A New Policy Is Needed Toward Africa

By Lyndon LaRouche, 23 Febrary 1996

Q: African Cardinal Hyacinthe Thiandoum is calling for a debt moratorium in Africa, continuing the Vatican’s efforts to deal with the economic situation. What are your thoughts about it?

LYNDON LAROUCHE: Well, people don’t realize how desperate it is. What the United States is tending to do, though the Clinton administration, the Clinton Presidency, to its credit, has resisted pressure from the State Department and other quarters to go whole-hog with the British line, genocide, is kind of soft on Uganda.

The genocide in Rwanda; the attempted genocide in Burundi; the temporarily suspended effort to destabilize Kenya; the escalated war run through Uganda against Sudan, using patsy John Garang as their operation, is all part of a package of genocide, just like the operation against Nigeria, against the Abacha government there, which is now going toward an election race in the constitutional process. The operation against Sudan.

The British are out to commit genocide, and the United States tends to, reluctantly or otherwise, go along with the Brits, as we’ve seen recently in this U.S. toleration of this fraud pulled by the British and their Egyptian patsies in the UN against Sudan.

The result of this policy toward Africa, which is a genocidal racist policy, even though the Clinton administration, obviously the President himself, would rather not have that kind of policy—but he’s under pressure to go along with it—leads to a disaster. Everyone who is human, who knows something about Africa, whatever side they’re on on other issues, recognizes this problem, and has recognized for a long time, that the only equitable solution, considering that {we} as the leading powers of the world, did to Africa what it’s suffering today. So {what right} do we have, like the landlord who murdered the good provider of the household, what right does he have to evict the widow? The same thing: What right do we have to collect debt repayment from African states which we’ve plunged into misery? This is just totally inequitable. It violates the fundamental principle of equity. And the Vatican has had, more or less, a consistent policy in this direction, as the concern, for example, of His Holiness in these kinds of directions.

So there’s nothing really {new} about it, it’s a very good thing that this statement of this policy has been uttered. I support it, I think it’s overdue; but it’s not entirely new on the Vatican’s part, or on the part of other people.