The DRC is home to vast reserves of minerals essential for modern technology, including cobalt, tin, tantalum and gold. About 70% of the world’s cobalt — crucial for electric car batteries and smartphones — comes from the DRC.
However, Malema said the Congolese people were not seeing any of these riches.
“Instead, multinational corporations and Western nations exploit these resources while fuelling conflict to maintain their access.
“Over 200 companies from the UK and Belgium are involved in purchasing minerals from the DRC, and these nations directly finance armed groups and perpetuate violence. These corporations and their governments remain complicit, failing to regulate supply chains or hold corporations accountable for using 'conflict minerals'.”
The red berets leader said ethnic groups that had fled from Rwanda during the Rwandan genocide and settled in the eastern DRC were being used as the basis for Rwandan support of M23 rebels against the regime in the DRC. He believed Rwanda is was simultaneously a proxy of Western interests in the DRC.
Malema questioned the peacekeeping mission and the role of South African troops in the DRC.
“In whose interests is our mission in the [DR] Congo? Whose peace and stability are we pursuing in the [DR] Congo? Is it peace and stability for the continent, or peace and stability for mining interests of global capitalists?”
Withdraw our soldiers from DRC, says Malema
Image: Freddy Mavunda/Business Day
EFF president Julius Malema has called on President Cyril Ramaphosa to withdraw South African troops from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Malema claimed the soldiers had not been given the necessary equipment for the “so-called peace mission”, adding he believed the motivation to deploy them there was dishonest.
“Our children, our sons and daughters of the SANDF have been sent to their deaths because the mineral interests of multinational corporations and individuals must be secured.
“Our soldiers have been sent to be glorified bodyguards of the mines in the DRC, and this mission has been disguised as a pursuit of peace and a defence of democracy. Bring our soldiers home, because our army should not be a pawn in a game of capitalists, which has now exposed the weakness of our military capacity,” he said.
Addressing the third plenum of the party's national people's assembly in Bela Bela, Limpopo, on Friday where he told the red berets the conflict in the DRC was being fuelled by the insatiable greed of the West for the DRC's mineral wealth.
“The chaos in the DRC goes back to colonial conquest and today it is sustained by the imperialist interest to loot the wealth of the DRC. This conflict is equally fuelled by ethnic divisions in the region.”
Defence committee postponement angers EFF as DRC conflict rages
The DRC is home to vast reserves of minerals essential for modern technology, including cobalt, tin, tantalum and gold. About 70% of the world’s cobalt — crucial for electric car batteries and smartphones — comes from the DRC.
However, Malema said the Congolese people were not seeing any of these riches.
“Instead, multinational corporations and Western nations exploit these resources while fuelling conflict to maintain their access.
“Over 200 companies from the UK and Belgium are involved in purchasing minerals from the DRC, and these nations directly finance armed groups and perpetuate violence. These corporations and their governments remain complicit, failing to regulate supply chains or hold corporations accountable for using 'conflict minerals'.”
The red berets leader said ethnic groups that had fled from Rwanda during the Rwandan genocide and settled in the eastern DRC were being used as the basis for Rwandan support of M23 rebels against the regime in the DRC. He believed Rwanda is was simultaneously a proxy of Western interests in the DRC.
Malema questioned the peacekeeping mission and the role of South African troops in the DRC.
“In whose interests is our mission in the [DR] Congo? Whose peace and stability are we pursuing in the [DR] Congo? Is it peace and stability for the continent, or peace and stability for mining interests of global capitalists?”
WATCH | Julius Malema delivers keynote address at EFF plenum
The red berets leader warned Ramaphosa to steer clear of an incitement to war trap not to be incited by “fanatics”.
“The president ought to be careful not to allow fanatics to incite him into a war simply because it will give the people who have lost hope in him a common enemy to unite against. The dignity and pride of our army is not harmed because our African counterparts do not respect us, it is harmed because we have interfered in a conflict we do not understand and sent our soldiers to fight rebels who are more equipped than us.
“It is when you do not appreciate the conditions that inform the conflict in the DRC, that you will speak in forked tongues when you speak to the president of Rwanda, and communicate a different message to the people of South Africa. Lies have short legs, Mr President, and we demand clarity from you because you have sent our soldiers to their deaths and then antagonised forces in their region, knowing very well you are not prepared for war.”
Malema criticised South Africa's role in the DRC, calling saying it was “laced with humiliation”.
“We are even threatened with war by the president of Rwanda because our role of peace in the DRC is questionable, because there is no peace that has ever been achieved through the deployment of soldiers. The SANDF is not in the DRC to pursue peace, but we are participating in a decades-old conflict to secure the mineral interests of the capital elite in the [DR] Congo.”
TimesLIVE
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