This is personal. I’ve been to the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the most exploited and consequently poorest nations on earth. I’ve seen the copper mines that enrich overseas investors but leave the Congolese people without schooling, health care, or an adequately trained and paid security force.
So when the New York Times reports that Donald Trump and the pro-Israel celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz have just conspired to again unleash the one man most recently responsible for the Congo’s misery, the Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, I know first-hand that their decision will cause actual suffering and death.
Five days before Trump’s term ended, his close adviser Dershowitz convinced him to remove Dan Gertler from a U.S. Treasury Department blacklist, which since 2017 had restricted the Israeli’s ability to do business with American banks and corporations. (“Trump Administration Quietly Eased Sanctions on Israeli Billionaire.”)
The Treasury Department’s statement when it put Gertler on the list was clear:
Gertler is an international businessman and billionaire who has amassed his fortune through hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). . . As a result, between 2010 and 2012 alone, the DRC reportedly lost over $1.36 billion in revenues. . . “
So now Dan Gertler is back in business. The $1.36 billion figure certainly understates his looting. What’s also vital to remember is that the DR Congo’s annual budget is only $7.2 billion, a pittance for a nation with 87 million people. (Just for contrast, the Oklahoma state budget is $8.1 billion: population 643,000.)
The DR Congo is still torn by the worst ongoing humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II; by one estimate, 5 million people died in the series of wars that started in 1998, and that still sputter along in the country’s east. Gertler’s secret bank accounts hide several billion dollars that could have been used to fight widespread malnutrition (the rate is 70 percent), to promote education and health (Congolese health workers are only now bringing the country’s latest ebola outbreak under control), and to slowly and steadily create a professional army and police force to replace the current bands of unpaid uniformed looters who rape and kill civilians with impunity.
In recent years, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to improve Israel’s ties with sub-Saharan Africa, with some undeniable success. But so far, Israel has apparently done nothing about Dan Gertler’s crimes, even though the billionaire returns regularly from the DR Congo to his home in Tel Aviv. In fact, Gertler barely registers in the Israeli consciousness, instead of being the national shame that he deserves. Israel may not have a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, like the U.S. does, which outlaws paying bribes overseas. But surely the nation’s economic and political elite could informally rein him in from continuing to damage Israel’s reputation.
Alan Dershowitz’s publicity-seeking antics are sometimes merely ludicrous. Why an 82-year-old man still behaves like an immature adolescent is a job for the trained psychologists. But there’s nothing comic about this latest move— using his influence with Donald Trump to free Dan Gertler to loot the DR Congo again.
Alan Dershowitz has long since revealed himself to be a mouthpiece and apologist for racist, expansionist, illegal/brutal occupier “Israel.” His credibility regarding the “Israel”/Palestinian-Arab conflict has been utterly demolished by among other scholars, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, who has proven him to be ill-informed and a plagiarist (See Finkelstein’s “Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.”) Dershowitz’s “The Case for Israel” is replete with misinformation and disinformation based largely on quotations lifted from his fellow con artist, Joan Peters’ mountain of falsehoods, “From Time Immemorial.”
“The DR Congo is still torn by the worst ongoing humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II; by one estimate, 5 million people died in the series of wars that started in 1998, and that still sputter along in the country’s east.”
Wars don’t really sputter causelessly along, they are waged…Justin Podur has done a book on it.
“Stealing Mineral Wealth for Corporate Interests: U.S. Bankrolled Mass Murder of Millions in Central Africa
After Lumumba was killed, the U.S. government lavished hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to help consolidate the power of his former army chief of staff and assassin Joseph Mobutu, who stole millions of dollars from the public treasury over the next 30 years, killed thousands of people, and wrecked any prospects for the DRC’s successful development.
When Mobutu fell ill with cancer and lost his strategic utility in the 1990s, the U.S. had him replaced and sponsored a joint Rwandan-Ugandan invasion of the DRC that caused millions more deaths and resulted in further looting of Congo’s resources.”
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2020/12/02/stealing-mineral-wealth-for-corporate-interests-u-s-bankrolled-mass-murder-of-millions-in-central-africa/