'Thousands' dying in DR Congo war

Congolese hope elections due this year will end their misery Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo is killing 38,000 people each month, says the Lancet medical journal.
Most of the deaths are not caused by violence but by malnutrition and preventable diseases after the collapse of health services, the study said.

Since the war began in 1998, some 4m people have died, making it the world's most deadly war since 1945, it said.

A peace deal has ended most of the fighting but armed gangs continue to roam the east, killing and looting.

"Congo is the deadliest crisis anywhere in the world over the past 60 years," said Richard Brennan, health director of the New York-based International Rescue Committee and the study's lead author.

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The war in DR Congo


"Ignorance about its scale and impact is almost universal and international engagement remains completely out of proportion to humanitarian need,"

Some 17,000 United Nations peacekeepers are in DR Congo, to restore peace and organise elections due by the end of June 2006.

Looting

Researchers visited nearly 20,000 households across the country over a three-month period in 2004, recording births and deaths over the previous 18 months.


DR Congo has the world's largest peacekeeping mission

They then compared their results with data from neighbouring countries and before the war began and are confident that their results are accurate.

Children were worst affected by the increased mortality rate, often from easily preventable and treatable diseases like malaria and diarrhoea, the study found.

In some parts, death rates were double the pre-war level, while the mortality rate in the city of Kisangani dropped by 80% after fighting there stopped in 2002.

At its height, at least seven foreign armies were involved in the war.

Many fighters - both foreign and Congolese - have been accused of looting DR Congo's vast natural mineral resources during the war.

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The unquiet death of Patrice Lumumba
By Bill Vann
16 January 2002

January 17 marks the forty-first anniversary of the brutal assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The murder of the leader of the Congolese independence struggle and one of the most impassioned critics of the colonial oppression of Africa continues to haunt governments in both Europe and America.

In November, an all-party commission of inquiry formed by the Belgian government released a report acknowledging that Belgium played a role in the murder of the Congolese leader.

The admission was far too little and came far too late. The Belgian government decided to launch the commission as a show of repentance for past crimes. Its aim was to smooth the way for increased involvement in its former African colony following the fall of the Mobutu dictatorship and to improve its bargaining position vis-à-vis the United States, its principal economic rival in the region.

“If we want to engage in frank dialogue with our former colonial partners, then we have to also consider some painful periods from our colonial past,” said a Foreign Ministry spokesman of the commission’s findings.

At the same time, the limited admissions served as a means of whitewashing the growing revelations about the assassination in the last few years, in both the book by Flemish historian Ludo de Witte published two years ago, De Moord Op Lumumba, and by journalists who interviewed Belgian officers and soldiers who participated in the killing.

Focus has been further brought to the assassination by the recent film Lumumba, directed by Raoul Peck, which recreated the horrific murder.

The film begins with the nightmarish scene of Belgian soldiers unearthing the remains of the Congolese leader and one of his comrades who were shot to death by a firing squad just days before. Determined to deny supporters of Congolese liberation even a corpse around which they could rally, the order was given to obliterate every physical trace of Lumumba. Thus, with axes, saws, acid and fire—along with ample quantities of whisky to dull their senses—the soldiers set about their grisly task.

The commission’s report concluded that authorities in Brussels and Belgium’s King Baudouin knew of plans to kill Lumumba and did nothing to save him. It insisted, however, that there is no documentary evidence that Belgium ordered the Congolese leader’s death.

It did acknowledge that the government covertly channeled funds and arms to regional secessionist groups within the Congo that were violently opposed to Lumumba. The report put much of the blame on Baudouin, who died, in 1993, alleging that the King pursued his own post-colonial policy behind the backs of elected officials. Some parties within the Belgian government have responded by calling for a debate on the future of the royal family.

In fact, earlier investigations have uncovered ample proof that the assassination of Lumumba was the direct result of orders given by the Belgian government and the Eisenhower administration, acting through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and local clients financed and “advised” by Brussels and Washington.

De Witte’s book cited a telegram sent three months before Lumumba’s death from Count Harold d’Aspremont Lynden, then minister for African affairs, to Belgian officials in the Congo:

“The main aim to pursue in the interests of the Congo, Katanga and Belgium is clearly Lumumba’s definitive elimination,” said the memorandum. Given that the Congolese leader had already been deposed from power and placed under house arrest at the time, there was no mistaking the meaning of these words.

Similar revelations have surfaced from the US side. Last year, the government released archive material related to the Kennedy assassination that included an interview with the White House minute-taker under the Eisenhower administration, Robert Johnson.

In a meeting held with security advisers in August 1960, two months after Congo achieved its formal independence from Belgium, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to “eliminate” Lumumba, according to Johnson’s account.

“There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued,” Johnson recalled.

The CIA’s director, Allen Dulles, referred to the Congolese leader as a “mad dog.”

Among the American agents on the ground in the Congo was a young CIA man working under diplomatic cover, Frank Carlucci, who tried to work his way into Lumumba’s confidence in the months before the murder. Carlucci went on to become national security advisor and defense secretary in the Reagan administration and is today the chairman of the Carlyle Group, the influential merchant bank that includes George Bush Sr. among its directors.

According to Larry Devlin, then the CIA station chief in Leopoldville (Kinshasa), the agency’s chief technical officer arrived in the African nation shortly after the “elimination” order from Eisenhower. With him he brought a tube of poisoned toothpaste that was to be placed in the Congolese leader’s bathroom. The improbable plot was dropped, however, in favor of a more direct method. Lumumba was delivered into the hands of his bitterest political enemy, Moises Tshombe, the secessionist leader of Katanga.

The assassination took place less than seven months after the Congo had declared its independence, with Lumumba as its first prime minister.

Lumumba was among the most courageous and principled figures in a generation of young nationalist leaders who came forward in the second half of the twentieth century to claim freedom from European colonialism.

These forces were ill prepared for the challenge of leading the immense eruption of social struggle that swept the continent. Moreover, both those who were murdered, like Lumumba, and those who survived were handed a poison chalice by the old colonial powers in the form of the arbitrary borders that they had drawn in the nineteenth century scramble to divide and conquer Africa.

In the Congo, in particular, Belgian colonialism had deliberately kept the African population untrained and uneducated, reduced to the status of beasts of burden for the extractive industries that looted the country’s vast mineral and other natural wealth.

On the eve of independence, the Congo, a territory larger than Western Europe, was seriously underdeveloped. There were no African army officers, only three African managers in the entire civil service, and only 30 university graduates. Yet Western investments in Congo’s mineral resources (uranium, copper, gold, tin, cobalt, diamonds, manganese, zinc) were colossal. These investments meant that the West was determined to keep control over the country beyond independence. The Belgians organized the transfer of power in deliberate manner to ensure that “independence” would at best be a formal fiction.

Following widespread rioting and strikes in 1959, the colonial power surprised all of the nationalist leaders by scheduling elections for May 1960. In a chaotic rush to take advantage of the fruits of independence, 120 different parties were formed, most of them regionally or ethnically based. Only one, the Mouvement National Congolais or the MNC, led by Lumumba, favored a centralized government and a Congo united across ethnic and regional lines.

Lumumba’s rise and fall was meteoric. Plucked from a Belgian colonial jail where he was beaten and tortured for advocating independence, he was flown to Brussels to participate in round-table discussions that were aimed at smoothing the way to a peaceful and smooth transition to a regime that would leave Belgium’s financial interests in the Congo intact, while transferring the trappings of state power from the white colonialists to a new native elite.

Peck’s film Lumumba acutely captures the immense social contradictions underlying the independence movement and the class position of Africa’s new petty-bourgeois nationalist rulers. A scene portrays Lumumba’s speech before the independence day celebrations attended by the Belgian king and his ministers as well as the collection of black opportunist politicians into whose hands Belgium intended to entrust the new independent state.

In the midst of a ceremony in which the Belgians had congratulated themselves on successfully civilizing the Congolese and preparing them for self-rule, Lumumba spelled out in graphic terms the reality of colonial oppression, describing it as 80 years of “humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force”:

“We have known harassing work, exacted in exchange for salaries which did not permit us to eat enough to drive away hunger, to clothe ourselves, or to house ourselves decently, or to raise our children as creatures dear to us.... We have known ironies, insults, blows that we endured morning, noon and night, because we are negroes.... We have seen our lands seized in the name of allegedly legal laws, which in fact recognized only that might is right.... We will never forget the massacres where so many perished, the cells into which those who refused to submit to a regime of oppression and exploitation were thrown.”

Pecks camera cuts between the stunned anger on the faces of the Belgians listening to this speech and the elation of crowds of Africans gathered around radios cheering Lumumba’s courage to honestly portray their existence.

Lumumba’s forthright demands for economic independence, social justice and political self-determination, and his hostility to a political setup based upon tribal divisions, which the colonialists had effectively used to divide and rule Africa, sealed his fate. His threat to appeal for Soviet aid as a last resort in his effort to free the country of the continuing domination of the Belgian mining interests and Belgian troops, who continued to intervene in the aftermath of independence, gave Washington the pretext for allying with the old colonial power in seeking his elimination.

Within days of independence, the political situation in the Congo spiraled out of control. Black troops mutinied against Belgian officers. Katanga province, the main mining region, declared itself a separate state under Tshombe, who acted under the protection of Western mining interests and the Belgian military. Belgium sent its army back into the former colony, with the alleged aim of protecting its nationals. Lumumba invited in UN peacekeeping forces, but they too subordinated themselves to the machinations of Belgium and the US, refusing to take any action to prevent the murder of the new prime minister.

While Tshombe became prime minister after Lumumba’s murder, his reign did not last long. In 1965, Joseph Mobutu, the Congolese army leader who handed Lumumba over to his executioners, staged a bloodless coup, inaugurating a 32-year dictatorship which was legendary for its corruption and greed. This “kleptocracy,” which renamed the territory Zaire, became Washington’s closest ally on the continent and served as a staging area for its counterrevolutionary interventions against liberation movements in southern Africa.

After his death, Lumumba was transformed into a harmless icon of African liberation and third world politics. Even Mobutu, who had engineered his death, paid homage to the former leader, as did the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy, which named its premier international university after him.

In fact, the Soviets had little intention of helping Lumumba. Its presence and interest in Africa was never as strong as the West maintained—in order to justify its own neo-colonialist strategies—or as Moscow itself pretended to promote its image as a champion of national liberation. Where it did intervene, it was not to further social revolution, but to improve its bargaining position vis-à-vis US imperialism as part of its Cold War policy of peaceful coexistence. Thus, it could provide aid to Angola against apartheid South Africa’s military aggression, at the same time that it buttressed a brutal military dictatorship in Ethiopia that plunged the entire Horn of Africa into desperate crisis.

Above all, Peck’s film Lumumba bleakly portrays the new Congolese prime minister as isolated, trapped in a set of political conspiracies that he cannot escape. Born in Haiti, Peck spent time as a youth in the Congo, where his father worked as a teacher. He is sympathizer of Pan Africanism and has repeatedly said that he made the film above all to present Lumumba’s story to an African audience. He accurately presents all of the forces aligned against the nationalist prime minister, from the CIA agents cultivating his military chief, Mobutu, to the Belgian colonialists and military officers and the treacherous set of grasping African politicians.

But what he is unable to see or explain is what social forces were at work within the new regime. Lumumba was unable to counter the enemies arrayed against him because, in the final analysis, he too was balancing between the imperialists on the one hand and the oppressed African masses on the other.

The murder of Lumumba was part of a political process that unfolded throughout sub-Saharan Africa in which the dreams of masses of workers, peasants and poor for revolutionary social change were cruelly betrayed.

The petty-bourgeois nationalist elites that came to power with decolonization were content to accept the legacy offered them by colonialism, laying hold of the state institutions and national boundaries created by the European powers in their conquest of Africa.

The formal granting of state independence nowhere in Africa represented in any fundamental sense the realization of the democratic aspirations of the African masses. Even in those areas where the end of colonialism was the product of armed struggle, state independence merely provided a cover for the continued dominance of imperialism over the masses of the former colonies, with corrupt national bourgeois cliques using the state to enrich themselves at the expense of any social progress.

While Lumumba’s brutal assassination turned him into a martyr of Western imperialist aggression in Africa, those whom he had emulated, from Nyere to Nkrumah and Kenyatta, presided over corrupt regimes that gave way to military dictatorships and police-state regimes in the service of the international banks and foreign capital.

The Congo itself, 41 years after Lumumba’s assassination, provides the starkest confirmation of the thoroughly reactionary character of the national bourgeoisie. Mobutu was overthrown in 1997, after his debt-ridden regime had outlived its usefulness to Washington with the end of the Cold War. His successor, Laurent Kabila, was in turn assassinated, replaced by his son Joseph, who has sought to be even more accommodating to Western financial interests.

In the course of three years of civil war, more than 2.5 million Congolese have died, most of them women and children who have fallen victim to hunger and disease. The armies of neighboring African regimes—Rwanda, Uganda on one side and Zimbabwe on the other—have intervened in the country’s civil war, ostensibly for reasons of political sympathy and regional security. In fact, they have merely emulated the historical role of Western colonialism, illegally appropriating and exploiting mining facilities to enrich military officers and their political and business cronies in the three countries.

There is no way out of the desperate social and economic crisis gripping the Congo and the entire African continent under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie and the domination of the Western banks and transnationals. The ideals of democratic freedoms, economic progress and social justice that inspired masses of Congolese and other Africans in the struggle against colonialism more than four decades ago will be realized only through the forging of a new movement to unite the African working class with that of Europe, America and the rest of the world based on the program of international socialism.






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World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved

Prime Minister, Monsieur le Premier ministre,

C’est avec fierté et beaucoup d’émotion que je réponds aujourd’hui à l’appel du destin qui prend parfois un tournant que l’on n’aurait pas osé imaginer. Sachez combien je suis honorée de la marque de confiance que vous me témoignez en me désignant le 27e Gouverneur général du Canada. Je tourne en votre présence une page importante de ma propre histoire et j’entreprends cette nouvelle aventure avec espoir et conviction.

Je voudrais avant tout vous parler d’espoir. Lors de sa vingt-deuxième visite au Canada, en mai dernier, la Reine Élizabeth II nous rappelait que nous pouvons “faire une différence” pour celles et ceux qui viendront après nous. “Si nous nous efforçons dans notre vie et à notre manière d’améliorer le monde qui nous entoure, alors, disait-elle, nous pourrons à bon droit être fière de notre contribution”. Voilà une parole en tous points conforme à la femme très préoccupée par le sort de l’humanité que j’ai eu l’honneur de rencontrer à Balmoral. C’est une parole d’espoir que je fais mienne devant vous.

Car l’espoir a éclairé tout mon parcours d’enfant et de femme et s’est incarné dans ce pays aux possibilités illimitées que, il faut bien l’avouer, l’on tient parfois pour acquis. Depuis la petite fille née dans un autre pays “barbelé de pied en cap”, pour reprendre l’expression si forte de mon oncle le poète René Depestre, celle qui a vu ses parents, sa famille, ses amis aux prises avec les horreurs d’une dictature sans merci, jusqu’à la femme qui se tient devant vous aujourd’hui, c’est tout un apprentissage de la liberté qui a vu le jour.

Je sais à quel point cette liberté est précieuse et quel héritage fabuleux elle représente pour chaque enfant et chaque citoyen de ce pays. Moi dont les ancêtres étaient des esclaves, moi qui suis issue d’une civilisation longtemps réduite aux chuchotements et aux cris de la douleur, j’en connais le prix et je reconnais en elle notre plus grand trésor collectif.

Je demeure convaincue que chaque Canadienne, chaque Canadien, est riche de cette liberté et défierait quiconque voudrait la lui enlever. De Signal Hill à l’île de Vancouver, de la terre de Baffin à Thetford Mines, cette terre de liberté est nôtre et nous unit toutes et tous. Cette liberté a marqué notre histoire et notre territoire de son souffle florissant comme nos étés et fort comme nos hivers. Elle a façonné cet esprit d’aventure que j’aime par-dessus tout dans ce pays et qui permet à chacune et à chacun d’entre nous de participer pleinement à son édification.
Il y a plus de quatre siècles, cet esprit d’aventure pousse des femmes et des hommes à franchir l’océan pour découvrir ailleurs un monde nouveau. C’est aussi lui qui amène des peuples autochtones à leur communiquer le génie de ces terres généreuses. C’est encore lui qui conduit les gens des quatre coins du monde à venir ici prendre part à nos projets d’avenir ou recommencer leur vie à l’abri de l’injustice et loin des massacres. C’est toujours lui qui incite nos artistes, nos chercheurs, nos forces du maintien de la paix et nos institutions à propager notre savoir-faire et notre message d’espoir. Nous sommes aujourd’hui la somme de toutes ces aventures.
Pensez-y. Aborder une terre inconnue avec l’espoir de s’y enraciner. Se nourrir de la rencontre avec les peuples de ces grands espaces qui résonnent de leurs coutumes immémoriales. S’ouvrir enfin au monde entier qui vient retrouver chez nous l’idéal d’une société où toutes les citoyennes et tous les citoyens sont égaux en droits. Notre histoire nous parle de la liberté d’inventer un monde nouveau, et de l’audace de ces aventures singulières.
Permettez-moi d’ajouter que ma nomination au poste de Gouverneure générale du Canada en est la preuve. La preuve que tous les possibles sont permis en ce pays. Ma propre aventure représente pour moi et pour d’autres une étincelle d’espoir que j’aimerais entretenir pour le plus grand nombre.

Nous récoltons aujourd’hui ce que nous avons semé, et la moisson est abondante. Nous avons mis en place des mesures qui ont favorisé l’éclosion de talents qui portent notre voix dans le monde entier. Le Canada peut compter, en ce début de millénaire, sur deux richesses inestimables : notre territoire et notre population. Chacune et chacun d’entre nous renoue à sa façon avec ce sentiment d’appartenance à cet espace que nous partageons et qui contient le monde. Jamais il n’a été aussi urgent d’en assurer l’intégrité éthique et écologique pour les générations à venir. Il s’agit là d’une obligation morale.

Je sais que notre planète est fragile et des catastrophes naturelles comme celle qui a sévi dernièrement chez nos voisins nous le rappelle brutalement. Nous avons vu tant de personnes perdre leurs biens. Puis, comme c’est universellement le cas dans de telles circonstances, nous avons vu émerger des segments entiers d’une population, parmi les plus démunis, celles et ceux qui n’avaient nulle part où aller. Dépossédés, sans repères, confrontés à la dévastation, voire au désarroi. Des images comme celles-ci, nous en avions vues en provenance du Darfour, d’Haiti, du Niger. Voilà que cette fois-ci, c’était la Nouvelle-Orléans, dans les marges d’une société d’abondance.

D’autres changements surviennent et nous rendent perplexes. La redéfinition des frontières et la violence qui parfois l’accompagne, l’ouverture des marchés, la rapidité et la convergence des moyens de communications font que la carte du monde se modifie de jour en jour sous nos yeux et que les pays s’interrogent sur la place qu’ils y tiennent. L’enjeu est de taille : il s’agit de participer à la fois à un mouvement de mondialisation et à la protection de signes qui enrichissent l’humanité de notre propre rapport au monde.

Le métier de journaliste, que j’ai pratiqué avec passion et conviction, m’a permis d’être le témoin privilégié de bien des bouleversements et de cette ouverture sans précédent sur le monde. Sachez que j’entends rester à l’écoute et que ma curiosité reste vive. J’estime que nous sommes à un point tournant de l’histoire des civilisations et que notre avenir repose plus que jamais auparavant sur celles et ceux qui nous forcent à imaginer le monde de demain. Ces femmes et ces hommes qui déploient aujourd’hui les multiples facettes de nos possibilités. Qui gravent dans notre mémoire la mesure de nos aspirations. Qui nous tendent un miroir où se révèle l’écart entre ce que nous sommes et ce que nous aspirons à être.

Il est fini le temps des “deux solitudes” qui a trop longtemps défini notre approche de ce pays. L’étroitesse du “chacun pour soi” n’a plus sa place dans le monde actuel qui exige que nous apprenions à voir au-delà de nos blessures et de nos différends pour le bien de l’ensemble. Bien au contraire, nous devons briser le spectre de toutes les solitudes et instaurer un pacte de solidarité entre tous les citoyens qui composent le Canada d’aujourd’hui. Il y va de notre prospérité et de notre rayonnement partout où l’espoir que nous représentons apporte au monde un supplément d’âme.

C’est dans cette perspective que j’entends m’assurer que cet espace institutionnel que j’occupe à compter d’aujourd’hui soit plus que jamais un lieu où la parole citoyenne trouvera un écho et où prévaudront les valeurs de respect, de tolérance et de partage qui sont si chères à mes yeux et à ceux de toutes les Canadiennes et de tous les Canadiens. Je dirais même que ces valeurs sont pour moi souveraines et sont inextricablement liées au Canada que j’aime. Mon mari Jean-Daniel Lafond et moi-même souhaitons rallier les forces vives autour de ces valeurs qui nous rassemblent et qui ont une portée universelle.

Il est une phrase de Montesquieu, ce philosophe du siècle des lumières, qui résonne beaucoup en moi et que j’aimerais partager avec vous. Elle dit que “le devoir du citoyen est un crime lorsqu’il fait oublier le devoir de l’homme”. J’ajouterais, évidemment, de la femme, puisque nous aimons être nommées à part entière. Et bien cette phrase m’inspire et me réconforte à la manière d’un rempart contre la barbarie qui afflige tant de peuples en ce monde. Elle me rappelle aussi la chance que nous avons toutes et tous d’être citoyennes et citoyens d’un pays qui ne craint pas de faire reculer les préjugés et dont la générosité est notre plus bel étendard dans le concert des nations. À titre de Gouverneure générale, j’entends mettre en valeur cet élan de générosité dont les Canadiennes et les Canadiens ont souvent su faire preuve au fil de l’histoire, depuis nos anciens combattants et nos Forces canadiennes, dont les sacrifices sont innombrables, jusqu’aux nombreux volontaires de l’action humanitaire qui travaillent souvent dans l’ombre au nom d’un idéal pacifique de liberté et de justice.

Je veux aussi et surtout que nos jeunes soient nos porte-étendard. Je veux qu’ils puisent à pleines mains dans ce trésor énorme qu’est le Canada. Je suis mère d’une petite fille dont l’histoire m’a ouvert les yeux sur des réalités très dures, mais incontournables. Marie-Éden, ma fille, a changé ma vie. Elle m’a appris que si tous les enfants naissent égaux, ils n’ont pas tous les mêmes chances de s’épanouir. Voilà qui vaut autant pour les enfants d’ici que pour les enfants du tiers monde.

Je pense également à Joshua, ce jeune Cri rencontré il n’y a pas si longtemps à Nemaska où mon métier de journaliste m’avait conduite. Alors que la plupart de ses camarades avaient décroché de l’école et que plusieurs d’entre eux s’étaient donné la mort, ce garçon s’est étonné de ma présence dans sa communauté. Il m’a interrogé sur mon travail dans les médias et, d’une manière ou d’une autre, mon expérience l’a incité à vouloir prendre sa place dans le domaine des communications, en dépit de tous les obstacles sur sa route.

Rien ne me semble plus indigne de nos sociétés modernes que la marginalisation de certains jeunes conduits à l’isolement et au désespoir. Nous ne devons pas tolérer de telles dérives. Après tout, nos jeunes nous aident à redéfinir la grande famille à laquelle nous appartenons toutes et tous dans un monde de moins en moins étanche, de plus en plus ouvert. Ils sont la promesse de notre avenir. Il est donc de notre devoir de les engager à participer à cette réinvention du monde et de leur communiquer cet esprit d’aventure que nos ancêtres nous ont transmis, quelles que soient leurs origines. Il faut donner aux jeunes le pouvoir et surtout l’envie de faire ressortir leur plein potentiel. À cela, je veillerai et j’invite tous et chacun à m’aider dans cette tâche primordiale.

Je suis animée de l’espoir de rencontrer très bientôt mes compatriotes et je suis forte de la conviction que le Canada doit continuer à accomplir de grandes choses si nous travaillons ensemble au mieux-être de la population et de l’humanité. Notre pays est si vaste et si riche dans ses coloris et ses accents. Plusieurs d’entre nous n’avons pas la chance d’en mesurer l’étendue. Je sais combien je suis privilégiée. D’où mon impatience et ma hâte d’aller à votre rencontre et d’amorcer avec vous le dialogue qui est pour moi l’acte fondateur de ce pays.

J’ai déjà une bonne idée de la sagesse des Premières Nations, de l’hospitalité légendaire et de l’humour des gens de l’Atlantique, de l’âme généreuse et de la culture rayonnante des Québécoises et des Québécois, de la résilience des francophones hors Québec, de l’impressionnante vitalité économique de l’Ontario, du sens de l’honneur des résidants de l’Ouest où, me dit-on, il est encore possible de conclure une bonne affaire par une poignée de main, de la géographie spectaculaire de la Colombie-Britannique. Je connais plusieurs des splendeurs de ce pays, mais il me reste tant à découvrir à vos côtés. Il me tarde d’aller vers vous, dans vos communautés, vos villes, vos villages, vos familles, et de vous entendre parler de votre foi en ce pays de liberté qui est une source inépuisable de renouvellement.

Les gouvernements de tous les ordres, les communautés de partout au pays, les organismes qui veillent à son essor, les institutions qui le mettent en valeur, les femmes et les hommes qui font que ce pays existe ont tous la responsabilité d’éveiller en nous cet esprit d’aventure avec lequel j’entreprends aujourd’hui d’assumer, avec fierté et détermination, la fonction de Gouverneure générale du Canada. Je souhaite de tout mon coeur que nous misions ensemble sur la vigueur de notre histoire collective pour réaliser notre voeu le plus cher, mais le plus ambitieux, d’un monde meilleur.

Je vous remercie.

Conférence panafricaine de Léopoldville (25/08/1960)


En plien crise congolaise, Lumumba n'abandonne pas son idéal panafricaniste.
Dans son discours inaugural de cette conférence qu'il tient le 25/08/1960,
Lumumba dit:

«Tous ont compris que si le Congo bascule, toute l'Afrique bascule dans la
nuit de la défaite et de la servitude! (...) C'est ici en effet que se joue
un nouvel acte de l'émancipation et de la réhabilitation de l'Afrique!
Poursuivant la lutte dont l'objectif primordial est de sauver la dignité de
l'homme africain, le peuple congolais a choisi l'indépendance immédiate et
totale. (...) Entre la liberté et l'esclave, il n'y a pas de compromis!»

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Men and women of the Congo,

Victorious fighters for independence, today victorious, I greet you in the name of the Congolese Government. All of you, my friends, who have fought tirelessly at our sides, I ask you to make this June 30, 1960, an illustrious date that you will keep indelibly engraved in your hearts, a date of significance of which you will teach to your children, so that they will make known to their sons and to their grandchildren the glorious history of our fight for liberty.

For this independence of the Congo, even as it is celebrated today with Belgium, a friendly country with whom we deal as equal to equal, no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that is was by fighting that it has been won [applause], a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood.

We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.

This was our fate for eighty years of a colonial regime; our wounds are too fresh and too painful still for us to drive them from our memory. We have known harassing work, exacted in exchange for salaries which did not permit us to eat enough to drive away hunger, or to clothe ourselves, or to house ourselves decently, or to raise our children as creatures dear to us.

We have known ironies, insults, blows that we endured morning, noon, and evening, because we are Negroes. Who will forget that to a black one said "tu", certainly not as to a friend, but because the more honorable "vous" was reserved for whites alone?

We have seen our lands seized in the name of allegedly legal laws which in fact recognized only that might is right.

We have seen that the law was not the same for a white and for a black, accommodating for the first, cruel and inhuman for the other.

We have witnessed atrocious sufferings of those condemned for their political opinions or religious beliefs; exiled in their own country, their fate truly worse than death itself.

We have seen that in the towns there were magnificent houses for the whites and crumbling shanties for the blacks, that a black was not admitted in the motion-picture houses, in the restaurants, in the stores of the Europeans; that a black traveled in the holds, at the feet of the whites in their luxury cabins.

Who will ever forget the massacres where so many of our brothers perished, the cells into which those who refused to submit to a regime of oppression and exploitation were thrown [applause]?

All that, my brothers, we have endured.

But we, whom the vote of your elected representatives have given the right to direct our dear country, we who have suffered in our body and in our heart from colonial oppression, we tell you very loud, all that is henceforth ended.

The Republic of the Congo has been proclaimed, and our country is now in the hands of its own children.

Together, my brothers, my sisters, we are going to begin a new struggle, a sublime struggle, which will lead our country to peace, prosperity, and greatness.

Together, we are going to establish social justice and make sure everyone has just remuneration for his labor [applause].

We are going to show the world what the black man can do when he works in freedom, and we are going to make of the Congo the center of the sun's radiance for all of Africa.

We are going to keep watch over the lands of our country so that they truly profit her children. We are going to restore ancient laws and make new ones which will be just and noble.

We are going to put an end to suppression of free thought and see to it that all our citizens enjoy to the full the fundamental liberties foreseen in the Declaration of the Rights of Man [applause].

We are going to do away with all discrimination of every variety and assure for each and all the position to which human dignity, work, and dedication entitles him.

We are going to rule not by the peace of guns and bayonets but by a peace of the heart and the will [applause].

And for all that, dear fellow countrymen, be sure that we will count not only on our enormous strength and immense riches but on the assistance of numerous foreign countries whose collaboration we will accept if it is offered freely and with no attempt to impose on us an alien culture of no matter what nature [applause].

In this domain, Belgium, at last accepting the flow of history, has not tried to oppose our independence and is ready to give us their aid and their friendship, and a treaty has just been signed between our two countries, equal and independent. On our side, while we stay vigilant, we shall respect our obligations, given freely.

Thus, in the interior and the exterior, the new Congo, our dear Republic that my government will create, will be a rich, free, and prosperous country. But so that we will reach this aim without delay, I ask all of you, legislators and citizens, to help me with all your strength.

I ask all of you to forget your tribal quarrels. They exhaust us. They risk making us despised abroad.

I ask the parliamentary minority to help my Government through a constructive opposition and to limit themselves strictly to legal and democratic channels.

I ask all of you not to shrink before any sacrifice in order to achieve the success of our huge undertaking.

In conclusion, I ask you unconditionally to respect the life and the property of your fellow citizens and of foreigners living in our country. If the conduct of these foreigners leaves something to be desired, our justice will be prompt in expelling them from the territory of the Republic; if, on the contrary, their conduct is good, they must be left in peace, for they also are working for our country's prosperity.

The Congo's independence marks a decisive step towards the liberation of the entire African continent [applause].

Sire, Excellencies, Mesdames, Messieurs, my dear fellow countrymen, my brothers of race, my brothers of struggle-- this is what I wanted to tell you in the name of the Government on this magnificent day of our complete independence.

Our government, strong, national, popular, will be the health of our country.

I call on all Congolese citizens, men, women and children, to set themselves resolutely to the task of creating a prosperous national economy which will assure our economic independence.

Glory to the fighters for national liberation!

Long live independence and African unity!

Long live the independent and sovereign Congo!

[applause, long and loud]