Africa was brutally exploited during the colonial period but after achieving independence, African countries have been further exploited particularly by the United States. This aerticle reveals how the United States politically destabilized and economically impeded ndevelopment in three countries, Somalia, the Congo and Libya. In addition the U.S. is complicit in the commission of major war crimes in these countries.

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Meretricious victory in Libya is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of U.S. digging its talons into African countries in order to expand its empire.   Since World War II, American foreign policy has aspired to gain control of the "Grand Area" which now extends to Africa, expedited by the creation of AFRICOM which may now have found a home on the continent.

Although a misinterpretation, Rudyard Kipling's "White Man's Burden" seemed to reinforce legitimization of imperial powers' brutal exploitation of Africa.   The unconscionable villainy inflicted on the peoples of the "Dark Continent" underwent a number of phases which include the original scramble for territory and the concomitant atrocities, struggles for independence and then postcolonial exploitation in which the United States has played a major role.

Since the sixteenth century when Portugal established permanent settlements along the coasts of Africa to the present day, Europe and the United States constructed a concept similar to that of Edward Said's "Orientalism" but applied to Africa, to justify plundering, massacres and looting of the continent's myriad resources desperately needed to fuel the industrial revolution and then the age of technology.   By perceiving the African people as the "other", colonizers treated them in a somewhat similar fashion as the natives in North America who were considered uncivilized, primitive and most importantly, inferior and superfluous.    The people of Africa were similarly an obstacle to the expansion, enrichment and prestige of the imperial powers of Europe and the United States.   During the industrial revolution, Imperial powers had developed weapons far superior to those in Africa thus providing the mechanism by which they could easily suppress any resistance to their grand designs.

European countries scrambled for territory to purloin resources, force the locals to engage in slave labour, and to establish outposts for their empires.   In the process, they deprived these nations of riches that rightly belonged to them and perpetrated the most heinous crimes against humanity in order to aggrandize their own wealth.

To regulate the fierce competition for colonies in Africa, Portugal called for a conference in Berlin in 1884 which was organized by Otto von Bismarck.   The Berlin Conference crafted a set of rules to guide colonization in Africa.   One of the rules determined which regions each European power had an exclusive right to and another prohibited the establishment of a colony in name only.   By the end of the nineteenth century, Europe controlled all of the territory in Africa except Ethiopia and Liberia.

Despite efforts to regulate the plundering of Africa, a series of crises eventually capitulated Europe into World War 1 when previous rivalries and alliances divided Europe into two opposing sides who slaughtered each other in the bloody trenches of Europe to settle their imperialistic disputes.

One of the most monstrous examples of colonial crimes against humanity took place during the 1890s in the Congo Free State by the blood-soaked hands of King Leopold II of Belgium who seized the opportunity to sell rubber to the embryonic automobile industry in the North but at the expense of 8 million inhabitants.   He forced the inhabitants into slave labour and cut off hands if they failed to meet their daily quotas.

According to the 1985 United Nations Whitaker Report, Germany was guilty of genocide in South-West Africa when it murdered 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Namaqua between 1904 and 1907 in an attempt to supress an uprising against German rule.   The rebellion was quashed by 1908 and the inhabitants were subject to slave labour and a system of apartheid.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the British were preoccupied with consolidating their colonies in South Africa and securing access to their valuable resources, in particular diamonds.   Their primary obstacle was the Zulu Kingdom with its standing army of 40,000 disciplined warriors.   In January, 1879, the British were caught off guard and were defeated in the first Zulu war but with reinforcements, the British rebounded to defeat the Zulus in August of the same year.   Crushing the Zulus was a critical point in South African history since the Zulus were the only power in the region who were capable of resisting white expansion.                                                                                            

Another example of British Imperialism took place when fifty British and French ships arrived in Alexandria Egypt in 1882 fomenting riots in Alexandria in which 50 Europeans were killed.   Britain responded by ordering the British fleet to bombard Alexandria which destroyed most of the city following which British marines occupied the city.   British occupation didn't end until 1936.

There is disagreement about the British motivations for their actions in Egypt which ran the gamut from preserving British control of the Suez Canal to protecting British investors who had financed the Canal.

In addition to Egypt, the UK decided that to maintain stability in the region and safeguard Egypt from the Mahdi forces in Sudan who were in control of most of the country, Mahdi forces would have to be crushed. British and Egyptian forces had already experienced defeat at the hands of the Mahdis, when the British/Egyptian forces attempted to rescue General Gordon in Khartoum in 1885.

In 1898, Horatio Herbert Kitchener led a 9,000 strong force into Sudan and defeated the Mahdist forces in the Battle of Atbara with the use of British machine guns and rifle power, killing 30,000.   British control of the Sudan survived until its independence in 1956.

In retaliation for losses suffered during its first invasion of Ethiopia in 1896, Italy perpetrated monstrous crimes against humanity in Ethiopia from 1935 to 1936 by invading the country with 100,000 troops and 250 planes equipped with mustard gas.   Villages, livestock and water sources were subject to the effects of the suffocating gas.

After Ethiopia surrendered, Marshall Rodolfo Graziani subjected the people to military occupation and a reign of terror in which a total of 760,000 people died, 300,000 during the occupation.

Following World War II, African colonies achieved independence predominately in the 1960s when 35 new African nations were recognized as sovereign states.   But independence did not protect the new nation-states from the plundering and atrocities prompted by European and American greed.   Due to its economic and military power following World War II, the United States emerged as the major post-colonial miscreant in Africa.

Considered the worst humanitarian disaster since WW II, atrocities in the Congo can be attributed largely to the United States and to a lesser degree to Belgium.

When nationalist riots threatened Belgium's control over the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it was granted independence on June 30, 1960.   Patrice Lumumba was elected the first Prime Minister in the embryonic democracy but was marred with a number of blemishes such as declaring his neutrality during the Cold War and harboring dangerous beliefs such as socialism.    His assassination sixty-seven days later remains somewhat of a mystery but it is known that Eisenhower ordered Allan Dulles, Director of the CIA, to eliminate Lumumba.

Mobutu, his replacement, a U.S. hand-picked dictator, was installed as president in 1965 and was heavily subsidized militarily by the U.S. in the amount of $1.5 billion from 1965 to 1991.   Notwithstanding his corruption and brutality, American support was forthcoming by virtue of his anti-communism and his penchant for supporting the American agenda in Africa.

A central tenet in American objectives in Africa was to capitalize on its Congolese, Rwandan and Ugandan allies to secure control of central Africa mainly for the rich repository of resources particularly in the Eastern Congo.   To strengthen their control over the resource-rich Eastern Congo, U.S. empire-builders first armed Paul Kagame as a Tutsi ex-pat living in Uganda, who had organized a militia, so that he could invade Rwanda in 1990 and ultimately become the President.   His ascendancy to president coincided with the end of the genocide in 1994 in which the U.S. bears complicity for delaying the UN from sending a 5,000 strong Chapter Seven force to end the massacres.   The American motivation was to obviate any possibility that the Hutus and Tutsis might negotiate a coalition government thus frustrating the U.S. attempt to install Kagame as leader.

In 1996 and 1998, according to U.S. plans, Rwanda and Uganda invaded the Congo led by Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni respectively, both allies of the U.S., in order to secure control of the vast resources of the eastern Congo.   One of the Congolese strong men who were seeking to replace Mobutu and opposing Rwanda and Ugandan interference was Laurent Kabila who struck alliances with Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia.   The result was a World War in Africa between 1998 and 2002 in which five million people died.   Women were raped, villages destroyed, young girls kidnapped to be concubines and young boys were recruited to serve as soldiers.

U.S. actions in the Congo led to monstrous violations of human rights and an unconscionable level of suffering.   Although the violence has subsided, the Congo people are still experiencing violations to their human rights and widespread suffering.

Since independence, Somalia was ravaged by war for which the U.S. bears some complicity thereby compounding natural disasters such as famine.   Somalia was ruled either by a dictator or the absence of a central authority from 1977 to the present triggering atrocities, starvation and danger from various armed forces.

Successive American administrations since President Carter have coveted the potential for oil and the unrestricted access to strategic ports in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

IN 1977, when the USSR abandoned the corrupt and brutal dictator Siad Barre in 1977, the U.S. became his protector supplying him with weapons, military training and economic aid.   Between 1982 and 1987, U.S. military aid amounted to $192.6 million.   Despite American support, domestic resistance led to the formation of rebel groups who eventually overthrew Barre who had the worst human rights record in Africa.

After the fall of Barre, American strategy shifted to ensuring that only a government subservient to American interests would survive to lead Somalia.   The absence of a strong central authority led to chaos and was exacerbated when the United States abandoned the goals of a 1993 peacekeeping and humanitarian UN mission in Somalia when President Clinton ordered a force of army rangers and Delta force operators to locate and capture Mohamed Aidid, a possible candidate for president who lacked the subservience required of a leader in an American post-colonial nation.

Throughout the 1990s, conflict and strife between rival warlords created chaos and exacerbated the humanitarian disaster.    In October 2004, Somali warlords formed the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) with funding from the CIA who feared that an Islamic government might gain control of Somalia.   They formed a government in 2004 but were unable to control much of the country and proved to be corrupt and incompetent.

They were finally defeated in 2006 by the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) who were established in 2000 and comprised of members of Islamic Sharia Courts who administered justice to maintain law and order.   The UIC's popularity and strength grew in 2006 as they gained control of Mogadishu and most of southern Somalia promoting stability and order.

The Bush administration could not tolerate an Islamic state in Somalia where vital resources and strategic locations were at stake.   To oust the UIC, Bush planned an attack on Somalia through its proxy, Ethiopia, but at the same time, American forces were involved in the assault on the UIC with U.S. Navy warships and AC-1130 gunships.   The purpose of the invasion was to drive the UIC out of power and to install the more American-friendly TFG.

Ethiopia's U.S.-supported invasion of Ethiopia deepened an already tragic humanitarian crisis triggering a war between al-Shabaab, the radical wing of the UIC, and the Ethiopian forces and their allies, the TFG.    As a result of the invasion, Ethiopian forces indiscriminately shelled civilian areas in the capital and moved from house to house kidnapping hundreds of men.   TFG forces also kidnapped children to serve as soldiers in their army.

According to UN estimates 600,000 people became refugees in 2007 and another further 800,000 in 2008.   Human rights abuses of the refugees included torture, killings and attacks on schools and hospitals.

In 2009, a coalition government was formed and parliament was expanded to include various factions in Somalia.   In the same year, Ethiopia finally withdrew from Somalia.   As of June 1, 2011, an ongoing warfare between al-Shabaab and the TFG has precipitated a further humanitarian crisis as 1.46 million people have been internally displaced and 750,000 have become refugees.

By supporting dictators, Ethiopia and the TFG, American actions in Somalia have completely destabilized the country and impeded any kind of economic or social development.

An ostensible mission to protect civilians in Libya, sanctioned by Security Council Resolution 1973, was bastardized into a mission to lend support to the rebels and to overthrow Gadhafi.

The most probable motive for the U.S. participation in the Libyan "humanitarian" campaign pertains to the refusal of Gadhafi to support American plans for the region and his attempts to create an independent Africa free of American influence.   He has challenged the institutions of global capital such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO and has refused to join American military alliances, in particular, AFRICOM.

The composition of the forces opposing Gadhafi consists of a wide range of groups each with their own agenda but with a common purpose to oust Gadhafi from power.

One group called the National Transitional Council (NTC) located in Benghazi formed on February 27, 2011, to act as the political face of the rebellion.   It has been funded by NATO and the NTC is their choice to replace Gadhafi As the next government primarily because they are NATO-friendly especially regarding oil resources

One group, The National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) established on October 7, 1981, was trained and supported by the CIA and was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Gadhafi on May 8, 1984.

Another major organization engaged in overthrowing Gadhafi was the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) who had close ties to al Qaeda and has been designated as a terrorist group by the state Department.

The differences in the groups in the campaign and the mission of Gadhafi loyalists to defeat the rebel forces leaves Libya with a very uncertain future.

Violations of Resolution 1973 relate to the weapons supplied to the rebels, NATO weapons used against Gadhafi forces and loyalists and the supply of military personnel on the ground assisting rebel forces.   In addition, NATO forces acted as air cover for the rebel forces destroying any obstacles on their march to Tripoli.   The World Health Organization reports that 120,000 refugees have fled to neighboring states.

As well, NATO warplanes bombed the pipe factory in Brega killing six people.   These pipes were used to repair the man-made irrigation system that supplies water to 70% of the Libyan people and is critical to repairing and maintaining their water supply.

It is clear that the U.S. and NATO forces had no intention of complying with Resolution 1973 and embarked on their own agenda to support the rebels in their campaign to overthrow Gadhafi.    In the process many civilians died and NATO intervened in a purely civil war to serve their own interests without proper authorization.  

American imperialism in Africa since World War II has cast a very dark shadow over Africa destabilizing a number of countries, killing an egregious number of civilians and forcing many people to become refugees.   When Africa cast off the shackles of colonialism, little did they realize that they would be replaced with the manacles of neocolonialism.   Development, progress, human rights and democracy are still a distant dream for many countries in Africa.

Authors Website: http://consuming-ourselves.blogspot/

Authors Bio:
I have been a professor of political science at Seneca College in Toronto. I have published five books the last of which "Selling Out: Consuming Ourselves to Death" was released in May/08. As well, I have been featured in CounterPunch, Z Magazine,Dissenting Voice and College Quarterly. Additionally, I have delivered numerous papers at international academic conferences including Cambridge and Oxford.