By Udo W. Froese
Johannesburg

AFTER four decades, Africa's holocaust still continues. But, who really cares? The British author, Joseph Conrad, wrote on what he had seen during his travels to Africa then, "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience".

Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central Africa's Great Lakes' District, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Liberia, Nigeria, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland and Zimbabwe are victims of their wealth. One cannot exclude South Africa and Namibia from that list, as they still suffer the consequences of colonialism and apartheid. In fact, both countries' economies are still exclusively owned and controlled by foreign interests.

Interestingly, all mentioned countries rate among the wealthiest as far as strategic resources are concerned. Yet, it is the formerly poorest nations of the European Community, who benefit hugely, by retaining economic control over their "former" colonies. Add to that club of neo-imperialists the new member, the exporter of "neo-liberal democracy, capitalism, human rights and freedom of the media, freedom of association and independence of the judiciary", the exporter of "wars; international awards; third rate, amoral television soapies; Hollywood; NGOs and influential foundations" - currently the world's most ambitious and brutal conqueror - the United States of America.

Particularly gold and diamonds have been mined through wars, wildcat prospecting, well-networked smuggling, straight theft, coercion and political collusion. Due to their nature of high-value and low bulk a robber-economy attracts adventurers and shady operators like cow-dung attracts flies, as observed among others, by Wayne Madsen in his book 'Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993 - 1999' and Janine Roberts in her book, 'Glitter & Greed, the Secret World of the Diamond Cartel'.

For the "civilized" western G-7 and their benefactors to wear diamonds and gold, back their bullion with gold, make their manufacturing industries boom in the "global village" and to benefit from the energy of Africa's oil and gas, Africans pay the highest price - they pay with their lives and loss of land.

"It is simple. Unless you give us back our nationhood, you can never claim your own." Those were wise words from the late Aboriginal leader in Australia, Rob Riley, whose people, the Aborigines were almost wiped out by the criminal colonizers, all "Christians" by their own admission.

Those words could also have come out of tens of millions of mouths of Africans, whose continent had not just been conquered by slave traders, colonial powers and neo-imperialists, but abused to the extent that in the 21st Century the 'international western community' could be held responsible in any international court of law for complicity in plundering, raping and mass killings, war mongering and character assassination, therefore perpetuating history's largest holocaust in a clearly structured way.

This evil mission continues - the higher the chaos in Africa, the higher the profits from the strategic resources in Africa.

Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, aptly said "let us not forget that the equivalent of a tsunami happens every week in Africa".

May I enlighten you? - The author, Adam Hochschild writes in his book, "King Leopold's Ghost", a historic research on Belgium's colonizing of the Congo, "the worst of the bloodshed in the Congo took place between 1890 and 1910". Hochschild referred to the killing of well over ten million Congolese in the space of twenty years of colonial occupation.

Today, Belgium's capital, Brussels, is also the head office of the European Community. Its other city, Antwerp, is Europe's diamond-center. However, Belgium does not produce a single carat of a diamond.

Twelve million African slaves suffered at the hands of European slavers between the 15th and the 19th centuries.

Baffour Ankomah, editor of the news magazine New Africa, comments: "Since 1949, Germany has paid over DM90 billion to Israel in voluntary reparations for Hitler's crimes against the Jews. More recently, German companies have agreed to compensate Jewish and other victims of slave labour during the Hitler years. European banks (and even governments) are also returning money, gold and paintings looted from, or sold by, the Jews under Hitler."

Ankomah writes on: "This restitution has happened despite the fact that Hitler's army included Jewish men and generals who directly or indirectly took part in the persecution of the Jews.

Therefore, the fashionable argument that Africans should not be compensated for slavery because they took part in the sordid deed, is neither here nor there."

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) in New York made public in December 2004 that since the outbreak of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 1998, some 3,8 million people have died and every month, a further 31 000 continue to be slaughtered as a result of continuing "low intensity conflicts", as the wars are described by the Pentagon's "Newspeak" military jargon. Between 1993 and 1997 well over one million people died in the Central African war zone of the DRC, Rwanda and Burundi.

The longest war in the history of the modern world took place in oil-rich southern Sudan. The consequences are that two million people were killed and an estimated 5 million displaced.

Below are some shocking statistics from the IRC as reported by New African news magazine from London:

- Every 30 seconds a child dies of malaria in Africa; over a million every year.

- Every day, HIV/Aids kills 6 000 people and another 8 200 become infected with the virus.

- Millions of people live on less than U$1 a day and millions more survive on below U$2 a day.

- Globally, some 6 million children die every year from malnutrition before their fifth birthday. Approximately every 3.6 seconds, someone somewhere in the world dies of starvation.

- Declining soil fertility, land degradation and Aids have led to a 23 per cent fall in food production per capita in the past 25 years.

- The children of a woman with five years of primary school education have 40% higher survival rate than uneducated ones

- Every minute, a woman dies in pregnancy of childbirth.

- Every month, 150 000 people in Africa die of malaria, a largely preventable and treatable disease.

- Trade barriers in the northern hemisphere are prevailing current injustices as they prevent Africa and other poor agricultural countries from exporting their crops and earning a living, literally taking the bread out of the mouths of human beings.

African nations own a crippling debt of U$200 billion to Western governments and global institutions such as the World Bank-International Monetary Fund (IMF). Those debts are unaffordable. In the pleas of Professor Jeffrey Sachs of the UN anti-poverty effort, "African nations should simply refuse to repay that debt. The time has come to end this charade. Those debts are unaffordable. If they remain unforgiving, obstruction is strongly recommended. Do it yourselves and do it united."

A strong suggestion, but a doable one.

Africa's wealth is the leading contributor towards dependence on the international western community; looting of Africa's resources; social instabilities; underdevelopment; dehumanization of her people, who in the process lost their self-esteem - all of it is a crime against humans and their continent.

Africans deserve a fair and just deal on their own continent and the time is long overdue!