A first statement on the decision by US imperialism to send troops to hunt down the leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)

Obama has just announced US imperialism’s decision to send 100 troops to Uganda to hunt down the leaders of the LRA. Imperialist-funded agency, Human Rights Watch, has created a cover for the actions of their masters by calling for troops from the US or South Africa to go after the LRA to destroy it once and for all.

The LRA has been active in the DRC, South Sudan and Uganda for at least the past 10 years, so they question arises: Why now and who will benefit from this public relations exercise?

From the 16^th to 22^nd October is International Congo week, where it has emerged that the UN and the United States not only knew of the 1997 invasion of the DRC by troops from the Ugandan and Rwandan regimes, as it happened, but the United States actively armed the invasion and genocide in the DRC, having their own military advisors on the ground.

Further, the clashes of the armed groups, including the method of the LRA, involved terrorizing the villages in the mineral-rich Eastern DRC, using mass rape as a weapon of depopulating whole areas so that mining operations for the imperialist companies such as Anglogold Ashanti and fronts for cassiterite mining for companies such as Umicore could go ahead with impunity. Jonathan Oppenheimer, son of Nicki Oppenheimer, is a director of Umicore, listed by the UN as one of the companies involved in international smuggling of cassiterite. Much of the world’s deposits of Cassiterite is in the DRC and is smuggled out through Uganda and Rwanda. Cassiterite and similar metals are used for cellphones, Iphones, playstations and laptops.

[Did Steve Jobs know where and how the raw materials for iphones were coming from? We think, yes].

From 1996 to today, more than 6 million people have died in the DRC as a direct result of imperialism’s wars of plunder. Such is the barbarism of modern capitalism.

The sending of US troops to Uganda to go after an agency that has served imperialism very well over the past 10 years to help clear villages for imperialist mining operations, is to attempt to brush over the real role of imperialism in the region, namely wars and genocide to aid the plunder of the region’s natural resources. It wants to help paint US imperialism as the friend of the African masses, when in fact it is our mortal enemy. The ones who should be pursued for the rape of Africa are the bosses of Apple, the bosses of JP Morgan Chase, the heads of Anglo American, the Oppenheimer family, the heads of the US regime, the head the South African, Rwandan, DRC, Ugandan armies and regimes, UN itself. The anti-Wall Street movement needs to raise these issues. The only force who can give justice to the people from Africa is when the working class in the United States seize power and end this barbaric system of capitalism.

17.10.2011