by Nylah Iqbal Muhammad, published on Mondoweiss, August 3, 2024
Friends of the Congo Executive Director Maurice Carney and Professor Eman Abdelhadi discuss the intersections between the genocides in the Congo and Palestine. Maurice Carney of Friends of the Congo is an old friend of UNAC, helping to keep us in touch with an African perspective. To understand this is to understand the depth of colonialism in our world. [jb]
Much like Palestine, Congo has a long history of being subjected to colonization and genocide. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, up to 10 million Congolese were killed by the Belgians, who began Congo’s modern history of being exploited for resources like rubber, uranium, and now coltan – which powers almost all technology. In fact, six million people have been killed in the genocide in the Congo since 1996, a genocide committed by Rwanda, with the support of foreign powers like the U.S. and China.
Looking at the genocides in the Congo and Palestine makes clear our liberation and our oppressions all are intertwined. From Israeli billionaires who steal resources from the Congo and use the money to build illegal Israeli settlements, to the surveillance tech that companies use the Congo to create so they can oppress Palestinians.
To discuss these intersections and what activists can do to fight for the Congo, Palestine, and our global liberation, Mondoweiss and journalist Nylah Iqbal Muhammad organized a discussion between Maurice Carney, Executive Director and co-founder of Friends of the Congo, and University of Chicago sociology professor Eman Abdelhadi.
Nylah: Maurice, Eman you both just came back from travels in the Congo and Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Can you talk a little about those experiences and what they revealed to you?
Maurice: The conflict, where the displacement camps are, was shocking. We had a chance to go down south, to the site of Lumumba’s assassination, which is sobering, to say the least. We had an opportunity to go to the mining areas, the mining capital of the world, Kolwezi, where there are major mining companies and artisanal miners. We had a chance to go down into the mines with the diggers.
We also went to the capital in Kinshasa to see some of the programs our partners were doing there. We had a chance to go across the river, Congo-Brazzaville (the Republic of Congo). It was a sharp contrast between Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa (The Democratic Republic of Congo.) We didn’t get a chance to go into the rainforest because there was too much violence in and around Kisangani.
We saw things that we wish we could convey in words or pictures or video but you’ve got to be there to see them. Human beings shouldn’t be living in the conditions that they’re living in those camps. They’re living in little tents on [sharp] volcanic rock, because in East Goma there’s an active volcano there. And then from time to time the militia groups lob bombs on the displacement camps and kill people. It’s horrible.
We’re trying to figure out a way to convey the urgency, the need, in terms of immediate humanitarian intervention, while at the same time focusing on or trying to mobilize people to put pressure on the U.S., U.K., and other governments to cease their support of the Rwandan government.
Rwanda has 4,000 soldiers in the east of Congo, and that’s the primary source of the humanitarian catastrophe. So we’re trying to figure out how to really get global attention on the humanitarian crisis. It’s difficult.
Eman: I think things in the Arab world are extremely tense. I think there’s a huge tension between people’s rage over watching this genocide of Gazans. People are very plugged into what’s happening in Gaza. They’re grieving, they’re mourning, they’re angry.
At the same time, they’re facing enormous amounts of repression from their governments, which are autocratic client states of the U.S. They are doing the work of the U.S. and Israel in suppressing dissent and opposition. Certainly I saw that in Jordan, certainly in the UAE (United Arab Emirates). It’s also happening in Egypt.
Nylah: There are genocides happening all over the world right now. This is not necessarily something new, but I would say that what is new is the mass awakening people are starting to have and the role of social media in putting a spotlight onto these causes.
Eman: Contrasting this with, for example, the war in Iraq. Most of our information was confined to mainstream media outlets [like] CNN, MSNBC, and outlets we know have an investment in the U.S. Empire, and are not objective purveyors of information. They are corporations tied to the interests of the ruling class.
In the mid-2000s, you started to see more independent media breaking out, partly in response to this U.S. hegemonic narrative but also facilitated by social media. Now, anyone can start an Instagram account, a Twitter or a TikTok. We see a lot more information spreading that way.
This is also a time when people are coming out of decades of immiseration, decades of standards of living decreasing, decades of feeling more powerless politically within the official systems, and more empowered on the street in protest.
This culmination is happening with Palestine and Congo, where there’s a meeting between the two and a growing political analysis that sees the world as being controlled by this ruling class, and seeing these institutions that govern our world for how corrupt they are, but also having more tools to communicate and share that analysis.
Nylah: I do want to start talking about tech, because the same companies involved in the genocide in the Congo are involved in the genocide in Palestine, and vice versa. It seems like such a natural point of collaboration.
Eman: Tech is an emblem of this broader structure of power and control. We all received the story that we were at the end of the colonial era, but in reality, the colonial era was transitioning to a different form. That was facilitated by these multinational corporations. You have states and corporations working hand-in-hand to basically enact a new form of colonialism, or a slightly revised version of colonialism.
You have Apple as a multinational corporation that has its own set of interests that are almost like a state, and it can use states like Israel or it can use the instability of a place like the Congo to basically colonize the world, carve up resources. It can decide different populations are disposable or exploitable for labor. It’s important to have a broad analysis of the way our world works because when it’s not Congo and Palestine, it’s going to be other places.
Maurice: One of the things people put forward [as a way to organize people] was the term “tech genocide,” because tech companies are benefiting from Congo’s minerals and causing human genocide.
For me, it was a stretch. Congo has long served, going back to the late 1800s, as a colonial outpost for the extraction of resources that power modern industries. It was rubber for the advanced automobile industry. Copper used in the bullets and weaponry for World War I. It was uranium that was used for atomic weapons that were dropped on Japan, and so on, right up to today, to the coltan in the Congo.
Congo’s modern history, it can be argued in a number of respects, has been in sync with advances in technology. That has been to the detriment of the Congo’s people, because they’ve been living on top of those resources that are needed to power a wide range of technologies.
But I wouldn’t use “tech genocide.” Without technology, our organizing wouldn’t be as effective. We wouldn’t be able to communicate with different people in Congo, especially in Eastern Congo, because it lacks infrastructure. It lacks road infrastructure, it lacks rail infrastructure, it lacks energy infrastructure, with 20% of the population having access to electricity. It lacks tech infrastructure, with 23% of the population having access to the internet.
Of course the tech companies are exploiting the resources in Congo. We were a part of collaborating with international right advocates that brought a lawsuit against five tech companies —Apple, Alphabet, Dell Technologies, Microsoft, and Tesla — for sourcing minerals tainted with child labor.
Nylah: I think I’m definitely getting what you’re saying. Bob Marley was talking about the Congo, Malcolm X was talking about the Congo, Marcus Garvey was talking about the Congo, and this was all before the idea of an iPhone was even a concept. If you think about the exploitation of Africa, and Africans across the diaspora, it takes on many different forms. So we could call slavery the cotton genocide or the sugar genocide. But we don’t have cotton plantations in the U.S. worked by African slaves anymore, still there is slavery here. It’s beyond technology or whatever resource they want at the moment.
Maurice: Yes, it’s capitalism. It’s colonialism.
Nylah: And like what we saw with blood diamonds, it gives people this one tangible thing to stop buying or to buy more ethically. Then they’re like,” OK, I’m done. I did it.”
Maurice: That’s an interesting point, because that is driven more by folks in the Global North as it relates to Congo. If everyone stopped buying an iPhone and boycotted Apple and Samsung, that wouldn’t end the crisis in the Congo. Interestingly enough, it may even make it worse. It’s an element that is not often explored around the Congo. And understandably so.
In 2010, the United States passed the Dodd-Frank Act, a huge financial reform bill that was a product of the bank crisis. Activists in Washington — we were in agreement with it — successfully attached two amendments to the Dodd-Frank Act. Section 1502 is what they call the conflict minerals provision in the Dodd-Frank Act. It said publicly traded companies that were sourcing tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, would have to declare in their SEC ( Securities and Exchange Commission filings) the source of their minerals. The Congolese government responded to this with the premise that if you were to cut off the financing of the rebel groups that were trafficking in these minerals, it would bring an end to the conflict or at least abate the conflict to some degree. So the Congolese government shut the whole artisanal mining sector down, like a ban.
Because it’s still a country trapped in the throes of colonialism, it’s a space for extractivism. That creates an environment of extreme poverty where people’s options are limited. However, one of the options, treacherous and dangerous as it may be, is artisanal mining, which has two traditions. One is a tradition of necessity. The other is thousands of years, and many generations of people mining artisanally in the Congo. But contemporarily, there are about half million artisanal miners across the board, and they have a direct socioeconomic impact.
When you shut that down, you stifle those people who are having some modicum of support to pay for their school fees; to put food on the table, pay school fees for children, or to get healthcare if they need it — all that is shut off. It punishes the local population and drives them deeper into poverty, and may even make it so they turn towards the militia groups.
So when I see people make videos on TikTok saying “I’m going to stop vaping, I’m going to use refurbished phones,” it’s more to satisfy the desire or the need of those of us who are outside to feel like we’re doing something to make a difference.
You should do something to make a difference, but understand what the challenge is — it’s capitalism. Don’t curtail your consumerism and tether it to the Congo. Curtail your consumerism because you see it as a part of the excessive nature of capitalism, and how your consumerism is an integral part of an oppressive system that is having a devastating impact on people in the Global South.
That’s why I appreciated Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s speech at the United Nations. He talked about how the consumerism and the habits of the North are punishing the Colombian people, where the coca plant is vital for health reasons and other reasons to their society, but because excesses in the North, they’ve demonized the plant and put the onus upon the people who are in Colombia, not on practices in the North.
Eman: Part of fighting capitalism is also fighting the structure and the hold these corporations and the ruling class have over our lives and our governments. This goes back to this question of material action — going into the streets, building up workplace organizing, building up unions. We need to be working on all fronts. I’m a radical but I think that includes working on electoral reform and divorcing and reducing the amount of control these corporations have on the most powerful government in the world. Especially as Americans, this is the job, this is the work — strengthening labor as a sort of counterweight to these capitalist forces.
For a lot of folks that started being more serious about boycotting companies invested in the genocide in Gaza, and in Palestinian oppression in general, I think there was this feeling of “Oh my God, everything is tied up, right? Everything, Google, Amazon, Apple — every dimension of our lives.” There’s been this sobering reality of the stark difference between our lives in the Global North and the lives of people in Gaza, Congo, and Sudan. What does it mean to invest so much in our homes while seeing our siblings reduce their lives down to a tent? And even that’s not safe? So I think a lot of people are reconsidering their choices.
I think Maurice is right that these consumer choices alone are not enough to solve any of these conflicts. And in fact, we’ve seen, especially with climate change, a concerted effort to move the onus onto consumers to say, “If you recycled your water bottles, if you looked for a more carbon neutral flight… ” If we all did all of those things, we would still have climate change. We are not the problem.
They are the problem. The ruling class is the problem. They’ve constantly tried to convince us to absorb their guilt and to focus on self-discipline and disciplining each other in all these tiny ways, all the while taking our focus away from the real enemy.
Eman: I think with boycott, like everything else, we need to think collectively rather than individually. We should change our consumption habits in part because of a building of ethical selves. What does it mean for your soul that you just buy, buy, buy, buy throw away, throw away, throw away? But in general, our politics, including in boycotts, need to be moved to the collective.
The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement demonstrates this. Some of our most important BDS wins have been with collective pressure; getting your companies or universities to divest. We’re moving to a more collective model of power building with the same goals and in some ways the same tactics, you know, but less of the atomized decision-making and more towards building power amongst each other and then leveraging that power onto these institutions that can only exist with our labor or our money?
Maurice: One measure of the success of the BDS movement is the response by the state throughout the U.S., to institute laws in order to curb the effectiveness of the BDS movement. We’ve seen the response from elites who criminalize those who participate by making it impossible for businesses to support BDS, or they even have to declare upfront that they’re not a part of it to get contracts with state governments. Texas is probably one of the states that’s out front on punishing people who are connected in any way to the BDS movement.
Nylah: The disgust I feel for the Texan government cannot be quantified. But yes, and we’ve also seen this happen with Congo. Not the same level of criminalization but for example, when they fought to put sanctions on Dan Gertler, somehow Dan Gertler gets the President of the DRC to intervene on his behalf and say “Everything’s copacetic here.”
Maurice: That’s part of U.S. strategic interests in getting access to critical minerals… for this green energy transition. And the European Union and the G8 in combining China’s Belt and Road Initiative, particularly in the Congo in terms of the acquisition of mines.
We have to talk about the compadre class, the local elites and the role they play, and how it is that they’re more in alignment with international finance capital, they’re more in alignment with the Dan Gertlers, more in alignment with the markets in the, in the West, than they are in alignment with the interests of their people. So one of the forces working against the Congolese people are their very own local elites.
But Dan Gertler definitely brings into sharp relief the geostrategic battle between China and the United States. That’s an important element of decision making that’s coming out of the Biden administration and out of the US Congress.
Nylah: And obviously Israel benefits from these exports, even though they don’t technically own a single mine.
Maurice: Without a doubt, those billions that Gertler made in the Congo are being repatriated to Israel. Many of those funds have been used to build illegal settlements and have been given to the Israeli government to fund the settler colonial project. And Gertler himself, he’s the grandson of the founder of the Israeli diamond exchange, Moshe Schlesinger.
Nylah: Going back to this conversation about people working against their own, it reminds me of the Palestinian Authority. There is this theme of empire recruiting the people of those marginalized identities, promising them minimal profits and benefits, and then those people taking that deal and suppressing the resistance of their own people.
Eman: After the second Intifada, the Israelis realized very quickly that it was too costly and too difficult to directly rule Palestinians in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority came in to play that role for them. The Palestinian Authority is comparable to other Arab client states in the region. They basically manage their own population as a sort of layer, ultimately for the interests of the elite ruling class entity within that government and their U.S. and Israeli allies. So the Palestinian Authority is absolutely repressive. It’s absolutely corrupt. It’s absolutely been doing Israel’s frontline dirty work for years.
Nylah: I read this article in Mondoweiss today about the barriers to full-scale uprising in the West Bank. Part of it is the Palestinian Authority.
Eman: Even despite the Palestinian Authority, there has been a lot of resistance in the West Bank, and we are seeing even missiles being dropped on the West Bank now. There have been hundreds upon hundreds of people who have been killed, thousands who’ve been detained. That speaks to the level of anger.
The West Bank is next. We all know that. The point is to ethnically cleanse from the river to the sea. The Likud Charter is very clear that it believes that they have authority, sovereignty over the entirety of historical Palestine. And they are systematically trying to displace and exterminate, to establish that authority.
Nylah: Yes, we need to constantly remember the West Bank in our activism. Maurice, I hear similar rumblings about Congo. It’s ignorance, but I have heard people say “You do realize this violence is happening in isolated parts of the country, right?” to downplay things. That’s ridiculous.
Maurice: You have to acknowledge the diversity of the Congo and what’s happening in different places in the country. But even within that diversity, all of Congo has a colonial legacy, not just part of Congo. All of Congo has been the victim of imperial intervention and colonial legacy. King Leopold II, the Belgians. The United States’ largest covert action in the world was mounted against the Congolese people to remove a democratically elected prime minister, in the same fashion that Mossadegh fell victim to imperial intervention in Iran or Allende in Chile.
So the colonial legacy of imperial intervention, which continues to this very day has really trapped the Congolese people in this system, this capitalist system.
And that initial design, right, as an outpost for the extraction of natural resources , obtains to this very day and shapes the life chances, shapes the possibilities, opportunities for the Congolese people at large. So it is within this context that you have intervention by Congo’s neighbors, neocolonial leaders, agents of neocolonialism, who couldn’t do what they do without the backing of countries like the United States and the UK. So the acute nature of the crisis in the East, or even now in Kisangani and some parts of the West, cannot be looked at isolated from the colonial legacy, from the imperial intervention, from the imposition of elites on the Congolese people.
In the face of the evidence, the historical evidence, in the face of the contemporary realities, it’s difficult for you to splice up the Congo in that way and say that, well, only the East is experiencing acute violence. I mean, poverty is violence.
Nylah: I want to talk about Project Nimbus and the recent WIRED investigation. From the article: “Google has a $1.2 billion cloud contract with Israel’s government called Project Nimbus. Google and Amazon workers, because Amazon’s involved in this too, have been protesting it.
Google says it’s not aimed at military work and it’s not “relevant to weapons or intelligence services, while Amazon has not publicly discussed the contract. But Wired reviewed the public documents and statements by Israeli officials, Google and Amazon employees, and they found that the IDF or the IOF have been central to Project Nimbus since its inception. And that top Israeli officials appear to think that Google and Amazon contract provides important infrastructure for the Israeli military.”
Eman: For any students of capitalism, technology is such an important driver of growth and competition. We are seeing an emphasis on this kind of information technology and surveillance technology. Tech represents about 20 percent of Israel’s economy, which is an enormous percentage. There’s a great book that people should check out called The Palestine Laboratory, that’s all about the way that Israeli companies use the apartheid and the occupation and the successful management of the Palestinian population as proof of how effective their weapons and surveillance technology is. A lot of the normalization with the Arab world happened in order to facilitate these contracts, to facilitate the sale of surveillance technology to autocratic places like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, etc, which is ironic since Israel constantly claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East. Apparently it’s a democracy in the Middle East whose economy is driven by selling and facilitating autocracy in the rest of the region. Of course, it’s also not democratic internally at all, which we all know.
But that’s part of companies seeing the world as open for exploitation, and rendering any population that stands in the way of that as disposable and exterminatable.
Maurice: When you talk about Project Nimbus, I see it as a part of the existing complex of what Israel exports, not just tech companies, but also investment groups and pension funds that invest in “security” and intelligence companies in Israel. It brings to mind, for me, the Pegasus software developed by the NSO Group, which is an Israeli company that produced the software, Pegasus, that are used by mostly authoritarian governments throughout the world. Rwanda came front and center in that equation, where they utilize the Pegasus software from the Israeli company, NSO Group, in order to spy on Congolese dissidents and get into their phones.
I think at the time, the Rwandan government had kidnapped Paul Rusesabagina. He’s the heroic figure of Hotel Rwanda, and brought him back. It’s an illegal rendition, much in the same way that the U.S. used to capture folks and take them to Guantanamo.
The Rwandan government captured Paul Rusesabagina and brought him back, put him in jail in Rwanda, and accused him of all kinds of crimes. And they used the Pegasus software to tap into the phone of his daughter, who was very active in fighting for his release, and vocal, critical, and getting platforms throughout the world to talk about her father and the authoritarian nature of the Rwandan government. So I put it in that context as one of the exports of Israel, right along with the arms sale, right along with the exporting of Israeli offensive forces.
And just before October, Israeli offensive forces were in the Congo training soldiers. And once the genocide kicked off in Palestine, they had to go back. That doesn’t only implicate the tech companies, as I said, but investment banks, Wall Street. The pension funds are, you know, the average U.S. citizen or the average British citizen, their pension funds are invested in these companies that work to wreak havoc on communities and organizers, grassroots activists, dissidents in different parts of the world.
And Israel’s surveillance, most of these cameras and this equipment are used at checkpoints, which again, Palestinians are the only people required to use those checkpoints. So you have a government that is collecting massive amounts of data on one ethnic group. And the world stands by and says, that’s fine.
Eman: You know, it’s so ugly. The world is literally like,” oh, how do you do that? Let me have some. “
Maurice: And we see that in a very stark way in the security state in the United States, how its police forces are trained by Israelis. So if there’s ever a reason for, as we saw in Ferguson, for Black folks in U.S. cities in the United States to be in solidarity with the Palestinians, certainly it is to rail against the security state in the United States that has collaborated with the Israeli security state.
Nylah: And this concept of laboratories has been going on since the beginning of colonization. They’ve tested out sterilization on Black women in Africa, on Black women and other Indigenous women in Puerto Rico. We have seen them test out, you know, medicines here.
Eman: And Israel has tested sterilization on Palestinian women.
Nylah: Exactly. And I always say, right now, we are separated from Gaza by our complicity and by our for some of us, temporary privilege. To think they are testing all of these weapons and they are never going to use it on anyone except Palestinians, you have lost sense and soul. The police dogs that they have, those have been used at the U.S.-Mexico border already. So people are looking at all this devastation and feeling pity. But these are people that you need to be in solidarity with, especially if you are marginalized, because, as we said, this is a laboratory. They don’t realize these weapons, these tactics, everything here that they are doing there, they are thinking about doing to you, planning on doing to you or they will do to you. And all of that should terrify you. No one is safe.
*Featured Image: Dan Gertler is a wealthy Israeli-Congolese Miner who funnels his fortune from the Congo into Israel settlement building.
Nylah Iqbal Muhammad is a writer with bylines in New York Magazine and the Nation.
Maurice Carney is Executive Director of Friends of the Congo.
Dr. Eman Abdelhadi is a Palestinian sociologist and assistant Professor of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.