Pour comprendre: http://www.rd-congo.info/video/kivu_msf.htm
Editor’s Note To Readers:
Generalissimo” Laurent Nkunda; not quite the liberator but a Rwanda- backed frontman for global corporate theft that uses genocide as a modus operandi
White Collar War Crimes; Black African Fall Guys
By Keith Harmon Snow
By Keith Harmon Snow
If your confused by or tired of reading the propaganda and misinformation in The New York Times and or listening to it on the BBC about the wars, genocide, and looting of natural resources in East and Central Africaby Western corporations –while being abetted by corrupt African governments and “media” such as the Times and BBC and Western governments– read brilliant investigative reporter Keith Harmon Snow’s expose.
Use this article as your reference and guide every time the corrupt corporate media try to deceive and hoodwink you. After a series of recent editorials on blackstarnews.com calling out the Times on their corrupt coverage and cover-up of genocide, the newspaper finally threw a piece of dry bone on the dining table on December 4 with an article about Rwanda’s not-so-secret war of aggression against Congo. For the real deal, read what follows. It’s long but everyword is an expose. After you’re done readingplease call President elect Obama’s transition office and ask what Secretary of StateClinton will do to end U.S. involvement in the African genocide:
How “Media” Facilitates Mass Murder And Looting In Africa
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. lacked 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 escalation of violence and media posturing?
In 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—cell phones built with the blood minerals of the Congolese people.
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 people. 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 andKivus 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’état 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 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 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. ,
[9], [10]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.
[9], [10]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 peoplebutchered all the way across Zaire—is a genocide denier. (Of course, the UPDF-RPF/A alliancealso 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 [http://www.ssg-dc.com/]. The New Yorker and CNN have consistently manufacturedthe pro-RPF/A propaganda, reported by Christiane Amanpour and Philip Gourevitch.
Amanpour is married to James Rubin, Bill Clinton’s Assistant Secretaryof 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. , [14], [15] 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 (www.aimint.org/usa/where_we_work/) 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 Truth can be buried and stomped into the ground where none can see, yet eventually it will, like a seed, break through the surface once again far more potent than ever, and nothing can stop it. Truth can be suppressed for a “time”, yet it cannot be destroyed. ==> Wolverine
The Truth can be buried and stomped into the ground where none can see, yet eventually it will, like a seed, break through the surface once again far more potent than ever, and Nothing can stop it. Truth can be suppressed for a time, yet It cannot be destroyed => Wolverine
