From Congo to Palestine, to the World: The Interconnected Fight for Liberation

The global genocide and exploitation of Congo dates back to the 16th century following the pillaging of Congo’s natural resources for colonial interests, and the brutalization of the Congolese people’s bodies, villages, women, and other civilians. Congo has been at the focus of the world’s deadliest conflict since 1945 involving 5.4 million deaths. Surrounding countries are involved in the ravaging of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s mineral wealth. More recently, hundreds of thousands of children, girls, and women are abducted, brutalized, and are forcefully made to work, some as sex slaves, and even UN peacekeepers do not do much to protect citizens and instead participate in these abuses and plunder.

 

 

At the center of the plight of the people of Congo, are unsafe and violent resource extraction projects. Home demolitions, evictions, displacement, targeted violence on activists and land defenders, and child exploitation are commonplace in these unsafe mines, with one of them caving in 2019 killing a total of 49 people.

 

 

Since the 1990s, Congo has been at the center of mass atrocities at the hands of Belgian colonizers led by King Leopold, amassing more casualties than the holocaust in an exploitative, brutal, and tortuous regime with farming rubber, ivory, and minerals for profit at the heart of its interests. Now, neo-colonial traditions continue to harm the Congolese people– history has not changed as children are still being abused for profit, women are still raped, villages are still being pillaged, and men are still being killed. A large part of what exacerbates the exploitative conditions in Congo are large mining companies that seek to pillage Congo’s wealth of natural resources to continue to wage imperialist wars on other nations. 

 

 

For example, grave human rights abuses are almost essential within Congo’s mines– massacre, genocide, environmental destruction, mines that Glencore, the world leading producer of cobalt in the DRC, and one of its subsidiaries, Katanga Mining have greatly benefitted from. Aside from this, these mining operations are responsible for up to 80% of the destruction of the ecosystem and cause the pollution of rivers, air, and soils that lead to chronic illnesses affecting surrounding communities. 

 

 

However, Glencore is not only active in inciting violence in Congo, but also in other nations– to pacify community resistance at mining sites, a large part of Glencore’s subsidiaries also employ numerous private security companies managed by former apartheid South African soldiers that are responsible for human rights violations in Namibia and Angola. 

 

 

The company is also in corruption scandals after allegedly paying 75 million euros to Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler who bribed officials in Gecamines to secure mining agreements. This tracks, seeing as Israel’s genocide of Gaza utilizes bombs, jets, tanks, and guns used by Israeli forces in their Palestinian occupation are directly produced from destructive mining operations in Congo, Columbia, South Africa, West Papua, and Bougainville. 

 

 

Our oppressors are not all that different, but are interconnected and the same. The brutal cycle of community resistance at mining sites which are pacificied via military repression fueled by minerals from other conflict zones does not start and end with Glencore. Unfortunately, it is not an isolated incident as seen in the case of Rio Tinto, a subsidiary of Bougainville Copper. Rio Tinto has polluted the Bougainville’s river systems killing aquatic life, land based livelihoods, and sacred spiritual sites in the area. They have also supplied helicopters to the Papua New Guinea army to pacify anti-mining and independence movements, commit torture, and launch extrajudicial killings, killing over 20,000 Bougainvilleans by the end of the decade. The same company is also responsible for human rights violations in Madagascar, West Papua, and Lonmin in the Marikana massacre. 

 

 

Human rights violations in the nations of the world’s oppressed majority range far and wide, but our oppressors remain exactly the same. The fight for a free Congo, is one with the fight for a free Palestine and a free world for the oppressed masses of the globe. As we recognize how each of our struggles for national liberation is interconnected, we must also come together to fight for what will be our joint liberation. Through finding strength in international solidarity of the oppressed peoples of the world, we shed the view that these issues of violence and abuse are separate instead of a shared fight against imperialism, colonization, and exploitation.

 

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