Merchants of Death: Exposing Corporate-financed
Holocaust in Africa
White Collar War Crimes, Black
African Fall Guys
by Keith Harmon Snow
www.dissidentvoice.org/, December
8th, 2008
Innocent Congolese men in South Kivu,
falsely accused of being FDLR militia from Rwanda, brutalized
and detained by FARDC. Photo copyright 2007 Keith Harmon Snow.
War in Congo has again been splashed across
world headlines and the same old clichés about violence
and suffering are repackaged and rebroadcast as "news".
Meanwhile, early indications out of America are that President-elect
Barack Obama will assemble a foreign policy-team primed for business
as usual.
How will Hillary Clinton as Secretary
of State compromise the Obama Administration's capacity to honestly
redress the untold suffering, massive theft of resources and millions
of deaths in Africa? And Tom Daschle? Behind the media smokescreens
are people whose involvement has been documented and exposed,
but there is always some African fall guy-the 'embraceable' black
subordinate or 'rebel' commander-charged with war crimes and used
to deflect attention from the leaders of organized white-collar
crime networks.
Blacked out are the corporate executives,
government officials and expatriate personnel of Western enterprises
whose success amidst chaos implicates them in the deracination
and death of millions of black people. What's behind the recent
hostilities and media posturing in Central Africa?
THE SHORT, BRUTISH LIFE OF SANDRINE
On a darkling plain in a far away place
the skeletons of hundreds of unnamed people lie strewn over the
land amidst the red dirt and brown grasses scorched by the equatorial
sun. Bones poke into the air here and there, hidden by the tall
grass, tripping you up as you walk; others lay bleaching white
in piles where the bodies fell. These are the killing fields of
Bogoro, a small hillside village on a southerly road out of Bunia,
a metropolis of suffering in the wild, wild east of Congo.
The grassy plains of Bogoro were guarded
by soldiers and when I arrived the militia of the day wore black
trench coats and black mirror sunglasses to enhance the aura of
terror that surrounds them. With AK-47's slung over their shoulders
they talked on shiny Nokias and Motorolas and Samsungs-cellphones
built with the blood minerals of the Congolese people._Militia
soldier talking on is cell-phone while guarding the killing fields
of Bogoro. Photo copyright 2007 Keith Harmon Snow.
Sandrine-not her real name-is a survivor
who participated in the massacre at Bogoro. I interviewed Sandrine,
just seventeen at the time, in 2007, and she recounted her ordeal
as the sex slave of soldiers. Sandrine told how people were forced
by militia commanders to chase down neighbors and kill or be killed.
I found Sandrine living in misery in an evacuated refugee camp.
Sandrine knows nothing at all of the vast
mining operations or minerals shipments being flown out of remote
jungle airstrips in her home territory-or even that such airstrips
exist. Ditto for the Congolese researchers I met, in Orientale,
who worked with the International Criminal Court. Moto Gold? Mwana
Africa? Walter Kansteiner? They had never heard of such companies,
or such people.
In Western media reportage the plunder
of raw materials in Congo is usually de-linked from the killing,
even though the extractive industries are directly behind it,
and even though almost everyone has begun to parrot the accusation
of "resource wars" in Congo.
The Bogoro massacre occurred in February
2003 and, like the Hutu-Tutsi stories from Rwanda, the media whipped
up the specter of ancient tribal animosities between Hema and
Lendu tribes. But the real story is not quite so black and white.
Or is it?
Today the International Criminal Court
(ICC) holds three Congolese "warlords" in the ICC prison
at The Hague, Netherlands, and all three were associated with
events at Bogoro. However, the white patrons reaping the profits
behind the bloodletting in the eastern Congo are protected by
a new humanitarian order predicated on permanent inequality, structural
violence and race politics.
But for a few brief periods of relative
calm, the war in Congo's eastern Orientale and Kivus provinces
has hardly stopped since its' beginning in 1996, and the realities
have been shrouded in media clichés and stereotypes and
disingenuous expressions of outrage that deflect attention from
the true protagonists and root causes of war and plunder in Africa.1
GOOD VERSUS EVIL AND THE NAMES GAMES
The UPC, FPRI, FNI-these are three of
the scores of militias that have risen and fallen in Orientale
since the war began in 1996 and, more poignantly, they are meaningless
acronyms used to scramble the brains of western spectator-news-consumers.
First there was the Rwanda Patriotic Front/Army
(RPF/A) that invaded Rwanda, and then came the Alliance for the
Democratic Liberation of Zaire (ADFL) that marched across Zaire
to unseat President Mobutu. Next came the "rebellion"
with Jean-Pierre Bemba and the Movement for the Liberation of
Congo (MLC), and all the different factions of the Rassemblement
Congolais pour la Démocratie, or Congolese Rally for Democracy-RCD,
RCD-G (Goma), RCD-K, RCD-K-ML-backed by Rwanda and Uganda.
Here are the comrades in arms who studied
together at the Marxist University of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania:
Yoweri Museveni, Uganda's president; Laurent Desire Kabila, the
ADFL figurehead and assassinated president of the Democratic Republic
of Congo; Meles Zenawi, president of Ethiopia; Isaias Afwerki,
president of Eritrea; Africa scholar Mahmood Mamdani; former RCD
leader Wamba dia Wamba; Paul Kagame, Rwanda's president; and John
Garang (d. 2005), former leader of the Sudan People's Liberation
Army (SPLA) and first president of South Sudan.
Both the RPF/A and SPLA waged successful
covert guerrilla wars against governments that were considered
"undesirable" by Washington, both achieved their objectives
of seizing land and gaining control, and both insurgencies were
covertly backed by U.S. Committee for Refugees official Roger
Winter-a pivotal U.S. intelligence asset operating in Sudan and
a dedicated ally of Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame and John Garang.
Winter's protégé is Susan Rice, Clinton's Assistant
Secretary of State for African Affairs. Rice was one of the primary
architects of the Pentagon's prized Africa Crisis Response Initiative
(ACRI)-a euphemistically named entity created to project U.S.
power in Africa, and run by U.S. Army Special Forces Command (SOCOM).2
The coups d'etat in Rwanda and Burundi
occurred after the presidents Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien
Ntaryamira were assassinated on April 6, 1994. Similarly, more
than a decade of covert U.S. military support for the SPLA, channeled
through Uganda and Ethiopia, led to the Naivasha Peace Agreement
of January 2005 and the creation of the autonomous country of
South Sudan.
The "Rwanda genocide" began
with the 1990 invasion of northern Rwanda by Ugandan forces that
brutally targeted everyone in their path. By the time the RPF/A
forces-comprised mostly of seasoned Ugandan troops-reached Kigali,
more than 800,000 IDPs (internally displaced persons) were hovering
around the capital city: they were terrified, they were homeless,
they were hungry, they were angry and-justifiably-they took up
arms. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR)
and its Canadian General Romeo Dallaire clandestinely backed the
illegal guerrilla war.3
The guerrilla wars in Rwanda and South
Sudan were prosecuted much like the CIA-backed low-intensity guerrilla
warfare, spawned by Washington, against populist movements in
Honduras, Nicaragua, Chile and Guatemala. This is exactly what
is playing out in Congo and Sudan today: low-intensity guerrilla
warfare prosecuted by powerful shadow forces competing for land
and loot.
SPLA leader John Garang received military
training at the School of the Americas, Fort Benning, Georgia.
Paul Kagame received training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. At
the time he was sent for training, Kagame was Museveni's director
of military intelligence; upon his return he assumed command of
the army created, financed and trained by Uganda: the Rwanda Patriotic
Army.
Both Garang and Kagame likely received
"counter-insurgency" training through the Pentagon's
International Military Education and Training Program (IMET).
Since 1998, the IMET program has provided training to 318 RDF
and 291 UPDF soldiers. Many other IMET soldiers who attended the
notorious School of the Americas are today known human rights
violators in Latin America.
In North Kivu province we find the Forces
for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and the National
Congress for the Defense of the People, the CNDP, created by self-appointed
Rwandan "General" Laurent Nkunda. Here the media has
historically cast General Nkunda as good, the FDLR as evil. Only
recently has Nkunda come under any kind of "harsh" criticism.
The war in Eastern Congo is almost universally
described with clichés about the "Rwanda genocide."
The usual targets of white media racial profiling and hysterical
academic polemics are the Hutu-the infamous Interahamwe and FDLR-the
"killers" that "fled Rwanda after committing genocide"
there. This is how millions of innocent Hutu people-comprising
over 85% of the populations of Rwanda and Burundi-are collectively
dehumanized.
Congolese Mai Mai militias are described
as "nationalists" sometimes "wearing bathroom fixtures
on their heads" and "shooting magic bullets." The
Mai Mai are the closest thing to a people's or indigenous justice
movement in Congo. The Mai Mai have most recently allied with
the Congo's national army, the Armed Forces for the Democratic
Republic of Congo (FARDC), and the Mai Mai are sometimes cast
as good, but usually as evil.
In 2007 the Mai Mai and FLDR joined forces
to form the Front for the National Liberation of Kivu (FNLK).
Backed by the FARDC, the FNLK is purportedly vying for power against
General Nkunda's CNDP. However, alliances are constantly shifting
based on private profit and "warlord" fiefdoms, and
ALL factions, at some point or other, have collaborated in war
and resource plunder.
Western news stories throw the acronyms
and names of militias around with little or no information about
their rise or fall, and nothing substantive about foreign backers
they collaborate with. Militias mysteriously appear and disappear.
Indeed, the more you read about Congo from venues like the New
York Times, Harper's, the New Yorker, or the Atlantic Monthly,
the less you will understand. This is no accident, and-no, you
are not dumb.
Take the militia FNI: but for the victims
and their suffering, it makes no difference what the acronym stands
for, it's all one big sadistic joke of language and power. The
most significant fact to remember about this "F" "N"
"I" is that they served as the private proxy army for
the gold mining operations of Metalor, a Swedish firm, and AngloGold
Ashanti, headquartered in South Africa and partnered with Barrick
Gold.4 Secondly, they were agents for Ugandan power brokers.
Anglo-Gold Ashanti directors include Sir
Sam Jonah, who is also a director of shady mining-cum-military
companies operating in Sierra Leone and connected to Tony Buckingham
and other white-collar mercenaries. Buckingham affiliated companies-e.g.
Heritage Oil and Gas, Branch Energy, Saracen Uganda-collaborate
with the Museveni regime. Saracen's top shareholder is General
Salim Saleh, half-brother of Yoweri Museveni, and Congo's nemesis,
a Ugandan agent cited by the United Nations for war and plunder
in Congo.
AngloGold Ashanti is the Anglo American
mining conglomerate of the Oppenheimers and De Beers mining cartels
of Britain and South Africa, interests deeply aligned with Belgian
American intelligence insider Maurice Tempelsman-the godfather
of covert operations in Africa. Tempelsman's diamond interests
in Congo were, at least partially, displaced by the Israeli cartels
of Dan Gertler and Benny Steinmetz.5 It is a no-brainer that the
Tempelsman gang backs Rwanda's occupation of eastern Congo.
For a second example, media corporations
have consistently blacked out the truth about the lucrative corporate
"conservation" industry with articles like the recent
New York Times production "Congo Violence Reaches Endangered
Mountain Gorillas" (Jeffrey Gettleman, 11/18/08). Unreported
however are the many accusations coming out of North Kivu that
link the Jane Goodall Institute and Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund to
local Mai Mai and FDLR: like every other militia, or occupation
army, these factions have infiltrated villages and now prey on,
intimidate and abuse the locals. The white agents working for
Western "conservation" NGOs-and we know their names-are
directly responsible for extortion, racketeering, land theft,
human rights atrocities and for ripping apart the social fabric.6
"The commander of the Mai-Mai is
Colonel Ntasibanga and the commander of the FDLR is Colonel Faraja,"
report Congolese locals who have been documenting the abuses (the
facts are confirmed by a Spanish journalist). "We count already
five people killed because of this [conservation] project DFGF
and JGI are without doubt corrupt they are paying armed groups
and forcing us off of our lands."7
The Gettleman NYT article, on the other
hand, cites one of these agents, Samantha Newport, described as
"a spokeswoman for Virunga National Park," who in fact
works for Richard Leakey's organization Wildlife Direct, a shady
paramilitary entity involving Walter Kansteiner.
A LITTLE MATTER OF GENOCIDE
The international arrest warrants issued
by Spain and France against some 40 former RPF/A and current Rwanda
Defense Force (RDF) are patently dismissed by Western media of
all stripes, buried behind waves of pro-RPF propaganda and intimidation
that labels anyone who does not support the Kigali military dictatorship
as genocide deniers, themselves guilty, by extension, of genocide.
While the RPF/A and UPDF are often named
for leading the charge and supplying the bulk of the forces, the
1996 invasion of Zaire, launched from Uganda and Rwanda, involved
U.S. covert forces with state-of-the-art C4ISTR-Command, Control,
Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance-and
there were Humvees and C-130 aircraft ferrying black-skinned U.S.
Special Forces into South Sudan and northeastern Congo. The invasion
also involved Israeli military experts, an assortment of Eritrean
and Ethiopian regulars, and SPLA forces.8
The Anglo-European-Israeli forces penetrated
eastern Zaire through the Gulu and Arua Districts of northwestern
Uganda-the heart of Acholiland and ground zero for the ongoing
genocide of the indigenous Acholi people-and they backed the RPA/UPDF
who marched across Zaire massacring refugees, mostly women and
children, mostly Hutus, that fled Kigali in 1994.910
Howard French, then the Africa Bureau
Chief for the New York Times, witnessed the Hutu genocide in Zaire,
and wrote about it.11 Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani-who by no
means was an impartial observer when he arrived in Goma in September
1997-described "an indiscriminate slaughter" of Interahamwe,
of unarmed Hutu refugees, and of Congolese Hutus in the Kivus.12
Bill Richardson, President Clinton's Ambassador to the United
Nations, stated in a may 1997 interview: "I think there's
strong evidence that there have been these massacres."13
But the subject of Hutus being slaughtered
was only broached as a tool to hammer down the uppity black rebel
who diverged from his script and upset Washington's plans. Indeed,
the rise and fall of ADFL figurehead Laurent Desire Kabila exemplifies
the embraceable black leader transformed almost overnight into
the unembraceable black fall guy. In the end, a bullet dispatched
Laurent Kabila on 16 January 2001, exactly 40 years after the
assassination of Patrice Lumumba (17 January 1961).
Anyone who dismisses the organized and
intentional RPF/A and UPDF military campaign against millions
of Hutu people-massacred and chased from the Uganda border to
Kigali, into to eastern Congo, and finally attacked in refugee
camps and butchered all the way across Zaire-is a genocide denier.
(Of course, the UPDF-RPF/A alliance also summarily executed and
massacred Rwandan Tutsis and indigenous Twa, and Congolese people.)
Similarly, anyone who dismisses the organized persecution and
atrocities against the Acholi people in northern Uganda-maintained
by the Museveni government and the UPDF occupation-is a genocide
denier.
The criminality of the Kagame regime is
whitewashed by the massive public relations campaigns involving
Kagame's special advisor/sponsors: former Ambassador Andrew Young
and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Young's Goodworks
International also backs the Museveni regime. Buffing the shiny
image of the government of Congo's President Joseph Kabila is
Stevens and Schriefer Group the Washington D.C. PR-firm that twice
helped get George W. Bush elected.
The New Yorker and CNN have consistently
manufactured the pro-RPF/A propaganda, reported by Christiane
Amanpour and Philip Gourevitch. Amanpour is married to James Rubin,
Bill Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State and Madeleine Albright's
right-hand man, and now economic adviser to President-elect Barack
Obama. Gourevitch-who produced the celebrated pro-RPF/A text We
Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families,
is a close friend of Paul Kagame and a conduit for State Department
disinformation passed by James Rubin, who was also Chief Spokesman
for the Clinton State Department (1997-2000), and whose sister,
Elizabeth Rubin, was dating Gourevitch.
U.S. business tycoon Joe Ritchie "has
volunteered in Rwanda for the past five years introducing the
country to business leaders around the world." Ritchie also
runs an "entrepreneurial philanthropy" called Friends
of Rwanda and serves on President Paul Kagame's Advisory Council
and as CEO of the Rwanda Development Board.1415 Like Walter Kansteiner,
Joe Ritchie is a commodities and options trader from Chicago with
deep pockets and dark secrets: involved in a private attempt to
overthrow the Taliban in 2000, Joe and James Ritchie were aided
by their favorite consultant, former national security adviser
Robert McFarlane, who successfully lobbied the CIA to dispatch
an Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle (UAV) to the skies over Afghanistan.16
The Congo wars have direct links to the
many long years of war in Sudan and Uganda, and they are intertwined
with the current low-intensity warfare and the mass murder in
Darfur, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. If we apply the genocide label
to conflicts where it surely fits, then genocide is ongoing in
Congo's Orientale and Kivus provinces, and in Acholiland in Northern
Uganda.17 But it is also occurring in Iraq, Afghanistan, Burundi,
Nigeria, Ethiopia, Botswana, Columbia, the Palestinian Territories
and Malaysia, to mention a few irrefutable cases.
These geopolitical and strategic hotspots
remain mostly blanketed by media reportage that quite literally
blacks out key white protagonists by putting a black African face
on things. Another example: there has been little reported about
the perpetual warfare and human rights atrocities in Orientale
linked to tight little airstrips carved out of the rainforest
and paved with support from the Pentagon-connected United States
Agency for International Development (USAID).18
Consider Mwana Africa, a South African
firm that controls the Kilo-Moto gold fields in Zani, DRC. The
Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), led by Thomas Lubanga, occupied
the Zani gold fields in 2002 and stirred up ethnic animosities
that led to massive suffering and depopulation. However, according
to Congolese locals, it was the white missionaries from the Africa
Inland Mission that deeply divided local ethnic groups. French
tycoons Jacques and Alvaro Hachuel own Mwana Africa.
Mwana Africa's European director, Etienne
Denis, began his long career of impoverishing the Congo at Umicore,
formerly the Belgian mining giant Union Miniere, in 1974. The
Mwana Africa airstrip at Zani, and nearby roads, were built with
USAID backing, and the gold is flown out to Tanzania-one of the
most underappreciated criminal players funneling weapons to Uganda
and Congo-or sometimes shipped out by road through Uganda.19 Mwana
Africa is also involved in Congo's bloody MIBA diamond concessions
in Mbuji Mayi and the cobalt/copper concessions in Katanga.20
Similarly, almost nothing in context has
been reported of the white mercenaries and their petroleum operations
on the Uganda border with Orientale.21 Like the ongoing covert
war in Darfur, where the backers of the "mysterious"
rebel groups are never exposed, the militias operating in Congo
are proxy armies that serve the interests of external power blocks
at the expense of their competitors.
Most reporting from the Kivus zooms in
on sexual violence and the Western media always blames the victims-Congolese
soldiers caught in the maelstrom of international proxy warfare
and organized crime-but we hear nothing about U.S. or Canadian
or Australian mining companies-and for those rare times that we
do the reportage de-links the mining from the mass murder.22 More
often, the media turns the story upside down, claiming that responsible
Western mining executives are waiting in the wings for security
to improve so they can provide jobs and accountability and "sustainable
development" for the Congolese people. Nothing could be further
from the truth.
A recent front-page news feature, "Congo's
Riches, Looted by Renegade Troops," about the Bisie tin mine
in North Kivu, offers the perfect example. "On paper, the
exploration rights to this mine belong to a consortium of British
and South African investors who say they will turn this perilous
and exploitative operation into a safe, modern beacon of prosperity
for Congo," wrote Jeffrey Gettleman for the New York Times.
"But in practice, the consortium's workers cannot even set
foot on the mountain. Like a mafia, Colonel Matumo and his men
extort, tax and appropriate at will, draining this vast operation,
worth as much as $80 million a year."23
And thus do the valiant white knights
of the New York Times shine their spotlight on plunder and extortion
in Congo. Alas, it is a selective shining, an expedient "humanitarian"
concern, and an arrogant moral high ground. Indeed, it is just
another shade of the black and white race politics behind the
politicization of the International Criminal Court.
THE BLACK AFRICAN FALL GUYS
In June of 2008 the ICC charged two black
African rebel leaders, Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui,
with six counts of war crimes (willful killing; inhuman treatment
or cruel treatment; using children under the age of fifteen years
to participate actively in hostilities; sexual slavery; intentionally
directing attacks against civilians; and pillaging) and three
counts of crimes against humanity (murder, inhumane acts and sexual
slavery).
ICC prosecutors say that Chui and his
commander Katanga-known as Simba-led a militia called the Front
for Patriotic Resistance of Ituri (FPRI); Chui was also a commander
in another militia, the National Integrationist Front (FNI). The
FPRI was fighting against the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC);
another militia in Congo backed by outsiders, in particular, some
faction from the U.S.
UPC commander Thomas Lubanga-another black
man-was the first person detained at the ICC's Scheveningen prison
at The Hague. Charles Taylor, former "warlord" and president
from Liberia was the second. Germaine Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo
Chui were next to be chosen for this auspicious club. Congolese
"warlord" Jean-Pierre Bemba is the last of five detainees
now held at the ICC. Bemba was the leader of the Congolese rebel
army, the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), but he is
charged with crimes in the Central African Republic.24
These five men all have more in common
than the charges against them. They are all black men, once embraced
by the system and empowered as local or national leaders, and
they are now the black stooges who fell from grace to become,
in the language of anthropologist and scholar Dr. Enoch Page,
"unembraceable."25
The unembraceable status, applied to Africa,
is reserved for black males, for dictators and warlords, rapists
and killers, for 'dirty' Arabs like Omar al-Bashir, President
of Sudan, and for former 'Marxist' guerillas, like Robert Mugabe,
President of Zimbabwe. Always they are people of color: they are
the O.J. Simpsons and Michael Jacksons of Africa, formerly embraced
black males now ruthlessly persecuted by the Western establishment-primarily
through racial surveillance and targeting in the mass media. Such
treatment is rarely applied to white males, anywhere.
Someone has to be held responsible for
the mass murder at Bogoro, but who paid the 29 year-old "warlord"
Germaine Katanga? Why should he be the only one prosecuted? Who
provided the jeeps for the "warlord" Mathieu Chui? Where
did "warlord" Thomas Lubanga get the satellite phone
to coordinate his private militia? How did Charles Taylor go from
Harvard University to money laundering in Liberia to a Massachusetts
prison-which he "escaped" from-and then on to become
first the "President" and later "warlord"
of Liberia?
How does Moto Gold Mining Company extract
gold from a war zone? And how do the shiny black leather belts
and pressed camouflage fatigues and crisp felt berets and rocket-propelled
grenades find their way to Laurent Nunda's "rebel" army
now fighting in the North and South Kivu provinces of Congo?
Aware of their vulnerability as black
African fall guys-and soon after the ICC arrest of Jean-Pierre
Bemba-the top brass of the Ugandan People's Defense Forces curtailed
their international travel plans and convened a special meeting
at Uganda's Bombo army headquarters near Kampala, in June 2008,
to discuss fears of ICC warrants being issued against them.
Of course, the U.S. Government and its
business partners dictate the operations of the ICC. While considering
soldiers of the United States and its allies to be above international
humanitarian law and protected from the jurisdiction of the ICC,
the Pentagon has simultaneously directed the formation, operations
and legal precedents of the ICC through the involvement of members
of the U.S. military's Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, the
legal arm of the Pentagon.26
Congolese troops and militias connected
to Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and wife Janet and their
military collaborators operate extortion and racketeering networks
that are plundering Congo. While former militias responsible for
plunder have ostensibly been disbanded, new military networks
have replaced them again and again.
UGANDA ARMING MILITIAS YET AGAIN
"The Congolese military [FARDC] works
with Ugandans," reported Christian Lukusha, an expert with
Justice Plus, a Congolese human rights NGO based in Bunia, "including
Salim Saleh, Museveni's half-brother. And they ship timber and
minerals across the border at both Aru and Mahagi. It's completely
clandestine."27
According to the United Nations Observers
Mission in Congo (MONUC), fighting in Orientale in September 2008
drove over 90,000 additional IDPs from their homes and lands.
Fighting continued into October and November, and militias new
and old are today floating between Uganda, South Sudan and DRC,
recruiting and conscripting soldiers, including children, and
training and indoctrinating them in the ideology of their "mysterious"
leaders.
The FPJC-Front Congolaise Pour la Justice
au Congo-is but the latest militia to suddenly emerge from the
hills of Orientale. On September 29, 2008, the FPJC, described
as "a newly formed rebel group," attacked and pursued
retreating contingents of President Joseph Kabila's regular army,
the FARDC, before raiding and looting villages. Since mid-September
the FPJC has engaged FARDC troops in firefights along the Lake
Albert border zone.
According to Congolese sources in Bunia,
the FPJC is solidly backed by Uganda and provides a second front
in an alliance with Laurent Nkunda's Rwandan army, which has freely
operated in the Kivu provinces for years.
"The FPJC rebels are in the bush
close to the Semliki River and the Uganda border," says Godefroid
(not his real name), a Congolese professional in Bunia who travels
back and forth to Uganda by land. "There is some new recruitment
of former militias along the Congo-Uganda border by Thomas Lubanga's
former UPC minister Mr. Avochi, a Congolese who as been in exile
in Uganda since 2004."28
Military training camps for the new FPJC
recruits are today operating from at least four sites on the Uganda
side of the border: {1} in the Kikong-Hoima district; {2} in Kasatu
(close to Djegu) in Nebbi district; {3} in the Urusi area (close
to Mahagi) of Nebbi district; and {4} in Bondo (close to Aru and
Arua) in the Uganda district.
"Such trainings cannot happen without
a clear agreement and support of the upper authorities of Uganda,"
says Godefroid. "It's all connected to the oil under Lake
Albert and the gold in Orientale."
According to this source, a senior FPJC
military commander named Sherif confirmed that Laurent Nkunda
and his National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP)
are involved with these Ugandan bases. "They are providing
CNDP military training and recruits are given the CNDP ideology."
Coincidentally-but not reported by the
media-a hornet's nest of Western petroleum and mining companies,
all linked to international private military companies, local
militias, and the national armies of Uganda, Rwanda and Congo,
are fighting for control of the land on both sides of the Congo's
eastern border.
"Salim Saleh is involved in all of
this," said one Congolese official at the border town of
Aru, DRC. "He is certainly responsible for war crimes and
crimes against humanity. Saleh worked with Jerome Kakwavu when
he was the big chief in Aru. Kakwavu is a FARDC general now, in
Kinshasa. Salim worked all the different groups, trading arms,
playing them off one against the other."29
Petroleum companies that have recently
emerged and now laying claim to DRC or Ugandan concessions on
Lake Albert include: Tower Resources; South African consortiums
PetroSA and Divine Inspiration; and H Oil & Minerals Ltd.30
Tower Resources is a U.S.-U.K. firm affiliated with U.K.-based
Hardman Resources and tied to oil exploitation in Kenya and Namibia.31
H Oil & Minerals is a European firm
operating in South Sudan, DRC and Angola; financiers include the
Deutsche Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction & Development,
and the Belgian giant Société Generale-one of the
Congolese people's greatest historical enemies. H Oil & Minerals
is also closely linked to Marc Rich and his Switzerland-based
company Glencore International, both known for arms trafficking
in Angola and DRC through Angolagate notable Pierre Falcone. An
Arizona (USA) republican, Falcone is reportedly very tight with
the Joseph Kabila government. Marc Rich is the fugitive Swiss
financier who for years appeared on the FBI's list of most wanted
criminals on charges ranging from trading with embargoed states,
tax evasion, racketeering and arms trafficking; Marc Rich was
pardoned by Bill Clinton on Clinton's last day in office.32
One of the most notorious global arms
traffickers involved in Congo, Namibia and Zimbabwe is John Bredenkamp,
one of Britain's 50 richest men. Walter Hailwax, the Belgian honorary
consul to Namibia, is a director of arms producer Windhoeker Maschinenfabrik,
and the local director of Bredenkamp's arms brokerage company
ACS International Ltd. A key agent in Zimbabwean and DRC organized
crime networks, Bredenkamp is one of the phantom white-collar
criminals behind Robert Mugabe, another black African fall guy
now targeted by the Western press, think tanks and flak organizations,
to the exclusion of other major interests. Of course, the Ndebele
people suffered war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide
under Mugabe, with the bulk of the atrocities committed from 1981-1988.
(Mugabe remained an embraceable black agent of white power until
about 1999, and today-according to the Western economic and policy
establishment, and the mass media, who no longer embrace him-he
is the devil incarnate in Zimbabwe.)
THE LORD'S RESISTANCE ARMY
If you asked Western media consumers to
name a bloodthirsty guerrilla movement in Africa it is likely
they would point to "warlord" Joseph Kony and the Lord's
Resistance Army (LRA), this thanks to the one-sided fictional
media campaigns waged by National Public Radio, Time magazine,
Washington Post, or by Christopher Hitchens-who calls them "a
Christian Khmer Rouge"-and Vanity Fair.3334
In the simplistic Western media narratives,
the LRA is always described as a "fanatical Christian cult"
that abducts children and forces them to commit atrocities. In
the dichotomy of "good" versus "evil" the
LRA is "wicked" and the forces they are fighting against,
President Museveni and the UPDF, are benevolent. Indeed, evangelical
Christian missionaries from the United States have been deeply
involved with the SPLA war against the "satanic" forces
of the LRA and the Islamic Government of Sudan.35
Spilling over from the wars in Uganda
and Sudan and operating a clandestine network of terror and extortion
in the north of Congo today, the LRA has waged a low-intensity
war against the Museveni regime since circa 1987. The LRA is a
Ugandan guerrilla force backed by the government of Sudan (Khartoum)
and its allies and clandestinely supported by unnamed factions
in Congo, Europe and Washington.
"For 19 years, Joseph Kony has been
enslaving, torturing, raping, and murdering Ugandan children,"
wrote Christopher Hitchens, "many of whom have become soldiers
for his 'Lord's Resistance Army,' going on to torture, rape, and
kill other children." Parroting the establishment line, Hitchens
has no complaints about the UPDF brutalizing children in the refugee
camps of Acholiland, and he never mentions the SPLA's conscription
of thousands of child soldiers.36
According to a high-level United Nations
source working in the DRC, the LRA maintains very high-level political
ties in New York and Washington D.C. through Jongomoi Okidi-Olal,
a Ugandan-American representative living in the U.S. The Uganda
government has purportedly asked the Bush Administration and the
United Nations to arrest Okidi-Olal and hand him over to the ICC.37
Other sources claim that Okidi is a fraud.
Interestingly, we find that Mwana Africa-whose
vast Kilo-Moto mining concessions sprawl across northern Orientale-is
also operating in Angola and South Africa, and at five major mining
concessions in the so-called "failed state" of Zimbabwe.20The
government of Angola has always backed President Joseph Kabila,
is very hostile to the Kagame gang, and currently controls Congolese
territory (Kehemba) near the Angolan border. Given the spoils
to be had, it is likely that factions from Angola or Zimbabwe
also back the Lord's Resistance Army in a bid to displace Mwana
Africa and other competitors from mining and petroleum sites in
northeastern Congo.38
Congolese sources claim that MONUC moved
into the Watsa region in northern Orientale only after the LRA-coming
in through Garamba National Park near the Sudan border-began threatening
the operations of AngloGold Ashanti, Mwana Africa and Moto Gold
Mining.39 Additionally, Garamba National Park is rich in diamonds
and gold.
While the LRA is also supported by Ugandan
factions opposed to the Museveni dictatorship, it is widely believed
the LRA is a tool of the Museveni government used to manipulate
public opinion, create chaos across the region, gain international
sympathy from foreign donors and thereby procure massive financial
backing to facilitate some of the world's most lucrative and unappreciated
AID-for-ARMS scandals. It is the perfect ruse to facilitate permanent
foreign military intervention.
The LRA also reportedly moved into the
northern DRC to displace SPLA troops that had a long history of
plundering the area, shooting wildlife and harassing villages.40
Thus while the evil LRA is always in the crosshairs of the international
media, the same media protects the saintly SPLA, no matter the
justice or criminality of either.41
The mass media and foreign policy discourses
are saturated with the writings, op-eds and policy briefs of "experts"
that serve as apologetic propagandists for foreign interventions
and hidden agendas. Such "experts" exercise stark biases
in naming or delineating the "killers" versus "victims"
and for this reason they often gain exclusive access to mass media
venues. The system of information control becomes self-perpetuating
in favor of power and deception.
Experts working for the Pentagon, State
Department, or national security apparatus deploy arguments cloaked
in righteous assumptions of higher morality about human rights
or humanitarian concern. For example, Sudan "experts"
like Dr. Eric Reeves and Alex De Waal provide a constant barrage
of one-sided propaganda to manufacture consent at home and project
American power in Sudan.41 This propaganda is unassailable by
Western "news" consumers, because consumers are not
otherwise privy to, interested in, or compelled to discover the
deeper truths.
STARBUCKS GENOCIDE COFFEE
Like the "Save Tibet" campaign,
the one-sided propaganda campaign and institutionalized big-money
networking of the "Save Darfur" movement compelled ordinary
citizens to become active participants in "stopping genocide."
A similar agenda is driving the new "RAISE HOPE FOR CONGO"
initiative. While their ideological programs are advanced through
the Western mass media, organizations-e.g. the International Crises
Group, Center for American Progress, International Rescue Committee,
ENOUGH!-work to manufacture consent and channel popular consciousness
through jingoistic sloganeering and humanistic language that offers
"news" consumers exactly what they want to hear: peacekeeping,
human rights, democracy, sustainable development, participatory
mapping, Africa for the African people, and "never again"
interventions against genocide.
Such propaganda campaigns proscribe ideas
and possibilities, and they subvert popular movements. In the
end, the true grass roots initiatives for social justice and legitimate
peace have been expropriated or channeled into serving narrow
prerogatives of power. And the voices of the voiceless are crushed,
along with their bodies. The International Criminal Court serves
a similar and necessary function in manufacturing consent and
consolidating Western power. It is really about keeping up appearances:
the appearance of justice being served, human rights being protected.
On October 14, 2005, the ICC unsealed
arrest warrants against five LRA commanders, all of them black
Africans: Joseph Kony, Vincent Otti, Raska Lukwiya, Okot Odhiambo
and Dominic Ongwen. In October 2008, after the LRA committed fresh
atrocities in northern DRC, the ICC renewed its calls for the
arrest of Joseph Kony.42
Uganda's representation at ICC proceedings
to explore war crimes in Congo has included at least two very
high-profile lawyers from Foley Hoag LLP, an influential Washington
law firm.43 Similarly, the Pentagon seconded its lawyers from
the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corp to the International Criminal
Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR), where victor's justice has arbitrarily
and selectively politicized genocide in favor of the Pentagon's
UPDF/RPA proxy governments.44
Foley Hoag LLP is also tied to the U.S.-Uganda
Friendship Council, a consortium that involves Coke, Pfizer and
Chevron-Texaco. Coke director Kathleen Black is a principle in
the Hearst media empire, while Coke directors Warren Buffet and
Barry Diller are directors of the Washington Post Company, and
these are the media institutions that whitewash the white-collar
crime in Congo. Uganda's image is further sanitized by London
PR firm Hill & Knowlton."45
From 2000 to at least 2004, Yoweri Museveni
was co-chair of the euphemistically named Partnership to Cut Hunger
and Poverty in Africa (PCHPA). The PCHPA is a front for multinational
corporations and USAID, a Christian-based "soft policy"
wing of the Pentagon that uses food as a weapon under the disguise
of charity. Other PCHPA chairs include former U.S. Senator and
Alston & Bird lawyer Bob Dole; Peter Seligman, Chair and CEO
of Conservation International, an NGO connected to the Dian Fossey
Gorilla Fund and Jane Goodall Institute operations in DRC; George
Rupp, President of the International Rescue Committee, a flak-producing
organization involved in DRC; and Alpha Konare, the former Chair
of the Commission of the African Union (2003-2008), the governing
body responsible, for example, for oversight of the supposedly
"neutral" African Union "peacekeeping" force
in Darfur, Sudan-a force that again deploys RDF forces as proxies
to secretly further U.S./U.K. interests.
One PCHPA director also represents Bread
for the World, a protectionist and nationalistic U.S.-based Christian
evangelical "charity" whose directors include Bob Dole
and former White House cabinet officials Mike McCurry and Leon
Panetta. Along with Thomas Pickering, Susan Rice, Gayle Smith,
Donald Payne, Ed Royce, John Podesta, Anthony Lake, Bill and Hillary
Clinton and others, these are the architects of covert operations
in Africa during the Clinton years.2
Senator Tom Daschle is a Special Policy
Advisor for Alston & Bird, and an Honorary Senior fellow of
the Center for American Progress (CAP), the nationalist U.S. big
money "think tank" behind a multitude of front groups
with hidden foreign policy agendas around Uganda, Rwanda, Congo
and Sudan. These include the ENOUGH! Project, the new RAISE HOPE
FOR CONGO initiative, the Genocide Intervention Network, the ONE
Campaign and the International Crisis Group (ICG)-all of which
somehow involve agents like John Prendergast, former national
security insider for President Bill Clinton. It is interesting
that a lot of the same people show up tied to different organizations
involved in "grass roots" campaigns to help Africa.
The ONE campaign was launched by a coalition
of 11 prominent corporate so-called "charity" organizations,
including Bread for the World, CARE, Save the Children and the
International Rescue Committee (IRC); each of these profit-based
organizations has a euphemistic name that suggests a humanitarian
or humanistic agenda, but they actually serve corporate interests.
CARE has received funding from weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin
Corporation. In 1996 the IRC reportedly took over bases near the
Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire and proceeded to shell the
camps with heavy weapons; also, Henry Kissinger and Madeleine
Albright are IRC overseers.46 ICG director Zbigniew Brzezinski
is an advisor to President-elect Barack Obama.
In July 2008, Senator Tom Daschle led
a special delegation of policymakers on behalf of the ONE Campaign,
described as "a bipartisan movement of over 2 million advocates
for the elimination of global poverty and disease." The ONE
delegation also "met with civic and government leaders, as
well as everyday citizens and entrepreneurs, to discuss Rwanda's
courageous national reconciliation since the genocide in 1994"47
Child Soldiers in the Congolese National
Army FARDC- Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Photo copyright 2006 Keith Harmon Snow.
Daschle and Dole's law firm, Alston &
Bird, is a sponsor of the corporate "Millennium Promise"
project, and they provide pro bono legal services, in both the
U.S. and Africa, for the Millennium Villages and Millennium Promise,
both in Rwanda.47 These programs are designed to put a "development"
face on Africa while maintaining structural inequality, protectionist
trade barriers and military superiority.
To put it simply, white people will always
get the best jobs, corporations will run and ruin the world-dumping
substandard and outdated products on confused populations; seeding
the natural world with genetically engineered crops; peddling
pretty plastic junk; pushing pharmaceutical pills; strip-mining
everything-and we will all fool ourselves and ease our consciences
by pretending that we are breaking down barriers of inequality
and building a better world.
According to a very high level United
Nations special investigator sent to negotiate with LRA commanders
in DRC's far north Garamba region in February 2007, the Uganda
government had then recently "arrested" a U.S. military
agent and five Congolese militia leaders discovered in Uganda.
Originally detained in Kampala, the U.S. military agent was nonetheless
allowed to move freely in and out of the DRC.48
The U.S. maintains "Intelligence
Fusion Cells" in Congo and one cell, in Kisangani, capital
of Orientale, was situated in a compound, ringed with coils of
barbed wire, near the Tshopo River power station, and was run
by a "ex" marine named "Tom" who refused to
discuss the cell. There were two U.S. military and two Rwandan
military working there.49 MONUC's local spokesman confirmed only
that the cell revolves around a "tripartite security arrangement
between Rwanda, Uganda and DRC," adding, "that one we
don't touch. It's very hot."50 British soldiers stationed
in Kisangani said the American fusion cell "monitors intelligence
on tantalum extraction."
A few years back, the U.S. donated to
Rwanda two Boeing aircraft that were routinely used by the regime's
Ministry of Defense for arms and minerals trafficking between
Rwanda, Belgium, Albania and Bulgaria. Operated by Silverback
Cargo Freighters, a Kigali-based company blocked from European
airspace since 2006, the planes were also reportedly used for
CIA operations, including the transfer of U.S. "war on terror"
prisoners. The Rwandan government refused to aid UN investigators
seeking information about the company's clandestine operations.5152
Recent massive human suffering and the
escalation of hostilities by the Nkunda army in eastern Congo
have provoked a spate of high-visibility policy statements where
some powerful Western interests are calling on the "international
community" to strengthen the MONUC military occupation of
Congo, while other powerful interests from the new humanitarian
order are calling for the European Union to send in a rapid reaction
force.53
BLESSED BE THE PEACEKEEPERS
Congolese sources everywhere confirm the
widespread involvement of MONUC soldiers in guns-for-minerals
swaps and sexual violence; sources repeatedly accuse MONUC troops
of delivering weapons back to militias to justify MONUC's one
billion dollar a year occupation of Congo.54
"MONUC was giving weapons to the
militias," says yet one more Congolese official. "MONUC
had their own ambitions. It was about gold. The peace that was
achieved in Orientale around 2006 was not achieved by MONUC; the
National Police Force from Kinshasa and the integrated FARDC brigades
achieved it. MONUC was frustrating the peace."55
In the new Congo war documentary by Dutch
filmmaker Renzo Martens, ENJOY POVERTY, we see South African mining
staff of AngloGold Ashanti confirming MONUC's pivotal role in
securing the company's access to gold in Orientale. The entire
"humanitarian" enterprise must be properly situated
in the political economy of profit-based charity, resource control
and racial injustice.56
MONUC doesn't need more guns, it needs
fewer guns (but arms dealers keep shipping them in), and Congo
doesn't need more foreign mercenary forces posing as "peacekeepers"
but secretly serving narrow, undisclosed interventionist agendas
on behalf of multinational corporations.
Ditto for Darfur. In an "explosive"
new book by progressive activists that mildly exposes some of
the hypocrisies of the Save Darfur movement we find the authors
calling for greater military intervention and sneering at others
who have criticized and rejected military intervention for being
what we might call the new, old humanitarian warfare in Africa.57
The book, Scramble For Africa: Darfur-Intervention
and the USA, cites ad nauseum all the usual propagandists that
are monopolizing the English language mass media, publications
from the far right to progressive left, on Darfur. These experts
include Alex De Waal and Eric Reeves-and the International Crisis
Group-but there are plenty of citations and references to journalists
who peddle the establishment inventions and thereby black out
the forces of Western control.
By page xvii of the preface, the authors-who
have no experience anywhere near Sudan-have become the prosecution,
judges and jury of their own private international court: "That
[President Omar al-Bashir] is a major war criminal is beyond doubt,"
they wrote, "as is the fact that he should face trial for
his substantial violations of international human rights law."
The American authors, it seems, are also in the business of overthrowing
governments: "Given the litany of abuses for which [the Government
of Sudan] is guilty," they wrote, "there would be little
to mourn in Bashir's overthrow, and such a move-depending, of
course, on the actors involved, and its prospects for success-could
be cautiously supported."58
In other words, it's fine for white people
from the United States to organize the overthrow of sovereign
governments, as long as we selectively chose the "right"
people for the job. The authors never similarly condemn "leaders"
from the United States, Canada, Israel or Europe, and they never
suggest that President Bush should be overthrown, or that Donald
Rumsfeld, or Henry Kissinger, or General Norman Schwarzkopf, or
Maurice Tempelsman, should be prosecuted for war crimes. The book
makes no mention of covert operations or private military companies
operating in South Sudan or Darfur, and while it illuminates the
Bush Administration's collaboration with the Khartoum government,
it is nothing more than a cheerleading tool for the opposing power
blocks, including the massive so-called "humanitarian relief"
operations. Such is the racial obliviousness of the new humanitarian
disorder.
But Darfur's cheerleaders and Khartoum's
enemies are not so neutral as they appear.
In 1992, Darfur human rights expert Alex
De Waal established African Rights, an NGO based in London, co-directed
with Rakiya Omaar. In August 1995, African Rights published the
report, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, one of the first
"human rights investigations" to appear after the so-called
"100 days of killing" and the successful RPA/UPDF coup
d'etat in Rwanda of 1994.
"Among the early reports on the genocide,
none matches Africa[n] Rights, Rwanda, Death, Despair and Defiance
(September 1994) for the clinical description of the atrocities
inflicted upon Tutsi victims," wrote renowned Africa scholar
René Lemarchand, "ranging from political murders to
collective massacres in churches, schools and stadiums, and the
daily manhunts conducted on the hills. Significant as it is to
our understanding of the sheer savagery that has accompanied the
carnage, the African Rights report is utterly silent on the grisly
crimes and torture inflicted by Tutsi soldiers on innocent Hutu
civilians, some of which are by now well documented (Nduwayo,
2002: 9-16; Amnesty International, 1994; Des Forges, 1999; Reyntjens
and De Souter, 1994)."59
Lemarchand makes the usual error of accepting
the "clinical description of the atrocities inflicted on
Tutsis" at face value. How does he know they are all Tutsis
and only Tutsis? Because African Rights says they are? Where does
he get his information about "daily manhunts conducted on
the hills"? Why would Lemarchand so quickly trust the claims
of a report that he simultaneously castigates for its (authors')
extreme and obvious biases?
"This woman of Somali origin is an
RPF agent," says Jean-Marie Higiro of African Rights' co-director
Rakiya Omaar. Higiro was Director of the Rwandan Information Office
(ORINFOR). "She has her office in Kigali. In 1994 she was
at Mulindi, the headquarters of the RPF. As the RPF conquered
territories from the Rwandan Government Forces, she collected
information fed to her by the RPF."60
"An intensive back and forth activity
between this so-called British human rights organization, African
Rights, and the intelligence services of the President's office
and the military, has been observed," wrote Paul Rusesabagina.
"Her investigators are very close to the [RPF/RDF] military
intelligence apparatus, and the modus operandi of both appears
to be similar."61
The African Rights report was one of the
first to manufacture and promulgate the false (one-sided) mythology
of "genocide" in Rwanda. It says nothing about RPF/A
massacres or foreign military involvement and peddles the now
clichéd and disingenuous stereotypes about victims and
killers. What does the African Rights report tell us about the
veracity of Alex De Waal's "human rights" reports and
political analyses coming out of Darfur? Further, Alex De Waal's
ties to U.S. intelligence include his involvement with Harvard
University and the Council on Foreign Relations: De Waal was a
member of a CFR task force focused on defining a new military
and intelligence engagement with Africa that is cloaked in "humanitarian"
rhetoric.62
We further witness the hypocrisy and international
scandal of having three battalions of Pentagon "trained"
Rwandan Defense Force (RDF) "peacekeepers" operating
in Darfur while the RDF is openly backing Laurent Nkunda's occupation
proxy force in Congo. Similarly, the UPDF-having received fresh
military training by U.S. covert forces in Uganda-has been sent
to Somalia. This is not "peacekeeping," it is crazy
making.
A few well-placed arrests-beginning in
Washington, Frankfurt, London, New York or Brussels-would redress
the problem of impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity
everywhere.
THE KANSTEINER CONNECTION
The Moto Gold Project is located in the
Kilo Moto goldfields in the north east of the DRC, some 150 kilometers
west of the Ugandan border town of Arua. Kilo Moto was President
Joseph Mobutu's private mine, but the project, at various stages,
involved powerful Western interlocutors: Belgians Yves Le Norvan
and the Damseau family; Roger Lemaire, a Houston (TX) insider;
and an Israeli military agent identified as David Agnon.63 Kilo
Moto's gold, then as now, usually exited Congo (Zaire) through
remote airstrips.63
The present Moto Gold Mining "lease"-a
massive land grab corruptly obtained-covers an area of approximately
1,841 square kilometers and involves sites at Durba, Watsa and
Doko. Moto Gold's partners in Orientale include Siemens and Ken
Overseas. Siemens director Tiego Moseneke is also a director of
PetroSA, a new South African oil minor poaching DRC oil concessions
on Lake Albert.64 Ken Overseas Company is involved in the Minière
de Bakwanga (MIBA) diamond mines in Congo's Mbuji-Mayi province.
In their reports on war and plunder in DRC, the United Nations
Panel of Experts named Ken Overseas in a MIBA mining consortium
linked to Belgian tycoon Philippe de Moerloose and Israeli mining
magnate Dan Gertler; both men have been flagged for arms trafficking.65
Walter Kansteiner III is one of the shadiest
architects of Congo's troubles. The son of a coltan trader in
Chicago, Kansteiner was Assistant Secretary of State for Africa
under G.W. Bush and former "National Security" insider
and member of the Department of Defense Task Force on Strategic
Minerals under Bill Clinton. Kansteiner's speech at The Forum
for International Policy in October of 1996 advocated partitioning
the Congo (Zaire) into smaller states based on ethnic lineage;
Laurent Kabila was marching across Zaire at the time.66
The balkanization of Congo appears to
be a major objective behind the current organized chaos in the
Great Lakes region.67 Further, it is obvious that conflicts from
within the U.S.-between the Department of State, Pentagon and
intelligence agencies-are translating to regional warfare on the
ground in, especially, Sudan, Uganda, and Congo.
Kansteiner is a trustee of the Africa
Wildlife Foundation-another profit-based "conservation"
corporation tied to Conservation International, the Dian Fossey
Gorilla Fund and the Jane Goodall Institute-entities whose front
of gorilla and chimpanzee protection hides a deeper agenda.68
It is not surprising to find that one of the AWF's premier sponsors
is Barrick Gold. Kansteiner is also linked to Richard Leakey's
paramilitary front organization Wildlife Direct, and to the Africa
Conservation Fund, a shady Washington D.C. entity.69
Kansteiner is a director of the precious
metal firm Titanium Resources Group, a company deeply tied to
Sierra Rutile Limited, a firm pivotal to the bloodshed in Sierra
Leone.70 Sierra Rutile Ltd. director Sir Sam Jonah reportedly
helped finance Rwandan RCD rebel groups in DRC while he was a
CEO of Ashanti Goldfields; Jonah is also a director for Moto Gold.2
Sierra Rutile is owned by Max and Jean-Raymond Boulle and Robert
Friedland, "Friends of Bill" Clinton who are linked
to clandestine networks of offshore holdings and front companies
involved in weapons trafficking, money laundering and human rights
atrocities from Burma to the Congos to Mongolia.2
On April 28, 2008, the ICC issued an international
arrest warrant for militia commander Bosco Ntaganda, former commander
of the Forces Patriotiques pour la Libération du Congo
(FPLC), a militia that operated in the oil and gold areas of Orientale.
Bosco is currently the Chief of Staff of Laurent Nkunda's CNDP
army in North Kivu.
On July 14, 2008, the prosecutor of the
ICC applied for an arrest warrant for Sudanese President, Omar
Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, accused of crimes of genocide, crimes
against humanity and war crimes in Darfur. Bashir is an Arab-another
person of color-and the ICC has deeply politicized the Darfur
conflict in keeping with the imperialist smokescreen of the "Save
Darfur" movement.
There have been no ICC indictments against
a single white man who could be proven to be equally culpable
in war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide, though the
list of possibilities-as indicated herein-is very, very long.
"Its name notwithstanding, the ICC
is rapidly turning into a Western court to try African crimes
against humanity," writes Mahmood Mamdani. "It has targeted
governments that are U.S. adversaries and ignored actions the
United States doesn't oppose, like those of Uganda and Rwanda
in eastern Congo, effectively conferring impunity on them."71
The writing is on the wall, and we can
anticipate the eventual arrest of Ugandan military commanders,
including Laurent Nkunda, James Kazini, James Kabarebe, Salim
Saleh and Paul Kagame. Such arrests aren't likely to involve legitimate
judicial proceedings, and it won't merely because these people
deserve to be arrested, which they do, and they probably won't
be arrested before a few more million people are slaughtered in
Central Africa.
The arrests will come because these are
the notoriously visible people of color used to make invisible-quite
literally black out-the white war criminals and covert operators
wrecking havoc in Africa and elsewhere around the world. They
are the embraceable black Africans, and the future fall guys,
and Africa's "leaders" should take note. And so should
Barack Obama.
Even more critical is the need for the
Western news consuming public to recognize the face of propaganda
and the nature of "change" and what it means to people
of color everywhere. Thus it is critical to note the recent shift
in media coverage that accompanies the imminent shift in the post-election
balance of U.S. power. General Laurent Nkunda has been deeply
involved in Congo for years and the Kagame military machine has
been shipping weapons and officers directly to Congo; these Rwanda
Defense Force (RDF) officers infiltrate the country and direct
the "rebel" operations, and the CNDP has served as a
lever of power used against the Kabila government. Reported herein-and
nowhere else-is the ongoing secret military involvement of Yoweri
Museveni and the Ugandan crime networks.
Only recently, as power shifts from the
G.W. Bush power elite to the incoming Obama Administration-being
packed with Clintonite friends and officials, and by Democratic
Party financiers like diamond kingpin Maurice Tempelsman-has Nkunda
or Rwanda been subject to any kind of "harsh criticism".
The New York Times article of December 3, 2008, is the perfect
example of the "news" media serving hidden agendas.
In "Rwanda Stirs Deadly Brew of Troubles in Congo,"
the New York Times peddles the standard narrative about "genocide
in Rwanda" in 1994.
Suddenly, writes Jeffrey Gettleman, one
of the NYT's chief Congo propagandists of late, there is a "secret
Rwandan brotherhood" and Rwandan government officials are
involved in the bloodletting and plunder in Congo.72 Such "exposés"
appear only because power factions-in this case a right-wing Republican
faction allied with the Bush administration-are exerting leverage
through their mouthpiece, the New York Times, and thus mildly
exposing the obvious links of the former Clinton administration-a
competing power faction, more heavily comprised of right-wing
Democrats-to war and covert operations in Congo. There is a similar
political economy of intervention at work vis-à-vis Darfur,
Sudan.
Suddenly it is beneficial to name a few
names-names like Modeste Makabuza Ngoga-names that have been known
and named before.73 These New York Times articles are nothing
more than expedience, tricks in a bag of tricks, as power jockeys
for its positions, and for massive private profit, as we approach
the zero hour and the twilight of savior Barack Obama's coming,
bringing "change" to America, and the same old, new,
humanitarian warfare to Africa.
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