Slavery fueled Genocide: Uranium in the Congo
This piece was written for Energy and Resources 160, a climate justice class at UC Berkeley in the Spring 2021 semester. It is a response to the documentary King Leopold’s Ghost, recounting some history of the Congo and the lasting impacts of King Leopold II’s legacy.
When I started going to UC Berkeley for nuclear engineering three years ago, I figured I would join a renaissance of nuclear technicians and engineers powering the carbon-free future. The effects of climate change were becoming undeniable, and time was running out, and I was excited to apply myself and change the world for the better.
Alongside the rigorous math and physics courses that lined my schedule, some required and some elective humanities and ethics courses livened up my work load. I expected to learn about the supply side of nuclear energy, the thermodynamic functionings of a power water reactor, the nuclear physics within the atom itself. Day in and out was a flux between shock and awe, from calculating my first schrodinger’s equation problem to the colonial roots my own department was built on. When I learned about the deep ties Jasmina Vujic, our head of the National Nuclear Security Consortium (NSSC) at Berkeley, has to a right-wing, pro-gay-genocide-in-Bosnia Serbian nationalist party Dveri, I thought about how if I was just born in different circumstances I would be killed (2). Sometime later Turkey, an American ally for keeping nuclear warheads stored in case “the Russia problem” acts up, supported neighboring regional power Azerbaijan in a historic re-ignition of aggression against the diminishing Armenian people. A slow continuation of the genocide that’s been a century plus denied as it lurks over the hearts and lands of my family and blood.
After the quick surrender of my people’s homeland and the needless deaths of so many trying to defend their life and land, I realized I was a part of the same colonization that killed and grave-robbed Indigenous peoples all over the world. The documentary King Leopold’s Ghost revealed to me a deeper level of connection, of my blood to the legacy of Berkeley: responsible for the development of the only mass-murdering nuclear bombs in all of history. Belgian colonization of the Congo began as a power grab, King Leopold II mimicking the European powers around him, he sent merchants and mercenaries into the Congo to overpower and enslave her Indigenous people. The colonizers committed horrific mutilations to control the people, and even indoctrinated children into a Belgian-loyal army to police the slaves as they were made to ravage the land they had lived on for millennia for its natural resources and beauty, exported out for the West to continue its way of life leeching off the Mother Earth in an unnatural affront on life and humanity.
What was particularly striking was that a majority of the Uranium used to power nuclear weapons in the Manhattan project was stolen from the Congo (1). Enslavement and war continue in the region to this day, as none of the valuable exports from the Congo benefited its people, only the investors and dictators with vicious control of the region. The travesty of hundreds and thousands of lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were erased in a second would not have been possible without the unimaginable cruelty at the Shinkolobwe uranium mine. Death fueled the death that fueled the death, every step of our Manifest Destiny built on the mass graves of indigenous genocide and the exploitation of life for our higher calling of civilization, technological progression, industrialization, or whatever the capitalist Neo-liberal of the west wants to call it in 2021.
What do we spend time learning, what is the purpose of our higher education? These facts were contested by misinformation when I brought this statistic up in a Nuclear Weapons Policy graduate class at UCB, whose final project is to compile a report to inform the US president’s nuclear weapons policy(!!).
Who profits from indoctrinating this misinformation as education?
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