by DANIEL FISHER
PHOTO/Yasuyoshi Chiba
With allies like Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Washington is causing immeasurable suffering on the Congolese people because they happen to sit on $24 trillion worth of resources that are critical to the American war machine. If Americans want to act in solidarity with the Congolese they should stop pretending that US foreign policy is rooted in justice, and instead support citizen movements like TELEMA that are fighting for change in DRC.
462 military observers, 1,090 police personnel, 18,232 military personnel. At 19,784 uniformed personnel, the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) is the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission on the planet.
With President Trump proposing billions of dollars’ worth of cuts to the United Nations, this 17-year peacekeeping mission (named MONUC prior to 2010) may soon look dramatically different. In between the corporate media’s insatiable appetite (often used for ratings) for Russian conspiracy theories, we have heard some rumblings about the international consequences of Trump’s budget proposal.
Despite 5 million Congolese civilians murdered or dead from starvation/preventable diseases the Congolese can only be tangentially mentioned in the U.S. press. The indifference is glaring when you consider that it is our American allies: Rwanda, Uganda, and the Joseph Kabila regime who routinely murders/detains civilians to preserve his rule, who are primarily responsible for the death toll. Yet, in spirt of this inherent responsibility, the discussion of Congolese peace is primarily centered around achieving American imperial goals.
CNN’s Peter Yeo warns, “If signed, such an order would seriously endanger US foreign policy and national security interests, and put millions of lives at risk”, and Americans should “[r]emember why the US provides these funds to the United Nations in the first place. Promoting global peace and security abroad through the UN prevents conflicts abroad and minimizes the number of people who need to flee, efforts that are directly aligned with President Trump’s policy to keep Americans safe.” Another CNN, report concluded these UN cuts would be “devastating to the war on terror.”
Conflating the peacekeeping missions and other humanitarian UN programs, Colum Lynch of Foreign Policy added that Trump’s $1 billion cut “reflected the White House’s clear desire to jettison America’s traditional role as the champion of the downtrodden and embrace that of a military powerhouse to be feared.”
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