Washington and London have decided it is in their interests to back Paris’s military move. With their support, the United Nations Security Council voted May 30 to give its blessing to an “emergency multinational force” led by Paris to intervene in the five-year-old civil war in the Congo. The motion gave the imperialist-led force the green light to “take all necessary means”—the UN euphemism for the use of military force.

Paris will lead an initial battalion-strength group of between 1,200 and 1,400 troops, of which up to 1,000 will be French.

The governments of Britain and Belgium will commit troops to the operation, as will South Africa and Pakistan. London is expected to commit about 200 signalers, intelligence and logistics specialists, and possibly a battalion of light infantry.

This will be the second-largest French military intervention in Africa this year. Paris currently has some 9,000 troops deployed in Africa. Since its 1964 assault on the former French colony of Gabon, French imperialism has intervened militarily in Africa about once a year up to the late 1990s.  
 
Troops in Ivory Coast
To protect French investments in the Ivory Coast, Paris has deployed some 4,000 troops to back the regime of Laurent Gbagbo in that West African country.

The troops are being sent to Congo under the pretext of putting a halt to the five-year civil war there between government forces and those of two main opposition groups, which has resulted in the deaths of as many as 3 million civilians.

French forces will be concentrated in the city of Bunia in the northeastern province, where fratricidal fighting between the ethnic Hemma and Lendu, fostered by the Congolese government and the opposition, has taken hundreds of civilian lives in the past weeks. More than 80 percent of the population of Bunia has fled, including 20,000 civilians who have taken refuge at a compound of the 5,300 UN troops already in the country.

The French troops are supposed to depart on September 1 when a reinforced UN “peacekeeping” force will supposedly relieve them.

The U.S. government, which is increasingly challenging French imperialist economic interests on the continent, is apparently content with Paris taking on this dirty chore. Richard Williamson, the U.S. representative to the United Nations for political affairs, said Washington helped to obtain written support from Uganda and Rwanda, which had opposed French intervention, to support the intervention force. The U.S. government has decided not to deploy troops to take part in the operation, which is under French command.

Earlier this month the Rwandan government described UN plans to send French troops to Congo as “unwelcome.” It pointed to the role of Paris in supplying weapons to the Hutu-dominated government during the Rwandan civil war in 1993 and 1994. French troops also played a key role in covering the retreat by leaders of that government to Congo (then Zaire), in the face of their impending defeat by forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.

One of the opposition groups in Congo, the Union of Patriotic Congolese, has also said it will reluctantly cooperate with the French-led force. The UPC had warned earlier that any French troops in Congo would be considered enemies.  
 
‘Human face’ on Paris’ intervention
Paris is working hard to put a human face on its actions in Congo and throughout Africa. To deflect Rwandan opposition, Paris is said to have insisted that the Security Council spell out that the operation is for a fixed duration and in a specific location.

On the day the UN Security Council gave its stamp of approval to French forces to shed African blood, French president Jacques Chirac announced that his government “will make a determined effort at the G-8 summit to raise the issue of growing poverty and conflict in Africa.” Chirac said he regards Africa as “the neglected continent,” and will press for firmer commitments to “close the growing wealth gap” between Africa and the rest of the world.

At the 22nd Franco-African summit, held in Paris in February, Chirac presented himself as a “tireless advocate” for the interest of the 52 African nations that attended. France, he said, was one of Africa’s “real friends.” Over objections from Washington, London, and leaders of the European Union, Chirac invited Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe to the summit, saying “dialogue was more important than exclusion.”

French imperialism has substantial economic stakes in Africa. The African Franc Zone ties the currencies of 14 West and Central African nations to the French franc, now replaced by the euro. Some 1,500 French companies and affiliates investing in sub-Saharan Africa enjoy an annual export market worth more than $16 billion.

The current fighting in Congo between forces supporting and opposed to the government in Kinshasa intensified on the day before the UN vote. On May 22 the main opposition group—the Congolese Rally for Democracy—announced its withdrawal from negotiations with the Congolese government in Kinshasa to implement an April 2 agreement brokered in South Africa. The agreement called for establishing a two-year interim government after which elections would be held.

In 1997 the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, led by Laurent Kabila and supported by the Rwandan government, overthrew the crumbling pro-imperialist regime of Mobutu Sese Seko, which had ruled Congo with an iron fist for more than three decades.

The Alliance rapidly split in the ensuing factional struggle for control of Congo’s vast mineral wealth.

Kabila declared himself president and cracked down on political opponents. In August 1998 he ordered the mostly Tutsi Rwandan military forces who had helped to overthrow Mobutu to leave the country. This action helped precipitate a military rebellion against the regime in Kinshasa.

While the big-business media portrays the ongoing civil war as a result of age-old “ethnic hatreds,” the underlying cause of the conflict has been the fight by bourgeois forces over land and mineral wealth—the same fundamental reason that the Belgian, French, U.S., and other imperialist powers have repeatedly intervened in Congo over the years.

The rebels, a fractured assortment of groupings calling themselves the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), are based among Rwandan Tutsi forces that had helped Kabila gain power. The governments of neighboring Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi—who had relied on these military forces to defend their borders from opposition groups launching incursions from eastern Congo—threw their support behind the anti-Kabila forces.

By late 1998 the RCD controlled much of the eastern provinces of Congo. It was on the verge of taking the Congolese capital but was turned back after troops from Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia intervened and came to the aid of Kabila’s government.

Kabila was killed by one of his bodyguards in January 2001. His son Joseph Kabila is now president.
 
 
Related article:
French troops out of Congo!  
 
 
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