Anybody seen this killer??????

[water]

Fuck Hitler. This shit is not even mentioned in schools......

This is the real killer: 10 million killed in Congo

King Leopold's legacy of DR Congo violence

Of the Europeans who scrambled for control of Africa at the end of the 19th century, Belgium's King Leopold II left arguably the largest and most horrid legacy of all.
While the Great Powers competed for territory elsewhere, the king of one of Europe's smallest countries carved his own private colony out of 100km2 of Central African rainforest. He claimed he was doing it to protect the "natives" from Arab slavers, and to open the heart of Africa to Christian missionaries, and Western capitalists.
Instead, as the makers of BBC Four documentary White King, Red Rubber, Black Death powerfully argue, the king unleashed new horrors on the African continent.

Torment and rape
He turned his "Congo Free State" into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people.
I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit
What is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo has clearly never recovered. "Legalized robbery enforced by violence", as Leopold's reign was described at the time, has remained, more or less, the template by which Congo's rulers have governed ever since.
Meanwhile Congo's soldiers have never moved away from the role allocated to them by Leopold - as a force to coerce, torment and rape an unarmed civilian population.

Chopping hands
As the BBC's reporter in DR Congo, I covered stories that were loud echoes of what was happening 100 years earlier.
The film opens with the shocking images of some of Leopold's victims - children and adults whose right hands had been hacked off by his agents. They needed these to prove to their superiors that they had not been "wasting" their bullets on animals.
This rule was seldom observed as soldiers kept shooting monkeys and then later chopping off human hands to provide their alibis.

'Foreign correspondents'
Director Peter Bate uses documented accounts of such atrocities to present an imaginary court case against the monarch who he compares to a subsequent European tyrant, Adolf Hitler.
He has an actor play the bearded, heavily-set Leopold, fidgeting nervously as damning testimonies are read out, compiled by the foreign correspondents of the day, the missionaries.
John Harris of Baringa, for example, was so shocked by what he had come across that he felt moved to write a letter to Leopold's chief agent in the Congo.
"I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit."

Positive legacy
In the film's most powerful sequences we see reconstructions of the terror caused by Leopold's enforcers and agents.
We see a village burnt without warning and its people rounded up; its men sent off into the forests, and its women tied up as hostages and helpless targets of abuse until their husbands return with enough wild rubber to satisfy the agent.
This, we are told, was the "moment of truth" for the whole community.
If the men did not bring back enough and the agent lost his commission, he would order the deaths of everyone.
There is no doubt that Congo's history, and White King, Red Rubber, Black Death are almost too upsetting to bear, however Leopold did leave, albeit unwittingly, one positive legacy - the birth of modern humanitarianism. The campaign to reveal the truth behind Leopold's "secret society of murderers," led by diplomat Roger Casement, and a former shipping clerk ED Morel, became the first mass human rights movement.
Its successors like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Kinshasa-based Voix des Sans Voix and Journaliste En Danger mean abuses in modern day DR Congo can never be hidden for long.

Congo: White king, red rubber, black death will be shown on BBC Four in the UK on Tuesday, 24 February at 2100


Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3516965.stm

 

[water]

Why don't they teach this in schools?????

 

[D-TOWN REP]

Why don't they teach this in schools?????

Real Talk! Reading shit like this makes me want to attack "innocent" white people!!!

 

[water]

The key to unravelling this shit is understanding HOW it happened.......

 

[Motorman]

IT's a lot that we as black people don't know about the white men and their ways.


WHY WOULD THE WHITE TEACHER TEACH THIS IN SCHOOL? they would not.

even the few black teacher i had could not teach black history and if they did it was like two words.

then we move on to how they killed off all the Native people in the new world.


i bet there is more stories about whites killing off blacks for there gain.

very sad to hear this.

this is the first time i heard of this man.

thanx for the BRAIN FOOD PLAYA

 

[elchoccolatte]

i guess it's TRUE you learn something NEW errrday, Good Info Bruh!!!




Preesheateit

 

[keone]

i guess it's TRUE you learn something NEW errrday, Good Info Bruh!!!




Preesheateit

co-sign

 

[PanzerBob]

If your looking for reasons, one would be that the Royals of Europe are and were a bunch of inbreed retards. Inbreeding to keep thier bloodlines "pure". Most of the oppression in this world can be traced back these Royal Thudfucks and their Christian Church Leaders. They kept their own people in virtual slavery, so enslaving and or oppressing anybody who didn't fit their mold was no problem to them.

Royality really pisses me off!!!

I SAY OFF WITH THEIR HEADS !!!!

 

[water]

If your looking for reasons, one would be that the Royals of Europe are and were a bunch of inbreed retards. Inbreeding to keep thier bloodlines "pure". Most of the oppression in this world can be traced back these Royal Thudfucks and their Christian Church Leaders. They kept their own people in virtual slavery, so enslaving and or oppressing anybody who didn't fit their mold was no problem to them.

Royality really pisses me off!!!

I SAY OFF WITH THEIR HEADS !!!!

Nice try there homie........


See my other thread: http://198.65.131.81/board/showthread.php?p=1656218#post1656218

[font=Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif] The Scramble for Africa: Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 to Divide Africa

[/font][font=Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]Meeting at the Berlin residence of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1884, the foreign ministers of fourteen European powers and the United States established ground rules for the future exploitation of the "dark continent." Africans were not invited or made privy to their decisions.
[/font]
[font=Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]Photo from the book [/font][font=Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]The Horizon: History of Africa[/font][font=Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif], American Heritage Publishing Co., New York, 1971, page 452.[/font]
[font=Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]1884-1885 - Berlin West African Conference carves Africa into spheres of control
[/font]
[font=Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]
[/font]
[font=Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]In the second half of the nineteenth century, after more than four centuries of contact, the European powers finally laid claim to virtually all of Africa. Parts of the continent had been "explored," but now representatives of European governments and rulers arrived to create or expand African spheres of influence for their patrons. Competition was intense. Spheres of influence began to crowd each other. It was time for negotiation, and in late 1884 a conference was convened in Berlin to sort things out. This conference laid the groundwork for the now familiar politico-geographical map of Africa.
[/font]

 

[Maximumtrini]

Please. Whites are telling blacks to get over slavery. They would never teach this in schools. You'll hear about the Holocaust a million times though.

 

[gene cisco]

Why don't they teach this in schools?????

Same reason I learned nothing about malcolm x or the black panthers in school but just had martin luther kings weak marching ass pushed on me.

Hell back when hip hop was hip hop groups like Xclan and public enemy and krs one opened my eyes to alot of shit and got me in the library reading!!!!!!!

How christopher columbus exterminated a whole race of natives AND still has a holiday!!!!!!!!!!!

Hell I spent all of 4th through 8thgrade having to memorize all the evil men from balboa to cortez to columbus!!!!!! How they "discovered" everything, how luis and clark were such brave men. How the alamo was soooo important.

Then ifor one month I got to learn about king and harriet tubman, no panthers, no deacons, no NOI, no marcus garvey, just I have a dream and lets get along king. Sad how they want us to be passive

History is written by the victors.

It took me years to unlearn all that bullshit

Of course why would a country that is 75% white teach about all the evils they did to others?

 

[PanzerBob]

Why don't they teach this in schools?????

You'd be surprised at all the shit they don't teach you!!! They give you the basics so you flow with the norm.....if you don't keep studing on your own you'll find you are really an ostrich with your head in the sand. Governments and Religions prefer us that way!!!

 

[water]

For the non-readers, just read the parts I have highlighted in blue.

Think about what is happening in Black America & the world today while reading it.

History really tries to repeats itself.......


Another link:
http://www.formofmoney.com/xKingLeopold.html

King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, 1998, Excerpts

Congo Pre-Western

The Kingdom of Kongo had been in place for at least a hundred years before the Portuguese arrived. Its monarch, the ManiKongo was chosen by an assembly of clan leaders. He sat on a throne of wood inlaid with ivory.<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>

As in much of Africa, the kingdom had slavery. The nature of African slavery varied from one area to another and changed over time, but most slaves were people captured in warfare. Others had been criminals or debtors, or were given away by their families as part of a dowry settlement. Like any system that gives some humans beings total power over others, slavery in Africa could be vicious.

In other ways, African slavery was more flexible and benign than the system Europeans would soon establish in the New World. Over a generation or two, slaves could often earn or be granted their freedom, and free people and slaves sometimes intermarried. The fact that trading in human beings existed in any form turned out to be catastrophic for Africa, for when Europeans showed up, ready to buy endless shiploads of slaves, they found African chiefs willing to sell.<o></o>

The Portuguese recognized in the kingdom a sophisticated and well-developed state – the leading one on the west coast of central Africa. The ManiKongo appointed governors for each of some half-dozen provinces, and his rule was carried out by an elaborate civil service that included specialized positions.<o></o>

Slave Market

The Western Hemisphere became a huge, lucrative, nearly insatiable market for African slaves. Once they were properly baptized, clothed in leftover burlap cargo wrappings, and chained together in ships’ holds, most slaves from this region were sent to Brazil, the nearest part of the New World. They were put to work by the millions in Brazil’s mines and on its coffee plantations, as well as on the Caribbean island where other European powers quickly began using the lush, fertile land to grow sugar. [Rum].<o></o>
Many of the slaves shipped to the Americas came from the Kingdom of the Kongo. Forced-marched to the coast, their necks locked into wooden yokes, the slaves were rarely given enough food, and because caravans usually traveled in the dry season, they often drank stagnant water. The trails to the slave ports were soon strewn with bleaching bones.<o></o>

Starting in the 1600s, a growing demand tempted many ship captains to make the longer voyage to the British colonies in North America. Roughly one of every four slaves imported to work the cotton and tobacco plantations of the American South began his or her journey across the Atlantic from equatorial Africa, including the Kingdom of Kongo.<o></o>
Missionaries

The newcomers built churches and mission schools. Like many white evangelists who followed them, they were horrified by polygamy; they thought it was the spices in the African food that provoked the dreadful practice. <o></o>

The lust for slave profits engulfed even some of the priests, who abandoned their preaching, took black women concubines, kept slaves themselves, and sold their students and converts into slavery.<o></o>

Industrial Revolution -- African Resource Grab

Underlying much of Europe’s excitement was the hope that Africa would be a source of raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, just as the search for raw materials for the colonial plantation economy had driven most of Europe’s earlier dealings with Africa. Expectations quickened dramatically after prospectors discovered diamonds in South Africa in 1867 and gold some decades later. But Europeans liked to think of themselves as having higher motives. The British, in particular, fervently believed in bringing “civilization” and Christianity to the natives. <o></o>

During the nineteenth-century European drive for possessions in Africa and Asia, people justified colonialism in various ways, claiming that it Christianized the heathen or civilized the savages or brought everyone the miraculous benefits of free trade. Now, with Africa, a new rationalization had emerged: smashing the “Arab” slave trader.<o></o>
Livingston

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>All the European impulses toward Africa – anti-slavery zeal, the search for raw materials, Christian evangelism, and sheer curiosity – were embodied in one man, David Livingston. Physician, prospector, missionary, explorer, and at one point even a British consul, he wandered across Africa for three decades, starting in the early 1840s. He searched for the source of the Nile, denounced slavery, found Victoria Falls, looked for minerals, and preached the gospel. As the first white man to cross the continent from coast to coast, be became a national hero in England.<o></o>
In 1866, Livingston set off on a long expedition, looking for slave-traders, potential Christians, the Nile, or anything else that might need discovering. Years passed and he did not return.

The Opulent Philanthropist: King Leopold

The man whose future empire would be intertwined with the twentieth-century multinational corporation began by studying the records of conquistadors. Dutch profits from Java depended on forced labor. Leopold remarked that forced labor was “the only way to civilize and uplift these indolent and corrupt peoples of the Far East.”<o></o>

Leopold had learned from his many attempts to buy a colony that none were for sale; he would have to conquer it. Doing this openly, however, was certain to upset both the Belgian people and the major powers of Europe. If he was to seize anything in Africa, he could do so only if he convinced everyone that his interest was purely altruistic.

Livingston, Stanley, and other explorers, Leopold saw, had succeeded in stirring Europeans by their descriptions of the “Arab” slave traders leading caravan of chained captives to Africa’s east coast. As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recognized that colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitarian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits.<o></o>

For several months before Stanley emerged at Boma, Leopold had eagerly scanned the Times of London daily for news of his fate. At one point he wrote to an aide, “The first thing on the agenda seems to me to check again if Stanley has reached the Lualaba.” As soon as Stanley reappeared, the king sent him a telegram of congratulations.<o></o>

Leopold Hosts a Philanthropy Conference

In 1876, Leopold began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and advance his African ambitions: he would host a conference of explorers and geographers. Leopold’s welcoming speech was a masterpiece. It clothed the whole enterprise in noble rhetoric, staked out his own role in what was to come, and guaranteed his plans a stamp of approval by the group he was hosting.<o></o>

Between sumptuous banquets, those attending the conference pulled out their maps and marked points in the blank space of central Africa for such “hospitable, scientific, and pacification bases.” Before the guests dispersed to their respective countries, they voted to establish the International African Association. Leopold magnanimously volunteered space in Brussels for the organization’s headquarters. The new body was welcomed throughout Europe. Prominent citizens, from the Rothschilds to Viscount Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, hastened to send contributions.<o></o>

Leopold Funds Stanley


In 1878, when Leopold sat down for his long-anticipated meeting with Stanley, Leopold was 43. Stanley was now a best-selling author, recognized as one of the greatest of living explorers. Although Leopold had lived a pampered life in yachts and palaces, Leopold was wiser in the ways of the world. He had taken into measure of Stanley’s ambition, of his immense capacity for hard work, of his craving for constant flattery, and of his need for a sponsor.<o></o>
Of the riches Leopold hoped to find in the Congo, the one that gleamed most brightly was ivory. European and American merchants were already eagerly buying African ivory in the markets of Zanzibar. Ivory from elephant tusks was shaped into knife handles, billiard balls, combs, fans, napkin rings, piano and organ keys, chess pieces, crucifixes, snuffboxes, brooches, and statuettes. In a faint echo of its original use to the elephant, it was made into false teeth. For the moment, such riches lay at least several years in Leopold’s future, for first Stanley had to build his road.<o></o>

Ambitious as his and Stanley’s plans were, Leopold was intent that they be seen as nothing more than philanthropy. The contracts Stanley made his European staff sign forbade them to divulge anything about the real purpose of their work. Leopold sent word that Stanley was lay the groundwork in the Congo for a “confederation of free negro republics,” black tribes to whose president would live in Europe and rule under the guidance of the Belgian king.<o></o>

Congo Chiefs Sign Treaties

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>
The very word treaty is a euphemism, for many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. Few had seen the written word before, and they were being asked to mark X’s to documents in a foreign language and in legalese. The idea of a treaty of friendship between two clans or villages was familiar; the idea of signing over one’s land to someone on the other side of the ocean was inconceivable. Did the chiefs of Ngombi and Mafela, for example, have any idea of what they agreed to on April 1, 1884? In return for “one piece of cloth per month to each of the undersigned chiefs, besides present of cloth in hand,” they promised to “freely of their own accord, for themselves and their heirs and successors for ever give up the said Association the sovereignty and all sovereign and governing rights to all their territories and to assist by labor or otherwise, any works, improvements or expeditions which the said Association shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories. All roads and waterways running through this country, the right of collecting tolls on the same, and all game, fishing, mining, and forest rights, are to be the absolute property of the said Association.” It was an even worse trade that the Indians made for Manhattan.<o></o>

For five years, Stanley was Leopold’s man in the Congo. In June 1884, his work for Leopold done and a sheaf of treaties in his baggage, Stanley sailed home to Europe. He grumbled a bit about his employer’s greed; the king, he complained, had the “enormous voracity to swallow a million square mile with a gullet that will not take in a herring.” But it was Stanley who made the big swallow possible.<o></o>
United States Recognizes Belgium’s Colony

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>

Once one major country recognizes anther’s existence, other nations are likely to fall into line. If no major European country would take this crucial first step, Leopold decided, he would look elsewhere. Unnoticed on his home continent, the king had already quietly begun making a dazzling end-run around Europe entirely.<o></o>

On November 29, 1883, Sanford was received by President Arthur at the White House. He claimed that Leopold’s treaties with Congo chiefs were similar to those which the Puritan clergyman Roger Williams, famed for his belief in Indian rights, had made in Rhode Island in the 1600s. The President cheerfully incorporated into his annual message to Congress text that Sanford had drafted for him about Leopold’s high-minded work in the Congo:<o></o>

The rich and populous valley of the Kongo is being opened by a society called the International African Association, of which the King of the Belgians is the president. Large tracts of territory have been ceded to the Association by native chiefs, roads have been opened, steamboats have been placed on the river and the nuclei of states established under one flag. The objects of the society are philanthropic. It does not aim at permanent political control, but seeks the neutrality of the valley.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>On April 22, 1884, the United States of America recognized King Leopold II’s claim to the Congo. It was the first country to do so. With Leopold’s embryonic state recognized by the United States and later Germany, Leopold was in a strong position.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>In Europe, the thirst for African land had become nearly palpable. Europeans were still used to thinking of Africa’s wealth mainly in terms of coastline, and there was remarkably little conflict over ceding to Leopold the vast spaces he wanted in the interior. A major reason he was able to get his hands on so much is that other countries thought that they were giving their approval to a sort of international colony – under the auspices of the King of the Belgians, to be sure, but open to traders from all of Europe.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>His power as king-sovereign of the colony was shared in no way with the Belgium government, whose Cabinet ministers were as surprised as anyone when they opened their newspaper to find that the Congo had promulgated a new law or signed a new international treaty.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>Most Belgians had paid little attention to their king’s flurry of African diplomacy, but once it was over they began to realize that his new colony was bigger than England, France, Germany, Span, and Italy combined. It was on thirteenth of the African continent, more than seventy-times the size of Belgium itself.

Leopold Develops the Congo<o></o>

At last, at the age of fifty, Leopold had the colony he had long dreamed of. As he prepared to develop the enormous colony, he found a number of tools at his disposal that had not been available to empire builders of earlier times. The tools were crucial, for they would soon allow a few thousand white men working for the king to dominate some twenty million Africans.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>To begin with, there was weaponry - breech-loading rifles which had just shown their deadly power on the battlefield of the American Civil War. They shot much farther and more accurately and used quick-loading waterproof brass cartridges. Another tool that allowed Europeans to seize virtually all of tropical Africa was medical knowledge. Around the turn of the century malaria and hematuria became better understood. Finally, because of the Congo’s unusual geography, one tool was even more important: the steamboat.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>By the end of 1889, there were 430 whites working in the Congo: traders, soldiers, missionaries, and administrators of the king’s embryonic state. Staff in place and tools in hand, Leopold set out to build the infrastructure necessary to exploit his colony. A rudimentary Congo transportation system was the first item on his agenda.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>Leopold began to find himself under financial pressure. He had inherited a sizable fortune, yet by the late 1880s, explorers, steamboats, mercenaries, armaments, and other Congo expenses had burned up almost all of it. If he hoped to turn a profit in exploiting the territory, where was the money to come from? He struck a deal with important members of the Belgian Cabinet, who were beginning to realize that the king’s African possession might someday be quite valuable. If Parliament gave him the loan he wanted, Leopold would leave the Congo to Belgium in his will. To support the philanthropic work he was doing in the Congo, he got a loan of twenty-five million francs [some $125 million in today’s money], interest-free.<o></o>

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>
Leopold: Champions Anti-Slavery

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>People in Europe continued to feel indignant over the “Arab” slave-traders based on Zanzibar and Africa’s east cost. The slavers were indeed spreading a wide swath of terror much of east and central Africa, and the slaves they captured continued to be sold all along the northeast shore of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. But European righteousness over the issue was more intertwined than ever with a growing desire for African colonies. Conveniently, the slave-traders were mostly Muslim, which allowed Europeans to feel still more virtuous about their ambitions. Leopold won much praise for his patronage of Christian missionaries in his new colony; he so impressed people with his vigorous denunciations of the slave trade that he was elected honorary president of the Aborigines Protection Society, a venerable British human rights organization.<o></o>
To the king’s great satisfaction, Brussels was chosen as the location, starting in November 1989, for an Anti-Slavery Conference of the major powers. The Anti-Slavery Conference was a boon to Leopold. The delegates approved plans the king proposed for the fighting the slave-traders – plans that bore a striking resemblance to those for the expensive transportation infrastructure he was hoping to build in the Congo. The king described the need for fortified posts, roads, railways, and steamboats, all of which would support columns of troops pursuing the slave traders. He grandly offered the services of the new Congo state toward this noble end, and asked in return only that the conference authorize him to levy import duties to finance the attack on slavery.<o></o>

Stanley Heads Emin Pasha Relief Expedition

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>Leopold’s ambitions had grown. His desire for colonies inflamed, he was now dreaming of the valley of the Nile. The Sudan, through which the upper branches of the Nile flowed, was under joint Anglo-Egyptian rule. Members of a rebel Muslim fundamentalist movement, the Mahdists, staged a rebellion in the mid-1880s, killing the British governor’s general and rebuffing the British forces sent against them. England was shocked, but the country had too many colonial wars under way elsewhere and decided, for the moment, not to fight this one. The rebels pushed to the south, where, holding out against them, was the governor of the Sudan’s southernmost province. Most conveniently for Leopold, it bordered on the Congo.<o></o>

The governor, Emin Pasha, asked for help from Europe. The Beleaguered pasha was a slight, short German Jew, originally named Eduard Schnitzer. In photographs, Emin’s unmistakably European face, adorned with thick spectacles and topped with a red fez, looks like that of a nearsighted delegate to a Shriner’s convention.>

To lead the Emin Pasha relief Expedition, who was a more suitable choice than Henry Morton Stanley? The explorer eagerly accepted the invitation. He was particularly delighted by the Maxim gun, which he tried out at its maker’s home, satisfying himself that it really could shoot the advertised six hundred rounds per minute. The new gun, Stanley said, would be “of valuable service in helping civilization to overcome barbarism.” The financing for the venture came from sources ranging from the Royal Geographical Society and British traders interested in Emin’s rumored stash of ivory to the press barons who knew that a new Stanley expedition would sell newspapers.

The expedition was to go through Leopold’s Congo, which would require crossing the unexplored Ituri rain forest. Once Stanley found Emin Pasha, he would ask him to remain the governor of his province – but as a province of the Congo state. <o></o>

He departed in early 1887. Stanley slogged through the rain forest at the head of the vanguard column, sentencing a deserter to be hanged and ordering numerous floggings, some of which he administered himself. To those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food. One of Stanley’s officers wrote in his diary, “The natives do not trade, or offer to, in the least. Stanley gave the order to burn all the villages round. It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the native quietly at their day’s work. Some women were making banana flour. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running about, singing. I opened the game by shooting one chap through his chest. He fell like a stone. Immediately a volley was poured into the village.”<o></o>

By the time they finally reached Emin, Stanley and his surviving men were hungry and exhausted. Most the supplies were hundreds of miles behind them with the rear column. Stanley had to ask Emin for supplies. Emin politely declined Leopold’s proposal to join his province to the new Congo state. Most embarrassing of all to the bedraggled vanguard, the rebel threat had eased since Emin’s letters of several years earlier, and he turned out not to be eager for relief. <o></o>

For some months after Stanley’s return in 1890, a controversy boiled in England over the loss of more than half the expedition’s men and over the atrocities committed under his command. The Emin Pash Relief Expedition had indeed been brutal. But those who condemned it were unaware that, compared with the bloodshed beginning just then in central Africa, it was only a sideshow.<o></o>

Stanley “shoots negroes as if they were monkeys” commented the explorer and writer Richard Burton.<o></o>

Leopold ‘s Decrees

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>There were a number of royal decrees from Brussels. The first and most important had been issued on the very day in 1885 that the existence of the Congo state was formally proclaimed; it declared that all “vacant land” was the property of the state. There was definition of what made land vacant. All over the world, of course, land that looks vacant has often been deliberately left to lie fallow while corps are planted somewhere else – especially in the tropics, where heavy rainfalls leach nutrients out of the soil.<o></o>

Leopold did not have the resources to exploit the entire territory, so anther set of decrees carved pasts of the Congo into several giant blocks, whose “vacant land” was leased out for long periods as concessions to private companies. In each of them the state – which in effect meant Leopold himself – usually kept 50 percent of the shares. Leopold was like the manager of a venture capital syndicate today. He had essentially found a way to attract other people’s capital to his investment schemes while he retained half the proceeds. <o></o>

The Lazy Native

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>Leopold’s will treated the Congo as if it were just a piece of uninhabited real estate to be disposed of by its owner. In this the king was no different from other Europeans of his age, explorers, journalists, and empire-builders alike, who talked of Africa as if were without Africans: an expanse empty space waiting to be filled by the cities and railway lines constructed through the magic European industry.<o></o>

To see Africa instead as a continent of coherent societies, each with its own culture and history, took a leap that few, if any, of the early European or American visitors to the Congo were able to make. To do so would have meant seeing Leopold’s regime not as progress, not as civilization, but as theft of land and freedom. <o></o>

Talk of the lazy native accompanied the entire European land grab in Africa, just as it had been used to justify the conquest of the Americas. To an American reporter, Leopold once declared, “In dealing with a race composed of cannibals for thousands of years it is necessary to use methods which will best shake their idleness and make them realize the sanctity of work.”<o></o>

To Europeans, Africans were inferior beings: lazy, uncivilized, little better than animals. In fact, the most common way they were put to work was, like animals, as beasts of burden. In any system of terror, the functionaries must first of all see the victims as less than human, and Victorian ideas about race provided such a foundation.<o></o>

Pursuing the Ivory with Forced Labor

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>As the 1890s began, the work whose sanctity Leopold prized most highly was seizing all the ivory that could be found. Congo state officials and their African auxiliaries swept through the country on ivory raids, shooting elephants, buying tusks from villagers for a pittance, or simply confiscating them. Congo peoples had been hunting elephants for centuries, but now they were forbidden to sell or deliver ivory to anyone other than an agent of Leopold.<o></o>

For Africans, transactions in money were not allowed. Money in free circulation might undermine what was essentially a command economy. The commands were above all for labor. At the beginning, the state most wanted porters. The death toll was particularly high among porters forced to carry loads long distances. Edmond Picard, a Belgian senator, described a caravan of porters he saw on the route around the big rapids in 1896:

“Unceasingly we meet these porters … black, miserable, with only a horribly filthy loin-cloth for clothing, frizzy and bare head supporting the load – box, bale, ivory tusk, barrel; most of them sickly, drooping under a burden increased by tiredness and insufficient food – a handful of rice and some stinking dried fish; pitiful walking caryatids, beasts of burden with thin monkey legs, with drawn features, eyes fixed and round form preoccupation with keeping their balance and form the daze of exhaustion. They come and go like this by the thousands, requisitioned by the State armed with its powerful militia, handed over by chiefs whose slaves they are and who make off with their salaries, trotting with bent knees, belly forward, an arm raised to steady the load, the other leaning on a long walking stick, dusty and sweaty, insects, dying along the road or, the journey over, heading off to die from overwork in their villages.”

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>Stanislas Lefrance, a devout Catholic and monarchist, was a Belgian prosecutor who had come to the Congo to work as a magistrate. Lefranc learned that several children had laughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all servant boys in town be given fifty lashes of whom several were seven or eight years old, lined up and waiting their turn, watching, terrified, their companions being flogged

Lefranc was seeing in use a central tool of Leopold’s Congo. It was the chicotte – a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into long sharp-edged corkscrew strip. Usually the chicotte was applied to the victim’s bare buttocks. Its blows would leave permanent scars; more then twenty-five strokes could mean unconsciousness; and a hundred or more – not an uncommon punishment – were often fatal.<o></o>

The bulk of the chicotte blows were inflicted by Africans on the bodies of other Africans. This, for the conquerors, served a further purpose. It created a class of foremen from among the conquered, like the kapos in the Nazi concentration camps.<o></o>

Force Publique

The framework of control that Leopold extended across his enormous realm was military. After all, without armed force, you cannot make men leave their homes and families and carry sixty-five pound loads for weeks or months. Leopold had made use of African mercenaries ever since sending Stanley of stake out his claim from 1879 to 1884. In 1888 he formally organized them into the Force Publique, an army for his new state.<o></o>

All the commissioned officers and some sergeants of the Force Publique were white, mostly Belgian. All the ordinary soldiers were black. Mercenaries from Zanzibar and the British West African colonies in the army’s first few years were soon outnumbered by soldiers from the Congo itself, most of whom were conscripts.

Children’s Colonies
<o></o>
Even the children were not spared the rigors of Leopold’s regime. “I believe we must set up three children’s colonies,” the king wrote on April 27, 1890. “One in the Upper Congo near the equator, specifically military, with clergy for religious instruction and for vocational education.”<o></o>

The children’s colonies were ruled by the chicotte and the chain. If they survived the kidnapping, transport, and schooling, most the male graduates of the state colonies became soldiers, just as Leopold had ordered. These state colonies were the only state-funded schools for Africans in Leopold’s Congo.<o></o>

As the years passed, many more children’s colonies were established by Catholic missionaries. Leopold subsidized the Catholics lavishly and sometimes used this financial power to deploy priests, almost as if they were soldiers, to areas where he wanted to strengthen his influence.

World’s Fair

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>In 1897, when a world’s fair took place in Brussels, the most talked-about exhibit was on the outskirts of the city, at Tervuren. More than a million visitors came to see this celebration of the Congo. The most extraordinary tableau was a living one: 267 black men, women and children imported from the Congo.<o></o>

There in the park, they were installed in three specially constructed villages: a river village, a forest village, and a “civilized” village. A pair of Pygmies rounded out the show. The “uncivilized” Africans used tools, drums, and cooking pots brought from home. They danced and paddled their dugout canoes around a pond. During the day they were on exhibit in “authentic” bamboo African huts with overhanging thatched roofs.<o></o>

Told that some of the Africans were suffering from indigestion because on snack and candy given to them by the public, Leopold ordered up the equivalent of don’t-feed-the-animals sign. The placard said” THE BLACKS ARE FED BY THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE. They were fed – and slept – in royal stables.<o></o>

These were not the only indigenous people on exhibit at world’s fair and elsewhere around the turn of the century. Perhaps the most appalling case was that of Ota Benga, a Pygmy from the Congo, who was displayed in the monkey house of New York’s Bronx Zoo in September 1906. An orangutan shared his space. Visitors ogled his teeth – filed, newspaper articles hinted, for devouring human flesh. To further this impression, zookeepers left a few bones scattered on the floor around him.<o></o>

The promoter who staged this exhibit was a former Presbyterian missionary who abandoned his preaching for several business ventures. A delegation of black ministers finally rescued Ota Benga from the zoo. He remained in the United States and committed suicide ten years later.

King Leopold Dies

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>In December 1909 the seventy-four-year-old king fell gravely ill with an “intestinal blockage,” possibly a euphemism for cancer. Both in Africa and Europe, Leopold’s death had promised to mark the end of an era. Many Belgians felt relieved; at last they would be rid of the multiple embarrassments of his youthful mistress, his unseemly quarrels with his daughters, and the sheer nakedness of his greed. But it was soon clear that Leopold’s ghost would not vanish easily.

French No Better

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>In France’s equatorial African territories, where the region’s history is best documented, the amount of rubber-bearing lad was far less that what Leopold controlled, but the rape was just as brutal. Almost all-exploitable land was divided among concession companies. Forced labor, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary company “sentries,” and the chicotte were the order for the day. Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold’s regime eventually fled back to escape the French.<o></o>
During this period a scandal erupted in France when two white men were put on trial for a particularly gruesome set of murders in the French Congo; to celebrate Bastille Day, one had exploded a stick of dynamite in the black prisoner’s rectum.<o></o>

Germans No Better

The exclusive focus of the reform movement on Leopold’s Congo seems illogical if you reckon murder by the percentage of the population killed. By these standards, the toll was even worse among the Hereros in German South West Africa, today’s Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance. <o></o>

After losing much of their land to the Germans, the Hereros rebelled in 1904. In response, Germany sent in a heavily armed force under General Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order. “Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot.”<o></o>

Von Trotha’s extermination order stirred some protests in Germany itself, but internationally it was greeted with silence, even though the Congo reform campaign was then flying high. Of the estimated eighty thousand Hereros who lived in the territory in 1903, fewer than twenty thousand landless refugees remained in 1906. The others had been driven into the desert to die of thirst [the Germans poisoned the waterholes], were shot, or – to economize on bullets – bayoneted or clubbed to death with rifle stock.<o>></o>

United States and British No Better

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>Around the time the Germans were slaughtering Hereros, the world was largely ignoring America’s brutal counter guerrilla war in the Philippines, in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed 20,000 rebels, and saw 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease. Britain came in for no international criticism for its killing of aborigines in Australia, in accordance with extermination orders as ruthless as von Trotha’s. <o></o>

Congo Legacy

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than many Europeans than those at work or at war elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”<o></o>

Forced labor became particularly brutal during the First World War. The years after the war saw the growth of copper, gold, and tin mining. It was legal for mine management to use the chicotte, and at the gold mines of Moto, on the upper Uele River, records show that 26,579 lashes were administered in the first half of 1920 alone. This figure is equal to eight lashes per full-time African worker.<o></o>

More than 80% of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe.<o></o>
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]-->

 

[DJB10]

i've only heard the name & i honestly can't tell you where i heard that. but this is a real good & eye opening read. thanks chill

 

[Maximumtrini]

Yup, people don't know what happened in the Phillipines either.

 

[Spectrum]

nice post

 

[water]

Man, there is some fucked up shit going on in the world today.

Its like everytime they show us Africa, they try to burn images of poverty, disease etc so that we would NOT look closely.

If we looked closely we would see all the European/American companies in AFRICA supporting strife while pumping out resources.

They don't show you images of natural resources and WHO are taking it out !!!


Look at this shit

In 1876, Leopold began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and advance his African ambitions:

In 2006: aka Humanitarian Aid



Once one major country recognizes anther’s existence, other nations are likely to fall into line.

In 2006: China treatens Taiwan if they declare independence, they will blow them out of existence



The tools were crucial, for they would soon allow a few thousand white men working for the king to dominate some twenty million Africans.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>To begin with, there was weaponry - breech-loading rifles which had just shown their deadly power on the battlefield of the American Civil War. They shot much farther and more accurately and used quick-loading waterproof brass cartridges

In 2006: He who has superior weaponry is king. See Nuclear countries



Stanley “shoots negroes as if they were monkeys” commented the explorer and writer Richard Burton.

In 2006: NYPD, LAPD and any other PD



To see Africa instead as a continent of coherent societies, each with its own culture and history, took a leap that few, if any, of the early European or American visitors to the Congo were able to make. To do so would have meant seeing Leopold’s regime not as progress, not as civilization, but as theft of land and freedom.

In 2006: We who were brought here are still under this magic spell




For Africans, transactions in money were not allowed. Money in free circulation might undermine what was essentially a command economy.

In 2006: Blacks are still encouraged to NOT CONTROL money but spend




As the years passed, many more children’s colonies were established by Catholic missionaries. Leopold subsidized the Catholics lavishly and sometimes used this financial power to deploy priests, almost as if they were soldiers, to areas where he wanted to strengthen his influence.

In 2006: Which square mileage has the most churches in America? The hood of course.


Nuff said:
Perhaps the most appalling case was that of Ota Benga, a Pygmy from the Congo, who was displayed in the monkey house of New York’s Bronx Zoo in September 1906. An orangutan shared his space.

 

[Rythm]

I've know about this for a while, I've seen the photos as well, and let me tell you, those images are truely heart breaking. They couldn't teach this shit in schools, because it shows their true nature. Their history is so bizarre that they want to just sweep it under the rug

 

[Motorman]

pimpin i don't know about you but i'm MAKING MY WIFE READ THIS POST.

this is just eye drop of wet from my eyes that we don't know about whites in this world..


i'm lost for words playa just lost.

 

[twiggy]

I did learn this in school, In know brother spread the word like aids

 

[Zatoichi]

They Do Teach In Schools But Only In Africa They Taught Me This When I Was Between The Ages Of 17-22. In Africna History Where You Study The History of Africa Before And After Colonization This Is What The Curiculum Over Here Is Missing. Actually We Studied This History Year After Year And Every Next Year Yo Get Deeper Into It Every Africa Region (West, East, North, & South). I Love That Shit FAM.

 

[KLEPTO]

i want to dig that cracka up and kill him again,,,,,i want to pour some acid on his bones and then im gonna shoot him,then hang him, then im gonna kill him again.

 

[BUMBAY DA DOGG]

i want to dig that cracka up and kill him again,,,,,i want to pour some acid on his bones and then im gonna shoot him,then hang him, then im gonna kill him again.

Peace,

Co-sign!

 

[water]

i want to dig that cracka up and kill him again,,,,,i want to pour some acid on his bones and then im gonna shoot him,then hang him, then im gonna kill him again.

The thing is that his children & grandchildren are still benefitting from this genocide................


Why can't his assets be frozen??????

 

[Thothprod]

Heres another interesting piece of info related to this....and it will probably give you new respect for Mark Twain (yea Tom Sawyer ...Huckleberry Finn)....He wrote a book abot this shit...that for many years was out of print...and even The libraries had it hidden away ....Check out the link.....


http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/i2l/kls.html

 

[water]

Overstand King Leopold........Osama looks like a saint!

 

[Sir Good Drank]

The thing is that his children & grandchildren are still benefitting from this genocide................


Why can't his assets be frozen??????



thats some real shit right there

 

[WorldEX]

Re: Anybody seen this killer??????#2

The Congo: How and why the West organised Lumumba's assassination
Review of two BBC documentaries: Who Killed Lumumba?, and Mobutu
By Linda Slattery
10 January 2001
Use this version to print

Later this year the Belgian parliament is due to report on the murder of the Congo's first prime minister after independence, Patrice Lumumba in January 1961. The circumstances of Lumumba's death have been shrouded in mystery for forty years, but as the Congo's vast mineral wealth is once again becoming a focus for imperialist rivalries, documents long hidden in official archives have been brought to light.

Last year, the BBC ran two documentaries on the tragic history of this central African state. Who Killed Lumumba?, was screened as part of the channel's Correspondent series. It drew heavily on the forthcoming new book by Belgian historian Ludo de Witte (The Murder of Lumumba, Verso Books, ISBN: 1859846181, published June 2001). De Witte has put together the facts of the case from official Belgian archives and the documentary also used archive film footage and interviewed surviving witnesses, to show that Lumumba was murdered in a plot masterminded by Western governments.

Mobutu, from the BBC's Storyville documentary series, reveals how the Western powers put Joseph Sese Seko Mobutu in power after the death of Lumumba, keeping him there for 32 years while he systematically looted the country. Mobutu became the west's main Cold War ally in Africa, and the Congo formed the staging post for CIA operations against Soviet-backed African regimes.

The film reveals the very close personal and political relationship that existed between Mobutu and several Western leaders. We see film clips of Mobutu being embraced by Jacques Chirac (now President of France), and sitting next to the British Queen in the royal carriage. For many years, until he fell out of favour at the end of the Cold War, Mobutu remained a friend of the Belgian king, but his closest friends were President George Bush Snr. and his family.

Between 1885 and 1908, some five to eight million fell victim to King Leopold of Belgium's personal rule over the Congo, under a barbarous system of forced labour and systematic terror. In 1959, the Belgium government finally decided to grant the Congo independence. The first elections brought Patrice Lumumba to power as prime minister. But his government was an unstable coalition of regional interests, and collapsed within a week. Sections of the army mutinied and the mineral rich province of Katanga seceded.

Who Killed Lumumba? featured important new material about the Katanga secession. Ludo de Witte has uncovered documents in the Belgian archives showing that Moise Tshombe, who led the secession, acted on orders from the Belgian government, which has always claimed that it only sent troops into Katanga to protect Belgian lives and property. De Witte's researches have shown that the Belgians plotted to dismember the Congo.

US Documents released last August reveal that President Eisenhower directly ordered the CIA to assassinate Lumumba. Minutes of an August 1960 National Security Council meeting confirm that Eisenhower told CIA chief Allen Dulles to “eliminate” Lumumba. The official note taker, Robert H. Johnson, had told the Senate Intelligence Committee this in 1975, but no documentary evidence was previously available to back up his statement.

Larry Devlin, the CIA's man in the Congo at the time, told the BBC filmmakers how he had been told to meet “Joe from Paris”, who turned out to be the CIA's chief technical officer, Dr Sidney Gottlieb. “I recognised him as he walked towards my car,” recalled Devlin, “but when he told me what they wanted done I was totally, totally taken aback.” Gottlieb gave him a tube of poisoned toothpaste, which Devlin was to smuggle into Lumumba's bathroom.

He claims he never did so, because “I had never suggested assassination, nor did I believe it was advisable.” Instead, “I threw it in the Congo River when its usefulness had expired.”

The “usefulness” of the poison expired rather quickly because Lumumba was murdered very soon afterwards, at the hands of Belgian agents.

Eisenhower was not alone in coming to the conclusion that Lumumba must die. A British Foreign Office document from September 1960 notes the opinion of a top ranking official, who later became the head of MI5, that, "I see only two possible solutions to the [Lumumba] problem. The first is the simple one of ensuring [his] removal from the scene by killing him." What steps, if any, were taken to put this plan into action remain unknown.

De Witte's work reveals the steps that the Belgian government took to remove Lumumba. Belgian military chiefs made nightly visits to Mobutu, then head of the army, and President Kasavubu, to plot Lumumba's downfall. Colonel Louis Maliere spoke of the millions of francs he brought over for this purpose. The plot to kill Lumumba was called “Operation Barracuda” and was run by the Belgian Minister for African Affairs, Count d'Aspremont.

The Belgium government ordered Kasavubu to sack Lumumba, who turned to the new parliament and won two votes of confidence. Mobutu then lead a coup d'état and Lumumba was placed under house arrest, from which he escaped only to be captured by troops loyal to Mobutu.

Contemporary film shows UN troops standing by while Lumumba is first beaten in front of Mobutu, then paraded through the streets of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) and finally beaten again. When taken to Thysville prison, he almost provoked a mutiny among the guards.

Count d'Aspremont ordered him be taken to Katanga province and certain death. On the flight there, he and two supporters—Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okite—were beaten so badly the pilot complained the plane was in danger of crashing. All three were shot by a firing squad commanded by Belgian officers and watched by Moise Tshombe.

The Belgian commander of the Katangan police force, Gerard Soete, was given the grisly job of destroying the bodies. Enlisting the support of a friend, they chopped up the corpses before dissolving them in acid. Soete recalls that they were drunk for the two days because, “We did things an animal wouldn't do.”

Both these films do a valuable job in bringing to the attention of a wider audience the new evidence about Lumumba's death and in revealing the way in which the imperialist powers supported Mobutu's dictatorial regime. However, what neither of them fully explains is why the West acted as it did. They present the assassination of Lumumba and the installation of Mobutu as simply part of the Cold War rivalry between the West and Moscow.

The central mystery of Lumumba's death remains. Why was he killed? Why was the might of at least three Western powers bent on eliminating this one man—even as he was held prisoner, reviled and beaten by his captors and was without military or political power. Some say the answer is that he posed a threat to the West because he was a committed Pan-Africanist, and since his death he has certainly taken on the status of a Pan-African martyr.

By late 1959 Britain and America had concluded that, far from representing a threat, Pan-Africanism offered the best chance for preventing revolution in Africa. And Pan-Africanists of much longer standing than Lumumba, such as Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Nyerere, Obote and Azikiwe had also come to power around this time.

The experience of the Congo, with its million-strong working class the largest on the continent outside South Africa, was a powerful factor in bringing them to that conclusion. When strikes and demonstrations broke out in 1959 as the mineral boom ended, the Belgian government decided to grant its colony independence. Their repressive apparatus was geared up to brutalising a divided and dispersed rural population, not an increasingly well-organised working class that was losing its local and communal loyalties.

When Lumumba showed that he could not be relied upon to control the Congolese working class, his fate was sealed. The West decided to make an example of him to the masses and to other African leaders, to show what would happen if they opposed imperialist dictates. Mobutu, who had impressed the CIA on his brief visits to Brussels as Lumumba's secretary, was chosen as the better candidate to safeguard Western interests. Through a mixture of brutality and political guile, Mobutu succeeded in ensuring that the Congo (renamed Zaire) did not become the flashpoint for an African socialist revolution

 

[WorldEX]

I saw these Belgium agents laughing on TV talking how they killed him, beat him, shot him and chop his body and depose his body in barrel of acid. Then dump it in the woods. The agents are still alive, when ask if you have any regrets they said no, they will do it again.

I when to Belgium few times, beautiful country, but I get very angry of what first nation world leaders to Africa. THE CIA had a lot to do with his death.

http://www.un.int/drcongo/history

 

[water]

There is a BBC documentary I'm trying to source called:

BBC - Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death


Torrent: http://www.mininova.org/get/99361

 

[water]

The thing is that his children & grandchildren are still benefitting from this genocide................


Why can't his assets be frozen??????



thats some real shit right there

That's why we blacks in America have to get rid of this divide and rule bullshit we still fall for.

We must have one agenda.........

 

[water]

Heres another interesting piece of info related to this....and it will probably give you new respect for Mark Twain (yea Tom Sawyer ...Huckleberry Finn)....He wrote a book abot this shit...that for many years was out of print...and even The libraries had it hidden away ....Check out the link.....


http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/i2l/kls.html

Good assist..............

 

[rage]

This post is sad but we must uplift ourselves,GOOD POST brotherman.

 

[Dirty Dade]

thanks homie! for this and the other post on the Berlin Conference. Not even the great Dr. J. H. Clarke brought this to light.

 

[water]

This post is sad but we must uplift ourselves,GOOD POST brotherman.

Blessings.........


Current news:


Government inquiry into firms 'fuelling Congo war' attacked

By Robert Verkaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent

Published: 13 November 2006



British-based human rights groups have lambasted a Government investigation into British companies accused of indirectly fuelling the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo for failing to produce a prosecution or deliver a single sanction. Cases originally identified by the United Nations against 11 of the 12 British companies, including well- known names such as Barclays, De Beers and Oryx, have either been "resolved" or dropped, prompting criticism from both MPs and international human rights groups. Only one company, Das Air, is still being investigated by the DTI.

The Commons International Development committee has stated that the failure to satisfactorily carry out the investigations undermined Britain's commitment to international corporate responsibility.

They said: "Given the number of UK companies listed by the UN ... the Government response should have been more thorough."

Two pressure groups against corporate sponsorship of war have asked the Government to investigate the evidence amassed.

A range of allegations first made by a panel of experts appointed by the UN in 2002 include financial and trading activities in violation of international guidelines for multinational companies. A subsequent UN report recommended that four of the 12 British companies should be investigated.

Only one of these, Das Air, accused of being in breach of guidelines by transporting the black mineral coltan from the DRC, is still being investigated by the DTI. A spokesman for Das Air said: "We are co-operating with the DTI investigation but the case against us appears to be full of inaccuracies. We deny any wrongdoing."

The other cases have either been "resolved" or ignored, the human rights groups allege. Yet many British companies continue to trade with the DRC in a way that may be still indirectly fuelling a conflict that has claimed four million lives.

MPs, in their report, said they were also unhappy at the way the allegations had been settled: "We are concerned by the manner in which companies ... were put in the resolved category by the UN panel ... they raise concerns about ... how vigorously the UK seeks to ensure that OECD guidelines are adhered to ..."

Patricia Feeney of Raid, the British based human rights group said: "The British Government's failure to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable corporate behaviour encouraged some companies to continue to exploit the Congo's natural resources in ways that the UN had deemed highly unethical." Carina Tertsakian, lead campaigner for Global Witness said: "The British government has not carried out any serious investigation into the British companies named and there have been no prosecutions ...in the UK or elsewhere ..."

A spokeswoman for the DTI said that all cases were properly investigated where there was evidence against an individual company and that these had either been concluded or the issues had been resolved with the companies. One investigation remained "ongoing".


British-based human rights groups have lambasted a Government investigation into British companies accused of indirectly fuelling the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo for failing to produce a prosecution or deliver a single sanction. Cases originally identified by the United Nations against 11 of the 12 British companies, including well- known names such as Barclays, De Beers and Oryx, have either been "resolved" or dropped, prompting criticism from both MPs and international human rights groups. Only one company, Das Air, is still being investigated by the DTI.

The Commons International Development committee has stated that the failure to satisfactorily carry out the investigations undermined Britain's commitment to international corporate responsibility.

They said: "Given the number of UK companies listed by the UN ... the Government response should have been more thorough."

Two pressure groups against corporate sponsorship of war have asked the Government to investigate the evidence amassed.

A range of allegations first made by a panel of experts appointed by the UN in 2002 include financial and trading activities in violation of international guidelines for multinational companies. A subsequent UN report recommended that four of the 12 British companies should be investigated.

Link: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1963596.ece