The United States and the Mineral Wealth of Central Africa
The US (under)mining job of Africa: An Interview with Wayne Madsen
“There is a race going on between French and American intelligence services to grab the open market for wireless telecommunication via partner companies. However, France is under pressure to give up its chasse gardee on other fields as well. The French guilty conscience after the genocide in Rwanda was a good means to clip their wings, whereas precisely the American plan to get rid of Mobutu via Rwanda ended up in a human tragedy. The United States were interested in the country without mineral wealth because Kugame’s RPF was the ideal vehicle to fill up the wish list of its companies: Barrick, American Mineral Fields (AMF), Banro Resources, Bechtel, Tempelsman & Sons, Halliburton (editorial note - of which present vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney, was CEO). Microsoft was on the look-out for coltan ore. Walter Kansteiner, whose father is a trader in tropical raw materials in Chicago, now is assistant secretary of State for Africa in the Bush administration. On October 16, 1996, he made a plea for the splitting up of Zaire in The Forum for International Policy. At about the same time Laurent-Desire Kabila started his Blitzkrieg towards Kinshasa - with the active co-operation of American intelligence services. Nowadays that man determines the US Africa policy.”
Madsen may be a touch on the conspiracy-by-association side, but I’d have to read his book to know that for sure; suffice to say, this is a very interesting little interview, since it puts the US’s foreign policy stance vis-à-vis Africa into an existing, coherent frame, namely, American Empire.