“Talk about Sudan and Congo” - The words hear round the leftist world. Here's my response - FUCK YES and I’m sorry.
I'm not going to focus on Hasan drama (mainly because doing so would undermine the severity of the concern for Sudan and Congo) and I'd rather focus on giving you the tools and reasons to effectively integrate discussion about Sudan and Congo into antiimperial work.
TLDR: both of these crises are being funded intentionally and profitably by American and Western corporate interests, including the UAE and Apple, who are interested in destabilizing the global South to enable further extraction of extraordinary material and human capital. This leads to them funding genocidal groups such as the RSF and M23 as they are the most effective chaos agents, and are closely aligned to Western allies, either Rwanda or the UAE. We must Center the material causes of this conflict, rather than fall for narratives that erase Western culpability or African autonomy.
So lets start.
Whats Going On?
Frankly, not an expert and you're going to learn more about the actual conflict if you go read the two Wikipedia pages. Both of these conflicts have gone on for more than a decade, have many belligerents all of which are imperfect. The focus for western leftists, so as to avoid justifying or providing justification for further imperialism should be the role of the western imperial powers and thier proxies in these conflicts. With that focus the targets are quite clear: The United Arab Emirates (and more generally the Western powers that fund and transact with them) and Western multinational corporations. Let me draw those threads very quickly:
Sudan - Gold, the RSF and the UAE
Sudan is perhaps the clearest, with the Rapid Support Forces being a internationally designated terrorist group (a word I and reticent to use derogatorily) that has a near formal relationship with the United Arab Emirates that is well known to be funding and arming it, as well as facilitating an extraordinarily profitable gold trade from Sudanese gold. The rapid support forces are the ones currently being accused of being the actual instruments of genocide in Sudan, as alleged by the official Sudanese government in an ICJ Filing.
This ICJ case was dismissed not on the merits, but on a technicality regarding the jurisdiction of the ICJ to even rule against the UAE on the genocide convention. Shortly, this is because jurisdiction (the ability for an international Court to rule against you, or even for u to be brought in front of them) is always voluntary at the time of signing the treaty and the UAE effectively didn't sign the part of the treaty that would give jurisdiction of the ICJ. This is fucking gross, should not be possible under international law but unfortunately is. This is significant because people will try to bring this up as a reason to believe that the Sudanese government was lying when accusing the rsf of genocide, but with literally any information on this it would be clear that that is not what it represents.
So in short an extraordinarily simplified and instrumentalized Narrative of this conflict can be that the United Arab Emirates is funding the RSF in Sudan who are committing a genocide against the non-Arab population in Sudan. The UAE is doing this primarily to facilitate a gold trade, because one of the primary exports of the United Arab Emirates is gold considering they have a “free zone” for gold. This free zone is famously where dirty gold goes to be melted down and made into anonymized bars of gold. It is money laundering, and it along with effective slavery is one of the primary Industries that built up the UAE.
Congo - Rwanda, M23 and Cobalt
The Congolese crisis is even more complicated and long, but the recent uptick and especially the genocide accusations are coming from the actions of the M23 militias. This is a primarily Rwandan funded militia group that has been incredibly accused of committing genocide in their effective annexation of Eastern DR Congo. A large part of this conflict is widely reported as ethnic violence stemming from long term ethnic conflicts following the Rwandan genocide and that is certainly significant but I don't think it should be the focus especially for Western leftists, because what is much more explanatory about why this is so uneven is because Rwanda has a close tie to the West that the Democratic Republic of the Congo does not.
The best example of this may well be the Rwanda scheme in the United Kingdom, which wanted to send rejected Asylum Seekers that were in the United Kingdom to Rwanda. I went to think about how crazy that is, the United Kingdom wanted to send immigrants to a place that is actively invading its neighbor and committing genocide. But it doesn't stop there both United Kingdom Weaponry as well as French and American Weaponry have been found in the arms of M23. And once again there is a more effective and cohesive write-up of this by Amnesty International so my intention is not to go in depth about it but I want to just connect some dots because it is true that Rwanda is more Western aligned than the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and there were lots of reasons for that, but one very well is that Western multinational corporations want to extract billions of dollars of minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and to Rwanda acting to the stabilize them is a very effective.
Specifically Apple has been taken to international court for using blood minerals from the DRC . And this accusation specifically tied to the Insurgent group's actions in eastern DRC to the blood minerals being used by Apple. Apple of course rejects these claims but why the fuck would we trust those Liars.
So putting this together, it seems quite clear that Western multinational corporations who we all know are the largest influence on Western Imperial interests, have they explicit interest in destabilizing and extracting from the Democratic Republic of the congo, and ethnic tensions and insurgents willing to escalate those ethnic tensions offer a perfect opportunity to do so. It is no wonder such escalations are happening, and that only more evidence is coming out that they are being funded by the western aligned power in the area.
What To Avoid and How -
Now that we have some background on this conflict and what to focus on it should be pretty clear that pushing this narrative as effectively as possible is the center when advocating, and then centering action items (boycotting the United Arab Emirates, connecting the boycott against Apple because of Palestine to the boycott against Apple because of Congo etc). But I want to preempt some tricks that the media will have - primarily centering it as a humanitarian conflict or civil war, and not as an outgrowth of American and Western imperialism.
I explained this better in my video but quite simply the media is extraordinarily interested in erasing both African and Western autonomy in this narrative, because they want to justify further intervention in this. This paradox leads to the appearance of this crisis as a completely amorphous blob of entirely unintelligible catastrophes, that we should not be bothered to even attempt to understand but rather as white Western saviors should long to solve. And I want you to watch the media for this because how many of them will mention the United Arab Emirates will be limited and how many of them will mention that America has a strong strategic arms and trade partnership with United Arab Emirates is even fewer. If anyone mentions that the UAE is a member of the Abraham Accords and recognizes and trades with Israel I will be astonished. This is on the side of erasing the intervention and external influence on this.
On the side of erasing African autonomy they will chalk this up to primarily ethnic conflicts that are a consequence of either long held ethnic differences or entirely unintelligible to the Western mind political distinctions. This is in some way true that ethnic and political distinctions matter in this conflict but they are not what is arming and funding the groups, those are very real economic incentives and aims, which must be focused on and undermined to effectively prevent further catastrophes.
The consequence of both of these is that we have a West that is totally innocent and can only do good or die trying, and we have a global south that is malicious and animalistic at worst and incompetent at best, leaving the natural solution for the West to do precisely what it wanted to anyway: intervene and condescend. This narrative supports the very structures that led to the crisis we are claiming to want to solve, but leads to the exact solution that the corporations want: Western intervention that will inevitably cause neoliberal reform, that allows further extraction.
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