Activist Nathalie Yamb is outraged by the fact that the world is acting as if it had just realized, with the death of Italian ambassador Luca Attanasio, killed in the attack of the WFP convoy, that the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been at war for years. Militias rule Kivu, slaughtering and killing men, women and children. She spoke about the role of the DRC’s neighbours in this conflict, which is underpinned by the exploitation of the country’s mineral resources. Militia abuses, ethnic conflicts for economic reasons, the silence of the major arms-supplying powers and above all the division of the Congolese ruling class are all subjects developed by Nathalie Yamb in a video posted on her Facebook page and YouTube channel this Wednesday, February 24 as the title “DRC: The stakes”. Below is the complete analysis:
“Hello, a European ambassador must be killed there so that suddenly, suddenly, the rest of the world remembers that Kivu has been in a murderous war for years. Yet death is daily in this region. Hundreds of civilians are killed, women are raped, women are ransacked, children are kidnapped and enslaved. The numbers are huge. Men, women and children are dying at a rate that even video game designers would not have dared to imagine.
Eastern DRC, composed of North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri and Virunga National Park, is a territory where armed militias, financed by neighbouring states including Burundi, Uganda and Rwanda, sows death, violence and desolation to appropriate the riches of the soil and especially of the basement. For example, a country like Rwanda may be the largest exporter of coltan while the vast majority of the world’s reserves of this mineral are in the DRC. A bit like Burkina Faso had found itself a major exporter of cocoa at the time when the rebellion of Guillaume Soro had cut in half the Ivory Coast, the first producing country.
Watch the video here :
A recent census counted 122 different armed groups in the east of the country. In the Congo, there were 700 deaths from Covid in 2020, but in the same period, in the country where blessed is cursed, in the province of Ituri alone, the Ugandan militia ADF killed 849 civilians and abducted 534 people, 457 of whom are still missing. These are only the regional figures of one militia over a year. There are 122, all more barbaric than the others. I’ll let you do the math. And while the purists argue over whether to call these millions genocide deaths or not, the slaughter continues.
Ethnic or community conflicts between Banianwouléngué against the Mai Mai or against the Lindou and the Emma, these are examples, are stoked and exploited for economic wars. I told you in my last video, our wars, our conflicts are their business. The five members of the UN Security Council (sic) are the five largest arms dealers on the planet. And it is also home to the companies that need the blood minerals that abound in the Congo, which accounts for 90% of the exports of a country that is ranked as the eighth poorest in the world. But you and I both know that the country is not poor, that it is even one of the richest in the world. But it is its people who are kept in poverty. Another example of irrationality is that the DRC has a gigantic 100,000 Mwt hydroelectric potential, one-third of Africa’s potential. But only 2677 Mwt are installed, of which only 1130 Mwt are in operation due to lack of maintenance. And that’s how only 9% of its inhabitants have access to electricity. It’s like banging your head against a wall.
f it were three local collaborators of the Italian embassy who had died, it would not have made the headlines. It would have been business as usual. In our ruthless world, as long as the dead are black, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really matter. That’s how Africans are always fighting each other or dying of starvation. The main thing, is it not that they never arrive in Europe? While they die in the forests of the Congo or at the bottom of the Mediterranean, it is kif-kif bourricot. On the other hand, coltan, tolsten, cobalt, uranium, tin, diamond, copper, gold they may not, must come to the West. They have to get out of the African bush because we need them for the manufacture of smartphones, laptops, cameras, electronics, electric cars, nuclear and aeronautical missiles, in metallurgy. 80% of the world’s coltan reserves are located in the Congo and 60% of the world’s cobalt is extracted from Congolese artisanal mines where children often dig by hand and where tunnels sometimes collapse by killing or maiming them so that elsewhere in the world people may have gadgets like the camera that is filming this video. The difference is that some are aware of the blood flowing on the hands of Apple, Google, Tesla, Samsung, Bayer, Sony, Huawei companies and others ignore it or pretend to ignore it. But now, you who look at it, you can no longer ignore it.
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I know that in Africa a lot of people don’t like to read, but I would still suggest a comic book entitled «Kivu» that I bought before my expulsion, the link of which I put in comment or in the description box, that tells with a striking reality the situation in the East of the Congo and the bloody relations that link the «clean Monsieurs» of the West with the killer monsters of the equatorial forest. But the international community says that it has already done so much for the Congolese. Here! There is a United Nations operation, MONUSCO, which does not serve much purpose except to keep the macabre statistics of the deaths that are piling up. However, a budget of $1 billion 154 million a year is available to 17,000 peacekeepers who are much better equipped than the Congolese army, which is unable to stop the bloodshed, which is largely a civilian casualty, whose protection is nevertheless the core of the mission for which 14,000 military personnel, 660 military observers and civil registration officers, 591 police officers and 1,050 members of constituted police units have been established since 2010. Ah yes, and then we gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Denis Mukwege, gynecologist, the man who repairs women whose vaginas were smashed by the bumps and the bailels of their rapists. He was also awarded the Olof Palme Prize, the United Nations Human Rights Prize, the Clinton Foundation Prize, the Chirac Foundation Prize, the Sakharov Prize. It is so much easier to buy a conscience by drinking a single person from a mountain of prices rather than to stop the massacres that mourn a country but enrich your entrepreneurs.
The DRC has the possibility of becoming the China of Africa, in terms of population power 100 million inhabitants, in terms of territorial extent, is 2,345,000 km2, in terms of mineral resources. But instead of being a colossus that inspires respect, that propels development, that sends people into space, it is a giant with feet of clay that its little neighbors have been abusing calmly for years and sending its children six feet underground. So it’s true, the outside has its fair share of responsibility. And it is good to remind her, from time to time, that losing a father, a husband or a son in violent attacks does not have to be the prerogative of the Congolese. But what angers me is the inability of the political leaders of the DRC to unite to finally give their country the place that should be theirs on the continental and global stage, and to the people a daily life of peace and prosperity. However, as Mamadou Coulibaly chanted in Côte d’Ivoire on October 10, 2020, a united people will never be defeated. Congo’s misfortune does not come from the appetite for its mineral resources outside the country. The misfortune of the Congo is that its leaders are the corrupt, the thieves, the sold-out, the traitors to the fatherland, the fearless and the thoughtless. The law which establishes that Congolese soil and subsoil are the property of the State is one of the important sources of the current situation. The land in the Congo must be reformed and owned by the local people at the same time as they are given the means to defend their property. I will put at the end of this video the link of one of Mamadou Coulibaly who explains his proposal for land reform in Côte d’Ivoire which may be, why not the basis of a reflection for the Congo.
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We Africans cannot pretend that the Congo is just the “sapeurs” and the “cadenced rumba”. In recent weeks, Congolese President Félix Tchisekedi has taken over the leadership of the African Union. It will be difficult for him to be credible in this role if, at the same time, the situation does not change positively in his country. The minimum he can do is mobilize the energies and attentions around the conflict that is tearing the Congo apart to stop the rivers of blood that are mourning the great lakes region and that honour none of them.we in Africa; it is to obtain the means to train and equip the Congolese army to secure the Eastern zone, which also serves as a base-back for rebellions that seek to overthrow the governments of neighboring countries; it is to reform certain laws to counter the voracious effects of external geostrategic appetite and it is also to invest in human capital. The task is not an easy one, but we must be able to feel the unshakeable will to go to the coal to turn the tide. Let us wish him success, let us help him to succeed, because Africa will win.
Very few media reported the name of the driver who died yesterday. His name was Milambo Mustapha. I present my yako to his relatives and to the hundreds of thousands of families who have lost members in this endless war in Kivu and the Congo. Take care of yourself and see you soon.”
