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THE WORLD’S MOST NEGLECTED EMERGENCY

keith harmon snow
5 November 2006



Josephine Aoka Bikenge is a widow who lives along the remote Lopori River, a major tributary in the Congo River Basin. Josephine and her three daughters tied their pirogues, dugout canoes carved out of massive trees, alongside my jungle raft and together we floated for three hours while I interviewed her about life and death in rural Congo. She had never spoken to a white person.

Josephine has never used a telephone—not even the hard-wired kind—or a computer. She has never been in a car, doesn’t own a bike. No radio, no T.V. The boats are rented: she owns the paddle in her hand and one dress, she says, which she is wearing, and one pan. Before she left her home she borrowed her neighbor’s only shoes. She has a kerosene lamp. “I don’t have anything else,” she said.

She has a mud and grass hut, in a mud and grass hut village, where children die from malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhea, and malnutrition. She lost two children, one to measles, one to tetanus; her daughters have lost seven children between them. Rwandan troops (1996-1997) butchered thousands of refugees, “like chickens” she said. Soldiers raped her daughters; one was shot and can’t walk. There is no clinic. No school, no medicines, no books, no cellphones…no reporters, no human rights investigators, no goodwill ambassadors, no Bob Geldorf.

She and her daughters worked for half a year to grow crops to take to market, 300 kilometers downriver, where she was going. She set off three weeks ago, and she was halfway there. They lost some of their goods as they journeyed along the river. She would have to borrow money to get home from market—so ruthless were the taxes and thefts, so hungry her family. But there is no one to borrow money from.

The World Wildlife Fund works nearby, they have their office in the logging company compound, and they are “certifying” the company trees as “sustainable,” before the trees are shipped to Europe and the U.S., and the WWF’s connections to the BBC—who publishes their press releases verbatim—insure that no one will know the truth of the suffering and plunder, or WWF’s acquisition of land, to the exclusion of the people who live(d) on it. Medicins Sans Frontiers had a program here, but one young, bright, caring MSF doctor realized they were doing more harm than good, and she resigned, and MSF, anyways—ignoring their own report qualifying the scale of the catastrophe—pulled out.

Western plantations cover vast territories here, and Josephine believes that people who work for “the company” are better off. According to a World Health Organization study done here, plantations mean slavery, extortion, despair and death—worse than areas absent of all “development” or employment “opportunity”—and workers, trapped in an indenturing system, are paid less than three dollars a month. (That is not a typo.)

According to Nicholas Kristof, the Pulitzer winning columnist at the New York Times, what Congo (Africa) needs is for multinational corporations to flock to Africa to set up factories and exploit the people. Kristof has been campaigning for sweatshops to be set up in Africa on the premise that the “only thing worse than exploitation is no exploitation:” people will take whatever they can get. But Kristof does not report in the exploitation and slavery that exists there now, and the multinational corporations and their people who profit from Africa’s misery. Kristof is peddling misery and exploitation under the banners of humanitarian concern; the New York Times loves it, because it supports the interests of the corporation, and all the directors, and all their affiliated businesses, and all their advertisers. The New York Times is, after all, a multinational corporation selling a product.

It was bad during Mobutu’s time, Josephine says, getting back to reality in Congo, but now it’s worse. As her boat drifted off she said: “Since I started talking to you I am taken into paradise.” Why? “Because I am happy. I am happy about the questions you ask me, and the way you are.”

As Josephine and her family floated away, drifting down the vast Lopori River, I tried to imagine the hardship of the past decade and the war that these people have seen, and the unspeakable traumas.

In 1996, Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, with the Pentagon behind them, launched their covert war against Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and his western backers. A decade later, there are six or seven million dead, at the very least, and the war in Congo (Zaire) continues. Both Kagame and Museveni shot their way to power in bloody coups, but we are never told such things. Instead, we hear about the horrors under Idi Amin in Uganda–who killed far less than have died under Museveni’s policies since–and the so-called “genocide” in Rwanda. Museveni rescued Uganda. Kagame rescued Rwanda. The IMF, World Bank, USAID… rewarded their men.

Here is the sound-bite, the chorus line, the constant refrain of the propaganda system: “In just 100 days the Rwanda genocide, led by the brutal Hutus, claimed some 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis.” Here is the truth: powerful interests from the U.S., U.K., South Africa and Belgium launched a covert war from Uganda, destabilized the legitimate government of Rwanda from 1990 to 1994, assassinated the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, and installed the Pentagon’s man, Paul Kagame. It was a coup d’etat. The Kagame machine did most of the killing, not the Hutus, as they tell us in the Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda. And we won—because no matter how you look at it, Americans benefit. Now, the battle rages on for control of the Congo.

The William Jefferson Clinton Foundation is allied with the defense establishment in Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa. But they deploy the Pangaea Aids Foundation, partnered with the San Francisco Aids Foundation, and they call it AIDS/HIV relief, and humanitarian aid, and their press releases slide unchallenged into the New York Times. The National Geographic reports on the wonderful new health programs, and the lasting traditions of savage societies, suffering from the AIDS pandemic, and so we can all pat ourselves on the backs for helping those poor, hopeless, Africans.

Here is the soundbite: “AIDS is the number one killer in Africa.” Here is the truth: high salaries and fancy SUVs for western relief and human rights workers; academic papers and tenured professorships; billion dollar university research programs; pharmaceutical profits and biopiracy; while depopulating Africa as fast, and as quietly, as possible. Here is the truth: the AIDS “relief” benefits the US military interests, and military partners, like the Ugandan and Rwandan soldiers, and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (involved in Darfur). Here is the truth: malaria is the number one killer in many Sub-Saharan countries, with tuberculosis, measles, typhoid, tetanus, diarrhea, and malnutrition fast on its heals.

Adastra Minerals, now in southern Congo, was once based in Hope, Arkansas. It’s connections to friends of Bill Clinton are never exposed. Instead we have the Clinton AIDS foundations and charities saving lives in Africa.

Maurice Tempelsman, a director/trustee of the Harvard AIDS Institute, is the Congo’s premier diamond kingpin (diamonds leave through Rwanda) but Samantha Power did not interview Tempelsman when she was at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights, and that is why she won a Pulitzer for her book, A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. This, indeed, is a problem from hell.

Here is the soundbite: “We (USA) were bystanders to genocide.” Here is the truth: General Romeo Dallaire, the UN ‘hero’ who ‘tried to stop the genocide,’ reportedly played a decisive role in the unraveling of Rwanda. It is no surprise that he is now part of UN Secretary general Kofi Annan’s special panel on “genocide.” Shake hands, indeed, with the devil.

The failure to bring to light the slaughter in Congo is due to powerful interests that connect to or permeate all levels of our society, from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch; from the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding to the World Policy Institute; from Conservation International to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund; from student groups at Smith and Dartmouth Colleges, to the American Friends Service Committee.

Pfizer is in Uganda, and Chevron, and Goodworks International, but people have read the New York Times for so long, and Newsweek, and the New Yorker, and the Nation, that we no longer know what questions to ask, or even that we should ask any questions at all. And because we are so busy talking on our cell phones we can just donate a few dollars to CARE, so that we can say that we do, and never ask where our money goes, or why it is mixed up with funds from Lockheed Martin, a major supporter of CARE, and we thank God that we do not live in Congo, or Darfur, or, worse, under the guns of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Joseph Kony—after all—is the devil himself: he captures children, and uses them as soldiers—imagine that—and maybe he eats them. Vanity Fair reported it, so it must be true. Scant is the attention to the brutalities committed by the Ugandan government forces, or the injustices of the Museveni regime.

AIDS trials on live human beings? In Uganda? Well, those Africans have no other options, so why not. And if there is oil under Lake Albert, and under Josephine’s land—the heart of darkness—and under Darfur, and if there is so much natural gas under Lake Kivu, well, wouldn’t this undermine the whole PEAK OIL scenario?

Here is the soundbite: “Peak Oil.” Here is the truth: The vast oil fields and deep reserves of Sudan, Congo, Uganda, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea (Afghanistan, Tajikstan, Kazakhstan, Uzebekistan, Tibet)…have yet to come on line. All of Sudan is one vast conglomeration of oil concessions.

Chevron, Shell, Exxon, Mobil, Andarko, Heritage… they better get at that oil, anyways, and the sooner the better: drop the prices at the pumps, so we can all get to the airport, fly to Rwanda, see the gorillas, before they are all eaten. Africans eat monkeys. I heard it on National Public Radio, right after that Archers Daniels Midland story about the “supermarket to the world”… Of course, one Archer Daniels Midland director is also a director of Barrick Gold. And ADM makes sure that Bob Dole is elected, and re-elected, and re-elected, and Dole makes sure that the World Food Program doles out its cash to ADM, and that is why people are starving to death.

Not only is there a Pangaea Foundation, there is, curiously, also a Pangea Minerals Ltd., a subsidiary of Barrick Gold, and both are connected to families named Bush and Clinton. Pangea (Barrick) works in Tanzania, and that—like Rwanda and Uganda—is where some of the weapons in Congo come from, and the minerals from Congo go. Barrick is mining in Congo too. But let’s forget such dirty details, because we’re going to see the gorillas, with Sigourney Weaver, Leonardo DiCaprio, Pierce Brognan, Angelina Jolie, and Daryl Hannah, at $4000 a pop, and maybe we can get an autograph in the process, and visit Dian Fossey’s grave, and sleep for a night in the Hotel Rwanda, or spend A Day by the Pool in Kigali, watching Curious George on our laptop (made with coltan).

What? They have closed the Volcanoes National Park (Rwanda New Times, 23 May 2006) and are building a fence around it? With security sensors made by the Department of Defense? Oh, well, WE can still go: the park’s only closed to starving Rwandans. Indeed, US soldiers (New Times, 15 May 2006) have been taken to see the gorillas, in that very same closed park, but let’s not confuse gorillas with guerrillas, because US soldiers are training their protégés from Rwanda, and together they support the African Union “peacekeeping” forces in Darfur, and so it must be a good thing. And they are trained by the National Defense University (USA), which also places U.S. military officers in corporations like Oracle, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrup, Grumman, Lockheed Martin and CNN—under Donald Rumsfeld’s Corporate Fellows Program—and so it must be a good thing. And these corporations are funding the gorilla conservation, or they are allied with the conservation organizations, and their directors sit on conservation boards, and it must be a good thing.

Here is the soundbite: “Arab Janjaweed on horses are committing genocide in Darfur.” Here is the truth, a battle for control of Sudan and its oil, a covert war in Tchad, another in Ethiopia, in Somalia, in Niger, a regime change in Khartoum, all backed by the Pentagon and multinational corporations. Anyways, U.S. soldiers only torture people in Guantanamo, or Abu Graib, or Bagram or, well, it wouldn’t happen in Africa, what with all those savage Mai-Mai and Mau-Mau and Tutsi and Hutu and Interahamwe and—Inshullah—Janjaweeds.

Weeds are something you have to get rid of—making us all into constant gardener’s—and there’s too many Africans anyways, so the average age of women at death in Rwanda (40) and Congo (38) might just be nature’s way of telling us. Fortunately, everything goes better with Coke, another benign sponsor of Rwanda and Uganda, who, like Pfizer, is looking out for our (white) interests. Coke and Pepsi are hungry for Gum Arabic, another prize from Darfur.

The ICG has published over 40 opinion pieces on Darfur, and more on Congo, in major newspapers around the world. They write reports, they pressure, they lobby…they indoctrinate. The ICG and International Rescue Committee directors and trustees are defense and intelligence policymakers, plus some people from think tanks and newspapers (as if there is any real distinction): Henry Kissinger; Morton Abramowitz; Zbigniew Brzezinski; Wesley Clark; William Taylor. The IRC also has a director named Vanden Heuvel, whose daughter is editor at the Nation.
Ugandan President Museveni is today Co-Chair of a euphemistically named Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa, along with Bob Dole, and George Rupp, the President of the IRC, and two directors of Conservation International (CI)—one of the big NGOS manipulating the situation in Congo. CI directors also include Northrup Grumman director Lewis Coleman, and Louis Cabot of the coltan Cabot Corp. CI chairman Gordon E. Moore is the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corp., another coltan beneficiary supplying aerospace, intelligence and defense technologies. Moore is also a director of Gilead Sciences Corporation, whose directors include, or have included, Donald Rumsfeld, former US secretary of State and long-time Bechtel ally George Schultz, and Belgian business mogul Viscount Etienne Davignon. (Recall that Congo is a Belgian colony.) Gilead Sciences Corp. turns out to be the license holder of the TAMIFLU vaccine for bird flu. Bechtel provided the satellite maps for the US-backed invasion of DRC (Zaire) by Rwanda and Uganda in 1996, when the current war in DRC began.

It is all about access: timber, copper, cobalt, coltan, niobium, diamonds, gold, oil, natural gas, Gum Arabic, primates—six US zoos this spring paid $400,000 for endangered primates from Congo. Access to raw materials; access to a cheap, replenishable, eager (read: desperate) labor pool; access to blood pools; access to biodiversity (piracy); access to game parks (tourism); access to markets for currency speculation; access to white sand beaches; access to desperate females; access to research subjects (animals, tribes, plants, blood, development failures, bones); access to artifacts; access for museum and zoo stocks.

And access to suffering, because humanitarian relief is big business (and there are never any lasting results to show for it). As Paul Farmer points out, and Noam Chomsky before him, the problem is structural violence, and the system that perpetuates it, and that system is not African. Access is gained through elite networks, involving Presidents and Lords and CEOs and actors, whose modus operandi is—by any means necessary. Organized crime, extortion, bribery, theft, corruption, privilege, white supremacy, total information warfare.

It always starts out as some kind of psychological operation, or perception management or, well, propaganda. But in the end it is about our collective amnesia. To Josephine, in rural Congo, it’s all the same in the end: she has nothing, she has always had nothing, and she will always have nothing. The bottom line, after the profits, and the comforts, and the privileges, and the excuses, and the denial, is the hard, brutal truth that the U.S. public simply does not care about people like Josephine.
http://allthingspass.com/uploads/doc-177UPDATE_CONGO_11_06.doc

Extra, Extra: STOP the Mainstream Press!
By:Keith Harmon Snow and Georgianne Nienaber on:Jul 30 2007 [02:31 pm] (448 reads)



The story began as they all do: DATELINE: Virungas National Park: “IN EASTERN CONGO OASIS, BLOOD AMID THE GREENERY. In Africa's Oldest National Park, Gorillas Are Being Killed and Their Guardians Are Endangered, Too.”


Published July 22, 2007, it is yet “another gorilla murdered” story. This time it was the Washington Post, recycling a month old story about a slain gorilla.


“I think what is important is the rangers, above all, and the gorilla’s.”
--Washington Post Correspondent, Stephanie McCrummen


From Africa to China, three days later the headlines of Wednesday July 25 screamed out that three more mountain gorillas had been killed. Not just killed, executed. On the 26th it was up to four.

“Mass Gorilla ‘Execution’ Discovered in Congo,” announced National Geographic News. “Three female mountain gorillas were found shot dead this morning in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virungas National Park.” There is a certain moral indignation expected from the public when someone is “executed”—it is the language that should be attached to human beings, but here it is attached to gorillas.

Photos on CNN and at least 100 web pages show the gorilla bodies displayed on stretchers, while seemingly appalled conservationists look on.

Meanwhile, 113,000 people have fled fighting between government forces, rebels and local militias since February 2007 in the same region of DRC. Some human rights organizations count 250,000. On July 20, 2007, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for action to resolve the crisis in the DRC’s volatile eastern region, where the United Nations on July 20 counted 700,000 people as internally displaced.

At least 1000 people a day die in this region due to war, malnutrition, disease and lack of basic medical care. Some of these deaths are executions by soldiers from varying militias and armies. Congolese journalist Serge Maheshe was executed on the street in Bukavu, South Kivu, on June 13, 2007, but there was no comparable outcry. OPEDNEWS was the only alternative media outlet that published a photo of the murdered journalist. There is little moral indignation for a single dead Congolese person, and usually the victims are blamed for their own suffering. It is the same for Ugandan and Rwandan peasants across the porous border.

Washington Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen apparently traveled from Goma to the park with security from Richard Leakey’s organization Wildlife Direct, but she refuses to answer simple questions about her relationship with the elite mercenary firm. “I think what is important is the rangers, above all, and the gorilla’s,” McCrummen replied tersely, on July 24. Is this journalism?

According to McCrummen and the Washington Post, the “beleaguered” Congo rangers—who have been blogging from the wilderness to feed Wildlife Direct’s web site and help raise funds abroad—“have not been paid in a decade.”

Why? What has happened to the millions and millions of dollars and euros and pounds and yen pumped into gorilla conservation in the past seven years alone? We were at Rumangabo in February and photographed well-stocked storerooms of food in the rangers’ encampments.

Forget about the onslaught of press releases from Wildlife Direct and Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, or the breathless articles from the Washington Post and National Geographic News, all blaming local “militias” and “charcoal gatherers,” and “Mai Mai” and “poison bananas” and “rebel leaders” for the gorilla killings.

But there is something else going on here too.

Our February-March investigative visit to DRC revealed a different picture than the one regurgitated by the Washington Post from press releases provided by Wildlife Direct, the mercenary “conservation” organization supporting the “beleaguered” “ranger force.”

Post reporter McCrummen laments about the rangers wielding “rusty machetes,” but is the truth?

Take a look at the accompanying photo, provided to us by Robert Muir in January 2007, when his employer, the Frankfurt Zoological Society, was touting the “success story” of the ranger program. Obviously well fed, well clothed, well-armed, with machine guns ready, and fresh from training by British mercenary and soldier-of-fortune, Conrad Thorpe (see Guns for Hire: Congo 2006; www.vonplanta.net) this mercenary army has more than “rusty machetes” as reported by the Washington Post.

There have been at least ten mountain gorillas killed since this publicity photo was taken: indeed, the killings are synonymous with Wildlife Direct’s arrival on the scene. It is obviously a failed policy to have mercenary rangers in Virunga Park. The current Wildlife Direct press releases plea for more money for the suddenly under-equipped rangers.

Wildlife Direct operates under the mantle of the Africa Conservation Fund, a tax-exempt (501-c-3) registered with the Internal Revenue Service. Walter H. Kansteiner III has been a board member since the founding of ACF in 2004. Kansteiner has been a constant presence behind the scenes in Congo’s war since 1996. His background and experience are not in conservation. He has worked on a strategic minerals task force at the Department of Defense and was Executive Vice President of a commodity trading and manufacturing company specializing in tropical commodities in the developing world.

The World Policy Institute finds this troubling. “Mr. Kansteiner's appointment is disconcerting, particularly with respect to the evolution of U.S. policy towards the war ravaging the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

The Democratic Republic of Congo has the world’s purest and largest deposits of strategic minerals, such as gold, coltan, niobium, cobalt and columbite. Kansteiner is on the Board of Directors of Moto Gold, now operating in the killing fields of the bloody Ituri district.

The late (2006) board member of ACF, Paul Van Vlissingen, had been working for years to privatize all of Africa’s national parks for tourism. Kansteiner was a major force for privatization in the Clinton and Bush governments, and his work continues in this vein with think tanks and policy institutes.

The BBC reported in 2003 that Van Vlissingen’s company “planned to take over a string of national parks throughout Africa.” The scheme was to found a private company, African Parks Management and Finance Company, to take them over.

At a press conference, Zambian Member of Parliament, Sakwiba Sikota, called for an investigation, saying the scheme “borders on theft and plunder of the resources of the people of Barotseland and should be thrown out.”

But the Washington Post did not even bother to take a look at the machinations behind the “Congo Rangers.”

One critical glance at the “Congo Rangers” promotional materials or board of Directors would have been welcome journalism by the Washington Post.

On the Von Planta video, the white mercenaries and their elite Congolese “rangers” can be seen terrorizing the local fishermen—whom they call “poachers”—forcing them to “confess” their crimes or face death. The video clearly shows the poorest women in the world running for their lives from armed gangs otherwise defined as “rangers” and their white Wildlife Direct “trainers.” The Virunga rangers are on videotape committing human rights violations against innocent villagers who have a few wire snares in their meager huts—their only means to feed their families.

The “Guns for Hire” video also makes it clear that the white mercenaries believe that Congolese officials are fanning the flames of the violence, encouraging local people to cultivate inside the park, because park officials receive “payoffs”—albeit pitifully meager—for each cultivated plot. Congolese government soldiers are blamed with running a charcoal operation offering incentives for peasants to make charcoal or collect wood inside the park. Poor Congolese communities rely on charcoal as a staple energy source, and while they are the victims of an unjust international system exploiting and forcing them off their lands, they are blamed for trying to survive.

White British SAS forces give smug interviews in the video and share lofty ideals, based in privilege and backed by the badge of their skin color, and sneak around in the bush—wearing flak jackets and carrying automatic weapons—peaking through tall grasses and spying on peasant fishermen in old rickety boats and skinny boys on rusty pedal bikes. The video is a stupidly made propaganda tool that catches the real criminals in the act(ing).

The Congolese people are not stupid, and someone is sending a very clear signal with the gorilla killings: we don’t like what you are doing, and we don’t want you here. The local people want the white mercenaries and their elite first-world agenda—with all the dishonesty, corruption and vested interests behind it—gone. Period.

That is the sad, hard truth, never mentioned in mainstream media. Why?

Consider this: Washington Post director Barry Diller is a director of Conservation International and the Coca Cola Company, one of the big partners of the aid organization CARE International, and the defense company IAC/Interactive. Diller’s wife, Diane von Furstenberg is also an IAC/Interactive director.

CARE is a USAID partner involved in “conservation” and “humanitarian” projects in Congo, Uganda and Sudan. USAID has funded scores of millions of dollars in big conservation projects in the Great Lakes region in the past decade.

Oracle Corporation—a big intelligence and defense contractor—is another partner of CARE. Oracle’s CEO, Lawrence Ellison, is on the board of directors of Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund-International. Three IAC/Interactive directors are directors of Oracle Corporation. One is Washington Post director Alan Spoon, and another is General Norman Schwarzkopf.

Bullet holes riddle the entrance signs to Virunga Park. The locals are not happy with elite private militias limiting their already minimal options for food and survival, or forcing them out of the only shelter they have in eastern Congo. Most want only a few hectares to grow maize for their sick, emaciated children.

“We drove from Uganda to Congo through the Virungas,” said Oscar Kashala, the Congolese medical scientist from Harvard who ran for president in Congo’s 2006 elections. “This is a very celebrated park. Everything was green but there are no lions in Virunga. No gazelles. People here have eaten everything. We didn't even hear any birds singing. We were seeing half naked kids coming out of the bush. For me—a doctor—to see malnutrition like that is very hard. The kids all have wounds on their feet, and their bellies are swollen. They are all sick.”

The gorillas have become hostages in a propaganda war, the people have become irrelevant.

On the other side of the fence—quite literally, the park boundary—the well-fed Congo Rangers and their families rely upon a sympathetic Western public for donations to keep themselves supplied and protected in former colonial encampments within the Virunga Park. In fact, Wildlife Direct recently put out a plea for more funds. The rangers were supposedly running out of food and an infusion of funding would certainly help.

Or, perhaps the fingers of blame should be pointed closer to home?

It’s a jungle out there, and the monkey and money holes run very deep.


For more visit the Keith Harmon Snow website www.allthingspass.com



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Access to health care no better now than during the war

quote:

The survey also found that even in those areas where there is some health care most people could not afford to pay for the services. "Even a very low flat fee contribution remains an insurmountable barrier for many people," Nicolai said.

Most Congolese live on the equivalent of US $0.30 per day, MSF said. "As a result," it added, "people only seek health care when it is often too late."

...
This WHO pdf Report may be of interest also.