SWEET SPOT
Guns are to Belgium as chocolates are to the Belgians and the world. Liege has been the "ground zero" of European weapons production for over 150 years. Historian Jonathan Grant of Florida State University explains in his article Merchants of Death :
The period 1860-1918 witnessed a profound expansion in the volume of arms trafficking. As industrialization picked up speed in Europe, more arms could be produced more quickly than ever before. Mass production and an unending series of technological advancements in weaponry generated obsolete castoffs and war surplus weapons on an increasing scale". In the global context, the main players in the extra-European arms traffic were the French and Belgians.
The city of Liege, FN's headquarters, has been making guns since the Middle Ages. In 1897 FN entered a business relationship with American arms designer, John Moses Browning. Browning had earlier developed the Winchester lever-action rifle, Model 1873, famously called "the gun that won the west." Such "winning" more accurately represented the final slaughter of the genocide of millions of American Indians. The Browning and Winchester companies live on as US-based subsidiaries of FN.
History has been kinder to Belgian weapons manufacturers than to its countless victims. As Professor Grant notes:
The prominence of the Belgian city of Lià ¨ge as a chief supplier of firearms to Africa also reflected changes in the period. By the late nineteenth century, Lià ¨ge had taken the African gun trade away from Birmingham, and the Belgian city accounted for some 67 percent of the African arms traffic by 1907.
A BLACKNESS BLACKER THAN
BLACK
Africa! The word should shiver the souls and bones of every living Belgian, indeed all of us. Africa!
Ivory. Rubber. Leopold! The horror! 1885 to 1908, not so long
ago. Remember! Read!
Under the guise of humanitarianism and philanthropy Leopold II,
King of the Belgians grabbed a million square miles of western Africa and
ludicrously called it the Congo Free State. It was his personal nation
controlled by his own private army (Le
Force Publique), fully armed, including machetes and rhinoceros hide whips.
Who supplied the weapons? Weapons to kill the elephants. Weapons to kill
whoever disobeyed. Millions were forced into servitude. And the rubber"hacking
the vines, destroying the ecology. Ten million murdered people for the profit and
pleasure of the king. The Congo population fell by half during Leopold's terror
reign. Joseph Conrad went there. He wrote: "The horror! The horror!"
THE HORROR TODAY
As of 2010, Belgium supplied 32 percent of the small arms exported by the European Union to the Middle East and North Africa. Tens of thousands of the cold war vintage FN FAL automatic rifles went to Libya alone. Muammar el-Qaddafi already had an enormous stockpile of "cold war" weaponry sold to him by other European nations like Bulgaria, Croatia, France, and Rumania. Except for Kalashnikovs, FAL rifles were the weapons most frequently used. After the fall of Qaddafi, they were recycled throughout the region. Between 2011 and 2013 FAL rifles from Libya were found in countries, including Algeria, Lebanon, Niger, Syria, and Tunisia.
The world now knows where all the Libyan arms went. The weapons ratline engineered by David Petraeus' CIA, a responsibility later assumed by the Turkish government, ran through Jordan and Turkey thence to the Syrian opposition, mostly radical operatives like Al-Nusra and multi-labeled fringe groups of mercenaries. A detailed, documented description of this can be found in my Criminal Complaint given to the International Criminal Court in The Hague in October 2014. This flagrant violation of international law has caused the havoc that engulfs Africa and the Middle East. And politicians dare not speak its horrible name. Nor does the media. Leopold, King of the Belgians, destroyed the Congo for financial profit. America, Turkey and its European and Arab partners-in-crime have destroyed the secular nations of North Africa and the Middle East for political profit.
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