute quantity in land up to 15%, and new techniques of holding cattle and other animals. With increasing investment external donors promoted the introduction of private property. The intensification program which led to a steady increase in work load was accompanied with a specific discourse: population growth was to be captured, because population would grow faster than the agricultural output. As economist Jef Maton has shown (1994), this was not the case. In contrast, with the expropriation off their land thousands of peasants became dispossessed. They became "surplus population". Fernan Bézy concluded his review of the Rwandan economy up to 1990 by recalling a saying of Jean Bodin: "Il n'y est richesse que d'hommes", meaning "there is no richness except humans." (in Fernan Bézy Rwanda 1962-1989. Bilan socio-économique d'un régime, Bruxelles 1990).

The land modernization development scheme, expropriation and the new trade in harvests in combination with the expensive land titling fees in a centralizing bureaucracy led to a sharp rise in social inequality to an extend unknown in Rwandan history. In 1980 Rwandaís land distribution was considered as one of the most equal in the world. In 1990, Jef Maton reported, it turned into one of the most unequal distributions. The elite residing in the Northern Prefectures and the nouveau rich profited out of land sales and bribed licences in transportation.

Already in 1975 the public works programme called umuganda was reintroduced, a copy of a Belgian common labour law. Somebody who did not comply to this new compulsory work twice a week could be punished either with penal fees or imprisonment.

In the 1980s Rwandaís peasants became highly dependent on world market exports of coffee and tee. After the prizes fell in 1987 and 1989 they became furious and started to erase coffee plants, destroyed terraces because they led to reductions in harvest results of up to 30 per cent. They also started to refuse umuganda labour which was ab/used to build bourgmestres houses collectively and feeder roads used by emerging merchants. Habyarimana had to make clear, that corruption was going to be exposed in public and he introduced a new discourse of morality as a reaction to the pressures from below. So there was lutte anti-érosive and lutte anti-corruptive, but the dispossessed werenít better off.

In these years a social movement emerged out of the internal polarization: peasants tried to create independent peasant ligues, self-organizations. The regime did all to prevent this, but after the La Baule summit with the francophone presidents in Mai 1990 Habyarimana allowed the creation of oppositional parties. Since July 1990 the Gouvernement de Synthèse à Base Elargie co-opted oppositional elites and most of their new parties. A new law allowed free press, and newspapers spread. Agathe Uwiringiyiama became a very popular speaker.

In October 1990 the Ugandan based RPF started to wage a war against the regime to force it to allow the return of Africaís oldest refugees: the Tutsi from 1959/61. The regime reacted with a well-organised campaign against Tutsi in the country. This is all rather well known.

What is not known is the internal opposition movement and their language and culture. Only if this is understood the way of the ethnification of social conflict can be understood: for example a journalist called Valens Kajeguhakwa denounced in his journal several practices of corruption, land expropriation and the famine occurring in summer 1990 in the Southern prefectures. His paper Kanguka, meaning "wake up!", was banned. But informally his news spread with the famine refugees moving to Eastern Rwanda and Tanzania. Soon another paper occurred, named Kangura, meaning "Awake It!" edited by Hassan Ngeze: he denounced the "reason" to all the problems: the Tutsi. Kanguka tried to politicise in naming the injustice in the state apparatus. Kangura ó called for the nationalist mobilization of the Bahutu people in an immediate counter-reaction. In this way social issues were systematically recoded along ethnic lines. In Kangura issue no. 4 Jan 1991 "The Manifest of The Bahutu" was originally published: the Tutsi were branded as a foreign race and the resolution of social conflict only to be found in the Tutsiís "return home". This was the new brand racism which was promoted by Kangura and parts of the new private media. As Jean-Pierre Chrétien called it in an early revealing article ("Presse libre" et propagande raciste au Rwanda, Politique Africaine Juin 1991) "Les liens entre Kangura et la sûreté sont affiché", the links between Kangura and the Rwandan secret service were an open secret. On the back page of this manifest issue of Kangura a photo of Francois Mitterrand was shown, underlined with: "real friends are recognized in times of need."

On 18^th January 1991 Rwanda's capital saw one of the largest opposition demonstrations since decades for peace with the RPF and a new government, the end of corruption and social injustice ("abolish umuganda"). The pro-Hutu journal Dialogue counted 100.000 demonstrators. 10 days later the newly created extremist right wing of the ruling party CDR called for a march against the Tutsi. After severe attacks several people died. CDR means conseil pour la défense de la république. It strongly rejected the peace negotiations with the guerrilla. Shortly after the Arusha peace accords had been finally signed on 4^th August 1993 Habyarimana himself started to dismiss them as a piece of paper. So he was influenced by the extremists.

The racist campaign needs to be further analysed: one point is the character of ideology. CDR and the militias played a lot on the self-image of the target group, the young Hutu, especially poor peasants from the North who had been among the most dispossessed. The recruitment itself targeted these youth by playing them down, by telling them they are worthless, bad and so on. Rightist mobilization plays on fears and insecurity by intimidating its proper subjects (objects!). Aggression is roused by deepening the feeling of being humiliated. Rwandan demagogues did this in playing on Tutsi character: "Tutsi are taller and much more refined, aristocratic than the stupid fat Hutu. So, unless you murder the Tutsi away, you will remain powerless forever". This programme was spread consciously and in a cold-blooded manner.

Another point is the organization of recruitment. In March 1992 the youth militias were created: the interahamwe of the MRND and the impuza mugambi of the CDR. One out of every 10 family cellule units had to go to the trainings. Finally, right wing factions, being small at their beginning, organized a shift in political opinions against the RPF and their attacks.

Especially to the Northern Hutu history was very appealing: the fact that they had been subjected under the rule of central Rwanda with support of German colonialists at the beginning of the 20^th century was actualized as a new nationalist independence movement playing on the conception that if the North, the former Bakiga Chefferie, would become independent of Central Rwanda - which was identified with the former Tutsi Nyiginyia aristocracy - then all their social problems would be solved. Which of course was wrong because the dispossession of land was a program of violence in disregard of the regional origin. Actually it was promoted by the central government consisting in the criminal Habyarimana-Clan of Bakiga origin. This is among the reasons why so many poor engaged in the state organized killings.

As the new style racism introduced into Rwandan peasants hearts and minds has to be analysed as a social technique of the organisation of behaviour, the forceful creation of a "Community of Killers" (the expression used by African Rights, London, Rwanda. Death, Despair and Defiance 1995) has to be considered as a new form of internal recomposition of peasant communities. While this treatment of the Rwandan populace can even be a preparation for later industrialization, the question rests why have the Tutsi been wiped out? Of course there is no questioning "why" in order to make the crime understandable, but the question remains how people called Tutsi lived inside Rwanda until 1990. Tutsi had been aristrocratic in the past, but have been impoverished since the 1960s. Among Tutsi only a minority figured as the kingdom clan. But Tutsi were engaged in a lot of family relations with Hutu, the Rwandan way of linking pastoralism with agriculture. In Kibuye even, one of the most remote prefectures where Tutsi constituted almost the entire population, they historically had no link to the aristrocratic families of Central Rwanda. Also, not all links with Hutu families were in a kind of close hierarchy. The question is whether one can call Rwandan society up to 1960 feudalist or whether the ethnic tension between the groups were a result of Belgian colonial doctrines of 19^th century race ideology. A lot like this remains to be reconsidered. In the 100 days of apocalypse in 1994, Kibuye was the prefecture of the most thorough wiping out of people: 242.000 of 250.000 were massacred by militias coming from all directions.

Meanwhile, in the mass media the "humanitarian intervention" in Rwanda was made a spectacle. But not the violated survivors inside Rwanda were being helped, but the resettled Hutu militias and their hostages. They got over one billion $ international emergency help. Through the way of Operation Turquoise the French army allowed the key murderers to leave the country to reinstall in Goma and Bukavu, in Zaire. French troops not only helped training the interahamwe under the leadership of Lt. Gen Chollet and Huchon in the Operation Noroit from October 1990 to December 1993, but made the militiaís flight from justice possible in a second military intervention (C Braeckman 1994). This is when imperialism became obvious.

Further reconstruction of the crime of genocide would have to focus on the external introduction of the Rwandan agrarian crisis: as mentioned above, at the end of the agricultural intensification programme and the fall of the international coffee price a famine occurred in Summer 1990. Agronomist top adviser staff like Joachim von Braun (International Food Policy Research Institute, IFPRI, Washington, Prof of Nutritional World Economics, Kiel, now Institute for Development Research in Bonn, Germany, host of this years Food Vision 2020 summit), and colleagues, considered Rwanda's food crisis in 1991 as a governance impasse and as a beginning of an agony. Edward Robins, who is with the Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), voted in the same year for an increase of internal productivity, not food aid (in Huss-Ashmore ed. 1990 African Food Systems in Crisis). What is striking in this large body of agrarian planning research is the statement that Rwanda is severely overpopulated. The question is now how the organization of mass murder is related to the considerations and decisions of international policy adviser staff. In one crucial publication Joachim von Braun, Hartwig de Haen and Juergen Blanken wrote in January 1991 "Subsistence orientation - that is, the share of own-produced food in total per capita food and nonfood consumption - is remarkably stable across different farm sizes and per capita income levels" (p. 12 of their IFPRI Report No 85 Commercialization of Agriculture under Population Pressure: Effects on production, consumption and nutrition in Rwanda, Washington DC 1991). The sentence means that in spite of seriously aggravating hunger in the region the people in the rural communities (in the research area in Gisenyi) share what they have, and provide for everybody in spite of different farm sizes and household income levels! This is a kind of communist behaviour: to guarantee existence for all members of the community. In the Southern regions of Rwanda a practice known as umusanzu guaranteed that children of the landless could have meals with the more well off. For this day labourers (abacancuru) met with employing families in the centre de negoce (e.g. in Butare) to obtain daily food. Their nonmonetary pay seemed almost immune to the two massive currency devaluations of the Rwandan Franc 1.10.90 and Sept. 1992.

Note that in the 1930s German agrarian research on the social structure and behaviour of "the Slavic Peasant" in Poland, Russia and Eastern Europe had developed very modern and precise econometric models of household consumption and "labour force potential" to find out how to exploit best in a model of dependent development and to spread an ideology of a so called transition from the backward peasant to the rational commercial farmer who reduces "his" number of children "rationally" (Theodor Oberlaender 1935, Helmut Meinhold 1942, Peter-Heinz Seraphim 1941 to name the most influential). These scientists found optimum research conditions under dictatorship and war. They organized a specific overpopulation discourse and even knew about local communal relations between peasants and surviving Social Revolutionaries in Western Russia in the 1910s and 20s. In Germany there is lot of evidence today about the crucial role of this policy research in the Nazi Holocaust. It is also documented that the knowledge has found its continuity into the post war era. It is called Bevoelkerungswissenschaften (see for a fine translation the English web site of Simon Wiesenthal Center).

In France today several members of the Chirac - Mitterrand clique are now on trial - but under substitutive accusations (e.g. corruption and arms trade). The Western side of genocideurs is not to speak about. Beyond, in Nairobi, the headquarters of Eastern African Finance, several of the prime architects of the Rwandan genocide live unmolested until today as a Rwandan exile community. Among them is Matthieu Ngirumpatse, hardliner and former chairman of the MRND, Augustin Ngirabatware, shareholder of the racist Radio RTLM and Enoch Ruhigira. Nairobi is home of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), which establishes close links to the French and German agrarian planning elite and to the IMF. Financial economist Augustin Ngirabatware for instance has worked for the AERC since 1992.

Francophone Africa has a long history of being shaped by French culture. It is French policy which I like to focus in this paragraph. As a sign of Bonapartism and arrogance France has strong influence in African agrarian policy. There is an ambitious francophone elite which plays an important role in shaping state centred developmental models and subsequent agrarian crisis related to the mis-harvest with new seeds and cultivation methods. Core of the policy of the 1980s was the PISANI plan, a pilot project in Mali, Kenya, Rwanda and Zambia, co-ordinated by the European Community (Union). French geographers and planners worked together closely with German and US officials (USAID, Michigan, Wisconsin). Two of the most important go-betweens between the AERC in Nairobi, the IMF and French "adjustment arts" are Jean-Paul Azam and Michel Griffon, the latter also director of CIRAD, Montpellier. In these abstract developmental policies "advantageous geographic space and populations" was promoted, and nonfavorable regions and people were "penalized". One exponent of this strategy has been Michel Labonne who worked in the core group of the implementation of the Pisani Plan. In the 1980s co-ordinating group Joachim von Braun, Walter Kennes and Edgard Pisani played a vital role. Thus the crucial issue is that while one crew has its responsibility for the promotion of social inequality in Rwanda, the other one resorted to the ethnification of social conflict, to the initiation and support of the racist hate speech campaign. Both crews provably knew and know each other and are affiliated through the links of several institutions.
 
 

5.1. German Officials in the Rwanda Holocaust 1994 contents
 
 

Another important aspect of imperialism in Africa is the policy of German party-linked political foundations, as there are the conservative Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation (K.A.S.) and the social democratic Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES). The latter has been very influential in the so called peace negotiations in Moçambique between Frelimo and RENAMO. While the FES is largely known for their political defeating role in supporting the revisionist factions of Latin American FMLN and Sandinistas, the K.A.S. close to the German CDU is known for supporting the Inkatha war for a long time against the ANC. In Rwanda, the one time founder of the KAS foreign detachment, Peter Molt, a youth time close friend of former German chancellor Helmut Kohl since the 1950s, was highly responsible for talking peace and waging war: he and his fellow Helmut Strizek supported Habyarimana in ridiculing the 1993 peace accords and in close relations to the Rwandan gendarmerie. Peter Molt collaborated with Mathieu Ngirumpatse and called him an MRND moderate figure. Their administrative support for the introduction of a population register as part of the Pisani Plan accentuated the apartheid exclusions against Tutsi in the 1980s. This polarizing structural policy behind the scenes might be the institutional foundation and the historical origin of the new ethnification of social conflict in Rwanda. The Belgian magazine Golias and a Rwandan journalist living in Germany even claim that the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation supported the notorious extremist radio station RTLM which instigated Hutu in killing "all the Tutsi race" by delivering the broadcast equipment (Golias Magazine 1996, p. 117). All this indicates that there have been several steps in the decision to genocide in Rwanda in the years since 1990 on a supranational level. There will be much more to come out. Activists in the US claim that also Clinton knew about the genocide. We really need a lot of further investigation.
 
 

6. The War of the Entrepreneurs in the Congo and the Great Lakes Region
 
 

The offensive of the Alliance des Forces Democratiques pour la Liberation du Congo (AFDL) in September 1996 has been one of the answers to the genocide in Rwanda. It was at first a response to the insecurity for Tutsi out of prolonged assaults on frontier communities introduced by the interahamwe militia and second a punitive expedition against one of their closest collaborators, Mobutu Sese Seko. But since then this offensive is being transformed from liberation into an entire recomposition of communal, ethnic and national belonging in the whole region via banditry and terror. Virtually, after a policy of internal containment of conflict the response to the Rwandan genocide brought the explosion into an escalation of a bush and rainforest fire which no-one seems to be able to control. The number of deaths is mounting to unspeakable 2,5 million (International Rescue Committee 10^th June 2000, 10^th May 2001).

The background to the war is now approached in two steps. The first is looking from inside Zaire from the end of the 1980s onwards. The second tries to integrate the recent history of conflicts in Uganda, Rwanda, and the whole region in its interconnectedness.

6.1. The Kinshasa Revolt 1991 and the Mobutu Termite's Hill contents
 
 

Mobutu established a state bureaucracy of personal loyalty among those which he choose as clients. They formed the elite and served as patrons for the impoverished masses. IMF and World Bank policy subsidized private acquisition of land, thus supported the new emerging bourgeoisie. External inputs were consumed by rich people's luxury while the peasants still had to produce and work more to feed their families and the cities.

Broke Grundfest Schoepf (1986) gave a quite impressive account about the way peasants were forced into production for the state marketing boards and parastatals under the surveillance of agricultural agents (les moniteurs agricoles) in the Mobutu era. They had been forced to produce certain crops for export and the cities and to sell them at a prescribed minimum price. Barter was illegal. However, peasants did barter a lot, avoided paying taxes, earned money by transporting and selling across the borders.

In the period from the 1980s to 1992 an internal process of government erosion emerged - an erosion so deep that it levelled down the whole corrupt and criminal system of Mobutu patronage. When this social revolutionary process finally came to its open outbreak in the Kinshasa revolt in 23.- 26. September 1991, peasants already had reduced vulnerability from inflation, evaded controls, withdrew from state marketing production and engaged in sales of self-controlled mining since several years in many parts of Zaire. They ceased to trust any of the province governors, officials, judges, policemen. In their moral economy of resistance representants of the system were not to deal with in the honest way.

The Kinshasa uprising destroyed large parts of the city, poor people of all ages walked into quarters of the rich and looted, factory sites were attacked, and Mobutus soldiers changed sides and joined in the popular upheavals. Only one loyal army block saved the remaining "government members" around their sanctuary Hotel Continental (see Colette Braeckman "Politique de la terre brûlée in Zaire" in Le monde diplomatique November 1991).

At the time of the Kinshasa revolt in September several province capitals like Kisangani in the East, Lubumbashi, Kolwezi, Kamina and Likasi in Shaba fell into the hands of insurgents. They destroyed the mining company's bureaus. Etienne Davignon, President of the powerful Belgian Holding Société Générale made it explicit: "This is Mobutus end. Since one year he controls nothing in Zaire!" But the opposition parties neither controlled the insurgent and looting people. Only since French troops gained control over the Kinshasa airport and intervened immediately in an open imperialist deployment the insurgency was contained. But Zairian or French officials never regained real control since then. Mobutu remained isolated until his comeback as Interahamwe supporter in 1994.

In that time from the makeshift restoration of order 1991 to the outbreak of war in September 1996 and the return of the mercenaries Zaire's internal policy laid down on the ground. The cleptocracy was finished. Why did the opposition not capture the structures? When we look at the UDPS we see a party which was devote to reformism, expatriate negotiators and development programmes. 'Le peuple' knew Tshisekedi had his small house in one popular quarter. Taxi drivers knew he had two further villas in upper class suburbs. This is what was rejected. Government structures had ceased to exist. People boycotted Mobutuís officials.
 
 

6.2. L'Afrique des comptoirs et l'Afrique inutile: the economy of war contents
 
 

Frank van Acker and Koen Vlassenroot define the economy of war as "violence which is used as a means to reorganise economic space and control mobility within and between spaces. War is then understood as an effort to concentrate violence in manageable and exchangeable forms" (in their "Youth and conflict in Kivu: Komona clair", Journal of Humanitarian Assistance 21.7.2000, http://www.jha.ac/greatlakes/b004.htm ).

These young authors confirm the previous social structure in the Kivu as "risk pooling at the community level (when viewed as a network of households) and at the household level itself, both between the sexes and between generations". Johan Pottier described impressingly how people in the Bwisha highlands Northern Kivu managed to cope with food shortages (1984): women of all households organized the equal share for every household - quite rationally. This densely populated area was sought as exporting region for high quality coffee since the 80s. Land rights are crucial in the Kivu. But until recently access to land remained almost entirely in the hands of the subsistence community. Usually it is the chief (or mwami) who distributes the land within an indigenous community. With the increase of population density land rights are inherited in parigeniture (real division) and it is more and more up to the household and the lineage itself to decide about the land. The chief rests responsible for conflicts among neighbours. For outside administrative structures it becomes increasingly different to grasp on the land rights if they are negotiated in such a way. Negotiators multiply and customarily land is not for sale (all this is shown in Acker and Vlassenroot's very well; see for the land rights debate R.E. Downs and S Reyna 1988; John Bruce Land Tenure Center Madison Wisconsin 1996; Bassett and Crummey 1993). It is only with violence that expropriation is possible.

So there was fighting over the right to determine land rights and property. The dynamics of the turn of liberation into terror and death might have the following aspects: While the advent of the AFDL and their march through the Congo in 1997 finally terminated Mobutuís regime, the ethnification of the clans in the Kivu and their mobilization against Tutsi is on the origins of the war. While thousands of young people joined the Forces as fighters or sympathizers, they soon became deceived by Rwandan and Ugandan accumulation politics in their home area. While the RPF and RPA was itself a rebel movement against the planned disappearance of cattle land rights in Uganda (through a new law in August 1990), North Kivu (official exclusion from citizenship 1993) and step by step exclusion of Tutsi in Rwanda under Habyarimana, the stopping of the genocide led the leaders to the projection that survival is possible only through military power. This led to an internal recomposition among the RPF itself. Since the very beginning the leadership around Paul Kagame was oriented toward US policy. In fact he was trained in Fort Leavenworth. But the ordinary followers had equal rights in mind. They wanted to abolish ethnic discourse. Among the most active expatriate sponsors of the RPF a new middle class came onto the scene of politics and in search for identity.

In the Kivu region the interahamwe militia originating from Rwanda introduced a new life style: the life style and reproduction of a killerís community taking hostages into the bush and extorting foreign exchange from humanitarian assistants and NGO's.

The tendency among the local youth to go to and form a militia is coming directly out of an egalitarian fighting impulse. The structure of the bands is largely a fusion of highly decentralized segmentary groups, who make alliances in case of self defence. Each of the local militias is of course trying to gain control over their territory. Meanwhile the super-regional warlords try to control each of the militia bands. This is done through a highly authoritarian commando to adhere to ethnic belonging. The latter is itself in constant metamorphosis! First all local communities like Lendu or Warega who are ascribed to belong to the "Hutu family" are instigated to defend themselves. Then this belonging is generalized to the notion of a "Bantu race" in a newly organized polarization opposed to all "Nilotic". At the other side of the front an alliance of Tutsi is generalizing into Banyamulenge-Tutsi, Hema, Bashi and so on.

In these new war economies the leader seems to decree everything, he seems to rule without control. The militia and the entire population is his appendix, his property, a relationship which seems to remind us to fascism. Personal rule replaces the old administrative system, bureaucracy is replaced by an automatic gun. Former Zairian ideology of La Citoyennité is replaced by mutual declarations of enmity. But as we could see in the murder of Laurent Kabila warlords can be weak: his assassination even had something of an incident which just happened. So the warlord is ruler over life and death, but he himself can be overruled very easily. We also should not forget that the militarist commando of the warlords over their followers and alliances is very hierarchical and thus very precarious. Children and youth rebels and bandits change sides several times in this war. Most of them want to flee the horrors.

Most radical Social Darwinism is the real determinant in current Congo economy: who has physical power can loot, assault, tax, rape, transport and sell what he wants to. Who is weak or weakened by the vulgarities of the weather, is in acute danger of starving. In line with this it is the main problem of the Kivu inhabitants that they are about to defend themselves and at the same time produce a result of war which resembles a lot to a solution convergent with abstract population policy: a massive and unprecedented death toll. In the 1980s Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Zaire set up negotiations about the refugee and "overpopulation problem". These negotiations never came to any result. As one of the members of the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation said, none of the rulers was ready to accept a redistribution from the Rwandan hills.

We now come to the second step of investigation: recomposition at the regional level. As we have seen it with the pastoralistís rights free access to land is increasingly reduced. This poses an acute threat to their existence. This is in no way an automatic process triggered by population growth but brought forward mainly through institutional decisions. The question remains why and how the liberative subjectivity turns into this current kind of madness. The key to the understanding of the period between the interior social revolution in Zaire in the context of the All-African cycle of struggle, and the outbreak of the Congo War, is the refugee crisis and the needs of refugees. Seen from below refugees vote with their feet. New expectations cross the borders of states. As refugees they do not pass in the refined canals of migrant labour contracts but they constitute a highly vulnerable latent surplus population which has lost civil rights. In the Kivu region at first Tutsi became uprooted and denied off their rights. Today it is the whole population in the Kivu, who became actors of racism and victims of the war.

The war alliances are precarious and shift several times. Warlords not only control the trade routes with Western capitalists but they do trade with each other! Beyond, child soldiers try to desert and flee as soon they don't get food and pay any more, and they fear the spirits of the dead for the atrocities they have committed under the influence of drugs. Maybe the majority of combattants change sides at least once in the whole period of war.

The saddest aspect in the Congo war is that ordinary people seem to survive only with a gun. Reports of the International Rescue Committee show that it is high above average that women and small children, and babies, die of starvation, and violence.

On the abstract level of analysis the most paradoxical point at the moment may be the following prognosis: as far as this war is an answer to mass autonomy and unruliness it is possible that this war leads to state formation. The aim would be reached with the destruction of the segmentary principle of decentral organization, with the "broadcasting of power and sovereignty into every region of the Congo" (Jeffrey Herbst 2000). Probably no-one has any interest in a division of the Congo. To the contrary. Power of the survivors of this war will remain highly centralized. It is the medium of war and racism itself, that generates centralized states. What we do witness is a crime of state building and population policy taking the lives of millions of people. Of people, who managed their survival independently on the community level.
 
 

7. Reintroduced Slavery in Sudan and Somalia as part of capitalist profit contents
 
 

Compared to the media spectacle, which aimed to show to the world that the unilateral genocide in Rwanda was a barbarism originating from inside the Heart of Africa, the genocide on the Dinka and the Nuer in Southern Sudan remains hardly even noticed. As much as 2 million people are supposed to be murdered in the course of war, forced dislocation and famine since 1983. In a second wave the war between the Islamist regime of "the Northerners" led by Omar el Beshir and ideological leader Hassan al-Turabi in 1990 large refugee trecks moved from the South of Sudan to Western Ethiopia. In a third wave beginning in February 1994 killings of the paramilitary Islamic Popular Defence Forces (PDF) reached a dramatic climax. Thousands of Southern refugees seeking refuge in Greater Khartoum have been brutally deported by the regime into the Northern desert were they have been left to starve to death.

Moreover, slave raids were perpetrated by several Arab clans organized in the PDF in the war against the South. The
PDF calls itself missionaries who bring the faith of Islam to the world and the rule of Sharia to the South, to introduce
them to "education". Jihad is a way slavery is legitimated in muslim orthodoxy and concealed to outsiders. As Millard
Burr and Robert O. Collins report in their book Requiem for The Sudan (1995) survivors reported that raiders came into the villages, killed all the adults, and took the children as slaves in the old sense of the term. Those considered not transportable were pounded to death (see also Human Rights Watch/ Africa Children of the Sudan. Slaves, Street
Children and Child Soldiers 1995).

8. The COMESA Project as Crucial Step into World Market Integration   contents
 

Meanwhile, there are hints that Western capital again reflects on the perspectives of unfree labour: economist
Thrainn Eggertsson theorizes on the productivity of unfree and slave labour as patterns of global accumulation using
formal models. What we have to investigate then is the question if and in what kind of way Western companies make
use out of political Islamismís slave raids. The thesis here is that the newly introduced Free Production Zones in the
Gezira Scheme in Central Sudan, in the Jubba Valley of Southern Somalia and possibly soon in parts of the Southern
Sudan/ Northern Uganda slavery or work with wages under subsistence level is used as part of a new triangle of the
political economy of Imperialism. This will be of genuine importance for the current project of regional trade integration
of the continent's Eastern half, the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), comprising SA,
Zimbabwe, Moçambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda and potentially Rwanda, Burundi and Kivu
(Kongo). Its first steps lie in the promotion of tourism and the textile and clothing industry in the cities on the coast to
the Indian Ocean. On this coast several new production sites and "cities" are going to emerge at the moment.
Together with the capitals and frontier garrisons of dictators and warlords on the interior borders between Sudan/
Uganda, South Africa/ Zimbabwe/ Moçambique these coastal production sites are planned as bridgeheads of
accumulation of a new trade empire. Mauritius is their current growth locomotive. Accumulation will be fed with
thousands of enslaved labourers chased and raided within an "ocean of hinterland" to each capital, raided again
among internal displaced and rural communities, thus keeping them on the move. As Arap Moi, Paul Biya or Mobutu
used prisoner's labour in previous decades to build feeder roads, dug canals, terrace hills and harvest cotton,
exploitation with wages below the subsistence level threatens to be one way of reproduction to stabilize the hard
currencies of RAND, US$, Euro, Yen and Pound. This widespread use of women's and children's labour is already called
FOOD FOR WORK (Joachim von Braun has edited an explorative handbook on the issue in 1995, Raisuddin Ahmed as
well, making use of the experience with Food for Work under Mengistu Mariam in the 80s, and the large world market
export crop sites in Bangladesh and Bolivia). Of course, as a matter of legitimacy, Western companies and states
claiming to be democratic, cannot so easily turn to an open use of slavery. But they use îbackwardnessî of îreligious
fundamentalismî for their current barbarities.
On a more general level ethnification and islamization can be considered as new modes of generating / creating a
bureaucratic class on the way to state formation, which is made disloyal to the moral of give-and-take with the
demands of poor relatives but which is indoctrinated to work for the new nation state, for the autonomous apparatus.
We might expect the new proletariat and the dispossessed to be less strict in clinging to ethnic belonging because as
everyday struggle for survival also leads to new demands upward the hierarchy, or to migration and then there is
ethnic and social realignment. Ethnic lines might lose importance when people hold up their long tradition of moral
economy to share everything in order to survive.
Thus we also recognize in these programmes of ethnicity, racism and islamic dogmatism the grim hate face of the
bourgeoisie. And if one wants to belong to the new elite, one has to struggle a lot and stop sharing.
After all, the warlords of Africa, be they Charles Taylor, or RENAMO or Hassan el Tourabi or John Garang are part of a
development programme. I do not name it a stage in the development because I reject evolutionism. But they are the
core of a developmental model in which all parts of society are forced under militarism and prostitution. In European
history the standing of the army and the sale of women's bodies together with the disempowerment of women
through the centralization of granaries was the early step in the imposition of capitalist industrialization in the era
beginning with the Thirty Years War 1618 onwards.

9. On the route to emancipation    contents
 

The genocide in Rwanda as all the other nightmares of war are catastrophes of civilization, catastrophes of the
breakdown of solidarity ? nationally as well as internationally. When we pass all this we feel deep sorrow and endless
pain. It puts guilt and shame on those responsible and those who live off the extracted wealth. There is also fury and
rage. Rage to revenge. Is there also hope and wisdom? I dare to say yes.
Many people today in Africa do not live in villages and small huts as European images go. They live in high flats, are
used to European or US TV series and go shopping. Many maintain linkages to their parents and relatives, but most of them do not want to ìreturnî to a traditional way. It would be reactionary to prescribe someone what she or he
would have to do.
Some passages in this paper seem to call for ìback to subsistence agricultureî. Yes, indeed somebody still has to
weed the hoe or push the plough. Otherwise from where comes the food? In Middle Europe, especially Germany, the
fact that only 7-4% of the population does work in agriculture and does know how to do so is only possible through
large scale capitalist farming, a subsidizing bureaucracy, imperialist accumulation and low paid immigrant work.
It would be however wrong to identify subsistence with conservatism. Working conditions and workerís behaviour
have been a focus here, as in contract farming, but another is culture. Today one can see everything in African
settings: people who practice Islam or go to church and also are gangsters, scholars who like red wine and have
chicken, and a proletariat who is damned to swallow all the waste. Lives are cheap. And not few are making it
cheaper.
If it is possible to find a new strategy of liberation and emancipation, of strong organizations who combine radical
syndicalism, womenís rights promotion, militancy and more it would be possible to give all the frustrated and angry
youth a new hope and possibly a new home.
Otherwise a cycle of violence and banditry would continue and extend. The typical Western solution proposed is to
ascend to bourgeois individualism. In Europe individualism is widespread and this is associated with modernity. This is
one reason besides racism why the many ways of collective power in Africa are frequently overlooked. However, with
the current tactics of counter-insurrection from within collective power can also descend into genocidal war.
As the volume of Donald Crummey and others shows (Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa 1986) banditry and
theft have been forms of the battle of primary rights in living. Today also gangsters like the mafia pose severe threats.
Socialism has been one form of containment of this problems, also in Eastern Europe. Indeed, one step could be to
use the state as a redistributional apparatus. This is quite complicated because it would further centralization. As
Jean-Baptiste Sipa pointed out in an interview with a German paper at the height of the social uprisings in Cameroon
(16/ 7/ 1991) the police and the army was created not to defend the country against an external enemy but against
the civil population.
Amilcar Cabralís once developed a perspective of liberation and emancipation beyond Europeanism. One possibility
could be to remember this theory and practice and to actualise it and apply it to the specific situations of today. One
level is that of community, another the national level. There we can see a lot of African NGOís which practice the link
between direct help in survival and political change. Others, especially the big European ones are more like firewalls
for imperialism. Thus as the All-African cycle of struggle at the beginning of the 1990s has shown capital and its
imperialist deployments is only to confront on a world scale. There has been a lot of discussion in the movements
about a new structure of trade: to intensify trade among the poor countries and even for the workers to take over
the industries.
Then there is the necessity of fundamental change in the fortresses of Europe, the USA and Japan. All of this forms
the giant task of linking all these levels to confront further capitalist penetration and violence for the sake of liberation
of the worldís proletariat.

10. Some Proposals for Common Action         contents
 

An answer from below has to be found against looting and mass murder capitalism in Africa. There is no such
"international community" from which one could expect resurrection in times of acute danger. It would be a waste of
time and was a waste of time in Rwanda 1994. Direct action could point to European and US multinationals and attack
their profit out of genocide, warlordism and enslavement. The companies should be named and else.
Some examples for direct action:
- Jean-Christophe Mitterrand is still moving freely in impunity although he is one of those Frenchmen being primarily
responsible for the support of the Habyarimana regime planning genocide and facilitating training the Interahamwe
milita.
- Several policy advisers of the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation have been at least ignorant toward a regime what was
about to plan and carry out genocide. Peter Molt even has to be suspected of being implicated in it. An investigation is
necessary to bring them to court.
- Without outside help and solidarity the survivors of the genocide in Rwanda will hardly be able to see justice.
Genocide is the step in history when all solidarity is lost. For example the Association des Veuves du génocide du
Rwanda AVEGA needs urgent support financially and politically. They neither rely on the Hutu rebels nor the RPF
warleading government. It is the self-organization of the widows and orphans.
- Shelter for Africa is an initiative of Sierra Leoneans in Hamburg linked to the Sierra Leone exile community in Europe.
They finance the reconstruction of their country on the family level.
- Just consider the many companies like transport constructing STRABAG in Frankfurt, Germany, which wants to build a
large highway from Kenia via Uganda to Kisangani, from which the Congo river is navigable to organize a free trade
corridor.
- Over 100 business men just demanded to check in on Head of Department of State Fischerís flight to Angola on his
one day visit in 20.11.2000. Even opportunist taz journalist Kordula Doerfler said, the German business class
obviously wants to profit much out of the economy of war in Angola.
- Similarly Germans should donate a part of their income monthly to families in Africa. This is a direct redistribution.
Capitalism is not a necessary stage in development, but it can be levelled off by direct transition to communism via
social revolution. For that it is necessary that cadres and activists seek close relations to those who are at the centre
focus of current capitalist aggression in any world area. The left and the peasants can learn from each other.

So I suggest:

1. We need to organize a revolutionary debate about the links between the brutalities and the strategy of capital.
There is a central need for an anticapitalist perspective for Africa.
2. Victims of terror need rehabilitation from trauma. They need to see justice with their eyes.
3. To speak out the truth about intimidating violence and expose the perpetrators, to decrease mistrust, and to
rebuild local communities by the end of impunity.
4. To stop the institutionalisation of private property but to restore customary or new collective rights in land and to
increase and secure womenís rights in land. Or invent new ones.
5. To do direct action against Western companies profiting out of the destruction of Africa and to link the African
debate and action with the world wide actions of Seattle, Prague, Genua, etc.
 

References:      contents
 

• African Rights, 1995, Rwanda. Death, Despair and Defiance, London (Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal)
• African Rights 1996, A Waste of Hope. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda, London
• Bassett, Thomas and Donald Crummey eds., 1993, Land in African Agrarian Systems, Uni of Wisconsin Press
• Braeckman, Colette, 1991 "Politique de la terre brûlée in Zaire" in Le monde diplomatique November 1991
• Braeckman, Colette, 1994, Rwanda. Histoire d'un génocide, Paris, Fayard
• Bruce, John, Land Tenure Issues Land Tenure Center Madison Wisconsin 1986/ reed. 1996
• Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, 1985, Afrique subsahariénne. Permanences et ruptures, Paris Ed Payot  = Africa.
• Endurance and Change South of the Sahara 1988, California Uni Press
• Crummey, Donald ed. 1986, Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa, London J Currey
• Decke, Bettina, 1981, A terra e nossa. Koloniale Gesellschaft und Befreiungsbewegung in Angola, Thesis Bremen (Colonial Society and Liberation Movement in Angola)
• Dieter Neubert, 1997, Entwicklungspolitische Hoffnungen und gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit: (Comparative Case Studies of NGOís in Rwanda and Kenya), Frankfurt/ New York Campus
• Downs, Roger E. and Stephen Reyna eds. 1988, Land and Society in Contemporary Africa, Hanover N.H
• Ellis, Stephen, 1999, The Mask of Anarchy. The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War, London, Hurst Co
• Golias magazine, 1996, été, Rwanda: L'honneur perdu des missionaires, No 48/49, p. 117
• Gouteux, Jean-Paul 1998, Un génocide secret díEtat. La France et le Rwanda 1990-1997, Paris, Editions Sociales
• Herbst, Jeffrey, 2000, States and Power in Africa. Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control, Princeton University Press
• Lemarchand, René, 2000, Exclusion, Marginalization and Political Mobilization: The Road to Hell in the Great Lakes,
• Observatoire de l'Afrique centrale, 14 décembre 2000, http://www.obsac.com/OBSV4N45-LemarchandEng.html
• Lux, André 1962, Le marché de travail en Afrique noire, Louvain/ Lovanium du Léopoldville
• Luxemburg, Rosa, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital ed. Kenneth Tarbuck, trans. Rudolf Wichmann, London Allen Lane 1972 Translation of her very important analysis p. 313
• Marx, Karl, Grundrisse (Concept of a critique of Political Economy) trans. Martin Nicolaus, NY, Vintage 1973
• Maton, Jef, Nov. 1994, Rwanda 1959-1994 ou le dixième dicile en face de l'apocalypse, Gent Belgique
• Prunier, Gerard, 1995, The Rwandan Crisis. History of a Genocide 1959-94, Hurst, London
• Reno, William, 1998, Warlord Politics and African States, Boulder Col. Lynne Rienner
• Reyntjens, Filip, 2000, La guerre des grands lacs: alliances mouvantes et conflits extraterritoriaux en Afrique centrale, Paris, LëHarmattan
• Schoepf, Broke Grundfest, 1986, Food crisis and class formation in Zaire: political ecology in Shaba, in World Recession and the Food Crisis in Africa ROAPE special edition ed. Peter Lawrence, pp. 201-212
• Scott, James, 1976, Moral Economy of the Peasant. Rebellion and Subsistance in South East Asia, New Haven, Yale University Press
• Uvin, Peter, 1998, Aiding Violence. The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, West Hartford Connecticut
• Willame, Jean Claude, 1997, Banyarwanda et Banyamulenge: violences ethniques et gestion de l'identitaire au Kivu, Paris  LíHarmattan

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