In a recent article in the Independent newspaper, the seriousness of conflicts in and around DR Congo could not be plainer.

But, as pointed out in this article by Get Loud: War Child Canada, the press often fail to point out the roots of the warfare due to colonial and corporate grabbing of land and resources that has been going on for centuries. Also it’s a fact that the world’s Top 5 arms producers are the members of the UN Security Council: US, Russia, France, UK & Germany. It’s these Top 5 and China that have ensured Africa is awash with weapons and continue to sell arms. For example throughout the Cold War (1950-1989), the US delivered over $1.5 billion worth of weaponry to Africa. Many of the top US arms clients ? Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC) ? have turned out to be the worst in terms of violence.

It’s therefore more than sickening to see the leading politicians of Britain and France saying something must be done to help, which usually involves more guns and soldiers but no real change to poverty, and especially anything that would affect business as usual for corporations. At the same time our governments are making it harder for refugees to escape to Europe by their borders and identity policies and attitude to non-EU born people in general. No Borders Nottingham has and will continue to support Congolese asylum seekers who wish to stay in Britain whatever the government says about the safety or otherwise of DR Congo. It’s also sickening to know that while Heckler & Koch, continue to distribute arms from their offices & depot right here in Lenton, their MP5 sub-machine gun and P7 semi-automatic pistol are being used in DR Congo. Also their older G3 assault rifle is the weapon of choice of the Janjaweed in Darfur/Sudan and were also used in the 2008 post-election massacres in Kenya. H&K is the world?s second-largest manufacturer of handguns, assault rifles, submachine guns, machine guns and grenade launchers.