Humanitarian intervention in Congo

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

After the elegant black life peer, Baroness Amos, took over the
international development brief after Clare Short's resignation, she
included in her aims for Africa, crisis resolution.

Yesterday evening BBC appeared to report some agreement that the UK would
contribute forces to an intervention led by French forces (a bit of spin
here?) into north east Congo.

I suggest it is very hard to protest against such an intervention as being
reactionary even though the pay off for imperialism is that it creates
propaganda for the interventionist politics.

As in west Africa it appears that the bodies of armed men, which every
society needs, in north east Congo now consist of small groups with
communal hatreds between them. In such a context which is extremely
damaging for any sort of unity of working people, super-imperialism is more
progressive than the political economy of war-lordism, since the weak
bourgeois national state structures have failed to maintain a minimum
social peace.

A better outcome would be to aid Africa to have its own intervention force,
as was tried to some extent in west Africa headed up by the anti-democratic
Nigerian regime. But it looks as if neither Nigeria nor South Africa are up
to sending troops to the Congo.

I suspect the left in the imperialist heartlands will not see the
opportunity to campaign against this particular humanitarian intervention
in the way it did against the war in Iraq and let it pass by. There is some
logic in that.

But IMO it means that an anti-imperialist global strategy has to be more
analytical than one of simple revolutionary defeatism at the beginning of
the last century.

Chris Burford
London