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The U.S. ambassador to Congo took to Twitter to condemn the deadly attack on “defenseless civilians” at a makeshift refugee camp in the eastern region of the country, which has seen its security conditions worsen in recent months.
Mike Hammer, the ambassador, called the killing “unforgivable” and said the killers “must be brought to justice.”
The New York Times reported that the attack occurred last Tuesday night at the Plaine Savo camp located in Ituri province. Pierre Boisselet, the coordinator of the Kivu Security Tracker, told the paper that there have been 800 deaths in the province within the past six months.
The most recent attack resulted in 60 killings. The paper said the victims had been sleeping in their white tents when they were shot and butchered. Many of the victims were women and children, the paper said.
Congo said it dispatched its own forces to find the suspected killers from the Cooperative for Development of Congo militia, which is also known as CODECO. The group has been blamed for hundreds of civilian deaths and forced thousands to flee.
“I first heard cries when I was still in bed. Then several minutes of gunshots. I fled and I saw torches and people crying for help I realized it was the CODECO who had invaded our site,” Lokana Lussa, a camp resident, told VOANews.com.
The report said these fighters mainly consist of members from the Lendu farming community, which has a history of clashing with Hema herders. The country has placed the mineral-rich province under a “state of siege” since May.
Hassan Khannen Je, an analyst who specializes in the Horn of Africa, told Al Jazeera that the root of the conflict between the farmers and herders can be traced to the “colonial history, which there was a perception that the Hema community was particularly favored.”
“This, later on, evolved to become an ethno-nationalist, religious cult…with a very extremist kind of approach,” he said. There is no government in the region, which is home to 120 armed groups, the report said.
The Times reported that there are nearly 5.6 million people who are displaced in the country as a November.
TRENDPOST: While the United States—the world leader in waging war and massacring millions—condemns the latest Congo slaughter, it was the United States CIA that set the stage for the state of that nation.
On 17 January, 1961, the same day U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address warning the American people that the military industrial complex was in control of the country and robbing it of the genius of the scientists, the sweat of the laborers and the future of the children.
Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first elected president, was executed in a plot that was allegedly designed by the CIA and its Belgian cohorts.
Lumumba was seized, tortured, and executed in a coup supported by the Belgian gang, the CIA, Jacobin magazine reported. He was replaced by the US-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko who the magazine said “laid the foundation for the decades of internal strife, dictatorship, and economic decline that have marked postcolonial Congo.”
The killing occurred while the Cold War was playing out, and the U.S. and its allies could not imagine a world where the raw materials found in the country could somehow end up in the hands of the Soviets.
The Guardian, in a 2011 article, reported that Lumumba’s hope was to use the raw materials to improve the living conditions of its people.
“In Congo, Lumumba’s assassination is rightly viewed as the country’s original sin. Coming less than seven months after independence, it was a stumbling block to the ideals of national unity, economic independence, and pan-African solidarity that Lumumba had championed.”
TRENDSPOST: It is not about civil and human rights that governments fight for… it’s the bottom line.
Last year, in a Trends Journal article titled “COBALT PRICE JUMPS AS SUPPLIES TIGHTEN,” we reported that most of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then shipped to South Africa’s port of Durban. From there, more than 40 percent of it goes to China for initial processing before being sent to battery makers.
With almost all of the world’s cobalt supply chain flowing through just three countries, inventories remain at the mercy of logistical or political disruption or manipulation.
“It’s very easy for countries like China to dominate the cobalt market because it only needs to be in control of a limited number of mines” to skew the market, Julia Kinnard, a professor of economic geology at the University of Witwatersrand, commented to The Wall Street Journal.
Cobalt prevents EV batteries from overheating and can extend the battery life. Cobalt metal is trading at four-year highs at around $71,000 a tonne, Reuters reported. Congo produces 70 percent of the world’s cobalt.