{"id":303368,"date":"2025-09-22T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=303368"},"modified":"2025-09-19T09:55:58","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T08:55:58","slug":"neocolonialism-in-africa-from-the-imf-and-the-world-bank-to-the-international-caucasian-court-for-prosecuting-africans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/09\/neocolonialism-in-africa-from-the-imf-and-the-world-bank-to-the-international-caucasian-court-for-prosecuting-africans\/","title":{"rendered":"Neocolonialism in Africa, from the IMF and the World Bank to the International Caucasian Court for Prosecuting Africans"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Samantha Power, author of “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” US Ambassador to the UN, National Security Council Advisor to President Obama, USAID Administrator, and staunch advocate of “humanitarian” intervention to stop genocide.<\/p><\/div>\n

Remarks prepared for a 16 Sep 2025 <\/em>Covert Action Magazine webinar<\/em><\/a> on Neocolonialism in Africa.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

17 Sep 2025\u00a0<\/em>– I\u2019m honored to be invited to join P.D. Lawton, Jeremy Kuzmarov, Milton Allimadi, Jean-Marie Higiro, and Lawrence Freeman here. I know a bit about most everyone\u2019s particular areas of expertise, but particularly those of Milton and Lawrence, so I\u2019m sure we\u2019ll be hitting a few of the same points.<\/p>\n

First let me say that as an American, my reporting on Africa has always been meant to expose and explain the US foreign policy that has caused inestimable suffering and death on the continent.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure that Covert Action readers and listeners are all familiar with the imperial toolkit for creating dependence and enabling exploitation all over the continent.<\/p>\n

The financial neocolonialism\u00a0imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank keeps African nations trapped in perpetual debt peonage that resembles the mortgage crisis of 2008-2009 here in the US. Banks lend money to African nations as they did to homeowners here until they\u2019re so deep in debt that they have to keep borrowing money just to pay the interest. Then, once African nations are in the most desperate straits, the IMF and\/or World Bank will come in and insist that further lending be conditioned on austerity\u2014cutting social services\u2014and on opening their markets and institutions to foreign investment without protection for nascent local industries.<\/p>\n

When nations can\u2019t protect and\/or subsidize local industries, they\u2019re trapped in neocolonial extractive structures, exporting raw materials to the industrialized world at low prices and importing finished goods at high prices. Without industrialization, they can\u2019t develop a complex division of labor, and the majority have to rely on subsistence farming.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the military neocolonialism represented by AFRICOM, the US Africa Command, and various other US\/EU\/NATO security operations promoted in the name of fighting the War on Terror. In most cases, the salaries paid to African soldiers are significantly higher than what they would otherwise earn, creating a military class that is invested in ongoing military collaboration. AMISOM (African Union Mission in Somalia), the precursor to ATMIS (African Union Transition Mission in Somalia), is particularly known for having created a middle class in both Uganda and Burundi that would not want to see Somalia become stable and militarily sovereign.<\/p>\n

Then, of course, there\u2019s media and information neocolonialism in that the US trains and employs journalists all over Africa who will not criticize empire.<\/p>\n

The NGO industrial complex creates another form of dependence for salaries, goods, and services. An example I\u2019m familiar with is Somalia, where USAID often distributes food aid just as farmers are bringing their products to market, meaning they can\u2019t sell them. Thomas Sankara famously said, \u201cWhere is imperialism? Look at your plates when you eat. The imported rice, maize, and millet; that is imperialism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Judicial neocolonialism<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d particularly like to talk about the judicial neocolonialism by which international law, international courts, the \u201crules-based order,\u201d and even the UN Genocide Convention are used to dominate Africa, and here I\u2019d like to go back to the time, in 2010, when I first met my co-panelist here, CUNY professor and Black Star News Editor Milton Allimadi. We met, along with another group of anti-imperialist journalists, lawyers, and scholars, during the so-called 2010 Rwandan presidential election, when opposition leader Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza was arrested and imprisoned for alleged genocide denial and for trying to run against military dictator Paul Kagame.<\/p>\n

I say \u201cso-called election\u201d because it was just a staged ritual like those in other US protectorates, including Rwanda\u2019s neighbors to the north and west, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.<\/p>\n

Prior to that I had taken interest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also known as the DRC, whose vast resource wealth has led to so much bloodshed and plunder since the 1885 Berlin Conference made it Belgian King Leopold II\u2019s personal property. I\u2019m sure everyone here knows that Congolese were virtually enslaved to produce rubber for bicycles and cars and that their mineral wealth has been used to build weapons, power plants, and now cell phones, renewable energy tech, and every sort of gadgetry.<\/p>\n

DRC also has vast swathes of arable land and huge oil and natural gas reserves in the lakes on its borders with Rwanda and Uganda. In 1982, a Congressional Budget Office document titled \u201cCobalt: Policy Options for a Strategic Minera<\/a>l\u201d declared that Congo\u2019s cobalt reserves were essential to US national security. Cobalt had become essential to manufacturing jet engines, including of course military jet engines, and two-thirds of the world\u2019s cobalt is in the Katanga Copper Belt, which stretches from Congo\u2019s southeast corner into northeastern Zambia.<\/p>\n

Now, lo and behold, DRC has vast lithium reserves needed to make lithium-ion batteries. Everyone wants a piece of Congo, which inevitably has the resources required to manufacture whatever\u2019s next.<\/p>\n

This vast resource wealth and all the suffering it\u2019s caused drew my attention to DRC and, for that matter, to Africa, then led to the moment, in 2010, when I met Milton.<\/p>\n

I had begun to follow the presidential election in DRC\u2019s eastern neighbor Rwanda, although before that I\u2019d understood very little about Rwanda or Uganda, only that they were both US-backed aggressors in DRC, who had invaded and plundered the country\u2019s resources for decades.<\/p>\n

At that time a fellow member of our tiny but obstinate US Green Party asked me to see if I could figure out why a member of the Rwandan Green Party wasn\u2019t being allowed to register his party and run for president. I made contact with that Rwandan Green, Frank Habineza, and eventually with the two other viable candidates, Bernard Ntaganda and Victoire Ingabire, all online.<\/p>\n

I soon realized that Victoire Ingabire was mounting the most profound challenge to the Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame\u2019s regime because she was challenging the simplistic and deceptive, legally codified and enforced history of the Rwandan war and genocide that he has used to justify his rule in Rwanda and his invasion, occupation, and plunder of DRC for the past 30 years. That, and her credible electoral challenge, were so threatening that he had her arrested and imprisoned for eight years.<\/p>\n

The late American lawyer Peter Erlinder, who had worked as a defense attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, traveled to Rwanda to defend Victoire Ingabire, and Kagame promptly had him arrested for genocide denial as well. In Peter\u2019s defense of his client at the ICTR, he had argued, with some success, that there had been no conspiracy to commit genocide in Rwanda.<\/p>\n

The US has backed President Kagame throughout the Rwandan war and genocide, and ever since he finally seized power in Kigali. Note that I said \u201cwar and genocide,\u201d not simply \u201cgenocide,\u201d because I find that many people don\u2019t realize that the horrifying \u201c100 days of genocide\u201d were actually the conclusion of a four-year war that began when Rwandan President, then General, Paul Kagame invaded Rwanda from Uganda on October 1, 1990. That was two months after Iraq invaded Kuwait, during the military buildup prior to the US\/EU\/NATO\u2019s Operation Desert Storm, also known as the Gulf War, which drove the Iraqi army out of Kuwait.<\/p>\n

The world was at the time so distracted by the hugely destructive aerial bombing campaign in the Gulf that one East African country\u2019s invasion of another was barely news. I can\u2019t even remember it registering with me at the time, though of course the \u201c100 days of genocide\u201d grabbed my attention, as it did the whole world\u2019s, four years later. To many it seemed like this was a sudden explosion of tribal violence, the most central and deeply racist narrative used to explain war and conflict in Africa.<\/p>\n

At the end of the war and genocide, the UN, backed by the US, created the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda to construct and reinforce that narrative about the genocide, namely, that demon Hutus plotted and viciously carried out the extermination of hundreds of thousands of innocent Tutsis in 100 days\u2019 time. Again, the four-year war preceding the genocide, was unimportant in this narrative.<\/p>\n

Only Hutus were indicted and tried, although the far more complex history has been researched and written by authors including Robin Philpot, Judi Rever, Justin Podhur, and David Peterson and the late Edward S. Herman, co-authors of\u00a0The Poltiics of Genocide<\/a> and\u00a0Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later<\/a>. It\u2019s a history that includes genocide against the Hutu, committed by Kagame\u2019s advancing army and Kagame\u2019s order to assassinate former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, panicking the population and triggering the genocide.<\/p>\n

The simple story of the 100 days of primordial African tribal rage and the world\u2019s failure to step in and stop it became the central narrative dominating the African Great Lakes Region, most specifically Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to this day. Even the recent DRC \u201cpeace agreement,\u201d which was really about securing minerals for US corporations, referred to Rwanda\u2019s \u201cdefensive measures\u201d against genocidal forces still present in DRC.<\/p>\n

It also became the narrative used to justify repeated US\/EU\/NATO \u201chumanitarian interventions,\u201d as in Libya and Syria. We were told that the West was morally compelled to bomb, decimate, and cause chaos in those nations to stop genocide.<\/p>\n

The International Criminal Court indicted Muammar Gaddafi for genocide amidst outcry about \u201cstopping the next Rwanda.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all of this, however, has been its persuasiveness in Africa itself in a kind of judicial neocolonialism.<\/p>\n

The simplistic, Manichean Rwandan Genocide narrative, the tribal rage of demon Hutus slaughtering innocent Tutsis, is widely received, as is the idea that humanitarian intervention and International Criminal Court indictments are a solution to African problems.<\/p>\n

Many, however, if not most, now refer to the ICC as the International Criminal Court for Prosecuting Africans.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/a>. In 2014 she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize<\/em> for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at <\/em>ann@anngarrison.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 blackagendareport.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remarks prepared for a 16 Sep 2025 Covert Action Magazine webinar on Neocolonialism in Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":303370,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[237,532,405,1268,1289,1050,551,70,1700],"class_list":["post-303368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-africa","tag-colonialism","tag-colonization","tag-european-union","tag-imf","tag-imperialism","tag-neocolonialism","tag-usa","tag-world-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303368"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":303371,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303368\/revisions\/303371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}