by Frans Boogaard*
In Eastern Congo, we see today how far VDL-II is willing to go for that: literally over dead bodies.
As angry Congolese burn down Western embassies in Kinshasa and President Tshisekedi begs the international community on his knees for support, the European Union is doing nothing. It ’follows developments’, such as the violent conquest of the eastern Congo city of Goma last week by the rebel movement M23, with essential support from 4,000 well-trained Rwandan soldiers. Without them it would not have been possible to take the city, said former Belgian Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht on Flemish TV.
The purpose of their presence? The unprecedented mineral wealth of North Kivu. Belgian NGOs estimate the value of gold, tin, cobalt and coltan (used, among other things, for mobile phones) in the former Belgian colony of around $24 trillion. According to De Gucht, Rwanda intends to occupy the region for a longer period of time. He speaks of ’pure robbery that is going to be institutionalised’.
Rwanda, one of the largest coltan exporters in the world, can thus help the EU achieve its ’strategic independence’. In this regard the new commission, VDL-II, is doing what Trump says he wants to do with Greenland: to seize sovereign territory and raw materials present in that area.
The difference, VDL-II does not do it itself, but uses Kagame, the Rwandan president, a favourite of the EU who has been in power since 2000. He has been re-elected time and time again with scores close to 100 per cent and has no problem putting political opponents in jail or even having them murdered, as human rights organisations stated on several occasions.
Without the self-proclaimed world champion of human rights, the EU, even saying a word about it, or preventing Von der Leyen and Kagame from having tea together.
Apparently, in the foreign policy of the EU, you have violent bad dictators like Putin and violent good ones like Kagame, but this policy is slowly starting to change. In its last days, the former Belgian government put heavy pressure on the EU to go further than paper condemnations of the violence and half-hearted calls for Rwanda to withdraw its troops.
Belgium wants the EU 27 to suspend both EU development aid to Rwanda and the EU/Rwandan raw materials agreement, while at the same time EU support to the Rwandan army for its UN mission in Mozambique (to protect a controversial billion-dollar project by Total Energies).
Now that M23 wants to advance further with Rwandan support towards South Kivu and possibly even Kinshasa, 1600km away, Commission President Von der Leyen and the EU as a whole have to choose: or get their hands even dirtier than they already are, or finally put on the brakes.
*Brussels based correspondent
By: N. Peter Kramer
