Dying For Plunder

In December of 2004 a massive subterranean earthquake sent giant waves racing across the Indian Ocean swift as killer-torpedoes. By the end of the day over 225,000 people were dead or missing, millions were homeless and even though the epicenter of the 9.0 quake was the Indonesian island of Sumatra its impact fell greatly upon Somalia nearly 2000 miles away.

The giant waves would end up churning up tons of nuclear and toxic waste that Europeans had been illegally dumping in Somalian waters ever since the country descended into anarchic civil war back in the early 1990s.

“Initial reports indicate that the tsunami waves broke open containers full of toxic waste and scattered the contents. We are talking about everything from medical waste to chemical waste products,” Nick Nuttal, the Unep spokesman, told The Times.

“We know this material is on the land and is now being blown around and possibly carried to villages. What we do not know is the full extent of the problem.”

Except that problem had been building for years and was common knowledge. As Jorge Piña reported from Rome in 2001: The developing South has become the dump for hundreds of thousands of ton of radioactive waste from the world's rich countries, a colossal business which is linked to money laundering and gunrunning.

''The trafficking of radioactive waste, a large part of which goes to countries of the South, constitutes a business of gigantic proportions, amounting to more than seven billion dollars a year in Italy alone,'' Massimo Scalia, the chairman of an investigative commission set up by the Italian parliament. Scalia said that every shipload of nuclear waste represents around five million dollars in profits. The radioactive waste was being primarily dumped in Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Algeria and Mozambique. The illegal dumpers would either jettison their toxic load in metal containers designed to sink to the bottom, or purposely sink the ship carrying the waste and report it as an accident.

'Toxic waste' behind Somali piracy

Now Najad Abdullahi reports that some of the pirates operating off Somalia's coast claim to be acting to protect their sovereign waters. They state that their ransom demands for captured ships is in response to the toxic dumping that has spread disease and destroyed their livelihoods as fisherman. So while the pirate hijackings have captured world attention the environmental devastation of Somalia's coastline continues unabated.

Africa's Environmental Time-Bomb
Every year, millions of dollars are literally going up in smoke in Nigeria, Africa's top crude oil-exporting nation, as companies burn off unwanted natural gas released during oil production.

This flaring, conditioned by the wetness of the Niger Delta, produces about 70 million tons of carbon dioxide daily. The UNDP/World Bank in 2004 reports the venting releases a cocktail of toxic substances that include benzene and particulates which pose serious health risks and environmental damage.

In 2007 Local communities in Nigeria took the World Bank before an internal auditor over claims that the lender neglected its duties and anti-poverty mission when it funded a controversial gas pipeline in the region, whose construction they say will harm the environment. They charge the World bank with having been derelict in carrying out necessary "due diligence" about the project's impacts.

[The 678-km pipeline, which would transfer natural gas from the Western Niger Delta to Benin, Togo and Ghana, is run by a consortium of oil giants led by ChevronTexaco and Royal Dutch Shell. About 530 kms of pipeline have been laid so far.]


Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR
Nigeria flares enough gas per year to power a good portion of Africa.

Survival vs Greed

In 2000, having (finally) acknowledged the great damage and injustice being done to that country the U.N. Security Council mandated a panel of experts to investigate Western involvement in the extraction of the Congo's vast natural resources.

If one needs to understand why the Bush administration remains antagonistic towards the United Nations one need look no further than that decision. Up until then, along with Britain and France, United States companies had been the major beneficiaries of the pillage carried out under the long and corrupt dictatorship of General Mobutu that lasted from the early 1960s well into the 1990s.

When Mobutu's successor, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, turned against his Western-backers with the support of Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia the Western powers turned to "Plan B". The new plan was to use Rwanda and Uganda as surrogates in order to exploit the Congo's wealth. The scheme aimed to divide the country along provincial and ethnic lines, beginning with the two Kivu provinces in the east – just as mineral-rich Katanga, abetted by the Belgians, had seceded soon after independence.

Stan Cox, AlterNet: The majority of the ore moves through illicit channels across the northeastern border to Rwanda, enriching troops and middlemen along the way. The U.K.-based organization Global Witness has comprehensively documented the impact of resource extraction in the DRC in a 2005 report that described "killing, rape, torture, arbitrary arrests, intimidation, mutilation, and the destruction or pillage of private property" that soldiers used "to gain control either over resource-rich areas or over the ability to tax resources."

"The war against the Congo is a looting war," explained the Deputy Minister of Mines, Mbaka Kawaya, in March 2001 after Kabila was duly assassinated. With brazen timing Bush had then promptly named Walter H. Kansteiner III to the post of US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Kansteiner was notorious for his business dealing with Apartheid South Africa and was one those advocating for the dismemberment of the Congo.

Within weeks, the first UN report was tabled at the Security Council. Barely reported in the corporate media, it pointed the finger at the United States, Britain and France as well as international financial institutions as "facilitators and passive accomplices" of "the systematic and systemic looting" of the Congo.

It exposed the direct links between the war and the looting: theft of agricultural products (coffee, cattle), of money from banks, of factories dismantled and moved piece by piece, and coercive use of children by various militias and imposition of "taxes" of all sorts on the civilian population.

We imagine somehow, ignoring the costly tragedies of our thoughtless actions whether in Iraq or Colombia or the Gaza Strip, that we in the well-off "North" can continue to pillage the earth and destroy with impunity. Yet, as the dethroned "Masters of the Universe" who manipulated us from Wall Street are finding out, wealth cannot be "created" but it can be almost instantly destroyed.

One U.N. expert sums it all up ruefully: "Wars have become commercial enterprises. Societies have become militarized. Wars open the way to profits and corporations don't respond to moral appeals."

Given the stakes, one would think we could master our greed long enough to recover our humanity. If only for our own sake.