Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-09-22-Speech-3-312"
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"en.20100922.23.3-312"2
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"Mr President, this debate implies that human rights abuses in the Congo are a recent phenomenon, or that this is an unusual state of affairs in Africa. Neither is the case: if only it were.
I remember the independence of the Belgian Congo in 1960, when I was still at school. I recall the kidnapping and arrest of Patrice Lumumba within months of independence. I still remember vividly the coverage of him being thrown roughly into the back of a lorry, never to be seen again. Decades of fratricidal instability, dictatorship and civil war have followed.
The Congo has not been a special case in Africa. A peaceful democracy would be more difficult to find. If I were to follow the prescriptive, ‘nurture’ explanation, I would have to say there must be something in the water. However, there is another explanation.
In Africa in general, if not particularly in the Congo, when the colonists drew straight lines on the maps of Africa, they ignored the differences between different tribes and peoples. Each country, on independence, contained enormous vertical ethnic, linguistic or religious divisions in the body politic, which always inject political instability.
This is as true of Belgium as it is of the former Belgian Congo. The only difference is that Belgium has escaped the political violence. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Bosnia and Croatia where there have been as many killings, if not the same gratuitous sadism.
If vertical divisions in political states lead to instability, and sometimes to violence, why are we creating the same vertical divisions in Europe by uncontrolled immigration from the Third World in general, and Africa in particular? We were not content to leave Africa with unworkable political societies. We are busy recreating the same problems in the European heartlands."@en1
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