As long as that does not happen, foreign powers will finance local opposition and the national government to mine the DRC and Africa’s resources without paying taxes, and without sharing profits.

Focusing on rape like the Vagina Monologues’ Eve Ensler has done may ‘strike a cord’ with the racism and prejudice that already exists against Africans and African men, but it does not get to the heart of what is going on in the DRC.

Let’s name a few names: Anglo-American De Beers (Oppenheimer Family), Beny Steinmetz Resources Group (Beny Steinmetz), Nikanor PLC (Dany Gertler), the Blattner Family (logging), Maurice Tempelsmen (billionaire and confidant of Hillary and Bill Clinton, and many others in the Democratic Party establishment).

Investigate them, and you will get to the heart of the problems in the DRC, because these multi-billionaires finance and direct policy, including US policy, in Africa and DRC.

Even the Zimbabwean situation turns out to be all about diamonds. As soon as the Oppenheimer’s Debshan Ranch was confiscated, legislation was pushed through the US Senate to put a credit freeze on the Zimbabwean government, to make their land redistribution program fail. Signed into law on December 21st 2001, this law crashed the Zimbabwean currency in 2002, the year inflation in Zimbabwe turned into world record hyperinflation. That was ZDERA. Sponsor of ZDERA was Bill Frist (R-TN), co-sponsors were tellingly: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Russ Feingold and Jesse Helms.

The way the diamond industry works, is that 90% of the world’s output is in the hands of a single company, Anglo-American De Beers, which is owned by the Oppenheimer Family. The business model is not to find new mines so more diamonds can be mind, but to buy up mines and keep them out of business, to keep the price high. Diamonds are ubiquitous, and would fall in value if all mines came online. That is what is going on – keeping diamonds off the markets, outside of the two countries where Anglo-American has a national monopoly – Botswana and South Africa.

Senator Feingold has his own bill out, called the Zimbabwe Transition to Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2010 (ZTDERA), which seeks to prolong the economic sanctions against Zimbabwe. At the same time, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma has a bill repealing ZDERA, called the Zimbabwe Sanctions Repeal Act of 2010.

Senator Feingold’s bill contains an entire section, Section 9, devoted entirely to the diamond Kimberley Process certification scheme.

For more details and sources, check out my blog (under My Take).