UNCOVERING THE WEST’S DIRTY WORK

(Review of the Millennium double issue of Covert Action Quarterly, no. 69, Spring/Summer 2000, an issue specially focused on "Global Recolonisation" and the corresponding spread of "hunger, war, eco-destruction")

- Dennis Small

In warning us not to let global market forces run roughshod over the poor, Nelson Mandela has this to say: "The shrinking of the globe . . . has made it even more incumbent upon us to become once more the keepers of our brothers and sisters no matter where they find themselves in the world. Poverty and social inequality remain features of most societies in the world" (Press, 30/9/00).

If you ever get the sneaky feeling that maybe, just perhaps, the Pentagon-CIA-World Bank-IMF-free press-GATT/WTO-World Economic Forum-Transnational Corporation-Business Roundtable-free trade-free market-capitalist enterprise system might not be too bad after all, you should always be able to revive your concerns by taking a look at its underside, at its "Hidden Agendas" to use the pithy phrase and book title of that inspirational journalist, John Pilger. There is something so horribly self-serving and hypocritical about it all, the sort of thing that Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ) specialises in regularly exposing. Indeed, the Millennium double issue on "Global Recolonisation" might be just the shot in the arm you need for renewing your participation in the international campaign for social justice and freedom - it sharpens one's sense of outrage.

Global Pillage And Plunder

First, some incisive quotes from the editorial: "As we enter the 21st Century, the New World Order continues to prevail with a lone superpower and its transnational corporations (TNCs) relentlessly seeking greater and greater hegemony and control over the peoples and resources of our planet. The consequences are unparalleled hunger, poverty and human suffering as the gaping chasm between the few wealthy and the destitute multitudes widens" (CAQ, p.2).

"As the TNCs and banks merge and globalise, in contrast, nations and peoples are fragmented by racism, xenophobia and religious and ethnic hatred - pitted against one another, often in bloody wars - to facilitate easier plunder, to distract people from recognising their common enemy, and to prevent them from uniting to confront this new world order onslaught" (p.2).

"Inevitably, in every corner of the globe people are resisting corporate globalisation, military domination and covert/overt intervention . . . As the 'Battle of Seattle' began to teach thousands who opposed the World Trade Organisation (WTO), unity and action are needed globally as well as locally. The response of the US purveyors of the New World order is ever greater military, covert and overt intervention under the rubric of human rights".

CAQ goes on to examine "imperial recolonisation" and its ramifications in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. This CAQ special issue also looks at repression within the heartland of the new imperialism, the US itself. There are articles on the Congo; Chechnya; Colombia & Ecuador; Iraq; Yugoslavia; India; Seattle and the WTO; hunger; climate change; America's class war; and more.

A particularly interesting article is the leading piece on "US Military and Corporate Recolonisation of Congo" (pp.4-13) by Ellen Ray, one of the magazine's co-founders. A very detailed and heavily documented account is given of the internecine regional politics and their foreign connections. The background to the current troubles stems to some considerable degree from the US Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) role in the overthrow and murder of the Congo's first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. The Congo, which refers here to Zaire, has long been a mineral resource-rich region targeted by Western interests. Until 1997, central to its control by the West, had been the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko. Finally in that year, rebel and allied forces under the leadership of the late Laurent Kabila drove Mobutu into exile. The main body of this Congolese "Liberation" army was in fact composed of Tutsi soldiers from the force which had earlier driven more than a million Hutus from Rwanda, many of whom had been guilty of the terrible massacres in 1994 of Tutsis and even moderate Hutus. Tutsi elements in Kabila's army took a similarly pitiless revenge on Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire.

Then the politics of the region reversed somewhat as it were and later in August 1998: "Ugandan and Rwandan regular troops invaded Congo with regrouped, well trained rebel forces, and began the war to overthrow Kabila that goes on to this day . . . (Kabila himself, of course, was killed in January 2001 with his son, Joseph Kabila, succeeding him, Ed.). Rwandans and Ugandans control most of the east of the country, and there has been a de facto partition, a gross violation of Congolese sovereignty" (p.4). The Rwandan Army is trained and supported by the US; and "vast segments of the Congolese infrastructure, particularly the mining companies have been taken over by US and Western linked multinationals, working with the Rwandan and Ugandan rebels and governments" (p.4). While the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains under constant siege the ruthless exploitation of its people and resources continues. In some ways not much has changed since King Leopold II of Belgium savagely plundered the country during the period of the late 19th/early 20th Centuries.

As Ray well observes: "The Mobutu era began with ardent US support, financial and military. From 1965 to 1991, Zaire received more than $US1.5 billion in US economic and military aid" (p.4). This was the typical pattern, of course, practised with so many other dictators - the Somozas, the Duvaliers, Trujillo, Marcos, Pinochet, Suharto, etc., etc., allowing wealth and resources to be ripped from their impoverished peoples to the US and other Western states. The trade-off has paid a most handsome return to the exploiters. It eventually resulted in the current globalisation of capitalist rapacity, most dramatically signalled by the 1995 inauguration of the WTO.

From the Congo To Colombia

Joseph Conrad's great novella "Heart of Darkness" served as the inspiration for the film "Apocalypse Now" on the Vietnam War. Some of its major themes are just as appropriate to the American/Western experience in its original setting of the Congo - the brutalising experience of imperialism and the corruptibility of human beings, all very deja vu. "Mobutu's corruption and brutality were ignored for thirty years. It was only when the plunder of Western-owned assets and the ruination of the country were nearly complete, when Mobutu's stolen billions had become a worldwide embarrassment, that the US began to seek an acceptable change" (p.5). Prominent among other such cases in the last couple of decades has been that of Marcos, Jean-Claude Duvalier and even Saddam Hussein (although so far he has survived his former ally's attempts to get rid of him), and presently the cynically calculated abandonment and scapegoating of Suharto (compare the current treatment of the Suharto regime by Time magazine, and other mainstream media, with that in the past).

Today, the US is using Rwandan and Ugandan forces for the creation of a "zone of influence" in East Africa. "The eastern provinces of Congo contain 80% of the world's reserves of cobalt, essential to defence and other high tech production. They also contain huge reserves of gold, diamonds and copper" (p.8). As a Western mining executive told a reporter, "sweeping his hand over a geological map of Congo, 'This is all money'" (CAQ, p.8 - quoting International Herald Tribune, 18/6/97). In the new era of globalisation old-fashioned imperialism is thriving! The big US-led push by the West to exploit African resources marks one more stage in an ongoing, painful saga over several centuries. On the dawn of the new Millennium, a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) approach has been dumped on Africa. More specifically, de facto "Balkanisation" (partition) of eastern Congo/Zaire has enabled mineral exploitation from protected enclaves. Meantime, other countries have been sucked into the conflict. For instance, the Mugabe government has committed a lot of Zimbabwe's resources to supporting Kabila's regime and Angola and Namibia are also backing it. Western media machine reports usually play up the angle of African competition while disguising the predatory Western role (e.g. TVNZ One News items on 18, 19 & 22/1/01). Similar items, including an editorial, appeared in the Press (20, 25 & 26/1/01: ironically the editorial [20th] was titled "The heart of darkness").

"The role played by the sale of natural resources in the region - its only real 'cash crop' - is a function of the overriding influence of the profit motive on Western, particularly US, policy" (CAQ, p.9). The Clinton Administration promoted "commercial diplomacy", or what is called "trade, not aid". On his 1998 visit to Africa, President Clinton appreciatively noted that returns on investment had so far averaged "an impressive 35%" (p.9 - quoting World Policy Journal, Summer 1998). In recent times, the politics of the warfare in eastern Congo has become very complicated and messy with even fighting between Ugandan and Rwandan troops as well as tribal conflicts. This region is yet another area of Africa and the world disastrously destabilised by superpower and neo-colonial interventions.

Like Africa, Latin America is also under renewed siege. An article on Colombia and Ecuador by Mark Cook, a long time reporter on Latin America, gives a range of insights into the situations and interconnections of these two countries (CAQ, pp.28-31). TV1, the NZ State television channel, regularly feeds us American "news" propaganda straight from the main corporate machines. In August 2000 an item on a Colombian drug bust glowingly highlighted US involvement to end the drug trade there just prior to Clinton's visit (TVNZ, One News, 28/8/00). But behind the drug-busting facade is the grim reality of US commitment to "Colombia's 40 year old civil war" (CAQ, p.28).

Murdering Human Rights

The US is dramatically expanding its intervention "in Colombia, a country whose military has the most monstrous human rights record of any in Latin America - a record consistent with US 'training'" (p.28). A package of $US1.3 billion in mostly military aid has been approved "to help Colombia fight drugs and guerrillas" (Press, 31/8/00). While the Clinton Administration tried to pretend that the newly boosted funding is mostly to fight drugs, rather than escalate Colombia's internal war . . . "its own allies - both the military and the death squads - are the biggest drug dealers in Colombia . . ." (CAQ, p.28). A major weapon against the revolutionary guerrilla movements is US support for the "'paramilitary' death squads which the US began training during the Bush Administration at the beginning of the 1990s and which, according to human rights groups and even State Department human rights reports, are responsible for the overwhelming majority of murders" (p.28).

Nowadays these paramilitaries are supposedly outlawed. But the death squads continue to prey on unarmed civilians and are routinely protected and assisted by the regular Colombian military. In July 2000, there was a rare media report of a massacre perpetrated by an "ultra-Rightist" death squad, clearly indicating the cooperative working links with the official military - yet another "sign of complicity between outlawed death squads and the military in a 'dirty war' against suspected Leftists" (Press, 12/7/00). This incident followed the Congressional approval of increased military aid. In covertly backing the paramilitaries the US is sticking to the practices it has employed so sytematically in other Latin American countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Argentina and Chile. It can rely on the mainstream "free press" to ignore or obscure the ultimate direction of such programmes from Washington.

Soon after Clinton left Colombia at the end of August 2000 the associated propaganda got a further burst across the world's media. For instance, a picture appeared in the Press (14/9/00) with the message, "Police destroy 90 cocaine operations", and showing "A United States-trained jungle commando . . ." crouching in an illegal coca plantation. According to the caption, anti-narcotics police had been wiping out peasant laboratories used to process coca leaves. A positive spin then on crushing more Third World resistance! Other picture items of this sort have appeared in the Press (20/11/00 & 17/2/01). On TVNZ's American-style 60 Minutes an item presented similarly subtle propaganda (5/11/00). At the end of an apparently even-handed report which denounced murderous Marxist revolutionaries and even worse Rightwing paramilitaries came the propaganda message: we should give the government of President Pastrana (who featured prominently in interviews) all the help he needs.

Ripping Off The World's Resources

Neighbouring Ecuador is used for US military bases and operations, including reconnaissance aircraft flights over Colombia, but the Clinton Administration faced a crisis when a popular revolt in the former country threatened to topple the pro-US government. The Ecuadorian President's attempt to "dollarise" the economy, effectively abolishing the country's currency in favour of the US dollar, led to the uprising (NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark please take note). "Only rich Ecuadorians have any significant holdings in dollars, usually stashed abroad" (CAQ, p.29). In reaction, the US moved to offset the revolt and consequently a slightly adjusted regime "went on to announce ongoing efforts to dollarise, new plans to extract oil from the Ecuadorian Amazon, and more 'privatisation' to attract 'foreign investment'" (p.29).

After the derailment of the revolt in Ecuador: "Opponents charged that 'foreign investment' in the current economic circumstances (where a foreigner in Ecuador can live like a prince on five dollars a week) would amount to allowing foreigners to buy the country's resources for practically nothing and loot them, as has occurred throughout Latin America" (CAQ, p.29). Public opinion polls, despite the US-backed repression, "showed that 70 to 80% of the population dared . . . to express support for the revolt's demands" (p.29). As a surprisingly balanced Press editorial (5/3/01) noted, the indigenous people of Ecuador are stirring and require justice if Ecuador is to avoid serious internal strife in the future.

Throughout the 1990s, there was a deepening US military as well as economic commitment to certain strategic countries in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. "The worldwide deployment of US troops, including to previously neutral or Soviet-allied countries, began in 1991 under a law, Section 2011 of Title 10 of the US Code, allowing the US military to train foreign troops with no regard for human rights restrictions and little or no oversight from US civilian authorities" (p.30). All this is coupled with much public hype about the need to intervene in various countries for supposed humanitarian reasons, e.g. the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) war against Serbia over Kosovo. The rapid deployment capacity of ready reaction US forces is being updated with a requirement now for a force to deploy anywhere in the world within 90 hours (TVNZ, One News, 15/1/00). Strategy and armour are being adapted, updated and developed to deal with small wars around the globe. A strategic review by the new Bush Administration is likely to herald a more narrowly selective interventionist line.

Even the overt "humanitarian" stuff is transparently very selective, e.g. most notoriously the US was obstructionist about any intervention under UN auspices, or otherwise, to help the victims of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Indeed, the UN had ignored warnings about the coming slaughter in Rwanda and later the US and British governments had refused to call it "genocide", with the French being even more seriously compromised - by helping with roadblocks, training death squads, and allowing massacres behind French lines (TVNZ, 60 Minutes, "The Crime of Silence", 22/8/99). These days US Special Forces have been teaching Rwandan troops things like "rifle markmanship" and "tactical skills". They also apparently facilitated the massacres of Hutu refugees in the eastern Congo/Zaire (CAQ, p15). In this post-Cold War New World Order, CIA critic John Stockwell, who, as an agent, once "ran massive, covert CIA operations in Africa", can perhaps shed some more light on American policy (see his "In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story", [WW Norton, 1978] on Angola). Interviewed in 1994, Stockwell was less critical of the CIA. In his view: "The world swarms with threats. He cites the case of vastly over-populated Rwanda, a country he once kept track of for the CIA" ("Cold Warriors Woo Generation X" by Steve Badrich, Namebase Newsline, no.6, July-Sept. 1994, p12).

If there are plenty of perceived threats, there are also plenty of perceived opportunities. The case of Chechnya is yet another case where the politics of oil, Western (again especially US) intervention, and civil/ethnic warfare intertwine. Chechnya, in southern Russia, has been the cockpit of a fierce power struggle following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It has repeatedly tried to break away from the present Russian federation. Within Chechnya the driving force for nationalist independence is a Muslim fundamentalist movement. Russia has brutally tried to subjugate the intransigent state in two wars (the second still being fought). Whatever the rights and wrongs of this particular conflict and its messy politics (CAQ takes a pro-Russia position on this issue), a crucial factor is again Western penetration and manipulation of the region for resources, markets and influence - "part of a larger effort to displace Russian influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia" (CAQ, p.22, quoting William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune, 28/2/00).

The Chechen war is only one of many in the whole Caucasus region involving both other parts of Russia and other states - from Karachay-Cherkess to Kyrgysztan. Among the flood of Western economic and military intrusions there have been "US-NATO military operations in the Caspian Basin" (p.27). In that bastion of pro-American foreign policy, the Christchurch Press (part of the Murdoch empire and long cultivated with US Information Service trips for staff members, etc.), an editorial has opined that: "The US has been trying hard to bring stability to the region, necessary if a pipeline is to be constructed" [so that oil can be pumped out to the West - a point nicely fudged in the editorial!] (25/7/00). Moreover, "the growing importance of the region, and the investment the world has in its stability, mean that powerful outside support is now being deployed in the search for solutions" (ibid). How delicately put. Imperialism can always find the appropriate moral gloss however tortured the circumstances! It should be acknowledged however that even the Press has been gracious enough in recent years to allow the (very) occasional alternative article on things like foreign investment and free trade and seems to be somewhat uneasy about the new Bush Administration. As well, it can publish the (very) odd reasonable editorial like the one on Ecuador cited above.

Globalising Chaos

CAQ's articles on Chechnya by Karen Talbot (and partly by Ellen Ray) constitute another lengthy, detailed and heavily documented examination of regional politics and resource wars (pp.16-27). Talbot records that: "A consortium of 11 Western oil companies now controls more than 50% of all oil investments in the Caspian Basin - these include Atlantic Richfield, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Pennzoil, Phillips Petroleum, Texaco and British Petroleum-Amoco" (pp.22, 23). In this context, democracy is being uprooted almost as soon as it has been trying to take hold. It has become subject to grossly self-interested foreign influences. "On March 17, 1991, 75% of the Soviet people voted overwhelmingly to retain the USSR; nevertheless, within nine months, the Soviet Union was dissolved as Yeltsin took power" with Western support (p.22). This has a curious resonance with the national democratic election ignored by the Bolsheviks soon after the 1917 Revolution.

As in Africa, "Balkanisation" is being encouraged by the West because "divide and rule" enables extractive access to mineral wealth. As oil prices rise or become more volatile and the Middle East gets more unstable with potential violence on a hugely disruptive scale, the more attractive to the West become places like Ecuador and Chechnya where the level of violence is more manageable, or at least may seem so at this point in time. But it is the same old story: "more blood for oil". More generally, there are the related US goals of an oil-rich imperial arc through the Middle East reaching deep into southern area of the old Soviet Union, and the extension of a free trade/investment zone from Mexico through Central America into Colombia and beyond, also tapping into oil and other mineral wealth.

The emphasis in this review of the Spring/Summer 2000 issue of CAQ has been on globalisation and the spread of resource wars as politico-economic competition hots up worldwide. There are other important themes related to globalisation as a number of articles demonstrate but everywhere conflict over resources is central to this process. American economic success over the last decade or so owes an enormous amount to the unprecedented reach of its free trade/investment imperium.

You do not need to agree with some of the perspectives and interpretations expounded in this issue of CAQ to appreciate its value. There is almost an ideological tendency at times to see the American Administration as the Great Satan a la Iranian fundamentalism. Life is a lot more complicated than this and all the political horrors of the 20^th Century - totalitarianism and mass murder by both Right and Left extremists and the multitudinous episodes of "ethnic cleansing" and related strife - are stark testimony to the dangers within. But if you want to come to grips with global capitalism in its deeper dimensions then CAQ is always vital reading, providing us with a quite unique fund of knowledge, insight and awareness, and a real antidote to the mainstream media. A hearty thanks is ever due to the expert and courageous team who produce it.

(For more information, visit CAQ's Website at www.covertaction.org, or e-mail CAQ at: info@covertaction.org. Covert Action Publications, Inc., 1500 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Suite 732, Washington, D.C. 20005. NZ annual sub. is $ US35).

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