French feel gagged by Gov't on Lisbon

Let's see. The French rejected the Lisbon Treaty (Constitutional Treaty) when put to a referendum in 2005. But magically, according to Sarkozy and Merkel, the populace has changed its mind in 2009. This video shows the populace of France not allowed to express their opinions on this important treaty.

I wonder who is telling the truth? The French people, or Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel? I will vote NO in Ireland on October 2, 2009 to honour all those French people who have voted against the treaty in a referendum and whose voice has been ignored by their political elite.



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David Cameron warned by Angela Merkel over Lisbon Treaty

Boycotting Israel is now a crime - really!

This is an obsure but alarming article. I had to read it twice to figure what it was saying: that it is a crime to advocate boycotting Israeli products in France. A man has been fined €1000 for organising a boycott of Israeli products; and the French appeals court and Council of Europe's European Court of Human Rights upheld this.

Since when is advocating a boycott of any country's products, punishible by law in any legal scope of Western civilised countries? I thought that's what civilised nations do - impose a trade embargo when rogue nations refuse to abide by international law. What about the trade embargo on Cuba for decades?

How can it be illegal for a citizen to refuse to buy a product if the producers are acting unethically? How can it be illegal to encourage other like minded citizens to do the same? Have we lost freedom to speak and meet politically also?

Boycott is the ultimate non-violent protest available to people to curb injustices they see but cannot directly change. They simply say, we will not purchase a product that has been made with child labour, in a sweat shop, or manufactured in a ecologically toxic manner, etc. But it is illegal in France to boycott the products of Israel who has committed unspeakable war crimes in Palestine and Gaza (among other places)? What is wrong with this picture?

To starve the beast into cooperation or compliance by doing nothing (except talking with other people) is the only power of passive resistance to tyrannical conditions available to people to influence government or the free market conditions.

I whole heartedly disagree with this ruling and the French people may also. The French don't like being pushed around for too long...they have a long fuse with a big bang at the end of it (see French Revolution). Or more recently, Michelin workers in France lock up management or French workers threaten to blow up factory.

Well if Author Naomi Klein Calls for Boycott of Israel, I am with her. The rest of Europe will probably be next in enjoying the new found powers of the EU of the Lisbon Treaty to homogenise the behaviour of its citizens. (Look out Brits - your government is almost midevil now anyway.)

Kudos to the Czech government for having been the only dissenting voice in the ECHR. Czechs must be made of marvelous stuff.

European court: Israel boycotts
are unlawful discrimination

By HERB KEINON
Source
Israel finally won one last week in an international human rights court.
On Thursday, the Council of Europe's European Court of Human Rights upheld a French ruling that it was illegal and discriminatory to boycott Israeli goods, and that making it illegal to call for a boycott of Israeli goods did not constitute a violation of one's freedom of expression.

The Council of Europe is based in Strasbourg, has some 47 member states and is independent of the European Union. The court is made up of one judge from each member state, and the rulings of the court carry moral weight throughout Europe.

On Thursday the court ruled by a vote of 6-1 that the French court did not violate the freedom of expression of the Communist mayor of the small French town of Seclin, Jean-Claude Fernand Willem, who in October 2002 announced at a town hall meeting that he intended to call on the municipality to boycott Israeli products.

Jews in the region filed a complaint with the public prosecutor, who decided to prosecute Willem for "provoking discrimination on national, racial and religious grounds." Willem was first acquitted by the Lille Criminal Court, but that decision was overturned on appeal in September 2003 and he was fined €1,000.

His appeal to a higher French court was unsuccessful, and as a result he petitioned the European Court of Human rights in March 2005, saying his call for a boycott of Israeli products was part of a legitimate political debate, and that his freedom of expression had been violated.

The court, made up of judges from Denmark, France, Germany, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Macedonia and the Czech Republic ruled that interference with the former mayor's freedom of expression was needed to protect the rights of Israeli producers.

According to a statement issued by the court on Thursday, the court held the view that Willem was not convicted for his political opinions, "but for inciting the commission of a discriminatory, and therefore punishable, act. The Court further noted that, under French law, the applicant was not entitled to take the place of the governmental authorities by declaring an embargo on products from a foreign country, and moreover that the penalty imposed on him had been relatively moderate."

The one dissenting opinion was written by the Czech judge.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor hailed the ruling Sunday, saying it provided important ammunition for those challenging on legal grounds calls frequently heard in Europe for a boycott of Israeli products, as well as calls for a boycott of Israeli academia.

"It is now clear that in every country in Europe there is a precedent for calling boycotts of Israeli goods a violation of the law," Palmor said. "This is an important precedent, one that says very clearly that boycott calls are discriminatory. We hope this will help us push back against all the calls for boycotts of Israeli goods."

French workers threaten to blow up factory

I love the French people, especially when they are on fire. Their revolutionary spirit is an example for all peoples, all workers the world over.

French workers threaten to blow up factory

PARIS, July 12
Reuters
Source

Workers at collapsed French car parts maker New Fabris threatened on Sunday to blow up their factory if they did not receive payouts by July 31 from auto groups Renault and Peugeot to compensate for their lost jobs.

New Fabris was declared in liquidation in April, so the workers stand to get no redundancy money, although they are entitled to draw state unemployment benefit. They want Renault SA (RENA.PA) and PSA Peugeot Citroen (PEUP.PA) to pay 30,000 euros ($41,800) for each of the 336 staff at the factory, or some 10 million euros in total, in return for its remaining stocks of equipment and machinery.

"The bottles of gas have already been placed at various parts of the factory and are connected with each other," CGT trades union official Guy Eyermann told France Info radio. "If Renault and PSA refuse to give us that money it could blow up before the end of the month," he added A delegation of the workers has a meeting on Thursday with Renault, which had no immediate comment.

Police also declined to comment on the threat by the workers, who are occupying the New Fabris factory at Chatellerault, near Poitiers in central France. The company is the successor to Fabris, founded in 1947 and put into liquidiation in 2007. It was later acquired by ZEN of Italy which is headed by Florindo Garro. ZEN SpA, based in Albignasego near Padua, makes cast iron parts for vehicles.

Garro controls other metal firms in France such as Rencast and SBFM that also have financial difficulties. Some French workers have adopted militant tactics in the economic crisis, including "bossnappings" where managers have been held hostage in their offices. (Reporting by Gerard Bon and Marcel Michelson, editing by Mark Trevelyan)

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

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Sarkozy under pressure as 'millions' take to streets

Les salariés de l‘équipementier New Fabris menacent de faire sauter l’usine

'Double, double, toil and trouble: Fire, burn, and cauldron, bubble.'
-The Witches, 4.1, Macbeth

Calls grow to supplant dollar as global currency

Maybe America can pay its bills with 'freedom fries'?

Source
July 6, 2009
The call to find an alternative to the U.S dollar as the global reserve currency is gaining momentum as France joined calls by China, India and Russia for a review of the world's currency practices.

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde challenged the dollar's supremacy “in a world that has changed because of the crisis and the growing role of emerging countries.”

The questioning of the U.S. dollar as the key currency for central banks by a leader of a major European economy gives renewed life to the issue at this week's Group of Eight summit meeting in L'Aquila, Italy. The U.S. dollar has long served as the dominant medium of exchange, and tends to dominate the official money reserves that countries hold through their governments and at their central banks.

In the first quarter of 2009, 65 per cent of the world's allocated foreign exchange holdings were held in U.S. dollars, according to the International Monetary Fund. That's the highest in seven quarters.

The push for an alternative is being driven in large part by concern over the weakened state of the U.S. economy.

The country is forecasting fiscal deficits for the next decade.

That's leading large holders of U.S. debt such as China to worry that the U.S. dollar may not be as safe as it once was. In addition, the dollar has been volatile on international currency markets, and the U.S. is running ongoing trade deficits.

Diversification would likely take years, because unwinding large reserve positions of U.S. dollars too quickly would devalue them. And despite concerns about the greenback, it has maintained its international appeal, in part because investors need the value of their U.S. dollar holdings to stay high.

With the U.S. continuing to require willing lenders to fund deficits, the situation has become what top Barack Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers once dubbed “a kind of balance of financial terror.”

That U.S. Treasury bills appreciated in the immediate wake of the financial crisis was proof of the dollar's strength, as “people fled to a stable place,” said Paul Wachtel, a professor at New York University.

Still, the risk of a move away from the greenback is not without precedent, said Shaun Osborne, chief currency strategist of TD Securities. “The U.S. is a bit complacent about this. Most U.S. officials appear confident there will be no quick switch away from the dollar. But we have seen before, with the decline of the pound, that these things can happen quickly, in the space of years.”

Recent comments may be as much about politics as economics.

Large developing countries are seeking a greater role at the International Monetary Fund. China controls only 3.66 per cent of the votes at the body, despite being the world's third-largest economy.

“A little bit of nationalism, a little bit of searching for someone to blame for the economic crisis,” Prof. Wachtel said. “Plus, it's a changing world: diversification of reserves might make sense.”

Canada and Japan both reaffirmed their support for the greenback this week.

“It's an issue that we have not addressed, other than to say that in the midst of what is still a significant global recession, it's important that we aim for stability,” Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said on Friday. “The stability has been based on the U.S. dollar as the global currency.”

Whether and how this will actually come up at the G8 summit remains unclear. Russia is a G8 member, and China and India are set to join the discussions on the second day of the three-day meeting, but all are playing down the prospect of formal talks just yet.

Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister He Yafei said yesterday: “You may have heard comments, opinions from academic circles about the idea of establishing a super sovereign currency. This is all, I believe, now a discussion among academics. It is not the position of the Chinese government.”

The Chinese central bank, the world's largest external holder of U.S. debt, reiterated its call for a new international reserve currency in a policy review published last week. It has proposed an International Monetary Fund-created unit called Special Drawing Rights as an alternative reserve currency.

Regardless of what happens at the G8 summit, some analysts expect a diversification in large countries' currency practices.

Alternatives like the euro, yen, Chinese yuan, and Special Drawing Rights all have drawbacks, said Benjamin Cohen of the University of California-Santa Barbara. “A more fragmented currency system seems in the offing, with much competition and no money clearly dominant,” Prof. Cohen said.

With files from Bloomberg News and Reuters

The Fire of the French

A huge crowd of protesters march in Paris

Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Three Million People Take to the Streets in France

Source
The protests, which polls show are backed by three quarters of the French public, reflect growing disillusion with Sarkozy's pledges of reform as the crisis has thrown tens of thousands out of work and left millions more worried about their jobs.
Demonstrators in France
Streets in central Paris were packed with protesters waving anti-Sarkozy placards and chanting slogans, with badges reading "Get lost you little jerk!", the now infamous comment made by Sarkozy to a protestor at an agriculture show, much in evidence.

"There are more and more workers who feel they are not responsible for this crisis but that they are the main victims of it," said Bernard Thibault, head of the CGT, one of the eight trade unions organising the strikes.

More than 2 million people are out of work in France and despite an easing in inflation, even many with a job struggle with the high cost of living.

Workers at the Continental tyre factory pelted managers with eggs at the protest this week and the government and business leaders have been acutely aware of the danger of unrest spilling over into the kind of violence seen in the urban riots of 2005.

Sarkozy under pressure as 'millions' take to streets

By James Mackenzie, Reuters
Thursday, 19 March 2009
Source
As many as three million people took to the streets across France today to protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy's handling of the economic crisis and demand more help for struggling workers.

The protests, which polls show are backed by three quarters of the French public, reflect growing disillusion with Sarkozy's pledges of reform as the crisis has thrown tens of thousands out of work and left millions more worried about their jobs.

Bright spring sunshine helped the turnout and the total reported by union organisers surpassed the 2.5 million seen on an earlier day of protest on Jan. 29.

Streets in central Paris were packed with protesters waving anti-Sarkozy placards and chanting slogans, with badges reading "Get lost you little jerk!", the now infamous comment made by Sarkozy to a protestor at an agriculture show, much in evidence.

"There are more and more workers who feel they are not responsible for this crisis but that they are the main victims of it," said Bernard Thibault, head of the CGT, one of the eight trade unions organising the strikes.

More than 2 million people are out of work in France and despite an easing in inflation, even many with a job struggle with the high cost of living.

A large public sector payroll and a relatively generous welfare state has kept French people better protected than many in other countries but there has been deep public anger at plant closures and stories of corporate excess.

Sarkozy, elected in 2007 on a pledge to shake up the French economy, has seen his approval ratings plunge as he has poured billions into bailing out banks and carmakers but rejected union demands for higher pay and tax hikes for the rich.

"People are in the streets and they are suffering, there are more and more people out of work and something has to be done," said Sylvie Daenenck, marching in Paris. "We shouldn't just be giving money to the bosses."

The CGT said 3 million people had joined the protests, with hundreds of thousands at the main rally in Paris and tens of thousands taking part in marches in provincial towns and cities. Police, however, put the Paris total at just 85,000.

Sarkozy's room for manoeuvre has been limited by the dire state of French public finances, which have been drastically strained by the need to prop up the fragile financial sector.

But a series of disputes, ranging from strikes by university staff to unruly protests by workers at a tyre plant in northern France, have underlined a worsening climate of discontent that the government fears could escalate.

Workers at the Continental tyre factory pelted managers with eggs at the protest this week and the government and business leaders have been acutely aware of the danger of unrest spilling over into the kind of violence seen in the urban riots of 2005.

Transport, energy and some government offices were all affected and unions said there was also strong participation by workers from the private sector, although there was no general shutdown of the economy. Most businesses and public services functioned at close to normal levels.

The unions have presented a long list of demands, including a boost for the lower salaried, more measures to protect employment, a tax hike for high earners and a halt to job cuts planned in the public sector.

The government has introduced a 26 billion euro ($36 billion) stimulus plan aimed at business investment, and after the Jan. 29 strike Sarkozy offered 2.65 billion euros of additional aid to help vulnerable households weather the storm.

But there is little prospect of an improvement in the situation, with many analysts predicting the economy will contract by 2 percent this year and unemployment will jump 25 percent to almost 10 percent.

The Spoils of Africa

AFRICOM China and
Congo Resource Wars

04-12-2008
By F. William Engdahl
Source
Just weeks after President George W. Bush signed the Order creating a new US military command dedicated to Africa, AFRICOM, events on the mineral-rich continent have erupted which suggest a major agenda of the incoming Obama Presidency will be for the son of a black Kenyan to focus US resources, military and other, on dealing with the Republic of Congo, the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, the oil-rich Darfur region of southern Sudan and increasingly the Somali ‘pirate threat’ to sea lanes in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. The legitimate question is whether it is mere coincidence that Africa appears just at this time to become a new geopolitical ‘hot spot’ or whether it has a direct link to the formal creation of AFRICOM.

What is striking is the timing. No sooner had AFRICOM become operational than major new crises broke out in both the Indian Ocean-Gulf of Aden regarding spectacular incidents of alleged Somali piracy, as well as eruption of bloody new wars in Kivu Province in the Republic of Congo. The common thread connecting both is their importance, as with Darfur in southern Sudan, for China’s future strategic raw materials flow.

The latest fighting in the eastern part of the Congo (DRC) broke out in late August when Tutsi militiamen belonging to the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP, National Congress for the Defense of the People) of General Laurent Nkunda forced loyalist troops of the Forces armées de la République démocratique du Congo (FARDC, Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo) to retreat from their positions near Lake Kivu, sending hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians fleeing in the process and prompting the French foreign minister, Dr. Bernard Kouchner, to warn of the imminent risk of ‘huge massacres.’

Nkunda, like his mentor, Rwanda’s Washington-backed dictator, Paul Kagame, is an ethnic Tutsi who alleges that he is protecting the minority Tutsi ethnic group against remnants of the Rwandan Hutu army that fled to Congo after the Rwandan genocide in 1994. MONUC UN peacekeepers reported no such atrocities against the minority Tutsi in northeast, mineral rich Kivu region. Congolese sources report that attacks against Congolese of all ethnic groups are a daily occurrence in the region. Laurent Nkunda's troops are responsible for most of these attacks, they claim.

Strange resignations
The stage for political chaos in Congo was further set in September when the Democratic Republic of Congo’s 83 year old Prime Minister, Antoine Gizenga, resigned after two years. Then at end of October, with suspicious timing, the commander of the United Nations peacekeeping operation, the Mission de l'Organisation des Nations-Unies au Congo (MONUC, Mission of the United Nations Organization in the Congo), Spanish Lieutenant General Vicente Diaz de Villegas, resigned after less than two months on the job, citing, ‘lack of confidence’ in the leadership of DRC President Joseph Kabila. Kabila, the Congo’s first democratically elected President, has also been involved in negotiating a major $9 billion trade agreement between the DRC and China, something which Washington is clearly not happy about.

Nkunda is a long-standing henchman of Rwandan President, US-trained Kagame. All signs point to a heavy, if covert, USA role in the latest Congo killings by Nkunda’s men. Nkunda himself is a former Congolese Army officer, teacher and Seventh Day Adventist pastor. But killing seems to be what he is best at.

Much of Nkunda's well-equipped and relatively disciplined forces are from the bordering country of Rwanda and the rest have been recruited from the minority Tutsi population of the Congolese province of North Kivu. Supplies, finance and political support for this Congolese rebel army come from Rwanda. According to the American Spectator magazine, ‘President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has long been a supporter of Nkunda, who originally was an intelligence officer in the Rwanda leader's overthrow of the Hutu despotic rule in his country.’

As the Congo News Agency reported on October 30, ‘Some have bought into the pretext of an endangered Tutsi minority in Congo . They never fail to mention that Laurent Nkunda is supposedly fighting to protect "his people". They have failed to question his true motives which are to occupy the mineral-rich North-Kivu province, pillage its resources, and act as a proxy army in eastern Congo for the Tutsi-led Rwandan government in Kigali. Kagame wants a foothold in eastern Congo so his country can continue to benefit from the pillaging and exporting of minerals such as Columbite-Tantalite (Coltan). Many experts on the region agree today that resources are the true reason why Laurent Nkunda continues to create chaos in the region with the help of Paul Kagame.’

The USA role and AFRICOM

Evidence which was presented in a French court in a ruling made public in 2006 claimed that Kagame was responsible for organizing the shooting down of the plane carrying Hutu President of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, in April 1994, the event that set off the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of thousands of people both Hutu and Tutsi.

The end result of the killings in which perhaps as many as a million Africans perished was that US and UK backed Paul Kagame—a ruthless military dictator trained at the US Army Command-General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth Kansas—was firmly in control as dictator of Rwanda. Since then he has covertly backed repeated military incursions by General Nkunda into the mineral-rich Kivu region on the pretext it was to defend a small Tutsi minority there. Kagame had repeatedly rejected attempts to repatriate those Tutsi refugees back to Rwanda, evidently fearing he might lose his pretext to occupy the mineral riches of Kivu.

Since at least 2001 according to reports from Congo sources, the US military has also had a base at Cyangugu in Rwanda, built of course by Dick Cheney’s old firm, Halliburton, conveniently enough near the border to Congo’s mineral-rich Kivu region.

The 1994 massacre of civilians between Tutsi and Hutu was, as Canadian researcher, Michel Chossudovsky described it, ‘an undeclared war between France and America. By supporting the build up of Ugandan and Rwandan forces and by directly intervening in the Congolese civil war, Washington also bears a direct responsibility for the ethnic massacres committed in the Eastern Congo including several hundred thousand people who died in refugee camps.’ He adds, ‘Major General Paul Kagame was an instrument of Washington. The loss of African lives did not matter. The civil war in Rwanda and the ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives.’

Now Kagame’s former intelligence officer, Nkunda, leads his well -equipped forces to take Goma in the eastern Congo as part of an apparent scheme to break the richest minerals region away from Kinshasha. With the US military beefing up its presence across Africa under AFRICOM since 2007, the stage was apparently set for the current resources grab by the US-backed Kagame and his former officer, Nkunda.

Today the target is China
If France was the covert target of US ‘surrogate warfare’ in 1994, today it is clearly China, which is the real threat to US control of Central Africa’s vast mineral riches. The Democratic Republic of Congo was renamed from the Republic of Zaire in 1997 when the forces of Laurent Désiré Kabila brought Mobutu's 32 year reign to an end. Locals call the country Congo-Kinshasa.

The Kivu region of the Congo is the geological repository of some of the world’s greatest strategic minerals. The eastern border straddling Rwanda and Uganda, runs on the eastern edge of the Great African Rift Valley, believed by geologists to be one of the richest repositories of minerals on the face of the earth.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo contains more than half the world’s cobalt. It holds one-third of its diamonds, and, extremely significantly, fully three-quarters of the world resources of columbite-tantalite or “coltan” -- a primary component of computer microchips and printed circuit boards, essential for mobile telephones, laptops and other modern electronic devices.

America Minerals Fields, Inc., a company heavily involved in promoting the 1996 accession to power of Laurent Kabila, was, at the time of its involvement in the Congo’s civil war, headquartered in Hope, Arkansas. Major stockholders included long-time associates of former President Clinton going back to his days as Governor of Arkansas. Several months before the downfall of Zaire’s French-backed dictator, Mobutu, Laurent Desire Kabila based in Goma, Eastern Zaire had renegotiated the mining contracts with several US and British mining companies including American Mineral Fields. Mobutu’s corrupt rule was brought to a bloody end with the help of the US-directed International Monetary Fund.

Washington was not entirely comfortable with Laurent Kabila, who was finally assassinated in 2001. In a study released in April 1997 barely a month before President Mobutu Sese Seko fled the country, the IMF had recommended "halting currency issue completely and abruptly" as part of an economic recovery programme. A few months later upon assuming power in Kinshasa, the new government of Laurent Kabila Desire was ordered by the IMF to freeze civil service wages with a view to "restoring macro-economic stability." Eroded by hyperinflation, the average public sector wage had fallen to 30,000 new Zaires (NZ) a month, the equivalent of one US dollar.

According to Chossudovsky, the IMF's demands were tantamount to maintaining the entire population in abysmal poverty. They precluded from the outset a meaningful post-war economic reconstruction, thereby contributing to fuelling the continuation of the Congolese civil war in which close to 2 million people have died.

Laurent Kabila was succeeded by his son, Joseph Kabila who went on to become the Congo’s first democratically elected President, and appears to have held a closer eye to the welfare of his countrymen than did his father.

Now, in comes the new US AFRICOM. Speaking to the International Peace Operations Association in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 27, General Kip Ward, Commander of AFRICOM defined the command's mission as, ‘in concert with other US government agencies and international partners, [to conduct] sustained security engagements through military-to-military programs, military-sponsored activities, and other military operations as directed to promote a stable and secure African environment in support of US foreign policy.’

The ‘military operations as directed to promote a stable and secure African environment in support of US foreign policy,’ today, are clearly aimed squarely at blocking China’s growing economic presence in the region.

In fact, as various Washington sources state openly, AFRICOM was created to counter the growing presence of China in Africa, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, to secure long-term economic agreements for raw materials from Africa in exchange for Chinese aid and production sharing agreements and royalties . By informed accounts, the Chinese have been far shrewder. Instead of offering only savage IMF-dictated austerity and economic chaos, China is offering large credits, soft loans to build roads and schools in order to create good will.

Dr. J. Peter Pham, a leading Washington insider who is an advisor of the US State and Defense Departments, states openly that among the aims of the new AFRICOM, is the objective of ‘protecting access to hydrocarbons and other strategic resources which Africa has in abundance ... a task which includes ensuring against the vulnerability of those natural riches and ensuring that no other interested third parties, such as China, India, Japan, or Russia, obtain monopolies or preferential treatment.’

In testimony before the US Congress supporting creation of AFRICOM in 2007, Pham, who is closely associated with the neo -conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, stated:

‘This natural wealth makes Africa an inviting target for the attentions of the People’s Republic of China, whose dynamic economy, averaging 9 percent growth per annum over the last two decades, has an almost insatiable thirst for oil as well as a need for other natural resources to sustain it. China is currently importing approximately 2.6 million barrels of crude per day, about half of its consumption; more than 765,000 of those barrels—roughly a third of its imports—come from African sources, especially Sudan, Angola, and Congo (Brazzaville). Is it any wonder, then, that…perhaps no other foreign region rivals Africa as the object of Beijing’s sustained strategic interest in recent years. Last year the Chinese regime published the first ever official white paper elaborating the bases of its policy toward Africa.

This year, ahead of his twelve-day, eight-nation tour of Africa—the third such journey since he took office in 2003—Chinese President Hu Jintao announced a three-year, $3 billion program in preferential loans and expanded aid for Africa. These funds come on top of the $3 billion in loans and $2 billion in export credits that Hu announced in October 2006 at the opening of the historic Beijing summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) which brought nearly fifty African heads of state and ministers to the Chinese capital.

Intentionally or not, many analysts expect that Africa—especially the states along its oil-rich western coastline—will increasingly becoming a theatre for strategic competition between the United States and its only real near-peer competitor on the global stage, China, as both countries seek to expand their influence and secure access to resources.’

Notably, in late October Nkunda’s well-armed troops surrounded Goma in North Kivu and demanded that Congo President Joseph Kabila negotiate with him. Among Nkunda’s demands was that Kabila cancel a $9 billion joint Congo-China venture in which China gets rights to the vast copper and cobalt resources of the region in exchange for providing $6 billion worth of road construction, two hydroelectric dams, hospitals, schools and railway links to southern Africa, to Katanga and to the Congo Atlantic port at Matadi. The other $3 billion is to be invested by China in development of new mining areas.

Curiously, US and most European media neglect to report that small detail. It seems AFRICOM is off to a strong start as the opposition to China in Africa. The litmus will be who President Obama selects as his Africa person and whether he tries to weaken Congo President Joseph Kabila in favor of backing Nkunda’s death squads, naturally in the name of ‘restoring democracy.’.

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