Europe fails to face up to its duties in the Congo

The third World War is what they have called it in Africa, a war involving eight countries and arising from seven conflicts. It is as much a third World War as was the first World War, except that it is in Africa and the rest of the world ignores it.

The war has involved Congo (Kinshasa) Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe Chad, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, with a spill-over from Sudan. Counting the conflict in Sudan, almost four million people have lost their lives here in the last five to seven years. There have been over six million refugees. By comparison, what has happened in the former Yugoslavia or in East Timor in the same period has been small fry.

But Yugoslavia is on the verge of Europe and refugees from there spill over into the centre of Europe. East Timor has the advantage of being a short boat ride from Australia, and Australia does not want any impoverished Asiatic immigrants; hence its keen involvement in East Timor.

Europe cannot easily dissociate itself from Africa. Six of our European partners - Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, Britain and Denmark - enslaved 11 million Africans in the Atlantic slave trade in the course of three centuries. And our partners in Europe - Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium, little defenceless Belgium on whose behalf we were urged to go to war in 1914 - colonised almost all of Africa from 1870 onwards, robbing it of its riches, murdering millions and bringing fatal diseases to millions of others.

Europe left Africa in chaos and conflict in the 1960s. It took the Portuguese a decade longer to get out of Mozambique and Angola. And since the 1960s, our partners in Europe have remained involved, establishing and propping up oppressive dictatorships that continued the murder of millions of Africans and the looting of African wealth.

Our partners, the Portuguese, were the worst of the slave traders, enslaving 4.7 million Africans. Our good neighbours and partners, the British, were the next worst. They, who now remember themselves as the liberators of the African slaves, enslaved 2.6 million. (These figures are taken from The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas.)

And the poor defenceless Belgians were the most savage and exploitative of the colonisers. They perpetrated the first holocaust of the 20th century. What they did in the Congo, while it was the personal possession of the Belgian King, Leopold II, in the period leading immediately up to the time that Irishmen were urged to go to the aid of "gallant little Belgium" in 1914, was a piece of infamy on a par almost with the most monstrous deeds in history.

Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were murdered by agents and soldiers of the Belgian king because of their failure to meet production quotas of rubber and ivory. Rivers and lakes were awash with corpses. Many, many more died from disease (smallpox and sleeping sickness being the most prevalent and deadly) directly related to the regime of the Belgians. Countless more were mutilated. The chopping off of hands was a common disciplinary measure.

In a riveting book on that story of greed and terror, King Leopold's Ghost by an American author, Adam Hochschild, it is estimated that between 1880 and 1920 the population of the Congo was cut by half, 10 million people. It wasn't genocide because it was not in the pursuit of the elimination of an ethnic, religious or national group, but it was a holocaust. One of the heroes of that story was an Irishman who was hugely responsible for bringing to the attention of the world what the gallant little Belgians were doing in the Congo. He was Roger Casement. But his genuine heroism at that time - and indeed later in the Amazon where he uncovered still more shocking crimes against humanity - counted for naught when the British authorities were beseeched to grant him clemency after he had been sentenced to death for treason in 1916. Before he was hanged on August 3rd of that year, in one of his last letters he wrote: " I made an awful lot of mistakes and did heaps of things wrong and failed at much but . . . the best thing was the Congo".

Another of our partners in Europe, France, has played an infamous role in Africa, not just in colonial times but more recently. Francois Mitterrand's France armed, trained and directed the Rwandan army and the militia that carried out the genocide of 1994.

France did this knowing of evidence of the plans for the genocide, knowing of the mini-genocide that preceded the explosion of killing which took place over 100 days, from April 1994, and which led to the massacre of more than 800,000 people. France, along with the United States, Britain and most of the rest of our partners - this time the Belgians behaved with relative propriety - joined in deceiving the world about what was happening in Rwanda.

And to round it off, the French intervened at a point when almost the entire Tutsi population of Rwanda had been murdered. They protected from an invading army of Tutsis (largely from Uganda) those Hutu leaders who had orchestrated the genocide.

The Belgians and the French contributed hugely to the greatest crime against humanity since the Jewish Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda. The Belgians, by priming the ethnic time-bomb that exploded in 1994; the French by helping to detonate that bomb.

The two countries did the same in Burundi: the time-bomb has been spluttering there for decades and threatens to explode any time. The British primed ethnic time-bombs in Sudan and Uganda. The Portuguese did so in Angola. All of them have continued to rape the African continent since they left as formal colonisers.

And to this day, Europe and the US are arming Africa to the teeth, lest the third World War fizzle out too soon. Huge Boeing 707 aircraft, formerly passenger airlines now with the economy class seats taken out to leave room for more cargo, are flying in and out of the numerous air strips in and on the verges of the Congo, stuffed with arms. I saw some of these on the airstrip in Goma in eastern Congo three weeks ago, where the RCD rebel movement's headquarters is located.

We are all Europeans now (aren't we?) and thus we can say that we, Europeans, are to blame not just for the dreadful crimes against humanity that were perpetrated during the colonial period.

We Europeans are responsible for the continued murder, mutilation and devastation in Africa because we support corrupt and oppressive dictatorships. We arm the protagonists, including the genocidal killers. And when asked to contribute to a peace process, we fail to muster even a few handfuls of peace monitors.

Is this what Partnership for Peace is all about?

Vincent Browne can be contacted at vbrown@irish-times.ie