(see http://news.yahoo.com/u-n-chief-pushes-regional-deal-end-congo-200136806.html)
Also, a group of intellectuals, including Jacques Chirac, Abdou Diouf, Muhammad Ali, Robert Badinter, Leymah Gbowee, Federico Mayor, etc. issued on December 25, 2012 an open letter to the international community entitled “Au Kivu, on viole et massacre dans le silence (In the Kivu, Rapes and Massacres are Committed in Silence) condemning the Rwanda-backed M23 atrocities on the Congolese soil. They wrote among many things: "Un drame que la communauté internationale pourrait arrêter. A l'instant. Il lui suffirait de donner l'ordre aux dix-sept mille soldats de faire leur métier et de remplir leur mandat. Leur métier de soldat. Et leur mission de garantir la paix et la dignité de l'espèce humaine" (Translation : "A drama that the international community could stop. For now, it would suffice to order the 17,000 [United Nations] troops [in the Congo] to fulfill their duty and accomplish their mission and mandate as soldiers. And their mission is to guarantee peace and human dignity”
Now, I will turn to Africanomics for Dummies. To set
the stage, consider Rwanda, governed by dictator Paul Kagame, who’s been running
with impunity a lucrative looting and killing business in the Congo for the
past 15 years.
First, Rwanda is a country that heavily relies on direct foreign aid to pay its government employees. In fact, foreign taxpayers have contributed 40% of the money needed to run the Rwandan government each year and for the last 18 years. Other governments have been reluctant to depositing money directly into Rwanda’s government’s coffers and have opted to help Rwanda through third-world golden bureaucracies known as Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs)!
Second, Rwanda’s dictator Paul Kagame has used efficiently this two-pipeline money design. This is what I call “strategic rip-off of foreign taxpayers”, which consists of a third world country’s accountable use of foreign taxpayers’ money with the sole purpose of perennial and even eternal reliance on foreign aid!
Third, every Economics 101 student knows that real economic growth is a function of economic output or production. Put simply, the more you produce to meet the demand, the more you grow. Therefore, foreign aid can only produce artificial growth, unsustainable in the middle or long run! So what? Only those who have or would have failed Economics 101 have praised Rwanda’s economic “growth” in the last 17 years!
Fourth, Rwanda’s looting of Congo’s natural resources (coltan, gold, diamonds, tin, coffee, tea, timber, etc.) has only produced artificial economic growth in Rwanda. Once the pipeline of stolen and looted goods from the Congo is shut down, Rwanda’s economy and its dictator Paul Kagame will crumble like a castle made of sand. Looting is NO production. By the way, if looting produced growth, Spain, a country that looted most of Latin America for centuries, should have been now one of the richest countries in the world! No need to read Levitt’s and Dubner’s Freakonomics! Read Jean Kapenda’s Africanomics!
Fifth, there is enough information out there to link the dots by associating the dictatorships of East Africa (Rwanda and Uganda) and Central Africa (the DRC), Rwanda-and-Uganda backed rebels groups in the Congo, and greedy and immoral foreign investors. Some of those investors have even strategically installed their businesses, including smelters in Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya, to efficiently take advantage of the looted and stolen goods from the Congo! Their childish motto to justify the looting of the Congo is that Congo’s resources must serve the development of the entire region! As if Congolese have the moral obligation to bail out Rwanda, Uganda, and any other poor country of East Africa! Africanomics for Dummies!
