CONFLICT IN THE CONGO

THE CONGO is Africa's second largest country, and potentially its richest. It is a country where all the contradictions of imperialism have been thrown together in sharp and violent contrasts.

Poverty and malnutrition co-exist with vast mineral wealth; subsistence farming and food-gathering economies exist alongside profitable mines and plantations; primitive tribal communities exist within the same society as modern industrial cities, and an organized African working class.

The Congolese people have seen in their history the advent European civilization, bringing barbarity and cruelty, the destruction of their native culture and decimation of the -In modern times they have seen the value of their country's exports increasing, and yet the workers' wages and living standards reduced, as the imperialist countries take their profits.

Intervention

They have seen their country's future being discussed by international organizations dedicated to world 'peace', as the prelude to its being plunged into bloody war.

The United Nations intervention in the Congo in 1960 was the second time that the country's fate was decided in the councils of nations by a gathering of the great powers.

The first occasion on which the Congo was disposed of in an imperialist 'Thieves' Kitchen' was at the Berlin Conassembled insperialises the Europe agreed to recognize, as the government of the Congo, the International African Association', which had been founded by Leopold II, King of the Belgians. • This Association proclaimed itself to exist 'for the purpose of promoting the civilization and commerce of Africa and for other human and benevolent purposes'.

What noble and philanthropic aims! And with a crowned head of Europe in charge of the endeavour!

In actual fact, as the "Congo Free State',_the Association founded by King Leopold was responsible for subjecting the African people of the Congo to the most bloody and rapacious colonialism.

Early visitors to the Congo had been impressed by the thriving native commerce and the evident vigour of the people and their culture.

'Flanders'

They remarked on the 'enterprise' shown by the river peoples, and their highlydeveloped trading connections with the interior. They described thriving native villages, with busy forges and tanneries.

On land won from the forests, the people were farmsugar-cane, ground-nuts, sweet potatoes, millet, maize, and bananas. They had vegetable patches which, according to a Belgian traveller, were 'as finely kept as any in Flanders'.

The Congo before its conquest by Belgian imperialism was no African Utopia; but nor was it just the wild jungle which we in imperialist countries like Britain have been brought up to imagine.

Savagery and violence, the 'law of the jungle, were brought into the Congo by European 'civilization'-or, to by the most sava capital, 'red in tooth and claw', bringing the laws of its own jungle.

European travellers who explored the Congo basin in the latter part of the 19th century estimated its population to be something over 20 million. By !).., when the Belgian administration took an official census, it had been reduced to eight-and-a-half million people.

What King Leopold and his capitalist associates wanted in the Congo was rubber, ivory, and, above all — profit; and profits there were to be had.

One of the companies to which the King farmed out concessions in the territory, the Abir Concessionaire Company, made a net profit in six years of £720,000 on a paid-up capital of £9,280. Its shares were at one time being speculated in at £900 to £1,000 per share. Shares in concessionaire companies rose so rapidly they became negotiable in tenths of a share.

Many a Belgian politician or other influential figure held Congo shares, and hence a vested interest in defending the system of exploitation of the Congolese people.

It was a very bloody system. Nowhere in history have the people submitted voluntarily to becoming an exploited proletariat.

Some force is necessary.

Here in Britain we had forcible Enclosure of Common lands; the crushing of peasant revolts; the institution of slavery in the Scottish coalfields; the 18th-century penal code; and the Highland clearances-all part of the process by which the mass of people were deprived of any share of and transformed forcibly into a propertyless class of workers, available for exploitation.

Capitalism is bloody and violent. In establishing its rule in the Congo it murdered millions of people.

Atrocities

The methods of Belgian colonialism led to atrocities with which only the Nazi rule in Europe can be compared.

First the colonialists established an army in the Congo. Then, in 1891 and 1892, they passed edicts under which all the soil of the Congo which was not already cultivated was to belong to King Leopold II; and the people were forbidden to sell rubber or ivory, but were to pay it as a 'tax' to the Belgian officials.

To make sure this tribute was extracted was the job of In 1899, a Congo Free State official told a British consular official about thè methods he used :

'His method of procedure was to arrive in canoes at a village, the inhabitants of village invariably bolted on their arrival; the soldiers were then landed, and commenced looting, taking all the chickens, grain, etc., out of the houses; after this they attacked the natives until able to seize their women; these women were then kept as hostages until the Chief of the district brought in the required number of kilogrammes of rubber.

"The rubber having been brought, the women were sold back to their owners for a couple of goats a-piece, and so he continued from village to village until the requisite amount of rubber had been collected.' Naturally this sort of treatment met with resistance from the people, and it took 20 years of fighting to establish white rule, during which the methods used by the colonizers became more and more barbarous.

It became customary for the troops to kill and mutiliate recalcitrant villagers.

'Each time the corporal ON DECEMBER 1, 1960.

out to get rubber, cartridges are given to him. He must bring back all not used; and for every one used he must bring back a right hand! .. As to the extent to which this is carried on, he informed me that in six months they, the State, on the Momboyo River had used 6,000 cartridges, which means tht 6,000 people Repressive are killed or mutilated.

It means more than 6,000, for the people have told me repeatedly that soldiers kill children with the butts of their guns.' (Evidence given by Mr Clark, an American missionary, for the Casement report.)

Besides the actual massacres, there was the effect on the native people of destroying their means of living. According to the British consul, Thesiger, reporting on the Kasai region, which in 1908 produced 50 per cent of the Congo's rubber :

"The rubber tax was so heavy that the villagers had no time to attend even to the necessities of life • • • the capitas (armed soldiers) told me they had orders not to allow the natives to clear the ground for cultivation, to hunt or to fish as it took up time which should be spent in making rubber.

Death

'Even so, in many cases the natives can only comply with the demands made on them for rubber by utilizing the labour of the women and children. In consequence, their huts are falling to ruin, their fields are uncultivated, and the people are short of food .. and dying off ... This district was formerly rich in corn, millet and other foodstufis . . . now it is almost a desert.?

A saying grew up in the Upper Congo region, Botofi bo le iwa-'Rubber is death':

Profits for the European capitalists, death for the Congolese people. If violence has been harvested in the Congo, we should recognize who sowed the seeds.

To quote again the American missionary Mr Clark:

'It is blood-curdling to see them (the soldiers) returning with hands of the slain, and to find the hands of young children amongst the bigger ones evidencing their bravery •. The rubber from this district has cost hundreds of lives, and the scenes I have witnessed, while unable to help the oppressed, have been almost enough to make me wish I were dead ... Measures LEFT-WING student Nail Karakan of Ankara university in Turkey was murdered last Friday when right-wing extremists attacked him and some of his friends.

The brutal manner of Karakan's death is a measure of the increasingly sharp conflict between the students and the working class on one side and the government, backed by right-wing archreactionaries, on the other.

Left-wing students have recently been demonstrating against the Turkish government talks over the future of Cyprus.

They are demanding that the conditions for settlement should be the evacuation of all foreign bases on the island and a nonnational Cyprus regime (that is not divided into Greek and Turkish).

In the course of these most recent demonstrations Ankara university was occupied by students and petrol bombs were thrown at the increasingly unpopular Premier Sulieman Demirel of the Justice Party.

The extreme right in Turkey's "This rubber traffic is steeped in blood, and if the natives were to rise and sweep every white person on the Upper Congo into eternity, there would still be left a fearful balance to their credit.' In 1908, the "Congo Free State' became the Belgian Congo', as the Belgian parliament voted to annex the terriCriticism of King Leopold's system and its atrocities had helped to bring about this step, but there were two more fundamental reasons why it was taken.

'Rane-offs'

In his search for more 'rakeoffs' for himself Leopold had started granting new concessions to outside interests, such as the American Congo Company — and this aroused the share-buying public in Belgium to take a fresh interest in the Congo.

The second reason was that the Congo as a source of rubber was now declining in importance relative to the Congo as a source of mineral wealth.

In 1906, Belgian and British interests had come together in Union Minière — a monopoly concern to exploit the copper and other resources of Katanga.

In the same year, a railway company, BCK was founded to devęlop a railway system linking Katanga with the ports. A third company founded in that year was Forminière, which was granted exclusive mining rights in Kasai and other parts of the Congo.

All three of the companies were dominated by one giant Belgian trust, the Société Générale, but other interests were also involved — the American Ryan-Guggenheim NTERNA TONAL THURSDAY'S government circles has been clamouring all year for harsher measures to be implemented by government particularly against the students.

Following a series of sharp clashes by students and workers with the police and the troops early this year the of repressive drafted a series repressive measures in relation to the universities.

These would allow police to check student organization headquarters, facilitate the call-up of militant students to force them to do their national service at once, and enable a special squad of university police to enter campuses to " 'intervene' amongst students.

Even these measures, however, were not enough for some sections of the right who demanded an immediate declaration of martial law.

And although apparently reluctant at that time to move in and declare such a law, Premier Demirel was to do so later in the year in June.

For a whole period the national newspapers talked openly of the dangers of a military coup to oust the Demirel government.

Their fear was of both . the right wing's growing impatience for more repressive measures and the increasing militancy of not only the students, but the organized working class as well.

Events finally came to a head in June when the government attempted to introduce amendments to the existing labour laws, aimed at streamlining the trade unions.

In the severe clashes which took place between the workers and troops three people were killed and 200 injured. Thirty union leaders were arrested.

In retaliation 5,000 Istanbul workers staged a sit-down strike in their factories.

Demirel declared martial law on June 7 in Istanbul and Kocaeli province which was to last a month. All administrative powers were vested in a military commander and legal matters were handled by courts martial.

Seriously worried by the developments and the radicalizaPAGE FOUR PRESS Thursday, December 31, 1970