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This article is part of the international report that was presented at the 12 January meeting of the CPGB-ML central committee.
The International Criminal Court has acquitted a notorious Congo ‘rebel’ leader, Mathieu Ngudjolo, of war crimes, although it is well known that as chief of staff of the marauding ‘Front for National Integration’, an armed militia made up mostly of members of his Lendu tribe.
He was responsible, among other things, for a 2003 attack on a village called Bogoro in the mineral-rich Ituri region of the country, in which about 200 people were hacked to death or burnt alive, while female survivors were raped and held in camps as sex slaves. Incredibly, the basis of the acquittal was “lack of evidence”. Although the prosecution asked for Ngudjolo to remain in custody while they appealed, this request was refused.
It should be noted that Ngudjolo’s vicious militia is one of many that operate in eastern Congo, financed, equipped and armed by various imperialist enterprises, whose function it is to safeguard the extraction of minerals from the area and their transportation out of the country. Recruitment to these militias is often facilitated by the puppet governments of Rwanda and/or Uganda, whose cooperation is in any event needed to ensure the militias receive supplies.
It would seem only natural that an imperialist court should be reluctant to condemn an imperialist henchman unless diplomatic considerations made it impossible not to do so.
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From the International Report delivered to the CPGB-ML’s central committee on 5 November
The autocratic government of Museveni is a vassal of US imperialism, serving the latter’s economic, political and military interests.
For instance, it supplies thousands of ‘peacekeepers’ to Somalia to prop up the unpopular US-backed regime in that country, and has opened up Uganda to foreign investment.
Interestingly the New York Times recently claimed that Museveni had stamped out the Lord’s Resistance Army, even as his government was coming under severe pressure from widespread Arab spring-style protests caused by the escalating cost of living. (‘Discontent simmers in a market as Uganda’s economy staggers’ by Josh Kron, 13 October 2011)
Yet the very next day the same newspaper reported that armed US advisers were being sent by Obama to Uganda … to help fight the Lord’s Resistance Army, which it described as “a notorious renegade group that has terrorised villagers in at least four countries with marauding bands that kill, rape, maim and kidnap with impunity … led by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed prophet known for ordering village massacres, recruiting prepubescent soldiers, keeping harems of child brides and mutilating opponents”! (‘Armed US advisers help fight African renegade group’ by Thom Shanker and Rick Gladstone)
This is how the imperialist media cover up the fact that the US military is being sent to protect imperialist interests in Africa – and specifically in the case of Uganda, to influence the award of oil exploration and extraction contracts and try to ensure that they do not go to China.
With this in mind, it is also important for them to prevent one of US imperialism’s most loyal puppet governments being dispatched by the mass uprisings that are taking place in Uganda – a subject on which the imperialist media are almost totally silent.
Moreover, the Lord’s Resistance Army is asserted to have been spreading mayhem in neighbouring countries too, so that although the initial deployment of US military ‘advisers’ will be in Uganda, they will also operate in South Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo – centres extremely rich in oil or other precious minerals – “subject to the approval of each respective host nation”.
