South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) stands in solidarity with the Congolese People amid the region’s battles against M23 rebel forces.
We are a solidarity organisation committed to supporting the struggle of Palestinians. Our commitment to anti-Zionism is rooted in our rejection of racism, colonialism and fascism. Since all struggles against neocolonial oppression are connected, our commitment to the Palestinian cause means standing also with our Congolese sisters and brothers and fighting for their freedom too.
We support the Congolese Solidarity Campaign’s call for solidarity with the Congolese people amid attacks by the M23 and Rwanda Defence Force. United Nations experts say that Rwanda and Uganda are backing M23, and there is evidence that they are using weapons and equipment similar to those used by the Israeli army and US special forces.
This is part of a much longer conflict in which Western mining companies and governments fund various state and non-state armed actors to terrorise and kill villagers. All that to gain access to critical mineral deposits like cobalt and lithium; crucial for the operation of artificial intelligence technology and the production of renewable energy, which hardly ever benefit the Congolese people.
The United Nations has found that companies from Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Canada and South Africa have been key players in Congo’s war economy for decades. Mining companies like Glencore have funded armed actors, looted the country of its vast mineral wealth, and benefited from child slavery. In the past, Israel has supplied weapons and military intelligence in exchange for a monopoly on diamonds.
This neocolonial looting, warmongering and state capture has undermined the sovereignty of the Congolese people, and contributed to horrifying levels of suffering and bloodshed. It has been called a silent genocide, with at least 5.4 million people believed to have been killed since 1996, and a further 6.9 million people forcibly displaced.
This is part of a much longer arc of genocidal violence from the West. Under the control of the Belgian King, Leopold II, from 1885-1908 an estimated 10 million people were killed in the forced labour camps set up to extract rubber. Their deaths came through murder, starvation, exhaustion and disease. If they did not fulfil their quota of rubber, adults and children were raped, had their hands cut off, or were killed. This is how western companies like Unilever were able to make vast profits.
Today, western powers involved in the Congo genocide are part of the same global imperial war economy that has supported and benefited from the genocide of Palestinians. They are also implicated in the ongoing killing of poor black people in Southern Africa, whether through such painfully drawn out processes as starvation and dispossession, or the immediate brutality of gunfire. Through plunder, bribery, tax avoidance, assassinations, arms exports and proxy wars, they have destabilised much of Africa, undermined people’s rights to self-determination and development, and destroyed vital public goods and ecosystems. To counter these malignant forces we must make these connections explicit. The killing of miners in Stilfontein and Marikana is connected to the killing of people in Congo, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Yemen and many other places across the global South.
SAJFP affirms our support for oppressed people across the globe, especially as these conflicts are interlinked and speak to the way Western and global elites continue to loot the resources of vulnerable nations. The freedom of the Palestinian people must come hand in hand with the freedom of oppressed people across the globe, and it is in this spirit that we declare our support for the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo in their fight to be free from neocolonialism, oppression and violence.
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