February 23, 2011
November 29, 2010
kidney deals tied to Israel
South Africa illegal kidney deals tied to Israel
The biggest health care provider in South Africa has been involved in illegal kidney transplant operations.
Netcare, the biggest health care provider in South Africa, has pleaded guilty to charges of performing illegal kidney transplant operations using Israeli-linked organ trafficking syndicate.
In return for charges being dropped against Netcare's Chief Executive Richard Friedland, the firm acknowledged in a plea bargain that, "payments must have been made to the donors for their kidneys, and that certain of the kidney donors were minors at the time that their kidneys were removed."
The suit follows a seven-year investigation into the illegal operations at St. Augustine's Hospital in Durban in association with an Israeli-linked organ trafficking syndicate.
According to reports, while organs had originally been sourced from Israeli citizens, they were later obtained from poor Romanians and Brazilians at a lower cost.
According to prosecutors, the Israelis were paid about USD 20,000 for their kidneys, while the Brazilians and Romanians were paid an average of USD 6,000.
Other related reports surfaced regarding 25,000 Ukrainian children who had been brought to Israel over the past two years to be used by Israeli medical centers for their "spare parts."
Additionally, the Israeli military was accused of stealing the organs of Palestinian prisoners.
The illegal operations in South Africa included the removal of organs from five children.
The healthcare firm was also forced to admit that, "certain employees participated in these illegalities, and [the hospital] wrongly benefited from the proceeds," as five notable South African physicians were also indicted in the case.
The hospital has agreed to pay nearly 8 million rand (USD 1.1 million) in fines.
The charges account for 109 operations carried out at the hospital between 2001 and 2003.
LF/MB
September 28, 2010
A Day in Solidarity with African People
A Day in Solidarity with African People: Reparations in Action!
Wendy Snyder, African People’s Solidarity Committee
(uhurunews) US president Obama claims we live in a “post-racial America.”
But the reality is that African people in this country have only 10 cents for every dollar that white people have; half of the 2.3 million people in US prisons are Africans; and the police murder and brutalize African communities with impunity every day.
The truth is there are two Americas, one living at the expense of the other.
Continue reading "A Day in Solidarity with African People" »
An interview with Socialist Party of Azania (SOPA) leader Lybon Mabasa
Sixteen years after official end of Aparthied: An interview with Socialist Party of Azania (SOPA) leader Lybon Mabasa
(uhurunews) Lybon Mabasa was one of the young activists of the Black Conscience Movement set up by Steve Biko during the 1976 Soweto uprising.
He was also one of the leaders of the Azanian People Organisation (AZAPO) founded in 1978 to pursue Steve Biko's combat.
Today, he is one of the leaders of the Socialist Party of Azania (SOPA).
The SOPA has had an active part at international level in many of the campaigns and activities of the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples.
Lybon Mabasa will be present in Algiers for the Open World Conference Against War and Exploitatiion on November 27-28-29, 2010.
For International Newsletter he went back over the present situation in his country (August 5, 2010).
As all the clamor around the World Cup dies down and as contradictions with official announcements arise, the situation in South Africa remains just as critical, even worsened by the consequences of the World Cup.
Continue reading "An interview with Socialist Party of Azania (SOPA) leader Lybon Mabasa" »
August 30, 2010
Outsourcing a U.S. war: Ugandans in Iraq
Outsourcing a U.S. war: Ugandans in Iraq
by Ann Garrison
Last week the Pentagon proclaimed that the last U.S. combat forces had left Iraq. This after an armored unit drove out of the country and crossed the border into Kuwait. However, there will still be 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
An Iraq veteran turned war critic, Camillo Mejia, said that 4,000 U.S. troops who are leaving Iraq will be replaced by 7,000 employees of private military contractors. Other observers say the U.S. has long outsourced the Iraq occupation to troops from some of the world’s poor nations, such as Uganda, Angola, India and Bangladesh, and that many of the mercenaries due to replace other U.S. troops will also come from those countries, especially from Uganda.
Continue reading "Outsourcing a U.S. war: Ugandans in Iraq" »
July 27, 2010
Exxon Valdez catastrophes
Niger Delta oil spills dwarf BP, Exxon Valdez catastrophes
One of the world’s largest oil spill catastrophes is unfolding right now — in Nigeria.
Delta oil fire
For decades, thousands of spills across the fragile Niger Delta have destroyed the livelihoods of fishermen and farmers, fouled water sources and have polluted the ground and air.
The Nigerian government estimates there were over 7,000 spills, large and small, between 1970 and 2000, according to the BBC. That is approximately 300 spills a year, and some spills have been leaking for years.
Vast swathes of the Delta are covered with tar and stagnant lakes of crude.
By some estimates, over 13 million barrels of oil have spilled into the Delta. That’s the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez spill every year for 40 years, according to The Independent.
April 28, 2010
crisis in southern Sudan
Emaciated children signal crisis in southern Sudan
By JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press Writer
AKOBO, Sudan – Three-day-old Odong Obong lay in the hospital bed, his pencil-thin arms almost motionless and his shriveled, gaunt face resembling that of an elderly man.
Emaciated babies and young children throughout the ward bore the signs of hunger: exposed ribs and distended stomachs. Outside, old villagers reclined motionless in the shade, too frail to walk.
The U.N. calls this the "hungriest place on Earth" after years of drought and conflict, with aid agencies already feeding 80,000 people here. A doctor says the worst is yet to come.
Two years of failed rains and tribal clashes have laid the foundation for Africa's newest humanitarian crisis. The World Food Program quadrupled its assistance levels from January to March in the Akobo region of southeastern Sudan.
March 26, 2010
Divide Nigeria in two
Divide Nigeria in two, says Muammar Gaddafi
Muammar Gaddafi blamed the British
for Nigeria's problems
Nigeria should be divided into two nations to avoid further bloodshed between Muslims and Christians, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has said.
In a speech to students, he praised the example of India and Pakistan, where he said partition saved many lives.
Splitting Nigeria "would stop the bloodshed and burning of places of worship," state news agency Jana quoted him as saying.
A senior Nigerian diplomat said he was not taking the suggestion seriously.
Hundreds of people have died in communal violence in villages around the central Nigerian city of Jos this year.
The BBC's Rana Jawad in Tripoli says Col Gaddafi's suggestion is unsurprising given his past form.
Last year, he called for Switzerland to be abolished and for its land to be divided between Italy, Germany and France.
February 12, 2010
A new flag for the African Union
A NEW FLAG FOR THE AFRICAN UNION
http://www.africa-union.org
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 31 January 2010- The African Union today unveiled its new flag at its 14th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government taking place in Addis Ababa . To tunes of the AU anthem, the new flag was hoisted by the outgoing Chairperson of the African Union, Brother Leader Muammar El Gaddafi, leader of the Libyan Revolution, Great Socialist People’s Libyan Jamahiriya.
January 20, 2010
Nigeria religious clashes
Nearly 300 killed in Nigeria religious clashes
Three days of Muslim-Christian clashes in the Nigerian city of Jos have left around 300 people dead, clerics and a paramedic said Tuesday, as troops were deployed to control the unrest.
Authorities placed the central city under a 24-hour curfew amid reports of continuing armed clashes, with terrified residents saying they could hear gunshots and smoke was billowing from parts of the Plateau State capital.
November 23, 2009
APSP-Sierra Leone founding conference
ASI North American Region salutes APSP-Sierra Leone founding conference
UhuruNews
Published Nov 17, 2009
Chioma Oruh, leader of the North American Committee to Build the African Socialist International
This statement was made by the African Socialist International North American Region on November 17th at a press conference in front of the Sierra Leone Embassy in Washington, D.C.
The African Socialist International, in unity with other organizations of the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, proudly announces the launch of an international workers party that will begin contesting for state power in Sierra Leone. The launch of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) in Sierra Leone marks the first officially registered political party led by and benefiting the masses of African workers and peasants in Sierra Leone’s history. As we speak, Chernoh Alpha M. Bah, a former child soldier, journalist and activist, is leading a conference attended by hundreds of Africans from Sierra Leone and by an international delegation of members of the African Socialist International from the North American region.
The international significance of this event cannot be overstated. The existence of the African People’s Socialist Party in Sierra Leone is here to expose the illegitimate attempts by neocolonial rulers that have their interests everywhere except with the masses of workers and peasants. We see that since the 2007 election of president Ernest Koroma and the overall leadership of the All People’s Congress, the conditions of the everyday worker in Sierra Leone have not improved. Rather we see president Koroma appealing more to the interests of foreign nations such as the United States, England and China. Koroma’s betrayal of his people is evident in the million dollar deals with the British Department for Foreign International Development (DFID) that provide monies for supposed social programs that alleviate nothing for the masses but result in securing the UK’s interest in the diamond mines. Further betrayal is exposed in Koroma’s permission of AFRICOM’s Africa Partnership Station to impose U.S. maritime security interests on how Africans in Sierra Leone use their own waters. This new program, in addition to the FBI’s legal attaché in Freetown, allows for the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus to trump any attempt by Sierra Leone to set the terms of their own security. No Western nation would allow Africans to set up militarily in their home region.
The launch of the African People’s Socialist Party is a bold step in a new direction. It says that Africans will not put the interests of foreign nations before those of her own citizens. This has been a longtime coming and should be embraced by all working class Africans around the world as a necessary step in moving towards a true freedom that we can believe in. Furthermore, in this period when the affairs of the entire African world are dictated by foreign interests and when the interests of the toiling masses—the workers and the peasants—are not represented, the African People’s Socialist Party in Sierra Leone now gives a voice to the voiceless. They are speaking truth to power about the various diamond miners that keep up the criminal economy of resource extraction without just payment of these precious stones—miners like the Global Exploration Corporation, Rex Mining Corporation, DiamondWorks (BranchEnergy and BranchMining), and Sierra Rutile-Nord Ressources. They are exposing the devastating scenario where more African women in Sierra Leone die from preventable childbirth related complications than anywhere else in the world.
Joining the hundreds of African workers in Sierra Leone Party is an international delegation from North America that will be there for 2 weeks. The delegation is led by Chairman Omali Yeshitela. Some of the activities they will participate in are: 1) a conference from November 16-18 that lays out the initial goals and objectives of the APSP in Sierra Leone, 2) setting up an FM and internet radio station that will allow African workers in Sierra Leone to hear news and other programs that articulate a political understanding of local and global political affairs with their interests in mind, and 3) launching the Oloshoro Fishing Project as well as a program to address the alarming infant and maternal death rates in Sierra Leone as led by the All African People’s Development and Empowerment Project.
We, children of the African world far away from the motherland, stand proud today in unity with our sisters and brothers in Sierra Leone who have done the hard work of launching this much needed international political front. The African Socialist International of the North American Region salutes your bravery and commitment to the worldwide struggle for liberation, particularly at this difficult point in history of sophisticated oppression—where it hides in the cloak of neocolonialism and Africans everywhere are encouraged to feel hopeful in the most desperate and devastating of times marked by a global economic crises and militarism. We stand here in front of the Sierra Leonean embassy as part of the global African nation that is one billion strong. Your achievements in launching this workers party will not go unnoticed and we stand together with you to say, “One Africa! One Nation!”
Uhuru!
An interview wit’ Kambale Musavuli
An interview wit’ Kambale Musavuli, spokesman for Friends of the Congo
by Minister of Information JR
Kambale Musavuli says in this photo he was “thinking about how to best break the silence. Revolution? Coalition? or whatever type of -tion?” To invite him to your campus or community, email Kambale@friendsofthecongo.org.
(October 20, 2009)This week is Congo Week, when people around the world are putting extra emphasis on studying, teaching, advocating, boycotting and protesting the war that has torn apart the land and the lives of the Congolese. Their suffering is due to the multinational corporate and government theft of their mineral wealth, most notably their coltan reserves.
Coltan is a mineral necessary for making electronic things work – like cellphones, ipods, PS3s and laptops. Over 6 million Congolese have been murdered to assure that the corporations and governments involved have a corner on the market for the minerals that the Congo produces.
Kambale Musavuli is the spokesman for Friends of the Congo, an organization that is a voice for the Congolese people to be heard. I personally have learned so much from Kambale in the very short time that I have met him about his home, an African country that borders nine other countries on the continent. Congo is one of the richest countries in the world in mineral wealth, and it is under siege.
In the spirit of Congo Week, POCC Block Report Radio and the SF Bay View newspaper did this interview to inform our readers about this very dire situation that is happening as we speak in the Congo.
M.O.I. JR: What is Congo Week? How did it start? Who leads it? And what locations are participating this year?
Kambale: Congo Week is a global movement, which calls on people of good will all around the world to speak out about the injustices in the Congo. Since 1996, it is estimated that nearly 6 million people have died in the Congo due to the conflict. Student leaders and community organizers have responded to the silence surrounding the lives lost in the Congo with a global movement to “Break the Silence” and raise awareness about the violence, especially against women and children.
The purpose is to mobilize people in a global teach-in and other activities, including a one-hour global cell out on Wednesday, Oct. 21, from 12 noon to 1 p.m., where we turn off our cell phones in commemoration of the lives lost, leave a message on the phone about our cell phone connection to lost lives in the Congo and, upon turning the phone on, we send a text message to six of our friends letting them know about the situation in the Congo and to visit congoweek.org to get involved in the global movement.
This global Congo movement would not have existed without the support of the students at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. In March 2008, the Aggies organized the world’s first “cell out” – a boycott of cell phone usage to raise awareness about the devastating situation in the Congo. Following the “cell out,” the Aggies helped to create Break the Silence Week. People from around the world hosted events to raise awareness about the situation in the Congo and provide support to Congolese people on the ground.
Friends of the Congo, an advocacy organization I am a part of, leads the movement by providing community leaders around the world with materials, films, action items and ideas on how they can participate in Congo Week.
At this moment, we have more than 30 countries and 200 universities and many more communities participating in Congo Week. From Japan to United Kingdom, Sweden to South Africa, Canada to Costa Rica and even countries like Romania, Australia, Ireland and many more … are all joining this global movement in support of the people of the Congo. You can visit www.congoweek.org to look at the full lists of participants.
Foreign corporations that use Congolese children to dig coltan from Congo’s rich earth make $400 per pound when they sell it to power our cell phones and laptops.
M.O.I. JR: What is the importance of “breaking the silence” on the war in the Congo?
October 16, 2009
war on Somalia with neocolonialism
Obama continues war on Somalia with neocolonialism and direct U.S. attacks
September 01, 2009
Opportunist uses unity with Zimbabwe land struggle to hustle Africans
Opportunist uses unity with Zimbabwe land struggle to hustle Africans
AAPDEP terminates relationship with Kwanisai Mafa
Dr. Aisha Fields, Director of the All African People's Development and Empowerment Project/ Published Aug 20, 2009
In September 2007, the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) formed the All African People’s Development and Empowerment Project (AAPDEP) as an organization that would have the responsibility of winning masses of African doctors, nurses, engineers, farmers and other skilled Africans to use their expertise, resources and energy as part of the movement to liberate and unite Africa and African people everywhere.
Continue reading "Opportunist uses unity with Zimbabwe land struggle to hustle Africans" »
June 28, 2009
Enough! wants peace in Sudan
Enough! wants peace in Sudan but war in Congo
Go figure. Enough! wants Sudan’s Omar Hassan al-Bashir behind bars – but wants U.S. support for Uganda’s Museveni. The fragile peace that was gained for two years in the region as the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) and the Ugandan government negotiated peace was destroyed by President Yoweri Museveni’s decision to attack.
by Carolyn Edson
Villagers who have formed a local self defense force move during a training session in the village of Bangadi in northeastern Congo Feb. 18, 2009. In the face of attacks and massacres by the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), who had slaughtered some 900 Congolese civilians since December, the villagers, using locally made weapons, have twice repelled LRA attacks in recent months. – Photo: Finbarr O'Reilly, Reuters
On its website, Enough! (www.enoughproject.org) says it’s the project “to end genocide and crimes against humanity.” Yet it is spearheading a project that could do the exact opposite.
Enough! is advocating yet another invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo by Ugandan forces, supposedly to capture or kill Joseph Kony and his treacherous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) with additional reinforcement and assistance by the United States.
Enough! demands a U.S.-assisted “Operation Lightning Thunder II.” This follows the dismal failure of “Operation Lightning Thunder I,” an attack on LRA positions inside the Congo by Ugandan troops assisted by the U.S. in December 2008, the last month of the George W. Bush government.
For 23 years all military operations against this notorious LRA have failed. Failure means that thousands of innocent people have been killed by both sides. Over a million people have been displaced in Uganda into wretched camps from which more people died of preventable diseases than from the conflict itself, literally in the hundreds of thousands.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni
Thousands have been killed and displaced in DRC as a result of the Uganda operation aided by Bush. Human rights organizations have reported that women and children have been abducted and subjected to torture and rape if not used as porters and then killed.
The fragile peace that was gained for two years in the region as the LRA and the Ugandan government negotiated peace was destroyed by President Yoweri Museveni’s decision to attack. The talks were undermined, some say because of Museveni’s maneuverings behind the scenes and Kony’s refusal to sign the final peace accords.
Against this background of bloodshed and failed military operations Enough! is propagating yet another invasion of DRC by Uganda’s army, the Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF). This time, for it to succeed, the U.S. should take a more active role, Enough! claims.
The whole idea is ridiculous and has only tragic possible outcomes. Enough! would have us believe that this time would be different because civilians would be “protected” and there would be “humanitarian” and “developmental assistance.”
This is preposterous rhetoric for American home consumption. The U.S. has had a terrible record of “protecting civilians” in any of its own wars; how will it be able to ensure the protection of civilians in a Ugandan army spearheaded war?
The price of blood diamonds: “For every hand taken in marriage, another hand is taken away,” this flier reads, adding, “To secure that their enslaved workers wouldn’t steal them, conflict diamond Guerillas would often cut off one of their hands. Beauty isn’t worth death.”
President Museveni of Uganda is the author of the abysmal camps in the northern part of Uganda, where the World Health Organization in 2005 reported that up to 1,000 civilians died per week. Apparently they were left unprotected deliberately, and one could be forgiven for thinking that he intended for as many people to die in the camps as possible because until the very end he did nothing to improve the conditions in which people were forced to live. They were left to die “like grasshoppers trapped in a bottle.” This is a phrase which President Museveni will recognize.
Museveni regarded the administration of President Bush as his friend and ally. The Museveni government has earned notoriety as being one of the world’s most corrupt regimes. One would have hoped that the present government of the U.S. would distance itself from such regimes. Apparently President Museveni serves the interests of the U.S..
Now while all these militias, rebel groups and armies have been causing horrific wars at great cost to human lives in central Africa, so-called developed countries have been enjoying a lifestyle that is sustained in large part by the resources that come from Africa. The DRC supplies the world’s diamonds, coltan, tantalite, oil and so forth.
DRC diamonds find their way to Western nations through Uganda. Western multinational corporations have no trouble hiring militias or mercenaries who deal with the warlords and militias in order to illegally extract these resources.
The warlords and militias hold the civilian population in what can only be called modern day slavery, human life meaning nothing to those in power or to the corporations. Western governments know this but turn a blind eye. We rarely hear a peep from Enough! which supposedly opposes crimes against humanity and genocide.
In previous wars perpetrated by Uganda in DRC, 7 million people died and the UPDF plundered DRC as documented in numerous United Nations and Human Rights Watch reports. See “Ituri Covered In Blood.”
In 2005 also the International Court of Justice ruled against Uganda for the Congo crimes and awarded $10 billion to Congo. Is there a hidden agenda behind Enough’s! advocating for another U.S.-backed Uganda invasion of Congo? Whose tail is wagging which dog?
Source:
Madagascar: Troops defy orders to put down opposition protests
Madagascar: Troops defy orders to put down opposition protests
by Fred Weston
“We no longer take orders from our hierarchy; we are following our hearts. We were trained to protect property and citizens, not to fire at people. We are with the people,” one rebel soldier is reported as saying.
The depth of the crisis and the level of social discontent in Madagascar directly affected a group of soldiers of the Army Corps of Personnel and Administrative and Technical Services who had been ordered to move against protestors on the streets. The soldiers refused to obey orders to fire on the people and repress anti-government demonstrators. Following this, they then declared they would not obey government orders either.
The soldiers at the Camp Capsat military camp on the outskirts of the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo, prepared their lines of defense as they were expecting an attack on the part of the presidential guard. The 600-strong troops apparently control large stocks of arms and ammunition.
These dramatic events remind us of Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “General, Your Tank Is a Powerful Vehicle,” which goes like this:
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.
General, your bomber is powerful
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.
General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.
These soldiers in Madagascar are being forced to think. As they say, they were trained to defend the people, not to shoot on them. And now they face the wrath of the ruling class and its officer caste.
Talbot Antonin Alexis, director general of Madagascan national police, has called for unity between the police, the armed forces and the gendarmerie in a desperate attempt to re-establish some order. Madagascan national police initially said he would be taking “military measures within the army.” Since then, a section of the army took over his headquarters and forced him to resign.
The government has accused the rebel soldiers of organizing a mutiny, something the soldiers deny. They stated that they were simply refusing to be used against protesting civilians. Colonel Noel Rakotonandrasana, a spokesperson of the rebel soldiers, explained, “We cannot accept the repression of the civilian population.”
All this comes at a critical moment for Madagascar. These events have taken place in the context of a bitter power struggle between the oppositionist Rajoelina and the President Marc Ravalomanana. At the beginning of this year, Andry Rajoelina, the opposition leader, started calling protests against the president. The president ordered the security forces to find Rajoelina, who has gone into hiding.
What has provoked the recent soldier rebellion has been the increasing use of the army to clamp down on the rising tide of protest sweeping across the country. Since the beginning of this year, about 100 people have been killed on the streets by the army. In February a protest rally was marching on the presidential palace but it was met with brutal repression and 28 people were killed.
Madagascar has a population of 20 million people, most of whom live in abysmal poverty. More than half the population survives on less than $1 a day. Like most African countries, Madagascar has been forced by the World Bank and the IMF to apply so-called structural adjustment programs, involving opening up its markets to the more powerful industrialized countries and privatization. In the last recession in 2001-02 at the same time as a serious political crisis affected the country, GDP fell by 12 percent. Last year inflation stood at over 9 percent, seriously affecting the already impoverished masses.
The 2001 presidential elections were heavily disputed but in April 2002, the High Constitutional Court declared Ravalomanana the winner. He then went on to win a second presidential election in 2006. Since then, however, the world economic crisis has added to the already difficult living conditions of the masses. Ravalomanana’s so-called “free market reforms” are now being exposed for what they really are, an attack on ordinary working people on the island.
Rajoelina, “a charismatic young businessman,” as he is described in the media, and quite a wealthy man, also owns his own television and radio stations. He was the mayor of the capital until recently and used this position to attack the government. In doing this he has tapped into a mood of anger brewing among the poor masses. In this context the army ranks have also been affected. Apart from refusing to fire on the people, the soldiers have been complaining about pay and the fact that their superiors have been embezzling funds.
The unfortunate thing about all this is the lack of a genuine mass socialist alternative that could unite the workers, the poor and the rank and file soldiers against the ruling elite. In 1972 the Party for Proletarian Power (MFM) was set up as a left-wing opposition. Unfortunately, as has happened to many former “left” forces in the past, the party abandoned its left-wing credentials to espouse liberalism and changed its name to the liberalism, in the meantime losing all its parliamentary representatives.
In the political vacuum that exists in the country is a struggle between two businessmen. But the movement of the masses and the revolt within the ranks of the army shows the potential is there for something much bigger.
After the mutiny of the Border Guards in Bangladesh, this revolt of soldiers in Madagascar highlights the point that Marxists have always made: in acute social, economic and political crises, when the masses start to move, the soldiers, the “workers in uniform”, sons of workers and peasants, can turn against their officers, refuse to be used against the masses, and can therefore be won over to revolution.
The famous “armed bodies of men” cannot always be relied on by the ruling classes. What we have seen in Bangladesh and Madagascar are indications of how deep the crisis is becoming. It bodes well for the workers of the world, but it requires a conscious, revolutionary leadership for it to be transformed into a force for revolutionary change.
Source:
Niger Delta v. Shell Oil case postponed
June 02, 2009
Foreign fighters invade Somalia: president
Foreign fighters invade Somalia: president
AFP
Published: Monday May 25, 2009
Somalia's President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed condemned Monday what he termed as an invasion by foreign fighters as rebels battle to oust him in weeks of clashes that have killed more than 200 people.
The latest round of violence erupted on May 7 when hardline Islamist insurgents launched an offensive against government troops, wounding hundreds and forcing tens of thousands of others to flee.
"Somalia is being invaded by foreign fighters, whose main purpose is to turn the country into an Afghanistan or an Iraq," Sharif said at a news conference in his office.
"We call on the international community and the Somali people to help us in fighting against them," he added.
According to Somali security officials and foreign intelligence sources in the region, there are up to 500 foreign jihadist fighters in the troubled country, most of whom arrived over the past few months.
The rebels themselves have admitted to receiving the support of foreign fighters believed to be from Arab, Asian as well as European countries in their latest offensive against Sharif's fledgling administration.
At least 208 people have been killed and 700 wounded by the fighting, Humanitarian Affairs Minister Mohamoud Ibrahim Garweyne said Sunday.
"I can tell you that 80 percent of the people killed and injured are civilians who were caught in the crossfire," Garweyne said.
"The clashes have also displaced 8,367 families, who have reached temporary camps outside the capital where their livelihoods are very precarious," the minister said.
Over the weekend, the United Nations
put the number of people displaced by the latest fighting at 57,000.
The rebel push is spearheaded by two armed groups: the Shebab, a hardline military movement with suspected links to Al Qaeda, and Hezb al-Islamiya, a more political group loyal to influential cleric Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys.
The Shebab, the former youth wing of an Islamist movement ousted by Ethiopia-backed Somali government forces in 2007, also claimed Sunday's car bomb at a military camp in the violence-wracked city.
"The attack was carried out by one of our young fighters who detonated his car inside the camp where the enemies of Allah are stationed," Sheikh Hussein Fidow, one of the group's officials, told reporters.
In February, they also claimed the single deadliest suicide attack on a base hosting the Burundi contingent of the AU forces.
The hardliners have rejected peace overtures by the government and even spurned the introduction of sharia (Islamic law) which has been one of their key demands.
Ethiopian forces withdrew from Somalia in January, but their pullout caused concerns of a security vacuum and fears that Somalia risked becoming a haven for jihadists affiliated to Al-Qaeda.
Eritrea has been singled out as one African country backing the Somali radicals.
The AU wants UN sanctions on Eritrea, as well as an aerial exclusion zone in Somalia and the blockade of ports and airports to prevent the entry of foreign fighters and weapons shipments.
But Asmara rejected the call, blaming an east African regional grouping, whose sanction call last week was endorsed by the AU, for the chaos in Somalia.
The seaside capital has been ravaged by 18 years of almost uninterrupted civil conflict and hundreds of thousands of people had already fled following Ethiopia's invasion in late 2006.
Source:http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Foreign_fighters_invade_Somalia_pre_05252009.html
May 01, 2009
Somalis speak out: Why we don’t condemn our pirates
Somalis speak out: Why we don’t condemn our pirates
Several Somali perspectives on Somali pirates
A blogger at Multitunes calls K’naan “the hope of politically conscious rap” and quotes one of his favorite K’naan lines: “Until the lion learns to speak, the tales of the hunt will always favor the hunter.”
A blogger at Multitunes calls K’naan “the hope of politically conscious rap” and quotes one of his favorite K’naan lines: “Until the lion learns to speak, the tales of the hunt will always favor the hunter.”
“As the first pirate attack on a U.S. ship in 200 years comes to a climax, I’m re-posting an essay I solicited and received several weeks ago from K’naan, a Somali-Canadian singer and activist. A video of a performance by K’naan that I filmed at the All Points West music festival last summer (can be seen here).” - Michael Vazquez, editor at URB. Don’t miss Davey D’s unforgettable interview with K’naan, parts 1 and 2, recorded April 12 and posted in the Bay View video section.
by K’naan
Can anyone ever really be for piracy? Outside of sea bandits, and young girls fantasizing about Johnny Depp, would anyone with an honest regard for good human conduct really say that they are in support of sea robbery?
Well, in Somalia, the answer is: It’s complicated.
The news media these days have been covering piracy on the Somali coast with such lopsided journalism that it’s lucky they’re not on a ship themselves. It’s true that the constant hijacking of vessels in the Gulf of Aden is a major threat to the vibrant trade route between Asia and Europe. It is also true that for most of the pirates operating in this vast shoreline, money is the primary objective.
But according to so many Somalis, the disruption of Europe’s darling of a trade route is just Karma biting a perpetrator in the butt. And if you don’t believe in Karma, maybe you believe in recent history. Here is why we Somalis find ourselves slightly shy of condemning our pirates.
Somalia has been without any form of a functioning government since 1991. And although its failures, like many other toddler governments in Africa, spring from the wells of post-colonial independence, bad governance and development loan sharks, the specific problem of piracy was put in motion in 1992.
After the overthrow of Siyad Barre, our charmless dictator of 20-some-odd years, two major forces of the Hawiye Clan came to power. At the time, Ali Mahdi and Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid, the two leaders of the Hawiye rebels, were largely considered liberators. But the unity of the two men and their respective sub-clans was very short-lived. It’s as if they were dumbstruck at the advent of ousting the dictator, or that they just forgot to discuss who will be the leader of the country once they defeated their common foe.
A disagreement of who will upgrade from militia leader to Mr. President broke up their honeymoon. It’s because of this disagreement that we’ve seen one of the most decomposing wars in Somalia’s history, leading to millions displaced and hundreds of thousands dead.
But war is expensive and militias need food for their families and Jaad (an amphetamine-based stimulant) to stay awake for the fighting.
Therefore, a good clan-based warlord must look out for his own fighters. Aidid’s men turned to robbing aid trucks carrying food to the starving masses and re-selling it to continue their war. But Ali Mahdi had his sights set on a larger and more unexploited resource, namely the Indian Ocean.
Already by this time, local fishermen in the coastline of Somalia had been complaining of illegal vessels coming to Somali waters and stealing all the fish. And since there was no government to report it to, and since the severity of the violence clumsily overshadowed every other problem, the fishermen went completely unheard.
This barrel, once filled with toxic – possibly radioactive – waste, washed ashore in Somalia after the 2005 tsunami. The Times of London reported online in March 2005 that the tsunami “stirred up tonnes of nuclear and toxic waste illegally dumped” off the coast of Somalia. – Photo: Somalinet
This barrel, once filled with toxic – possibly radioactive – waste, washed ashore in Somalia after the 2005 tsunami. The Times of London reported online in March 2005 that the tsunami “stirred up tonnes of nuclear and toxic waste illegally dumped” off the coast of Somalia. – Photo: Somalinet
But it was around this same time that a more sinister, a more patronizing practice was being put in motion. A Swiss firm called Achair Partners and an Italian waste company called Progresso made a deal with Ali Mahdi that they were to dump containers of waste material in Somali waters. These European companies were said to be paying warlords about $3 a ton, whereas to properly dispose of waste in Europe costs about $1,000 a ton.
In 2004, after a tsunami washed ashore several leaking containers, thousand of locals in the Puntland region of Somalia started to complain of severe and previously unreported ailments, such as abdominal bleeding, skin melting off and a lot of immediate cancer-like symptoms. Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environmental Program, says that the containers had many different kinds of waste, including “uranium, radioactive waste, lead, cadmium, mercury and chemical waste.”
But this wasn’t just a passing evil from one or two groups taking advantage of our unprotected waters. The U.N. envoy for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, says that the practice still continues to this day. It was months after those initial reports that local fishermen mobilized themselves, along with street militias, to go into the waters and deter the Westerners from having a free pass at completely destroying Somalia’s aquatic life.
Now, years later, the deterring has become less noble, and the ex-fishermen with their militias have begun to develop a taste for ransom at sea. This form of piracy is now a major contributor to the Somali economy, especially in the very region that private toxic waste companies first began to bury our nation’s death trap.
Now Somalia has upped the world’s pirate attacks by over 21 percent in one year, and while NATO and the EU are both sending forces to the Somali coast to try and slow down the attacks, Blackwater and all kinds of private security firms are intent on cashing in.
But while Europeans are well within their rights to protect their trade interest in the region, our pirates were the only deterrent we had from an externally imposed environmental disaster. No one can say for sure that some of the ships they are now holding for ransom were not involved in illegal activity in our waters.
The truth is, if you ask any Somali, if getting rid of the pirates only means the continuous rape of our coast by unmonitored Western vessels and the producing of a new cancerous generation, we would all fly our pirate flags high.
It is time that the world gave the Somali people some assurance that these Western illegal activities will end if our pirates are to cease their operations. We do not want the EU and NATO serving as a shield for these nuclear waste-dumping hoodlums.
“The truth is, if you ask any Somali, if getting rid of the pirates only means the continuous rape of our coast by unmonitored Western vessels and the producing of a new cancerous generation, we would all fly our pirate flags high. … [O]ne man’s pirate is another man’s coast guard.” - K’naan
“The truth is, if you ask any Somali, if getting rid of the pirates only means the continuous rape of our coast by unmonitored Western vessels and the producing of a new cancerous generation, we would all fly our pirate flags high. … [O]ne man’s pirate is another man’s coast guard.” - K’naan
It seems to me that this new modern crisis is truly a question of justice, but also a question of whose justice. As is apparent these days, one man’s pirate is another man’s coast guard.
This story first appeared April 13, 2009, in the Huffington Post.
Somalis are defending their land and shores As for the “pirates” of Somalia, it is an encouraging case but also a very sad one. According to some, these so called “pirates” are professional Somalis with different careers behind them; that is, most of them were doctors, engineers, pilots, computer scientists, professors and so on.
I was told by a friend of mine that these ex-professional Somalis were converted to their new job when foreign big boats started clearing their shores, that is, their sea products, different types of fish and sea food. Some of the big international ships come to the Somali seashores in order to dump their toxic waste.
The Somalis are defending their land and their shores, I think very bravely. But it worries me to see that the U.S. and Europeans - the French in particular - are working actively to occupy Somalia.
The world is tired about their terrorist lies, so they are coming to occupy Somalia in the name of “pirates.” Believe me, the Somalis will fight until one person is left in their land.
This is a simple African woman’s opinion.
Renowned historian Runoko Rashidi shared this email message he received April 11, 2009. It is signed, “Your Sister in the Horn of Africa.”
Continue reading "Somalis speak out: Why we don’t condemn our pirates" »
Why Somalis seize ships
Why Somalis seize ships
by Abayomi Azikiwe
After the execution of three Somalis and the wounding and capturing of another in the Indian Ocean on April 12, a leader of the so-called pirates vowed to avenge the deaths of these youth who held the U.S. captain of a cargo vessel known as the Maersk Alabama for five days. Capt. Richard Phillips was released while the U.S. military and the corporate media hailed the killings of the Somalis, saying the actions were justified.
[The mother of the 16-year-old youth who was captured is appealing to President Obama for the release of her son. See the sidebar below, followed by a video of her appeal. - ed.]
The Maersk Alabama was never taken over by the Somalis, even though the captain remained in the custody of the pirates for five days. The captain was not harmed during the five-day standoff, and the ship was later docked at the port of Mombasa in the East African nation of Kenya.
Abdi Garad, a spokesperson for the group of Somalis that attempted to seize the Danish-owned 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama about 450 kilometers off the coast, told the French Press Agency (AFP) on April 13 from the eastern coastal town of Eyl, “The American liars have killed our friends after they agreed to free the hostage without ransom. But I tell you that this matter will lead to retaliation, and we will hunt down particularly American citizens travelling our waters.”
Garad went on to say, “We will intensify our attacks even reaching very far away from Somalia waters and next time we get American citizens … they [should] expect no mercy from us.” Garad claimed that after dropping the ransom demand, the Somalis had asked that Capt. Phillips be moved to a Greek ship held by the group.
‘The American liars have killed our friends after they agreed to free the hostage without ransom. But I tell you that this matter will lead to retaliation, and we will hunt down particularly American citizens travelling our waters. - Abdi Garad
Jamac Habeb, a 30-year-old Somali from the town of Eyl, stated in Inside Somalia on April 13, “From now on, if we capture foreign ships and their respective countries try to attack us, we will kill them. U.S. forces have become our number one enemy.”
Another Somali, Abdulahi Lami, said in the same article that the pirates would not be intimidated by U.S. military actions in the Indian Ocean. “Every country will be treated the way it treats us. In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying. We will retaliate for the killings of our men.”
According to the official reports issued by the U.S. military, snipers positioned on the Naval warship the USS Bainbridge shot and killed three Somalis after monitoring their movements for several days. The plan to kill the Somalis was reportedly approved by President Barack Obama.
U.S. Navy spokespeople claimed that the snipers fired on the Somalis when Phillips’ life was endangered. “They were pointing AK-47s at the captain,” said Vice Admiral William Gortney, who heads the U.S. Naval Central Command. His statement was made in a Pentagon briefing from Bahrain and reported by Al Jazeera on April 13.
However, this version of events has been disputed by Somalis who support the vessel seizures. They contend that the three young men were killed after they agreed to end the standoff and release Phillips. This operation took place only two days after similar actions were carried out by French military commandos who stormed a yacht held by Somalis, which resulted in the death of one of the French nationals being held.
Mohammed Adow, a correspondent for Al Jazeera, said in the same report, “U.S. forces are reported to have attacked the lifeboat when the pirates were expecting a diplomatic exchange … [and] have taken the remaining pirate to one of their ships in these waters.”
In another development that further escalated tensions in the region, two low-flying U.S. military helicopters flew over areas at the port city of Harardhere in the northeast of Somalia on April 12. The U.S. military claims that this area is a base for pirate operations against vessels traveling in the Gulf of Aden.
Local residents of the area believed that the U.S. helicopters were planning an air raid on the port. According to a Somali journalist, “The fishermen decided not to fish in the morning because of the helicopters; they are scared.” (Inside Somalia, April 13)
Behind the escalation in ‘piracy’
Over the last several months, Somali pirates have alleged that European corporations are unloading toxic waste off the coast of this Horn of Africa nation. A Ukrainian ship which was held and released by the Somalis garnered a multimillion-dollar payment by the owners, which is reportedly being utilized to clean up the waste being dumped in the area.
In a statement reported by Al Jazeera on Oct. 11, Januna Ali Jama, a spokesperson for the Somali pirates, said that the ransom acquired serves as a means of “reacting to the toxic waste that has been continually dumped on the shores of our country for nearly 20 years.”
A Ukrainian ship which was held and released by the Somalis garnered a multimillion-dollar payment by the owners, which is reportedly being utilized to clean up the toxic waste being dumped in the area.
Jama, who is based in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, continued, “The Somali coastline has been destroyed, and we believe this money is nothing compared to the devastation that we have seen on the seas.”
Further evidence of toxic waste dumping came from the United Nations envoy to Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, who told Al Jazeera in the same article that the international body has “reliable information” that both European and Asian corporations are unloading toxic chemicals, including nuclear waste, off the Somali coastline. “I must stress, however, that no government has endorsed this act and that private companies and individuals acting alone are responsible.”
In the aftermath of the tsunami in late 2004, evidence began to appear confirming such illegal dumping activity in the region. The United Nations Environment Program reported that the tsunmai washed up old, rusting containers of waste on the shores of Puntland, which was formerly part of Somalia prior to the collapse of the Western-backed government of Mohammad Siad Barre in 1991.
A UNEP spokesman, Nick Nuttall, told Al Jazeera in the same article that when the rusting barrels were opened by the force of the waves, dumping that had been occurring for many years was revealed. “Somalia has been used as a dumping ground for hazardous waste starting in the early 1990s, and continuing through the civil war there. European companies found it to be very cheap to get rid of the waste, costing as little as $2.50 a ton, where waste disposal costs in Europe are something like $1,000 a ton,” said Nuttall.
Nuttall went on to say that there are “many different kinds” of waste. “There is a uranium radioactive waste. There is lead, and heavy metals like cadmium and mercury. There is also industrial waste, and there are hospital wastes, chemical wastes - you name it.”
Since the containers have come to shore, there has been a sharp increase in various illnesses among the population, including such symptoms as oral and abdominal bleeding, skin infections and other ailments.
“We [the UNEP] had planned to do a proper, in-depth scientific assessment on the magnitude of the problem. But because of the high levels of insecurity onshore and off the Somali coast, we are unable to carry out an accurate assessment of the extent of the problem,” Nuttall continued.
Nonetheless, Ould-Abdallah said that the practice of illegal dumping of toxic waste continues in the region. “What is most alarming here is that nuclear waste is being dumped. Radioactive uranium waste is potentially killing Somalis and completely destroying the ocean.”
Mohammed Gure, chair of the Somalia Concerned Group, said in the same Al Jazeera article that the social and environmental impact of this toxic waste dumping will be felt for decades. “The Somali coastline used to sustain hundreds of thousands of people, as a source of food and livelihoods. Now much of it is almost destroyed, primarily at the hands of these so-called ministers that have sold their nation to fill their own pockets.”
‘What is most alarming here is that nuclear waste is being dumped. Radioactive uranium waste is potentially killing Somalis and completely destroying the ocean.’ - U.N. envoy Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah
Other factors involved in the exploitation of Somalia are that the Gulf of Aden shipping lane transports billions of dollars of goods through the region every week. Almost none of these funds are utilized for the benefit of the Somali people, who are still suffering from underdevelopment resulting from U.S. interference in their internal affairs.
The U.S. administration under George W. Bush financed and engineered an invasion and occupation of the country by the Western-allied state of Ethiopia in December 2006. As a result of fierce resistance, the Ethiopian military withdrew from the country in January 2009. The formation of a new coalition government has failed to bring all the various political groupings into the regime.
Consequently, Ugandan and Burundian troops remain in the capital of Mogadishu under the auspices of the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM). The leading resistance group, Al-Shabab, is continuing to demand the withdrawal of the AU forces before it agrees to enter the coalition government headed by President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed.
The fledging government in Mogadishu, which has been endorsed by the U.S., applauded the attack on the Somali pirates on April 12. “We are very happy at this action and the outcome,” said Foreign Minister Mohamad Abdullahi Omaar. “I am not surprised, nor will anyone by surprised, at the actions of the American government to save its citizens and ensure the security of its people,” Omaar told Reuters. (April 13)
Increased U.S. military presence must be opposed
Recent reports coming out of the White House indicate that the Obama administration is divided over how to carry out its foreign policy in the Horn of Africa. Some elements want a more diplomatic approach to the problem of piracy as well as a concerted effort to bring more European and Asian nations into patrolling the waters in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
However, other advisers within the White House want to see a more direct U.S. military involvement on land and off the coast of Somalia. The recent incident involving the Maersk Alabama prompted the dispatching of additional warships to the Indian Ocean region. (Washington Post, April 12)
According to the figures issued by the International Maritime Bureau, at least a dozen cargo ships and more than 200 crew members are being held by Somali pirates in the region. At the same time, fighting inside of Somalia is continuing between the Al-Shabab resistance fighters and the AMISOM forces, which are working in conjunction with the troops loyal to the new coalition government in Mogadishu.
On April 13, Garowe Radio reported that three people had been killed over a two-day period resulting from mortar fire in the capital of Mogadishu. “Suspected insurgents launched at least 10 mortars at the main port in the Somali capital Mogadishu on April 11.”
The report noted: “Islamist rebels vowed war against the Horn of Africa country’s interim government. Witnesses and workers at Mogadishu’s main seaport said AMISOM peacekeepers closed off roads near the port and entered nearby neighborhoods as a ship docked.”
The report continued: “There were many AMISOM soldiers in our area … on top of buildings and they refused to allow us to leave our homes, a witness said. Port workers said the ship unloaded military hardware, including vehicles, which were transported to AMISOM bases in Mogadishu.”
Based on these reports and the U.S. administration’s framing of the killing of the three Somalis, it is vital that anti-war and anti-imperialist forces in the United States emphasize that greater U.S. military involvement in the region will not create a more stable political situation in Somalia and throughout the Horn of Africa.
In fact, as history has proven, the role of U.S. imperialism in the Horn of Africa has created greater instability and underdevelopment in the region. As a result of the Bush administration policy toward Somalia, the worst humanitarian crisis on the continent of Africa came into existence.
During the present period, progressive forces must demand a shift away from militarism in the Horn of Africa and insist on the right of self-determination including reparations for the people of Somalia and the Horn of Africa as a whole.
© 2009 Workers World. This story was originally published April 13, 2009, by Workers World, 55 W. 17th St., New York NY 10011, ww@workers.org, www.workers.org, at http://www.workers.org/2009/world/horn_of_africa_0423/. Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire, an extraordinarily valuable news source designed “to foster intelligent discussion on the affairs of African people throughout the continent and the world.”
Mother of young ‘pirate’ appeals for his release
by Mary Ratcliff
A very thin but broadly smiling Somali teenager, the sole survivor of the four Somali teenagers who seized the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama on April 8, arrived Tuesday in the U.S. - the place he had told a crew member he dreamed of visiting to attend school.
He will be the first alleged pirate to stand trial in this country in more than a century. The last pirates to stand trial in the U.S. were the captain and 11 crew members of the Confederate vessel Savannah.
“I cried when I saw the picture of him,” said his mother, Adar Abdirahman Hassan, who sells milk at a small market in Galkayo, central Somalia, when relatives showed her the photo.
“The last time I saw him he was in his school uniform,” she said. The photo shows a chain wrapped around his waist and his left hand heavily bandaged. A Maersk crew member tells of stabbing him with an ice pick and capturing him after Capt. Richard Phillips had left with the other three Somali teenagers who were later killed by Navy Seal snipers.
“He was brainwashed,” she said of her oldest son, Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse. She insists he is only 16, though a law enforcement official says he is at least 18 and can be tried as an adult in a U.S. court.
“I appeal to President Obama to pardon my teenager; I request him to release my son or at least allow me to see him and be with him during the trial,” said his mother, who described young Muse as a “talented boy” and “a good student.”
She said her son had been doing well in school but late last month had failed to come home. Fifteen days later she heard on the radio that he had been captured.
“Hassan says it breaks her heart to think that he will be tried as an adult criminal in the United States,” writes Alisha Ryu from Nairobi for the Voice of America. He was charged Tuesday with five counts, including piracy. “[H]is mother’s claim that he is a 16-year-old juvenile could pose a problem for prosecutors seeking the maximum sentence of life imprisonment,” Ryu reports. “International law is more lenient toward juveniles.
“Determining Muse’s true age is difficult because birth certificates are rare in Somalia, a country which has not had a functioning government for nearly two decades.”
According to the Guardian of London, Ron Kuby, a New York-based civil rights lawyer, said a legal team to represent Muse is being formed. “I think there’s a grave question as to whether America was in violation of principles of truce in warfare on the high seas,” said Kuby. “This man seemed to come on to the Bainbridge under a flag of truce to negotiate. He was then captured. There is a question whether he is lawfully in American custody and serious questions as to whether he can be prosecuted because of his age.”
Alleged by Capt. Phillips to be the leader of the four youths, Muse appeared in court Tuesday night. “The court proceedings were quickly thrown into turmoil when his lawyer claimed that he was 15 - too young to stand trial as an adult,” the New York Times reported. “The judge dismissed the claim after speaking with Mr Muse’s father in Somalia, who said that the accused was the first of his 12 children and the fourth was born in 1990. Prosecutors said that Mr Muse had admitted he was 18.”
The lawyers representing him Tuesday night asked that Muse be given painkillers for his hand wound and Muslim meals in jail.
Miguel Ruiz, a member of the Maersk Alabama crew, said he asked one of the pirates, “Why do you do that?” The response: “We’ve got 20 million people in Somalia who are poor, that don’t have education. We don’t have no food.”
‘The most powerful navy in the world against barefoot Somali brigands’
An April 18 New York Times story provides this description of the “battle” between the Navy destroyer and the “pirates”:
“Under cover of darkness dozens of U.S. Navy Seals parachuted into the Indian Ocean and made their way in inflatable boats to the USS Bainbridge.
“The $800-million U.S. Navy destroyer, armed with guided missiles, was shadowing a ragtag band of teenage pirates with AK47s holding an American hostage in a drifting 18-foot lifeboat.
“It was the ultimate assymetric stand-off, pitting the most powerful navy in the world against a skiff-load of barefoot Somali brigands.
“‘It’s almost reminiscent of “Black Hawk Down,” where you have high-tech, highly trained units which get into a situation where there is a low-tech environment but some pretty creative people with a lot of experience in a war zone,’ Jamey Cummings, a former U.S. Navy Seal, said. ‘These highly trained Seals are coming in to take out 17-year-old pirates.’”
__________________
Source: Bay View editor Mary Ratcliff compiled this sidebar from several major media sources. She can be reached at editor@sfbayview.com.
Reverse piracy: Toxic Euro and American electronic waste dumping in Africa
Reverse piracy: Toxic Euro and American electronic waste dumping in Africa
by Greenpeace and Ann Garrison
Now we finally know where “conflict minerals” coltan and cassiterite, essential to the electronics industries, go after being smuggled out of the Democratic Republic of Congo to Rwanda - and from there to who knows where. No one really knows because coltan and cassiterite refiners and electronics manufacturers all assure us that they never buy conflict minerals, even though most of the world’s coltan reserves and much of its cassiterite reserves lie in conflict torn D.R. Congo’s North Kivu Province.
But at least we know where a lot of coltan and cassiterite go, in the end. They go to Ghana and other parts of Africa as toxic electronic waste, often disguised as charity: European and North American “contributions” of worn-out, broken, no longer fashionable tech garbage.
This demonstrates how homicidally Europeans still behave in Africa, including even many from nations like the Netherlands, which seems relatively benign, when compared to the U.S., which continues to expand Africom, the U.S. Africa Command, a chain of U.S. military bases commanded by U.S. Army Gen. William “Kip” Ward, in Africa.
The Netherlands joined Sweden in ending foreign aid to Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s regime, because of human rights violations and war crimes in both Rwanda and neighboring D.R. Congo. The Netherlands is, nevertheless, on Greenpeace’s list of European nations shipping and dumping toxic e-waste “charity” in Ghana.
Isn’t this an international crime more serious than Somali “piracy,” a response to nuclear waste dumping on one end of the Somali coast and to European trawlers fishing out Somali waters, which Somali fishing communities depended on, on Somali’s other coast?
Shouldn’t the same Netherlands politicians who canceled aid to Rwandan President Paul Kagame take the lead in stopping the shipment of toxic Euro e-waste to Ghana and elsewhere in Africa or any other African nation? And shouldn’t President Barack Obama either follow that lead or take it himself?
Ann Garrison is a Bay Area journalist and activist and the website writer-editor of thepriceofuranium.com. She can be reached at anniegarrison@thepriceofuranium.com. This story was first published by Colored Opinions.
Bioengineering and the Fate of Africa
Bioengineering and the Fate of Africa
What Is Biodiversity? Biodiversity is defined as “the variety of all forms of life, from genes to species, through to the broad scale of ecosystems” ("Biodiversity," 2003). From this definition we include all of Africa’s agriculture and native species of plants, which means that any change in the African environment results in a change in biodiversity. But how exactly do GMO crops change or have the potential to change African biodiversity? There are few possibilities: the development of a super weed, extinction of native crops, and the adaptability of pests.
One of the most prominent concerns is that the growth of GMO crops will produce a “super weed." The opponent of GMO crops concerns stem from the claims that have been made of GMO crops. These crops have been advertised as “improving crop yields and reducing crop lost” (McDonald, 2004). This enhancement was brought about through the altering of the plants' DNA to increase their resilience and make them immune to drought and disease.
The concern is that this modification can be passed to other non target crops which could mutate them into super weeds. By possessing this gene the weed would be more resilient and harder to clear out of fields. The development of these "Super Weeds" would make farming more difficult, and also threaten delicate plants in other parts of Africa. The threat is becoming worse; some of GMO crops that are coming onto the market are now being enhanced with Roundup pesticide resistance. If these crops passed the resistance gene to weeds, then they would be almost unstoppable.
Another problem of the growth of GMO crops is the possibility that they could wipe out the native crops of Africa. This problem stems from the common practice of artificial selection. The artificial selection happens at harvest time when a farmer goes through his crop selecting the biggest and best of his crop to be used as seeds for the next planting. When this practice is continued for a few seasons the seeds that are inferior are eliminated and the farmer gets a bigger yield.
The method only becomes a problem when GMO and non GMO seeds are mixed. The modified seeds will grow the biggest and yield the most produce and will be selected for planting the next crop--but they are engineered to be sterile and can't germinate. Logic holds that by mixing the GMO seeds and the selection method could “lead to the extinction of native stocks” (Marsh, 2002). Unfortunately for scientists, the loss of native genetic material could even lead to the extinction of bioengineering, as they return to endemic species in order to create more GMOs (Marsh, 2002).
From Fig. 1, it is easy to see that Africa is a biodiverse nation with many threatened plants. Native plant stocks, which are already troubled by rapid deforestation and population growth, could be devastated by GMOs. This could lead to more starvation in Africa and other economic and social issues, which will be discussed later. The scariest part of this diagram is the fact that the country in blue (the most biodiverse) is South Africa, the only place where GM crops are grown commercially.
The mixing of seeds may have already begun. A study done in South Africa found that “Of the 58 products selected and sampled randomly, 44 tested positive for the presence of GM” (Viljoen, 2006 ). GMO fields must be completely isolated in order to prevent gene transfer, which is impossible. To test the transfer of genes over distances, two studies were conducted with alfalfa crops.“Both studies indicated that although gene flow can be detected over 1500 feet from the pollen source, and is reduced to less than 0.5% at 900 feet and less than 0.2% at distances greater than 1500 feet.” (Deynze, 2004) While this might not sound like a far distance, it takes up a circumference of 9420 ft. This is unfeasible situation for Africa, where crop land is at a premium.
Critics of GMO crops have also questioned the wisdom of switching from dusting their crops with pesticide to growing crops with pesticide in its genes. Scientists believe that by incorporating Bacillus thuringiensis into the crop insects will better adapt to the bacteria. This is not an unlikely concept since insects that survive pesticide applications will often have offspring that are resistant to those pesticides (Ando, 2000). This would eliminate a useful pesticide for farmers, especially useful for organic farmers who are limited in pesticide choices na doften use Bt. If insects did adapt to Bt then farmers would have to switch harsher pesticides that would kill non targeted species, harming Africa’s biodiversity In contrast, the relatively safe Bt is "harmful only to members of a single family of insects: Lepidoptera” (Ando, 2000).
It seems that GMOs are only solutions to the problems that modern agriculture has presented. Where monocropping is present, farmers often have more difficulties with pests and disease. The circle of destruction continues as farmers use GMOs and the accompanying pesticides to temporarily relieve the stress of monocroppping on the environment. It is unwise to utilize technology that is only a quick fix for problems that should be addressed by teaching Africans more stable methods of farming. Sustainable farms include many varities of plants, and could help with the Africa's biodiversity issues.
March 30, 2009
Sudan's Beshir arrives in Libya
APF
Published: Thursday March 26, 2009
Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir -- who faces an arrest warrant for alleged war crimes in Darfur -- arrived in Libya on Thursday for talks with leader Moamer Kadhafi on his third trip abroad this week.
Beshir landed in Sirte, Kadhafi's Mediterranean hometown 600 kilometres (360 miles) east of the capital and would meet with the leader, Libyan state news agency Jana reported.
Accompanied by his foreign and industry ministers, Beshir was met by Libyan Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmoudi, Jana said.
Earlier, Beshir's office had said the president would be travelling to Ethiopia.
Kadhafi has criticised the warrant, issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on March 4. He told UN chief Ban Ki-moon it constituted a "grave precedent against the independence of less powerful states, their sovereignty and their political choices."
Kadhafi, the current African Union chief, said the ICC was "selective" and that the court, based in The Hague, was "employing a policy of double standards in targeting African and third-world states."
On Monday, defying the warrant, Beshir paid a visit to Eritrea and talks with Issaias Afeworki.
That was followed on Wednesday by a trip to Egypt and a meeting with President Hosni Mubarak. Afterwards, Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit said that, in common with other Arab and African states, Egypt "does not accept the court's manner in dealing with the Sudanese president."
But the office of ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo warned Beshir on Wednesday that there is no way for him continue business as usual and avoid being held to account.
Libya, Eritrea and Egypt are not parties to the Rome treaty that created the ICC, the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal.
The ICC does not have a police force and calls on signatory states to implement warrants. However, all United Nations member states are urged to cooperate with The Hague-based court.
Even the United States, where the administration of former president George W. Bush described the Darfur conflict as genocidal, said on Tuesday it was under "no legal obligation" to arrest Beshir as it was not a signatory to the Rome statute.
On Wednesday, an Ocampo spokesman renewed the ICC prosecutor's call for "all political leaders who might meet Omar el-Beshir to explain to him there is no possible way out."
"There can be no question of 'business as usual' with someone who is the subject of an arrest warrant on charges of such crimes," the spokesman said.
Doubts have been raised over whether Beshir will attend an Arab summit in Doha at the end of the month, with Sudan's highest religious authority, the Committee of Muslim Scholars, issuing a fatwa, or edict, urging him not to go.
The United Nations says 300,000 people have died -- many from disease and hunger -- and 2.7 million been made homeless by the Darfur conflict, which erupted in 2003.
Khartoum puts the death toll at 10,000.
Many African and Arab states, along with key Khartoum ally China, have condemned the ICC move and called for the warrant to be suspended.
March 29, 2009
The holocaust in DR Congo: War for the sake of war itself
by Ann Garrison
Imagine being a little child torn from your home, your roots by a war for the wealth that is your birthright. “The Congo’s so poor because it’s so rich,” raps Congolese-American Omekongo in his song, “Welcome to the Congo,” at http://www.sfbayview.com/2008/welcome-to-the-congo/. – Photo: AFP/Getty Images
The deadliest war in the world today is the Congo War, a.k.a., the African holocaust or the African World War, a covert U.S. war waged by African proxy armies to secure Congo’s unparalleled natural resources. To secure, above all, the “geostrategic” cobalt reserves in the Katanga Copper Belt, which runs through DR Congo’s southeastern Katanga Province and into its southeastern neighbor, Zambia.
Cobalt is essential to our military industries’ ability to manufacture the modern weapons of war. So, the Congo War, a.k.a. the African holocaust, is a war for the sake of war itself.
Even the complicit United Nations reports that the Congo War is the most lethal war in the world today, with the highest death toll since World War II, though the U.N. does so primarily to fundraise for ineffective mega-U.N. charities like UNESCO, UNICEF and the UNHCR. It has never censured the United States or any other imperial power for arming, advising and ultimately controlling myriad armies and militias in DR Congo.
Many Americans who supported Barack Obama had hoped for a de-escalation of the war, the perpetual, post-09/11 War on Terror, in Iraq, Gaza, Afghanistan and Pakistan and even the covert U.S. war in DR Congo, the war for the sake of war itself.
And many are now shocked by Obama’s decision to leave 50,000 troops in Iraq, to send 17,000 more to Afghanistan, to bomb Pakistani insurgents and to stand behind Israel, no matter how mercilessly it bombs Gaza. And, to hike the U.S. military budget by 4 percent in 2010, startling even Robert Gates, Bush’s former defense secretary, who is now Barack Obama’s.
Congolese refugees displaced within their own homeland by militias and armies, fighting with foreign weapons for foreign purposes, face extremely rough conditions in makeshift Camp de Kahe in Kitchanga in the Masisi district of Congo’s North Kivu Province, near the Rwandan border. – Photo: S. Schulman, UNHCR
The Congo War continues, with little protest visible beyond the Internet. It moved into a new phase on Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009, when new, wholly illogical military alliances emerged. The official story advanced then and since by the U.S. State Department, the Rwandan, Ugandan and Congolese governments, and the U.N., then regurgitated by obedient corporate news outlets, is that the Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF), instructed by U.S. military advisers, crossed into southeastern DR Congo to join the Congolese Army (FARDC), the U.N. peacekeepers (MONUC) and the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) in hunting down rebel Gen. Laurent Nkunda, the former commander of the CNDP, one of the groups now allied to hunt down both him and his career enemies, the Forces Democratique de Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR).
In December 2008, reports were that on the Ugandan border of Eastern Congo, U.S. military advisers had helped organize the Ugandan army (UPDF) to cross into northeastern DR Congo to join the Congolese army and the U.N. peacekeepers (MONUC) in hunting down the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). In March, the Congolese government agreed to let them stay, indefinitely.
In Kigali, Rwanda, on Jan. 7, 2009, soldiers with the Rwanda Defense Forces are trained by U.S. soldiers as part of U.S. Africa Command’s (Africom’s) African Deployment Assistance Phase Training (ADAPT) program. – Photo: www.Army.mil
These alliances and these accounts of them are so riddled with contradiction that deconstructing them would only play into the hands of those so carefully obscuring the fundamental reality of the Congo War. How many Americans would be anything but dizzy and confused by this list of acronyms for just the best known militias and armies fighting in DR Congo: CNDP, FDLR, UPDF, RDF, FARDC, MONUC?
So, let’s forget the acronyms; forget all the African militias and armies fighting proxy wars for the imperial interests of the U.S. and other imperial powers. Americans should understand instead why the U.S. is fighting a covert war in DR Congo.
High stakes
The stakes in the Congo War are enormously high. They include:
1) War itself, because, again, the Congo war is, above all, a war for cobalt, the mineral most essential to the manufacture of modern weapons of war. Cobalt is required to build jet fighter bomber engines, missiles, including nuclear missiles, battleships, including our nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, and virtually all modern industrially manufactured weapons of war, except perhaps biological and chemical weapons.
Cobalt is essential to the manufacture of anything requiring high grade steel.
Shocks in cobalt’s supply and price during the 1970s and early ‘80s led to a 1982 Congressional Budget Office document warning that the U.S. would have to be prepared to go to war to secure cobalt reserves so as to secure the power to manufacture for war, especially in time of war.
The war for control of Congo’s wealth has killed 6 million and displaced many millions more.
2) An ongoing African holocaust, the systematic destruction of the Congolese people. Six million have died, according to widely acknowledged sources including the International Relief Commission and the U.N. Forty-five thousand Congolese continue to die every month, with no end in sight; many die in refugee camps of starvation and easily curable disease, and one third of these are children.
3) Barack Obama’s legacy, and our legacy, as the Americans who elected him. Will our legacy be an ongoing African holocaust, another 6 million African Congolese lives? Will it be the expansion of Africom, the U.S. Africa Command, throughout Africa and the further plundering of Africa’s resources?
Some, including Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford, say that Barack Obama is “U.S. corporate empire in Black face” or that corporate America desperately needed a Black face now. This is arguable, especially given that, in 2007, Africa surpassed the U.S. wartorn Middle East as a source of U.S. oil imports.
However, though huge corporations generously filled Obama’s campaign coffers, so did many everyday Americans, who also organized and rallied for Obama with high hopes of peace and change. Many now at least seem to have a place at the table that they didn’t have before.
Can they use it to call for an end to the covert war in DR Congo? First, more Americans will have to find DR Congo on the map, even amidst the toughest times since the Depression.
Acting locally
Is there anything we, ordinary Americans, can do to end this war for the sake of war? Acting to stop the Congo War is daunting indeed. I really can’t imagine action at the federal level, because I simply can’t imagine the national apparatus of force - the military, foreign policy, intelligence and police agencies - acting to deconstruct themselves.
The only successful actions that I can imagine are local. Here’s a list of those which occur to me, though only, again, with “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” I list them to keep faith with many of my dearest friends, who believe that the election of Barack Obama, our first African American U.S. president, has indeed made all things possible:
Blue Angels
So, to end the Congo War, the City and County of San Francisco, where I live, could conceivably:
1) Cancel our invitation to the annual all forces military recruitment drive, best known as Fleet Week and the Blue Angels Air Show. Despite its use of African proxy armies, the U.S. military could not sustain and expand Africom, the U.S. Africa Command, and continue to prosecute the Congo War, without troops.
2) Implement Community Choice Renewable Energy legislation passed by the San Francisco City and County Board of Supervisors, which calls upon the city to build a clean, renewable power infrastructure based on solar, tidal and wind power. The Congo War and ‘most all the covert wars in Africa, including that in Sudan’s Darfur, are wars for Africa’s oil, natural gas, coal, acreage planted for bio-fuels and uranium.
President Patrice Lumumba, 1960
3) Apologize for the 1961 assassination of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first elected president, Patrice Emery Lumumba, by CIA and Belgian operatives and call on President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress to do so as well. Belgium apologized on Jan. 17, the 40th anniversary of Lumumba’s assassination. Though the CIA’s involvement is now widely acknowledged, it has never been acknowledged by the U.S. government, just as the U.S. covert war in DR Congo is not acknowledged now.
4) Call on Barack Obama to close the U.S. military base in Kigali, Rwanda, and end all U.S. military support to its authoritarian African puppet regimes, including those of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Rwandan President Paul Kagame and now Congolese President Joseph Kabila.
Yes, we can?
Ann Garrison is a Bay Area journalist and activist and the website writer-editor of thepriceofuranium.com. She also blogs at Colored Opinions, where this story first appeared. She can be reached at anniegarrison@thepriceofuranium.com.
Africom’s covert war in Sudan
The winter of Bashir’s discontent
by Keith Harmon Snow
Omar al-Bashir, speaking to thousands of supporters in Khartoum, angrily rejected war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court on Thursday, March 5. “The true criminals are the leaders of the United States and Europe,” he said. “We have refused to kneel to colonialism; that is why Sudan has been targeted.” – Photo: AFP
I recently received a phone call from an Australian man who identified himself as an investigator for the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, Netherlands. The investigator and his colleague had read my story, “Merchants of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa,” and they wanted my cooperation to provide more detailed evidence about the warlords behind the massacres at Bogoro, Congo, described briefly in my story.
After some weeks of back and forth discussions and me revisiting notes and photos to see what I had, I sent them an email at the definitive moment, when they were hoping to receive a brief “dossier” about the specific case - which they said “had generated a lot of interest” at the ICC - and I shared my uncertainty about the ethics of collaborating with an “International Criminal Court” that was only indicting Black Africans.
I indicated my concern for the witness “Sandrine,” a young girl discussed in my story who named names of commanders, dates of executions, and who herself used a machete in an ethnic massacre and was raped by militiamen. I noted that witnesses identified for the Rwandan Tribunal (ICTR) had been murdered or mysteriously disappeared and noted my awareness of the injustice of the tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the disconcerting trajectory of the ICC.
I told them I couldn’t in good conscience help them, it seemed, until the ICC arrested some of the white-collar war criminals running loose around the world. It was the right decision, in light of the recent ICC indictments against another Black man, and an Arab at that. It was a very stupid career move, someone else remarked.
On March 4, 2009, the ICC prosecutors announced that they were at last issuing the long threatened but first ever indictments against a sitting head of state, Omar al-Bashir, the Arab president of Sudan. Meanwhile, Somali “pirates” off East Africa recently freed a Ukrainian ship with a Panamanian registration, a Ukrainian crew and flag of Belize: The freighter carried tanks, rockets and munitions destined for Darfur, and it is owned by an Israeli “businessman” and reputed Mossad operative named Vadim Alperin.
It is difficult to make sense of the war in Darfur - especially when people see it as a one-sided “genocide” of Arabs against Blacks that is being committed by the Bashir “regime” - but such is the establishment propaganda. The real story is much more expansive, more complex, and it revolves around some relatively unknown but shady characters. What follows is a short and imperfect summary of some of the deeper geopolitical realities behind the struggle for Sudan.
The politics of war crimes
First note that the ICC can now be viewed as a tool of hegemonic U.S. foreign policy, where the weapons deployed by the U.S. and its allies include the accusations of, and indictments for, human rights violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity. To understand this, we can ask why no white man has yet been charged with these or other offenses at the ICC - which now holds five Black African “warlords” and seeks to incarcerate and bring to trial another Black man, also an Arab, Omar Bashir.
International Criminal Court, The Hague, Netherlands
Why hasn’t George W. Bush been indicted? Or what about Donald Rumsfeld? Dick Cheney? Henry Kissinger? Ehud Olmert? Tony Blair? Vadim Alperin? John Bredenkamp?
Following on the heals of the announcement that the ICC handed down seven war crimes charges against al-Bashir, a story broadcast over all the Western media system and into every American living room by day’s end, President al-Bashir ordered the expulsion of 10 international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Darfur under the pretense of being purely “humanitarian” organizations.
What has not anywhere in the English press been reported is that the United States of America has just stepped up its ongoing war for control of Sudan and her resources: petroleum, copper, gold, uranium, fertile plantation lands for sugar and gum Arabic - essential to Coke, Pepsi and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. This war has been playing out on the ground in Darfur through so-called “humanitarian” NGOs, private military companies, “peacekeeping” operations and covert military operations backed by the U.S. and its closest allies.
However, the U.S. war for Sudan has always revolved around “humanitarian” operations - purportedly neutral and presumably concerned only about protecting innocent human lives - that often provide cover for clandestine destabilizing activities and interventions.
Americans need to recognize that the administration of President Barack Obama has begun to step up war for control of Sudan in keeping with the permanent warfare agenda of both Republicans and Democrats. The current destabilization of Sudan mirrors the illegal covert guerrilla war carried out in Rwanda - also launched and supplied from Uganda - from October 1990 to July 1994. The Rwandan Defense Forces (then called the Rwandan Patriotic Army) led by Major Gen. Paul Kagame achieved the U.S. objective of a coup d’etat in Rwanda through that campaign, and President Kagame has been a key interlocutor in the covert warfare underway in Darfur, Sudan.
During the presidency of George W. Bush, the U.S. government was involved with the intelligence apparatus of the Government of Sudan (GoS). At the same time, other U.S. political and corporate factions were pressing for a declaration of genocide against the GoS.
Now, given the shift of power and the appointment of top Clinton officials formerly involved in covert operations in Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and Sudan during the Clinton years, pressure has been applied to heighten the campaign to destabilize the GoS, portrayed as a “terrorist” Arab regime, but an entity operating outside the U.S.-controlled banking system. The former campaign saw overt military action with the U.S. military missile attacks against the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (1998): This was an international war crime by the Clinton administration and it involved officials now in power.
The complex geopolitical struggle to control Sudan manifests through the flashpoint war for Darfur and it involves such diverse factions as the Lord’s Resistance Army, backed by Khartoum, which is also connected to the wars in the Congo and northern Uganda. Chad is involved, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Germany, the Central African Republic, Libya, France, Israel, China, Taiwan, South Africa and Rwanda.
There are U.S. special forces on the ground in the frontline states of Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, and the big questions are: 1) How many of the killings are being committed by U.S. proxy forces and blamed on al-Bashir and the GoS? And 2) who funds, arms and trains the rebel insurgents?
United States Agency for International Devastation
Rebels? Insurgents? The drumbeat of Western propaganda portrays the conflict as a one-sided affair: a “genocidal counter-insurgency by the GoS” - in the words of Eric Reeves - versus the good Samaritans of the “humanitarian” NGO community … and throw in a few (non-descript) rebels.
“Sudan ordered at least 10 humanitarian groups expelled from Darfur on Wednesday after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the country’s president,” wrote Associated Press reporter Ellen M. Lederer. “Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the action ‘represents a serious setback to lifesaving operations in Darfur’ and urged Sudan to reverse its decision, U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.”
However, when Ban Ki-moon met with Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame recently, he never called for Kagame’s arrest, no matter the findings of two international courts of law that have issued indictments against top RPA officials. Instead Ban Ki-moon praised Kagame and called for African countries to hunt down and arrest Hutu people purportedly involved in the now specious “genocide” in Rwanda in 1994.
The non-governmental aid groups ordered out of Darfur by President al-Bashir on March 4 were Oxfam, CARE, MSF-Holland, Mercy Corps, Save the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the International Rescue Committee, Action Contre la Faim, Solidarites and CHF International.
Providing humanitarian aid to refugees in Darfur is a large and profitable industry. - Photo: Reuters
Of course, the Western media is all over the expulsion of any big “humanitarian” moneymaker from Darfur - the moral outrage is so thick you can almost wipe it. The NGOs and the press that peddles their images of suffering babes complain that hundreds of thousands of innocent refugees will now be subjected to massive unassisted suffering - as opposed to the assisted suffering they previously faced - but never asks with any serious and honest zeal, why and how the displaced persons and refugees came to be displaced or homeless to begin with. Neither do they ask about all the money, intelligence sharing, deal making and collaboration with private or governmental military agencies.
Large “humanitarian” NGOs (and “conservation” NGOs) operate as de facto multinational corporations revolving around massive private profits and human suffering. In places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Darfur these NGOs also provide infrastructure, logistical and intelligence collaboration that supports U.S. military and government agendas in the region. Most are aligned with big foundations, corporate sponsors and USAID - itself a close and long-time partner for interventions with Africom and the Pentagon.
Refugees and displaced populations are strategic tools of statecraft and foreign policy just as “humanitarian” NGOs consistently use food as a weapon and populations as human shields. The history of the U.S. covert war in South Sudan is rich with examples of the SPLA and its “humanitarian” partners, especially Christian “charities,” committing such war crimes and crimes against humanity. (See: Keith Harmon Snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia?” Global Research, Feb. 7, 2007.)
CARE International has received funding from Lockheed Martin Corp., the world’s largest and most secretive producer of weapons of mass destruction, and both CARE and Save the Children are tied up with weapons and extractive industries in other ways. A peak at the board of directors of Save the Children makes it clear why the U.S. media is so devoid of truth about Darfur.
Similarly, the International Rescue Committee does not work with refugees, per se, but serves as a policy and pressure group involved in funneling private profits from the West back to the West. The IRC has also been cited for involvement in military operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and it has deep ties to people like Henry Kissinger.
The AID (read: misery) industry in Sudan was by the mid-1990s the largest so-called “humanitarian” enterprise on the planet, Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) - a form of managed inequality and a temporary and mobile economy of white privilege, adventurism and, of course, good will (sic). The misery industry shifted its focus from South Sudan to Darfur after a pseudo peace “treaty” was organized to end the decades old war between the SPLA and GoS; the U.S. and Israel backed the SPLA from 1990 onward and continue to do so at present. The result of more than 12 years of illegal U.S. covert low-intensity warfare in Sudan resulted in the creation of the independent and sovereign state of South Sudan in circa 2005 - a state dominated by Jewish and Christian faith-based interests and Western multinational corporations.
Much of the AID infrastructure in Sudan has at one time or another been used as a weapon through the use of human shields, food deliveries to refugee populations inseparable from insurgents and shipments of weapons by “humanitarian” NGOs. This is both incidental and deliberate policy. Christian “relief” NGOs played a huge role in supporting the covert Western insurgency in South Sudan. One notable “humanitarian” NGO involved in weapons deliveries was the Norwegian People’s Aid (known affectionately in the field as the Norwegian People’s Army).
In Darfur, Sudan, the U.S. government agenda is to win control of natural resources and lever the Arab government into a corner and, at last, establish a more “friendly” government that will suit the corporate interests of the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and Israel.
Several major think tanks - read: propaganda, lobbying and pressure - behind the destabilization of Sudan include the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, Center for American Progress, Center for Security Policy, International Rescue Committee and International Crisis Group. Individuals from seemingly diverse positions of the political and ideological spectrum run these organizations, which are ultra-nationalist capitalist organizations bent on global military-economic domination.
The former Clinton officials most heavily focused on the destabilization of Sudan include Susan Rice, Madeleine Albright, Roger Winter, Prudence Bushnell, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Anthony Lake and John Prendergast. Carr Center for Human Rights co-founder Samantha Power, now on the Obama National Security Council, has helped to whitewash clandestine U.S. involvement in Sudan.
John Prendergast has continued to peddle disinformation disguised as policy and human rights concerns through the International Crisis Group (ICG) and through its many clone organizations like ENOUGH, ONE and RAISE HOPE FOR CONGO. Prendergast has been a pivotal agent behind the hijacking of U.S. public concern and action through the disingenuous - and discredited - SAVE DARFUR movement.
Other notable agents of disinformation on Sudan include Alex de Waal and Smith College Professor Eric Reeves. It is through these and other conduits to the corporate U.S. media that the story of “genocide” in Sudan is cast as an Africa-Arab affair devoid of Western interests.
In 1992, human rights researchers Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal established the London-based NGO African Rights. In August 1995, African Rights published “Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance,” one of many pivotal “human rights” reports that falsely represented events in Rwanda, set the stage for victor’s justice at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and began the process of dehumanizing millions of Hutu people and protecting the true terrorists: Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, the Rwandan Patriotic Army and their Western backers.
The man for a new Sudan
The pivotal intelligence asset working on the ground in Sudan to destabilize and overthrow the Government of Sudan (GoS) is Roger Winter - profiled very disingenuously in the seven-page New York Times Magazine feature story of June 15, 2008.
This photo, captioned “A camp for members of the Dinka tribe outside the town of Abyei, Sudan,” illustrates the New York Times story about Roger Winter, “The Man for a New Sudan.” – Photo: J. Carrier, NY Times
Interestingly, “The Man for a New Sudan” story - an establishment whitewash of the involvement of the U.S. military-intelligence establishment in Sudan - was written by Eliza Griswold, a “fellow” with the New America Foundation, a left-leaning think tank and pressure group with a very confused ideological but nationalist-militaristic position. (The NAF is obviously dependent on U.S. foundation funding, and it reveals no apparent policy formulations of substance on the Great Lakes or Horn of Africa, conflicts on which they remain completely silent).
“When Roger Winter’s single-engine Cessna Caravan touched down near the Sudanese town of Abyei on Easter morning, a crowd of desperate men swamped the plane,” Griswold wrote. “Some came running over the rough red airstrip. Others crammed into a microbus that barreled toward the 65-year-old Winter as he climbed down the plane’s silver ladder. Some Sudanese call Winter ‘uncle’; others call him ‘commander.’”
Winter’s special post at the State Department was created specifically for him and his “work” in Sudan. Why do Sudanese people in South Sudan call Roger Winter “commander”?
Roger Winter is the primary conduit for the ongoing covert destabilization of Sudan. His operations are run primarily out of Uganda, with the terrorist government of Yoweri Museveni providing support through the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) alliance with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).
The SPLA is the de facto backbone of the Sudan Liberation Army, one of the main so-called “rebel” factions involved in Darfur; the Pentagon provides military and logistics support to the SPLA via Uganda through unknown channels, but most likely involving the nearby Pentagon client states of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Chad and Eritrea.
The primary Ugandan agents supporting the U.S. war in Darfur have always been, and remain, Brigadier Gen. James Kazini, a nephew of Ugandan dictator Museveni and the chief of staff of the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF); Gen. Salim Saleh, half-brother of Museveni; and President Yoweri Museveni himself.
One of the main protagonists in the Darfur conflict is the current military regime in Rwanda, whose troops have been involved in Darfur under the guise of an “independent” and “peacekeeping” operation under the African Union “peacekeeping” umbrella - backed by NATO and private military companies.
Little known and widely misunderstood is the role of the United States and its proxies, the UPDF and the RPA, in committing massive crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide during the Rwandan conflagration, 1990 to 1994. Prior to the RPA invasion of Rwanda (from Uganda) in October 1990, the RPA and Rwandan Tutsi Diaspora had publications like Impuruza, published in the United States between 1984 and 1994 - when the RPA achieved the coup d’etat against Rwandan President Habyarimana.
Tutsi refugees joined Roger Winter, who was at the time the director of the United States Committee for Refugees, to help fund the publication. The editor, Alexander Kimenyi, is a Rwandan national and a professor at California State University. Like most RPA publications, Impuruza circulated clandestinely in Rwanda amongst Hutu and Tutsi elite and it peddled a genocidal ideology against Hutu people.
The Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora USA, assisted by Roger Winter, organized the International Conference on the Status of Banyarwanda (Tutsi) Refugees in Washington, D.C., in 1988, and this is where a military solution to the Tutsi problem was chosen. The U.S. Committee for Refugees reportedly provided accommodation and transportation.
The devil came in a helicopter
Roger Winter was one of the primary architects of the RPA guerrilla war, organized from Washington in 1989, that has led to the loss of more than 10 or 12 million lives in the Great Lakes of Africa since 1990. Winter acted as a spokesman for the RPF and their allies, and he appeared as a guest on major U.S. television networks such as PBS and CNN. New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch and Roger Winter made contacts on behalf of the RPA with American media, particularly the Washington Post, New York Times and Time magazine.
Roger Winter moved through Rwanda during the RPA invasion and worked the front lines of the covert war as a key Pentagon and U.S. State Department asset in collaboration with the Kagame RPA operation of terror. From 1990 to 1994, Winter traveled back and forth from the RPA controlled zone to Washington, D.C., where he briefed and coordinated activities and support with U.S. military, intelligence and government officials.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice – Photo: AFP
Roger Winter is intimate with USAID and a long-time ally of Susan Rice, former assistant secretary of state on African Affairs (1997-2001), special assistant to President Clinton (1995-1997), and National Security Council insider (1993-1997). Susan Rice is the Obama administration’s ambassador to the United Nations and staunch enemy of Omar al-Bashir.
Roger Winter is also a staunch supporter of U.S. Rep. Donald Payne, one of the leading U.S. Democrats who was pressing for action to “stop genocide” in Darfur, Sudan. Payne sponsored the Darfur Genocide Accountability Act and he was arrested in June 2001, along with John Eibner, director of Christian Solidarity International, for protesting against the GoS.
Christian Solidarity International has a very subversive relationship to “peace” and “religion” in Sudan, and they have been one of the frontrunner organizations peddling the accusations of slavery by the al-Bashir government, in particular; a highly contested and controversial issue generally inflated and manipulated by fundamentalist Jewish and Christian NGOs and missionary organizations, like Christian Solidarity International, Samaritan’s Purse, Servant’s Heart and Freedom Quest International, that operate in Sudan.
“Roger Winter was the chief logistic boss for [RPA] Tutsis as early as mid-1990,” says Ugandan human rights expert Remigius Kintu, “and until their victory in 1994 they were operating from 1717 Massachusetts Aven. N.W. in Washington, D.C. Roger Winter told a [name deleted] South Sudanese exile at the time [1994]: ‘I have now stabilized Rwanda and will turn my full attention to Sudan.’ Winter subsequently closed up shop in Rwanda and based himself in Kampala working on Sudan. A few years later, Darfur exploded and with Winter’s manipulations, Rwanda was the first to send troops into that troubled area. From my sources, the Rwanda Defense Forces [working under the African Union umbrella] have killed civilians and brought in their media experts to pile the blame on Sudanese government troops.”
This is exactly what the Kagame and Museveni terror apparatus has done in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Much of the terror operations of the UPDF/RPF in Rwanda in the 1990s were covered up by Human Rights Watch experts Alison Des Forges (d. February 2009) and Timothy Longman, associate professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Vassar College.
Similarly, throughout the long war in South Sudan, and now in Darfur, the atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed factions were and are downplayed, dismissed or ignored, while those committed by competing factions are amplified and spotlighted. Also, following the pattern of UPDF and RPA criminal activities - such as massacres committed under disguise and/or attributed to the “enemy” - for which there is now a long history of documentation, and given the lack of any true independent evaluation, there is no telling who actually committed the massacres always blamed on the GoS or “Janjaweed” militias.
One Sudanese professional from the South told me recently that it was not the government of Sudan but rather the UPDF and SPLA who were arming the Janjaweed - the so-called Arab militias accused of wanton killing in an Arab-against-Black genocide. (This Arab-on-Black genocide has been widely discredited.)
Professor Timothy Longman and Alison Des Forges co-produced the fat treatise on “genocide” in Rwanda, “Leave None to Tell the Story,” published in 1999. Longman and Des Forges produced numerous documents - based on field investigations in Congo (Zaire), Rwanda and Burundi from 1995 to 2008 - touted as independent and unbiased human rights reports but always skewed by hidden interests. Both Longman and Des Forges had relationships with the U.S. Department of State, National Security Council and Pentagon, both were regular consultants with USAID and they certainly worked with Roger Winter, the Pentagon’s secret weapon in Sudan.
Kenyans watch the huge freighter MV Faina enter the port of Mombasa, Kenya, last month after the Israeli-owned ship, loaded with tanks and other heavy weaponry reportedly destined for Israeli-backed “rebels” in Darfur, was ransomed and released by Somali “pirates,” who had held it for four months. – Photo: Antony Njuguna, Reuters
On Sept. 25, 2008, a Ukrainian freighter was seized by “pirates” off the coast of Somalia and was held until a ransom of $3.2 million was paid on Feb. 5, 2009. Somali fishermen disenfranchised by international dumping of toxic - and possibly nuclear - wastes off Somalia are labeled “pirates” when they fight for their rights and freedoms.
The MV Faina is registered in Belize, owned by a company registered in Panama and piloted by Ukrainians. The MV Faina carried 33 Soviet T-72 battle tanks, grenade-launchers, anti-aircraft guns and ammunition en route to Mombasa, Kenya, the Pentagon’s primary base on the east coast of Africa.
The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet monitored the Ukrainian ship during the four-month standoff, with the MV Faina pinned down by at least six U.S. and four European warships. The ship’s owner is Israeli national Vadim Alperin (alias Vadim Oltrena Alperin), said to be a Mossad agent involved with clandestine activities through offshore front companies and money laundering. The ship was unloaded in Mombasa on Feb. 12, and the weapons are destined for Juba, South Sudan.
There are reports that weaponry also included tank munitions heads sporting deadly depleted uranium and that the final recipients are the Israeli-backed Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) “rebels” in Darfur. Sudan has previously accused Israel of supporting “rebels” in the Darfur war. International arms syndicates and dealers routinely transfer “Soviet-era” arms for international organized crime, including covert military operations involving proxy militias and national governments in Sudan, Uganda, Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda.
Keith Harmon Snow is a frequent contributor to Op-Ed News, where this article first appeared. To learn more, visit his website, All Things Pass, and Friends of the Congo. He can be reached at keith@allthingspass.com.
Zimbabwe’s military in Congo: Launching pad of corruption
by Jean Damu
Zimbabwe National Army troops were deployed to DR Congo under former President Laurent Kabila. A blogger, formerly of Zimbabwe, mused: “Why is it that Mugabe should deploy his army, a foreign force, into the DRC – when he reacts angrily to the idea of military invention in Zimbabwe?”
While the role of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his annoying refusal to respect the electoral process has attracted much of the world’s attention, little notice has been given to the elevated role of Zimbabwe’s military establishments and their reactions to economic “structural adjustments” forced upon Zimbabwe in the early 1990s by Western dominated international financial institutions.
Many say these reactions, which in numerous cases took the form of establishing military corporations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, likely have contributed greatly to the grand Zimbabwean meltdown; and others claim these reactions in fact constitute a military coup.
Furthermore, beyond the tentative establishment of a unity government, there seems to be little good news coming out of Zimbabwe.
In the last 90 days we have been informed of a partially successful assassination attempt against Air Marshall Perence Shiri (he was wounded), that President Mugabe has purchased a multi-million dollar compound in Hong Kong, that the family of former Deputy Commander of ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army) Solomon Mujuru (aka Rex Nhongo) was thwarted in an attempt to illegally export and sell 3,600 kilograms of gold and diamonds on a monthly basis from Congo and that Zimbabwe college students must now pay for their educations in dollars.
However, the most debilitating factor of life for Zimbabweans is the cause of the hyperinflation: a government that forces the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe to print money. The government finances its spending by issuing debt that the RBZ must purchase with new Zimbabwe dollars. The bank also produces jobs, at the expense of every Zimbabwean who uses money. Between 2001 and 2007 its staff grew by 120 percent, from 618 to 1,360 employees, the largest increase in any central bank in the world. Still, the bank doesn’t produce accurate, timely data.
The last official inflation statistics, for July, are hopelessly outdated. Money-supply data are even worse; the most recent figures are for January 2008 - ancient history.
In the absence of good official numbers, Steve Henke of the Libertarian Cato Institute developed his own hyperinflation index for Zimbabwe. He derives it from market based price data starting in January 2007.
The index tells us that Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate recently peaked at 80 billion percent a month. That means around 6.5 quindecillion novemdecillion percent a year - or 65 followed by 107 zeros. To get a handle on it, realize that it’s equivalent to inflation of 98 percent a day. Prices double every 24.7 hours. Shops have simply stopped accepting Zimbabwean dollars.
The catastrophic conditions now experienced by Zimbabwe and which are being intensified by sanctions imposed by the West are dismaying to anyone who has even remotely followed the economic history of Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. For the first 10 years of freedom, local capital and the Zimbabwean state was one of the few historic blocs in Africa that had managed to establish hegemony over foreign capital: capital controlled by the imperialist powers.
A scandal erupted in December when the U.N. reported that arms were being smuggled to Zimbabwe through DR Congo. Robert Mugabe is shown here with officers of the Zimbabwe National Army.
Those conditions drastically changed in 1991 with the ruling party ZANU-PF’s adoption of the Economic Structural Adjustment Program (ESAP) that saw social services dramatically reduced and local capital hamstrung and finally drastically diminished.
Though structural adjustment programs ran just four years, from 1991 through 1995, economic forces were loosened which the state has not been able to check. In fact ZANU has now renounced structural adjustment, while Morgan Tsvangirai’s party, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which grew largely out of Zimbabwe’s trade union-led urban protests against the ESAP, now embraces structural adjustment.
Nevertheless, the abandonment of socialist principles and ideology by ZANU, signaled by the adoption of structural adjustment, loosened constraints on personal wealth accumulation by the state’s elites and, as instability and insecurity heightened during the 1990s, the forms of wealth accumulation became mercantilist and non-productive.
Nowhere has this been more true than within Zimbabwe’s military apparatuses. When opportunity presented itself in the form of widespread warfare in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, military leaders and others were quick to take advantage.
Despite having no territorial interests to defend in relationship to the DRC, as did Angola, for example, Zimbabwe’s leaders signed agreements with then DRC President Laurent Kabila to provide Zimbabwean combat troops in exchange for permission to establish Zimbabwean corporations to exploit Congolese raw materials.
A U.N. study of the situation in 2002 informs us:
“The key strategist for the Zimbabwean branch of the elite network is the Speaker of the Parliament and former head of Zimbabwe Intelligence, Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa. Mr. Mnangagwa has won strong support from senior military and intelligence officers for an aggressive policy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His key ally is a Commander of ZDF (Zimbabwe Defense Force) and Executive Chairman of COSLEG, General Vitalis Musunga Gava Zvinavashe. [COSLEG is a natural resource exploitation firm largely owned by the family of Joseph Kabila and the Zimbabwe military. Joseph Kabila succeeded his father Laurent as president of the DRC after the elder's assassination in 2001.] The General and his family have been involved in diamond trading and supply contracts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A long-time ally of President Mugabe, Air Marshal Perence Shiri, has been involved in military procurement and organizing air support for the pro-Kinshasa armed groups fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is also part of the inner circle of ZDF diamond traders who have turned Harare into a significant illicit diamond-trading center.
“Other prominent Zimbabwean members of the network include Brigadier General Sibusiso Busi Moyo, who is Director General of COSLEG. Brigadier Moyo advised both Tremalt and Oryx Natural Resources, which represented covert Zimbabwean military financial interests in negotiations with State mining companies of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Air Commodore Mike Tichafa Karakadzai is Deputy Secretary of COSLEG, directing policy and procurement. He played a key role in arranging the Tremalt cobalt and copper deal. Colonel Simpson Sikhulile Nyathi is Director of defence policy for COSLEG. The Minister of Defence and former Security Minister, Sidney Sekeramayi, coordinates with the military leadership and is a shareholder in COSLEG. The UN Panel has a copy of a letter from Mr. Sekeramayi thanking the Chief Executive of Oryx Natural Resources, Thamer Bin Said Ahmed Al-Shanfari, for his material and moral support during the parliamentary elections of 2000. Such contributions violate Zimbabwean law.
“In June 2002, the Panel learned of a secret new ZDF diamond mining operation in Kalobo in Kasai Occidental run by Dube Associates. This company is linked, according to banking documents, through Colonel Tshinga Dube of Zimbabwe Defence Industries to the Ukrainian diamond and arms dealer Leonid Minim, who currently faces smuggling charges in Italy. The diamond mining operations have been conducted in great secrecy.”
John Mikembe, a Zimbabwean member of Transparency International and an early critic of the government, said: “Zimbabwe seems intent on raiding the DRC and making it an economic colony … (but) it won’t be Zimbabwe as a nation that benefits. Instead a number of individuals in the political elite will enrich themselves.”
For its part Zimbabwean military and government spokespersons have long said the military corporate structures erected in the DRC were meant to economically augment their military cooperation with Congo. More recent arguments say the military earnings in the DRC are necessary in light of Western economic sanctions.
The main problem with these arguments is that no one has ever been successful in demonstrating that any significant portion of the money the money earned in the DRC, either through the ZDF mineral extraction corporations or timber extraction corporations ever found its way back to Zimbabwe. Several major loans were denied to Zimbabwe in the early years of involvement with the DRC because the Congo operation was costing Zimbabwe far more than they appeared to be earning.
Displaced people walk past the body of a Congolese government soldier as they return home, near Kibumba, late last year.
Furthermore Zimbabwe’s participation in the Congo war was never popular domestically and was seen by many as the initial stimulus that began to wean popular support away from ZANU.
As popular support for ZANU began to wane by the turn of the century and the personal enrichment of military leaders began to increase, the role of the Joint Operations Command, a body of all the Zimbabwean military and paramilitary leaders and the head of the central bank, ascended.
The Joint Operations Command, recently renamed the National Security Council, was originally established by the Ian Smith regime during he last throes of a dying colonialism in an attempt to beat back the liberation forces. Smith was the last white leader of Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe.
In light of the destabilization activities of apartheid South Africa against the newly independent Zimbabwe, no doubt the ZANU government felt an urgency to continue this unusual concentration of military, paramilitary and economic power.
In more recent times, however, especially since South Africa is no longer a destabilizing threat and with the vigorous intervention of the Zimbabwean military in economic matters, many fear the National Security Council poses an extreme threat to any efforts to promote or construct democracy.
Catherine Philip, writing in the Times Online last year, quoted “senior diplomats” in Harare as saying “a military coup by stealth” had taken place following the March 2008 elections that rocked the Mugabe camp and the run up to the June electoral run-off and that the Joint Operations Command had taken control of Mugabe’s re-election campaign and was making the day to day decisions of the government.
This is not to suggest that military and political leaders are in lock step with all ZANU decisions. There are known to be factions that disagreed with the militarization of the recent Mugabe campaigns and took pains to distance themselves.
The Mujuru family is one such faction.
However, it is the Mujuru family, reflecting the concerns of the earlier cited John Mikember of Transparency International, headed by Zimbabwe Executive Vice President Grace Mujuru and her husband, former ZANLA Deputy Commander Solomon Mujuru and their daughter and son in law, who are the center of the recent gold and diamond smuggling scandal.
Europeans blew the whistle on the Mujurus when numerous names involved in the gold and diamond transactions turned up on lists of international human rights violators. These lists, largely drawn up by Western political powers, are hypocritical at best when making distinctions between East and West, Muslim and non-Muslim, etc.
But the Swiss firm that balked at completing the Mujuru’s transaction did the world a favor by noting that the illegal riches being smuggled out of the DRC were contributing directly to the warfare in eastern Congo by helping to finance Congolese rebel groups opposed not only to Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda but Kinshasa as well.
This in relation to the Mugabes’ recent purchase of a four-story compound in Hong Kong as well as a diamond cutting company there provide concrete substance to the old question, with friends like these, who do the Zimbabwean people need for enemies?
The truth is Zimbabwe has many friends. The future need not remain bleak, they say. South African and other economists urge that Zimbabwe de-link itself from the Western economic institutions as it did in the 1930s and later following the Smith regime’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth. A degree of economic independence resulted, they say, after each instance.
Writing in the fall 2008 edition of the African Studies Quarterly, Padraing Carmody and Scott Taylor argue that the key to rebuilding Zimbabwe’s economy is to focus on rebuilding the urban-industrial sector, the sector that will most produce jobs. Carmody and Taylor argue there are five reasonable and possible choices of development strategy:
• Unmediated integration into the global market (the IMF/World Bank approach)
• Mediated integration/new regionalism
• Delinking
• Neoliberalism in macroeconomics with grassroots empowerment or
• Market socialism/ecological economics
Clearly the first two choices are problematic and the last three choices would, it seem, depend largely on a strong state infrastructure.
But as rightly noted by Carmody and Taylor, which of these is ultimately adopted in Zimbabwe will depend in no small part on the outcome of the struggle for democracy, social justice and livelihood currently enjoined by Zimbabwe’s people. Looming over all of this, however, remains the role of the military.
Jean Damu is the former western regional representative for N’COBRA, National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America and a former member of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, taught Black Studies at the University of New Mexico, has traveled and written extensively in Cuba and Africa and currently serves as a member of the Steering Committee of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Email him at jdamu2@yahoo.com.
Witch-hunt: The Hidden War on African Women
In villages across Africa, old women suspected of witchcraft are hacked to death, while young girls are mutilated to preserve their virginity. But attitudes are changing – and thousands of lives are being saved.Johann Hari reports from Kenya and Tanzania | ||
Across Africa, a war is being waged on women – but we are refusing to hear the screams. Over the past fortnight, I have travelled into the secretive shadow world that mutilates millions of African women at the beginning of their lives, and at the end. As girls, they face having their genitalia sliced out with razors, to destroy their "filthy" sexuality and keep them "pure". As old women, they face being hacked to death as "witches", blamed for every virus and sickness blowing across the savannah. | ||
Johann Hari is an award-winning journalist who writes twice-weekly for the Independent, one of Britain's leading newspapers, and the Huffington Post. He also writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, The New Republic, El Mundo, The Guardian, The Melbourne Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, South Africa's Star, The Irish Times, and a wide range of other international newspapers and magazines
March 03, 2009
Mugabe wants Zimbabwe's white farmers out.
AP – Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, right, and his wife Grace are seen during his 85th birthday celebrations …
CHINHOYI, Zimbabwe – Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe said Saturday that land seizures would continue, and he called for the country's last white farmers to leave.
Mugabe was addressing supporters at a celebration marking his 85th birthday in Chinhoyi, 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of Harare.
"Land distribution will continue. It will not stop," Mugabe said. "The few remaining white farmers should quickly vacate their farms as they have no place there."
Mugabe was capitalizing on what has long been a sensitive issue in Zimbabwe and other nations in the region: the unjust division of land between whites and blacks that is a legacy of colonialism and white minority rule. Dozens of the several hundred white farmers left in Zimbabwe are currently challenging the right of its government to confiscate their land before a regional tribunal of Africa judges.
The birthday bash, which reportedly cost $250,000, was held as Zimbabwe's new unity government failed to secure financial aid to rescue the country's collapsed economy.
Zimbabwe faces the world's highest official inflation rate, a hunger crisis and a cholera epidemic that has killed nearly 4,000 people since August.
Mugabe, who turned 85 on Feb. 21, has ruled Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980. He was recently forced to relax his grip on power and enter a coalition government with longtime rival Morgan Tsvangirai who was made prime minister.
But the first few weeks of the unity government have been marred by squabbles over key positions and the continued arrest of political activists, leaving some doubting how much power Mugabe is prepared to relinquish.
"I am still in control and hold executive authority, so nothing much has changed," Mugabe told a crowd of about 2,000.
There has been a recent upsurge in reported "invasions" of white-owned farms, with one support group saying at least 40 white farmers have been forced off their land since January.
Last year, a regional court ruled that 78 white Zimbabweans could keep their farms, saying the government's land grab policy was racially motivated.
On Saturday, Mugabe called the ruling "nonsense" and said it was of "no consequence." "We have our own laws which govern our own land issues," he said.
Critics blame Zimbabwe's economic collapse on Mugabe and his land reforms that saw white-owned farms seized and given to his cronies instead going to impoverished blacks as promised.
A smiling Mugabe was greeted by cheers and shouts of "Long live our president," as he arrived at the town's university hall on Saturday. Dressed in a beige suit and red scarf, he released a bunch of balloons into the air and joked with young school children as he posed for photographers. Tsvangirai decided not to attend the celebrations as he considered the event a "private" affair of Mugabe's party, his spokesman James Maridadi said.
On Friday, the coalition government failed to secure $2 billion for an economic rescue package from regional nations. A regional heads of state meeting will discuss proposals submitted by Zimbabwe, but it set no date and made no funding commitments.
Zimbabwe's finance minister, Tendai Biti, who belongs to Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change, attended the ministerial meeting in Cape Town and asked for $2 billion — half for emergency spending on schools, health care and infrastructure, and the rest on economic revival measures.
This article was originaly published bt the Associated Press. Sat. Feb. 28 2009
March 02, 2009
Lucy (Dinqineš)
Lucy (also given a second (Amharic) name: dinqineš, or “Dinkenesh,” meaning “You are beautiful” or "you are wonderful") is the common name of AL 288-1, the 40% complete skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis specimen discovered in 1974 at Hadar in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression. Lucy is estimated to have lived 3.2 million years ago.
The discovery of this hominin was significant as the skeleton shows evidence of small skull capacity akin to that of apes and of bipedal upright walk akin to that of humans, providing further evidence that bipedalism preceded increase in brain size in human evolution.
Side view of Lucy replica
French geologist Maurice Taieb discovered the Hadar Formation in 1972. He then formed the International Afar Research Expedition (IARE), inviting Donald Johanson, an American anthropologist now head of the Institute of Human Origins of Arizona State University, and Yves Coppens, a French born paleontologist now based at the Collège de France to co-direct the research. An expedition was formed with four American and seven French participants, and in the autumn of 1973 the team surveyed Hadar, Ethiopia for fossils and artifacts related to the origin of humans.
In November 1973, near the end of the first field season, Johanson noticed a fossil of the upper end of a shinbone, which had been sliced slightly on the front. The lower end of a thighbone was found near to it, and when he fitted them together the angle of the knee joint clearly showed that this fossil, reference AL 129-1, was an upright walking hominid. Over three million years old, the fossil was much older than any others known at the time. The site lay about two and a half kilometres from the site at which they subsequently found "Lucy".
The team returned for the second field season in the following year and found hominid jaws. Then, on the morning of November 24, 1974, near the Awash River, Johanson abandoned a plan to update his field notes and joined graduate student, Tom Gray from Texas State, in taking their Land Rover to Locality 162 to search for bone fossils.
Both Johanson and Gray spent a couple of hours on the increasingly hot arid plains, surveying the dusty terrain, then Johanson decided on a hunch to make a small detour on their way back to the Land Rover to look at the bottom of a small gulley that had been checked at least twice before by other workers. At first sight there was virtually no bone in the gulley, but as they turned to leave, a fossil caught Johanson's eye; an arm bone fragment lying on the slope. Near it lay a fragment from the back of a small skull. As they looked further, they found more and more bones, including part of a thighbone, vertebrae, part of a pelvis indicating that the fossil was female, ribs, and pieces of jaw. They marked the spot and returned to camp, excited at finding so many pieces apparently from one individual hominid.
Cast of Lucy in Mexico
In the afternoon, everyone on the expedition was at the gully, sectioning off the site and preparing for careful collection which eventually took three weeks. That first evening they celebrated at the camp, staying up all night, and at some stage during the evening the fossil AL 288-1 was nicknamed Lucy, after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which was being played loudly and repeatedly on a tape recorder in the camp.
Over the three weeks, several hundred pieces or fragments of bone were found, with no duplication, confirming their original speculation that they were from the one skeleton. As the team analyzed the fossil further, they calculated that an amazing 40% of a hominin skeleton had been recovered, an astounding accomplishment in the world of anthropology. Usually, only fossil fragments are discovered; rarely are skulls or ribs found intact. Johanson considered it was female based on the one complete pelvic bone and sacrum indicating the width of the pelvic opening. Lucy was only 1.1 m (3 feet 8 inches) tall, weighed 29 kilograms (65 lb) and looked somewhat like a Common Chimpanzee, but although the creature had a small brain, the pelvis and leg bones were almost identical in function with those of modern humans, showing with certainty that these hominids had walked erect.
Johanson brought the skeleton back to Cleveland, under an agreement with the government of Ethiopia, and returned it according to agreement some 9 years later. Lucy as a fossil hominin significantly captured public notice, becoming almost a household name at the time.
Further discoveries of afarensis specimens occurred during the 1970s giving anthropologists a much better appreciation of the range of variability and sexual dimorphism of the species.
March 01, 2009
A Challenge to 'Radical' and 'Pan-Africanist' Obamites
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
In an "Open Letter to the People of Zimbabwe," U.S.-based activists denounce sanctions against that country as "war crimes and the officials who initiated them as war criminals." By that definition (a good one), Barack Obama is a war criminal. The problem is, some of the signers of the Open Letter are prominent Obama supporters. What use are their declarations of solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe, when they support the "war criminal" who imposes sanctions against them and makes common cause with banksters here at home? It's past time to call these confused and conflicted people out by name, and challenge them to a real debate.
A Challenge to ‘Radical' and ‘Pan-Africanist' Obamites
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
"Obama has consistently spoken and acted in lockstep with George Bush on Zimbabwe sanctions."
An "Open Letter to the People of Zimbabwe," widely circulated on the Internet in February, demands "the U.S., British and other imperialist governments" end economic sanctions against that nation and otherwise keep their "hands off Zimbabwe!" Although honest progressives may differ on the political character of Robert Mugabe's regime - now joined in a power-sharing relationship with the opposition, whose leader's allegiances are likewise subject to dispute - there can be no equivocation about the Zimbabwean people's "right to self-determination and sovereignty without any imperialist interference."
Washington's blatant and longstanding campaign for regime-change must be denounced and resisted in all its manifestations - no ifs, ands or buts. The economic sanctions are, as the letter describes them, "collective punishment of the Zimbabwean people." The signers correctly and "unequivocally denounce these sanctions as war crimes and the officials who initiated them as war criminals."
Well said - but there's a great disconnect between the words and some of the names listed as endorsing the letter. A number of the signers are full-throated, religious-like followers of Barack Obama, one of the "war criminals" that has supported and, as president, extended U.S. sanctions against Zimbabwe.
These unabashed Obamites, several of whom I debated at a large forum in Harlem, in December, make a great noise about "imperialists" in general while pledging undying "solidarity" in the struggle against such "criminals," yet in their daily practice labor mightily to absolve President Obama of culpability for his crimes. It requires rivers of obfuscation and oceans of purposeful omission to separate the Commander-in-Chief and President of the United States from the crimes planned and carried out in his office. The perpetrators of this bizarre fantasy - that the "imperialists" are out to get Mugabe, but Obama isn't one of them - deepen confusion among the public, especially African Americans, and make a mockery of true solidarity. In the light of ever-unfolding events, they make themselves and progressive politics appear ridiculous, as they tip-toe around the mountainous facts of Barack Obama's actual presidency - not the wishful one they have invented.
"They labor mightily to absolve President Obama of culpability for his crimes."
Obama's implacable hostility to Zimbabwean independence and sovereignty is undeniable. He has consistently spoken and acted in lockstep with George Bush on the subject, and as president is preparing new ground for aggression against that country and elsewhere in Africa and the developing world.
On June 24, 2008, following a U.S.-UK-led United Nations Security Council resolution declaring that violence fostered by Mugabe's government had made fair runoff elections "impossible," candidate Obama took South Africa to task for failure "to pressure the Zimbabwean government to stop its repressive behavior." The U.S., he said, should tighten its economic sanctions. Obama told the press: "If fresh elections prove impossible, regional leaders backed by the international community should pursue an enforceable, negotiated political transition in Zimbabwe that would end repressive rule and enable genuine democracy to take root." That's regime-change.
Obama's behavior was in perfect synch with the Bush Administration, and with Republican presidential candidate John McCain's statements on the issue.
At the United Nations on July 10, Russia and China vetoed punitive American and British sanctions against Zimbabwe. Frustrated and outraged, Bush used his executive powers to expand U.S. sanctions, joined by Britain and the European Union.
"The U.S., Obama said, should tighten its economic sanctions."
On January 15 of this year, days before Obama took the oath of office, his nominee for Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, told a confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill it was still possible that Russia and China might be persuaded to change their votes on Zimbabwe sanctions. There can be no doubt she was speaking for the incoming administration, which looked forward to winning sanctions where George Bush had failed.
On January 26, Mugabe and the opposition agreed to form a unity government, threatening to derail the U.S.-British strategy to further isolate and then topple Mugabe. When the unity talks briefly fell apart, Obama, now president, let it be known that he hoped the opposition would remain out of government, so that momentum toward UN sanctions might be revived. That would be Susan Rice's job. "Susan is extremely aware of what is going on in Zimbabwe and she feels very strongly that there is a tremendous miscarriage of justice in that country and that it has to end," an Obama foreign policy aide told The Times-UK. "Once she has her feet on the ground she is going to turn her attention to this issue." The January 28 story was titled, "President Obama leads US drive to topple Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe."
When, a few days later, unity talks successfully resumed with the support of African organizations, the Obama administration reacted with bitterness and frustration. "Mugabe is not getting a reprieve from President Obama," said an aide. For the time being, however, UN sanctions were off the table, and the momentum of American aggression was spent.
But not necessarily for long. Susan Rice, an ardent supporter of AFRICOM, like her boss, is a leading advocate of "humanitarian" military intervention, the doctrine that big powers have a duty to intervene when a government fails to protect its people from...whatever. In the run-up to unity talks, the Brits and Americans appeared to be trial-ballooning Zimbabwe's cholera outbreak as a pretext for intervention - but in Africa, a "humanitarian" rationale for imperial interference can always be found, or invented.
"Obama let it be known that he hoped the opposition would remain out of government, so that momentum toward UN sanctions might be revived."
It is beyond dispute that Obama, as candidate and president, has been a fierce proponent of sanctions against Zimbabwe. George Bush's sanctions by executive order are now Barack Obama's sanctions - fully qualifying the new president as a "war criminal," as defined by the signers of the recent "Open Letter to the People of Zimbabwe." Yet some of the signers are apparently capable of compartmentalizing facts as it suits them, in order to avoid painful confrontation with the truth: Obama is not only our first Black president, but also our first Black war criminal president.
Who are these deeply conflicted persons? I am specifically referring to five signatories of the Open Letter, whose irrational Obama-Love I have personally witnessed in the context of debate over Obama's foreign and domestic policies, the first four at Harlem's Great Debate in December, the last encounter at Audubon Ballroom, Harlem, in early 2008.
Prof. Dr. Leonard Jeffries, City College CUNY. Dr. Jeffries refuses to present any substantive critique of Obama's actual policies on Africa or any other issue. He proclaims that every Black person should study "Obama-ology," meaning "how Obama does things."
Dr. James McIntosh, Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People (CEMOTAP). Dr. McIntosh tells audiences to look out for Obama's "winks" - those confidential messages meant especially for Black folks. The rest is just Obama doing what he has to do.
Viola Plummer, December 12th Movement. Ms. Plummer has the uncanny ability to call for revolution and declare the near-divinity of Obama in the same breath.
Atty. Malik Zulu Shabazz, New Black Panther Party. Atty. Shabazz and his party bear no resemblance to the original. His evaluation of Obama: "He is a good father and husband."
Amiri Baraka, playwright & poet. The one-time Prince of Schisms now pillories Cynthia McKinney for failing to get on the Obama-wagon. His capacity for both insult and reason appears to be failing.
Not one of these five people, all prolific speakers with followings in their own arenas, would call President Barack Obama a war criminal in the usual course of their political work. Instead, to varying degrees, they publicly praise and even express adoration for him. Yet they sign an Open Letter affirming solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe in the face of sanctions by "war criminals" - like Obama. Such solidarity is worthless on its face, because it means less than nothing in their actual domestic practice, which is filled with expressions of love for the war criminal and endless excuses and rationalizations for his behavior.
One line of the Open Letter is especially poignant in light of the contradictions personified by the Five Obamists: "We face the same enemies at home as do the people of Zimbabwe--the worldwide clique of bankers and bosses who put their greed for profits before meeting people's needs."
The Obamites are fully capable of damning the banksters till midnight, all the while pretending that Barack is not Wall Street's protector and co-conspirator. Resisting reality, they spread further confusion.
It is past time to call them out - not just the five signatories but all the "Left" representatives of Obamite contradiction who are misleading our people at this critical juncture in history. Preparations are under way on both coasts for a series of REAL debates on how to deal with the Obama presidential experience - a challenge like none other in American - especially African American - history.
We challenge the "Left" Obamites to attend. BYOR (Bring Your Own Reality) is not permitted.
Courtesy of BAR executive editor Glen Ford (A certified Elder of the Black Journalism Tribe) can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com .
February 27, 2009
Critic of murderous Kagame regime in Rwanda killed in crash of Continental Flight 3407
by Wayne Madsen
The evening before Human Rights Watch expert on Rwanda Alison Des Forges’ critical quote on the secret deal worked out between Rwanda’s murderous U.S.-backed President Paul Kagame and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) President Joseph Kabila appeared in a Washington Post article written by Stephanie McCrummen from Kigali, the Rwandan capital, Des Forges died in a the fiery crash of Continental Flight 3407, en route from Newark to Buffalo, Des Forges’ home town. Des Forges, an expert on the ethnic violence that has swept Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern DRC, was returning from a trip to Europe on Human Rights Watch business.
Also on Flight 3407 was Beverly Eckert, a 9/11 widow whose husband, Sean Rooney, died on 9/11 while in his Aon Risk Services office in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. On Dec. 19, 2003, Eckert wrote an op ed in USA Today titled “My Silence Cannot be Bought.” She rejected a pay-out offer from the 9/11 victims’ compensation fund and opted for a lawsuit to seek out answers to her many questions about 9/11.
She wrote, “I want to know why two 110-story skyscrapers collapsed in less than two hours and why escape and rescue options were so limited.” She added, “I say to Congress, big business and everyone who conspired to divert attention from government and private-sector failures: My husband’s life was priceless, and I will not let his death be meaningless. My silence cannot be bought.”
Much will be written, undoubtedly, about Beverly Eckert and her suspicions about 9/11. But it was Des Forges who had an enemy in the Kagame regime, which has, in the past, used assassinations in Rwanda and abroad as a tool to silence its critics. One such operation was planned against this editor in Tanzania.
On Dec. 3, 2008, WMR reported: “The Rwandan government, through its political and intelligence network in Washington, applied pressure on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, to reject this editor’s testimony on two different occasions about the 1994 plane shoot down [of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi]. On a third occasion, I received word that Kagame’s intelligence team in Arusha would ensure I would “never make it” to my U.N.-arranged guest house on the way from Kilimanjaro International Airport.
Heeding the warning about Kagame’s intentions that were passed on to me by a friendly African intelligence service, I quickly cancelled my trip to Arusha. Members of Rwanda’s regime have been indicted by judges in France and Spain for murder.
Des Forges was quoted in the Post criticizing a deal worked out and signed in Goma, DRC, on Dec. 5, 2008, between Kagame and Kabila that permits Rwandan troops to legally enter the DRC to ostensibly clean out elements of the Rwandan Hutu militia - the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR) - operating in the country. However, the FDLR is seen by both Rwanda and the DRC as a spent force that is an internal DRC problem and not a threat to Rwanda.
In return for allowing Rwandan troops into the DRC, Rwanda “arrested” its Tutsi proxy rebel general, Gen. Laurent Nkunda, after he fled the eastern DRC into Rwanda. Nkunda was the head of the Rwandan-sponsored National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), which replaced the former Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD). The RCD was involved in the 1998 second invasion of the DRC by Rwanda, an invasion supported by the Clinton administration. Rwandan troops first invaded the DRC in 1996 to overthrow the then-Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
WMR’s sources in Africa report that Nkunda is not under real arrest in Rwanda because he is not in jail. In addition, Rwanda is ignoring repeated extradition requests from the DRC for Nkunda to be returned, but it appears that these requests are merely “window dressing” attempts by Kabila’s government to show that it is interested in putting the rebel general on trial. Nkunda, a self-declared Christian preacher, is linked to a shadowy U.S.-based Pentecostal group called the “Rebels for Christ.” Nkunda is also an open admirer of George W. Bush.
Kabila, according to WMR’s African sources, is suspected of being an ethnic Burundian Tutsi who was adopted by his father and predecessor as president, Laurent D. Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001, in a plot said to have been engineered by Rwanda with the help of Angolan elements.
Des Forges questioned the Rwandan-DRC pact in her interview with the Post. She said, “Is the FDLR now suddenly on the verge of becoming more militarily powerful? I don’t think we’ve seen that … And if they haven’t, then what you have is Rwanda trotting out an old warhorse of an excuse to go in again. The question is, what is the intent?”
Des Forges obviously knew the answer. With U.S. military forces of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) now backing a joint Ugandan-DRC offensive in the northeastern DRC to wipe out the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), with hundreds of civilian casualties in the DRC and Uganda, and a secret pact worked out between Kabila and Kagame to permit Rwandan troops to occupy the eastern DRC, the target of both operations is securing the vast territory that is rich in commodities that the United States, Britain and Israel - all allies of Uganda and Rwanda - want badly. Those commodities are gold, diamonds, columbite-tantalite (coltan), platinum and natural gas.
And Des Forges’ criticism of the pact between Kagame and Kabila earned her some powerful enemies ranging from the murderous Kagame, who will not think twice about sending his agents to silence critics abroad, and international interests who want to see nothing prevent them from looting the DRC’s vast mineral and energy resources.
Eckert’s criticism of the 9/11 Commission report and her honest skepticism about the events of that day in 2001 also earned her some powerful enemies. The sudden crash of Continental Flight 3407 eliminated two spirited enemies of those who hide in the shadows of government and business around the world.
This story first appeared on WayneMadsenReport.com. Editor Wayne Madsen writes: (T)his online publication tackles the “politically incorrect” and “politically embarrassing” stories and holds government officials accountable for their actions. Contact him at wmreditor@waynemadsenreport.com. Courtesy of http://www.sfbayview.com.
Qaddafi elected president of African Union, vows to push for United States of Africa
by Akbar Muhammad
Libyan Leader Muammar Qaddafi, who has long worked for a united and prosperous Africa, is this year’s president of the African Union.
Tripoli, Libya - The African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa has elected Libyan Revolution Leader Muammar Al-Qaddafi the new president of the AU. The position will give Al-Qaddafi the power to influence policies across Africa for the next year.
Al-Qaddafi immediately vowed to push on with his plans to strengthen the institutions of the AU and make the African states stronger, stable and peaceful in a rather unstable world.
In his acceptance speech, he said, “I think the coming time will be a time of serious work and a time for action, not just empty words.”
He told Africa’s heads of state that there is much to do and that some of the procedures need to be reviewed in order to speed up the establishment of Union’s institutions.
He also promised to do all he can to solve the problem of Darfur and other African conflicts. In his acceptance speech, Al-Qaddafi acknowledged that he at times provoked some of African heads of state in order to push the agenda of the African Union.
However, he said for the African leaders to have different views regarding the future of the continent is healthy. He said the credit goes to all heads of state and their sovereign countries for making the right decisions. It was reported that in a closed meeting much of the opposition to the election Al-Qaddafi was led by South Africa and Uganda, two countries that the Libyan leader and his country’s men and women had helped the most in achieving their goals of freedom and justice for their people.
Al-Qaddafi told the summit he did not wish to take up the post of the chairman of the AU earlier, even though he was invited to, because he believed that his position was to help push the car regardless who was the driver. Africa must realize its dreams of unity, regardless of any one person’s official position.
Al-Qaddafi is, in fact, the engineer and the founder of the AU. He called for an emergency summit of the Organization of African Unity on Sept. 9, 1999, in Libya and methodically laid out why the OAU should move forward to become the African Union. He said that if Dr. Kwame Nkrumah could rise from his grave, the masses, the young, the old, the students, the workers, the military, the civil servants and the politicians would have carried him on their shoulders. The African masses’ real objective is to see the birth of a United States of Africa that is rich, peaceful and secure.
In 1999 and up to the establishment of the Union in Durban, South Africa, in 2002, many dismissed the whole idea of an African Union as unrealistic. But Qaddafi’s insistence, persistence and audacity and his strong belief in the future of a united, prosperous African continent, as well as his commitment to devote his country’s resources to serve such a noble cause, made the dream a reality.
During the African summit, Qaddafi praised the outgoing president of the AU, Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete, for his good management during his tenure and insisted that the chairman of the AU Commission, Jean Ping of Gabon, should keep his post as he has proven to be capable in running the day to day affairs of the Union.
The president of the African Union is a rotating position held by heads of state for one year. It gives the holder influence over the continent’s politics.
Qaddafi believes, with so many other leaders of Africa as well as millions of Africans in the Diaspora, that only a United States of Africa can tackle the long-term issues of poverty, disease, illiteracy and conflicts and make the continent a global powerhouse. He recognized, however, that there was much work to be done and that many of the African leaders are not in agreement as to where and how to start.
The new AU president is seen by the masses as an accomplished statesman in Africa who is seriously committed to serve the interests of the continent.
In his closing speech, Qaddafi made it clear that Libya, alone among oil- producing nations, has not lost money during the world financial crisis. “Libya has not lost a single dollar in this crisis. Libya has invested billions in Africa. We have not invested in America,” he emphasized.
Qaddafi praised the new American president and described Barack Hussein Obama’s accession to the White House as a victory against racism and urged the first Black U.S. president to lead his country boldly and with integrity. “The Black people’s struggle has made tremendous advances against racism in America. It was God who created color. Today President Obama, son of a Kenyan father, a true son of Africa, has made it in the United States of America,” he said.
“We hope he will be well protected, strong and unshakable. America doesn’t belong to the whites alone. I hope he will be able to accomplish the change that he carries in his spirit,” he added. In his Green Book, which he wrote over 30 years ago, Qaddafi was able to foresee that Blacks will prevail in the world. The election of a young energetic Black president of the most powerful nation on earth is clear proof that Muammar Qaddafi, a revolutionary thinker, was right.
Akbar Muhammad, who has had close ties to Muslim leaders Malcolm X, Minister Farrakhan and Imam W.D. Mohammed, has lived in Ghana for over a decade. He can be reached at Africandtheworld@msn.com. http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/qaddafi-elected-president-of-african-union-vows-to-push-for-united-states-of-africa/
The conflict in the Congo is a resource war waged by U.S. and British allies
A contextual analysis of the December 2008 U.N. report
by Kambale Musavuli
Heal Africa counselors in Goma support victims of sexual violence in Eastern Congo. – Photo: Harper McConnell, Heal Africa
Since Rwanda and Uganda invaded the Congo in 1996, they have pursued a plan to appropriate the wealth of Eastern Congo either directly or through proxy forces. The December 2008 United Nations report is the latest in a series of U.N. reports dating from 2001 that clearly documents the systematic looting and appropriation of Congolese resources by Rwanda and Uganda, two of Washington and London’s staunchest allies in Africa.
However, in the wake of the December 2008 report, which clearly documents Rwanda’s support of destabilizing proxy forces inside the Congo, a series of stunning proposals and actions have been presented which all appear to be an attempt to cover up or bury the damning U.N. report on the latest expression of Rwanda’s aggression against the Congolese people.
The earliest proposal came from Herman Cohen, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs under George Herbert Walker Bush. He proposed that Rwanda be rewarded for its well documented looting of Congo’s wealth by being a part of a Central and/or East African free trade zone whereby Rwanda would keep its ill-gotten gains.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy would not be outdone; he also brought his proposal off the shelf, which argues for essentially the same scheme of rewarding Rwanda for its 12-year war booty from the Congo. Two elements are at the core of both proposals.
One is the legitimization of the economic annexation of the Congo by Rwanda, which for all intents and purposes represents the status quo. And two is basically the laying of the foundation for the balkanization of the Congo or the outright political annexation of Eastern Congo by Rwanda. Both Sarkozy and Cohen have moved with lightning speed past the Dec. 12, 2008, United Nations report to make proposals that avoid the core issues revealed in the report.
The U.N. report reaffirms what Congolese intellectuals, scholars and victims have been saying for over a decade in regard to Rwanda’s role as the main catalyst for the biblical scale death and misery in the Congo. The Ugandan and Rwandan invasions of 1996 and 1998 have triggered the deaths of nearly 6 million Congolese. The United Nations says it is the deadliest conflict in the world since World War II.
The report “found evidence that the Rwandan authorities have been complicit in the recruitment of soldiers, including children, have facilitated the supply of military equipment, and have sent officers and units from the Rwandan Defense Forces” to the DRC. The support is for the National Congress for the Defense of the People, or CNDP, formerly led by self-proclaimed Gen. Laurent Nkunda.
The report also shows that the CNDP is sheltering a war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court, Gen. Jean Bosco Ntaganda. The CNDP has used Rwanda as a rear base for fundraising meetings and bank accounts, and Uganda is once more implicated as Nkunda has met regularly with embassies in both Kigali and Kampala.
Also, Uganda is accepting illegal CNDP immigration papers. Earlier U.N. reports said that Kagame and Museveni are the mafia dons of Congo’s exploitation. This has not changed in any substantive way.
The report implicates Tribert Rujugiro Ayabatwa, a close advisor to Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda. Rujugiro is the founder of the Rwandan Investment Group. This is not the first time he has been named by the United Nations as one of the individuals contributing to the conflict in the Congo.
In April 2001, he was identified as Tibere Rujigiro in the U.N. Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as one of the figures illegally exploiting Congo’s wealth. His implication this time comes in financial contributions to CNDP and appropriation of land.
This brings to light the organizations he is a part of, which include but are not limited to the Rwanda Development Board, the Rwandan Investment Group, of which he is the founder, and Kagame’s Presidential Advisory Council. They have members as notable as Rev. Rick Warren, business tycoon Joe Ritchie, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Scott Ford of Alltell, Dr. Clet Niyikiza of GlaxoSmithKline, former U.S. president Bill Clinton and many more.
These connections provide some insight into why Rwanda has been able to commit and support remarkable atrocities in the Congo without receiving even a reprimand in spite of the fact that two European courts, French and Spanish, have charged their top leadership with war crimes and crimes against humanity. (The Spanish court is the same court that ruled against Pinochet of Chile.) It is only recently that two European nations, Sweden and the Netherlands, have decided to withhold aid from Rwanda as a result of their aggression against the Congolese people.
The report shows that the Congolese soldiers have also given support to the FDLR and other armed groups to fight against the aggression of Rwanda’s CNDP proxy. One important distinction must be made in this regard. It appears that the FDLR support comes more from individual Congolese soldiers as opposed to overall government support.
The Congolese government is not supporting the FDLR in incursions into Rwanda; however, the Rwandan government is in fact supporting rebel groups inside Congo. The Congolese population is the victim of the CNDP, FDLR and the Congolese military.
The United Nations report is a predictable outgrowth of previous reports produced by the U.N. since 2001. It reflects the continued appropriation of the land, theft of Congo’s resources, and continuous human rights abuses caused by Rwanda and Uganda. An apparent aim of these spasms is to create facts on the ground - land appropriation, theft of cattle and other assets - to consolidate CNDP/Rwandan economic integration into Rwanda.
The Congolese government is not supporting the FDLR in incursions into Rwanda; however, the Rwandan government is in fact supporting rebel groups inside Congo. The Congolese population is the victim of the CNDP, FDLR and the Congolese military.
Herman Cohen’s “Can Africa Trade Its Way to Peace?” in the New York Times reflects the disastrous policies that favor profits over people. In his article, the former lobbyist for Mobutu and Kabila’s government in the United States and former assistant secretary of state for Africa from 1989 to 1993 argues, “Having controlled the Kivu provinces for 12 years, Rwanda will not relinquish access to resources that constitute a significant percentage of its gross national product.”
He adds, “The normal flow of trade from eastern Congo is to Indian Ocean ports rather than the Atlantic Ocean, which is more than a thousand miles away.” Continuing his argument, he believes that “the free movement of people would empty the refugee camps and would allow the densely populated countries of Rwanda and Burundi to supply needed labor to Congo and Tanzania.”
Cohen’s first mistake in providing solutions to the conflict is to look at the conflict as a humanitarian crisis that can be solved by economic means. Uganda and Rwanda are the aggressors. Aggressors should not define for the Congo what is best, but rather it is for the Congo to define what it has to offer its neighbor.
A lasting solution is to stop the silent annexation of Eastern Congo. The International Court of Justice has already weighed in on this matter when it ruled in 2005 that Congo is entitled to $10 billion in reparations due to Uganda’s looting of Congo’s natural resources and the commission of human rights abuses in the Congo. It would have in all likelihood ruled in the same fashion against Rwanda; however, Rwanda claimed to be outside the jurisdiction of the court.
The United States and Great Britain’s implication is becoming very clear. These two great powers consider Rwanda and Uganda their staunch allies and, some would argue, client states. These two countries have received millions of dollars of military aid, which in turn they use in Congo to cause destruction and death.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame is a former student at the U.S. military training base Fort Leavenworth and Yoweri Museveni’s son, Lt. Gen. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, graduated from the same U.S. military college in the summer of 2008. Both the United States and Great Britain should follow the lead of the Dutch and Swedish governments, who have suspended their financial support to Rwanda.
With U.S. and British taxpayers’ support, we now see an estimated 6 million people dead in Congo, hundreds of thousands of women systematically raped as an instrument of war and millions displaced.
A political solution will resolve the crisis, and part of that requires pressure on Rwanda in spite of Rwanda’s recent so-called “house arrest” of Laurent Nkunda. African institutions such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union are primed to be more engaged in the Congo issue. Considering Congo’s importance to Africa, it is remarkable that they have been so anemic in regard to the Congo crisis for so long.
Rwanda’s leader, Paul Kagame, cannot feel as secure or be as arrogant as he has been in the past. One of his top aides was arrested in Germany as a result of warrants issued by a French court and there is almost global consensus that pressure must be put on him to cease his support of the destabilization of the Congo and its resultant humanitarian catastrophe.
In addition to pressure on Kagame, the global community should support the following policies:
1. Initiate an international tribunal on the Congo.
2. Work with the Congolese to implement a national reconciliation process; this could be a part of the international tribunal.
3. Work with the Congolese to assure that those who have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity are brought to justice.
4. Hold accountable corporations that are benefiting from the suffering and deaths in the Congo.
5. Make the resolution of the Congo crisis a top international priority.
Living is a right, not a privilege, and Congolese deaths must be honored by due process of the law. As the implication of the many parties in this conflict becomes clear, we should start firmly acknowledging that the conflict is a resource war waged by U.S. and British allies.
Living is a right, not a privilege, and Congolese deaths must be honored by due process of the law.
We call upon people of good will once again to advocate for the Congolese by following the prescriptions we have been outlining to end the conflict and start the new path to peace, harmony and an end to the exploitation of Congo’s wealth and devastation of its peoples.
Kambale Musavuli is spokesperson and student coordinator for Friends of the Congo. He can be reached at Kambale@friendsofthecongo.org. http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/the-conflict-in-the-congo-is-a-resource-war-waged-by-us-and-british-allies/
February 26, 2009
How we fuel Africa's worst war...
...and it's starting again
By Johnn hari / http://www.JohnnHari.com
The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again – and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in the Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a “tribal conflict” in “the Heart of Darkness.” It isn’t. The United Nations investigation found it was a war led by “armies of business” to seize the metals that make our twenty-first century society zing and bling. The war in Congo is a war about you.
Every day I think about the people I met in the warzones of Eastern Congo when I reported from there. The wards filled with women who had been gang-raped by the militias and shot in the vagina. The battalions of child soldiers – drugged, dazed thirteen year olds who had been made to kill members of their own families so they couldn’t try to escape and go home. But oddly, as I watch the war starting again on CNN, I find myself thinking about a woman I met who had, by Congolese standards, not suffered in extremis.
I was driving back to Goma from a diamond mine one day when my car got a puncture. As I waited for it to be fixed, I stood by the roadside and watched the great trails of women who stagger along every road in Eastern Congo, carrying all their belongings on their backs in mighty crippling heaps. I stopped a 27 year-old woman called Marie-Jean Bisimwa who had four little children toddling along beside her. She told me she was lucky. Yes, her village had been burned out. Yes, she had lost her husband somewhere in the chaos. Yes, her sister had been raped and gone insane. But she and her kids were alive.
I gave her a lift, and it was only after a few hours of chat along on cratered roads that I noticed there was something strange about Marie-Jean’s children. They were slumped forward, their gazes fixed in front of them. They didn’t look around, or speak, or smile. “I haven’t ever been able to feed them,” she said. “Because of the war.” Their brains hadn’t developed; they never would now. “Will they get better?” she asked. I left her in a village on the outskirts of Goma, and her kids stumbled after her, expressionless.
There are two stories about how this war began – the official story, and the true story. The official story is that after the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu mass murderers fled across the border into Congo. The Rwandan government chased after them. But it’s a lie. How do we know? The Rwandan government didn’t go to where the Hutu genocidaires were; not at first. They went to where Congo’s natural resources were – and began to pillage them. They even told their troops to work with any Hutus they came across. Congo is the richest country in the world for gold, diamonds, coltan, cassiterite, and more. Everybody wanted a slice – so six other countries invaded.
These resources were not being stolen to be used in Africa. They were being seized so they could be sold on to us. The more we bought, the more the invaders stole – and slaughtered.
The rise of mobile phones caused a surge in deaths, because the coltan they contain is found primarily in Congo.
The UN named the international corporations it believed were involved: Anglo-America, Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers and more than 100 others. (They all deny the charges). But instead of stopping these corporations, our governments demanded the UN stop criticising them.
There were times when the fighting flagged. In 2003, a peace deal was finally brokered by the UN, and the international armies withdrew. Many continued to work via proxy militias – but the carnage waned somewhat. Until now. As with the first war, there is a cover-story, and the truth. A Congolese militia leader called Laurent Nkunda – backed by Rwanda – claims he needs to protect the local Tutsi population from the same Hutu genocidaires who have been hiding out in the jungles of Eastern Congo since 1994. That’s why he is seizing Congolese military bases and is poised to march on Goma.
It is a lie. Francois Grignon, Africa Director of the International Crisis Group, tells me the truth: “Nkunda is being funded by Rwandan businessmen so they can retain control of the mines in North Kivu. This is the absolute core of the conflict. What we are seeing now is the beneficiaries of the illegal war economy fighting to maintain their right to exploit.” At the moment, Rwandan business interests make a fortune from the mines they illegally seized during the war. The global coltan price has collapsed, so now they focus hungrily on cassiterite, which is used to make tin cans and other consumer disposables. As the war began to wane, they faced slowly losing their control to the elected Congolese government – so they have given it another bloody kick-start.
Yet the debate about Congo in the West – when it exists at all – focuses on our inability to provide a decent bandage, without mentioning that we are causing the wound. It’s true the 17,000 UN forces in the country are abysmally failing to protect the civilian population, and urgently need to be super-charged. But it is even more important to stop fuelling the war in the first place by buying blood-soaked natural resources. Nkunda only has enough guns and grenades to take on the Congolese army and the UN because we buy his loot. We need to prosecute the corporations buying them for abetting Crimes Against Humanity, and introduce of a global coltan-tax to pay for a substantial peace-keeping force. To get there, we need to build an international system that values the lives of black people more than it values profit.
Somewhere out there – lost in the great global heist of Congo’s resources – are Marie-Jean and her children, limping along the road once more, carrying everything they own on their backs. They will probably never use a coltan-filled mobile phone, a cassiterite-smelted can of beans, or a gold necklace – but they may yet die for one.
Johann Hari is an award-winning journalist who writes twice-weekly for the Independent, one of Britain's leading newspapers, and the Huffington Post. He also writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, The New Republic, El Mundo, The Guardian, The Melbourne Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, South Africa's Star, The Irish Times, and a wide range of other international newspapers and magazines.
You Are Being Lied To About Pirates
Behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal
By Johann Hari / http://www.JohannHari.com
Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as "one of the great menaces of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often saved from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains Of All Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence.
If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked often, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century".
They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy." This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."
This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".
No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas." William Scott would understand.
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won't act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world's oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?
Johann Hari is an award-winning journalist who writes twice-weekly for the Independent, one of Britain's leading newspapers, and the Huffington Post. He also writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, The New Republic, El Mundo, The Guardian, The Melbourne Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, South Africa's Star, The Irish Times, and a wide range of other international newspapers and magazines.
Congo’s riches belong to the Congolese
by Kambale Musavuli
Speech delivered Jan. 17 in Raleigh, N.C.; videos follow
Rallying on the 48th anniversary of the U.S.-backed assassination of the great Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first freely elected prime minister, student leader Kambale Musavuli speaks in Raleigh, N.C., Jan. 17. – Photo: Peter Peyechu
Veiw Film: Can Anyone Save Congo?: The March - Part 1
This superbly produced film is the beginning of a journey into the hearts and the minds of the Congolese in America, as they Break the Silence and fight to SAVE CONGO! The filmmakers are Charles Vakala and Eric B. Ndelo, who also did the editing, of Divine Righteous Children. It transports us to the march and rally in Raleigh, N.C., on Jan. 17, the 48th anniversary of the U.S.-backed assassination of one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century, Patrice Lumumba.
Forty-eight years ago, on this 17th day of January, the first freely elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Patrice Emery Lumumba, was brutally murdered by the United States, Belgium and certain local elites because he wanted the resources of the Congo to benefit the Congolese people. He, as a public servant to his people, fought day in and day out to bring the Congolese people independence from Belgium.
On this day we commemorate him, we need to always remember that he gave his life for us to have a better future than he had. His legacy lives and his bullet-proof ideas still resonate in our generation. As I speak to you today, the underlying reason of his murder still remains the central question for the conflict in the Congo since 1996: The underlying issue is who is going to control Congo’s wealth and for whose benefit.
To those of you who may not know what is taking place in the Congo, I would like to tell you that Congo is bleeding and dying a thousand deaths. The Congo is the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today, where nearly 6 million people have died since 1996 - half of them children under the age of 5 - and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, all as a result of the scramble for Congo’s wealth.
The United Nations says it is the deadliest conflict in the world since World War II. Yet, Doctors Without Borders say that it is one of the most under-reported stories of our time. The media is silent, the government is silent and the world is silent.
Why is the world silent? “A time comes when silence is betrayal,” says Dr. Martin Luther King. He goes on to say, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It is a scar on the human conscience to know what is happening in the Congo and do nothing about it.
It is up to all of us to help the children of the Congo who live in a refugee camp for months, sometimes years, just because the world needs the resources of the Congo. As Che Guevara stated years ago, “The Congo problem is a world problem.”
As Gaza receives the media attention due to the unthinkable tragedy taking place there, we shall not forget that immeasurable tragedies are taking place in the Congo - with 45,000 people dying every month just for the blings of our lives and the rings of our phones.
What can we all do to work with our brave brothers and sisters in the Congo waging a fight for peace and human dignity?
In the Congo, 45,000 people are dying every month just for the blings of our lives and the rings of our phones.
I will start with you, my Congolese brothers, sisters and elders. I want you to remember what Lumumba said before his death in his last letter to his wife, “that the future of the Congo is beautiful and that it expects for each Congolese to accomplish the sacred task of reconstruction of our independence and our sovereignty; for without dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men.” A greater sacrifice on the part of Congolese is needed for the sons and daughters of the Congo.
Patrice Lumumba in Stanleyville, May 1960
What sacrifices are we willing to make so that our brothers and sisters in Congo can live peacefully as we do in America? What kind of sacrifices are we making so that our Congolese children can go to school as they do here, so that our young mothers are not widowed, so that our sisters are not raped, so that our brothers are not joining militias because there is no better option, so that people do not go hungry in the most fertile land in Africa? What sacrifices are we willing to make so that our Congolese families can live in dignity, as we do here? WHAT SACRIFICE ARE WE MAKING!
We are the ones who will rebuild our beautiful country. We need you in every sector of life. The world will help us, but they won’t fight for our country. The world would put pressure on their governments but will not elect our leaders in 2011. The world will advocate for us but will not reform our political system for us.
We must sacrifice our time to the Congo, our life if necessary. Some of us are Congolese Americans and should pressure the American government by lobbying day in and day out to alleviate the suffering of our brothers and sisters at home. Some of us work for hospitals and could help in sending medical supplies to many clinics that need it at home. Some even own companies, and they could help in any way possible.
Our people on the ground need your help. Always remember our origin. They can take you out of the Congo, but they cannot take Congo out of you. We need to support our people at home. The future of the Congo is bright, as I can see in the eyes of students and people I meet all over the country.
Fifth graders at Kipp DC: Will Academy, a middle school in Washington, D.C., raised $800 in one day for the movement after a presentation about the conflict taking place in the Congo. The Avonside Girls’ High School students mobilized their whole school to join the international cell-out (cell phone usage boycott) and had a public relations firm help them to get the word out on the war in Congo in their community.
Not to forget my beloved Aggies, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University students, who went around the campus and collected 1,200 student signatures and the endorsement of more than 40 student organizations’ presidents so that our university would join the Break the Silence Movement and receive an official letter of recognition from the chancellor of the university.
Through all my travels, I’ve met so many compassionate people from all races and faiths. And all of them were ready to support the Congolese people. To all of you who are here on this cold day, remember that Congo needs you. As Dr. King explained: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
The forces against the Congo are tremendous. We want you to join the global movement to break the silence around the atrocities taking place in the Congo. We hope that this new wind can be TODAY what the Free South Africa movement was yesterday. Bring your talents, your ideas, your skills to help us support the Congolese people.
Call your local leaders, radio stations, inform your professors in your universities, talk with Congolese as they try to find healing from this suffering. Let people in your network know about the Congo.
Just imagine Congo’s spectacular potential, which ranges from its fauna and flora to its untapped reserves of resources. It is a storehouse of strategic minerals we use in our daily lives. Sixty-four percent of the world’s reserves of coltan are found in the Congo. It is a part of the second largest rainforest in the world behind the Amazon. It has the hydro capacity to provide electricity for the entire African continent, southern Europe and parts of the Middle East. It could feed the entire world through 2050.
Did you know that the oldest mathematical artifact was found in the Congo? It is called the Ishango bones and is about 22,000 years old.
All the potential of the Congo can be realized with unity, dedication and the submission of individual and personal aspirations to the collective will. We ask that you BREAK THE SILENCE in your daily lives and support us in our quest to bring about fundamental changes in the Congo.
Lumumba stated, “We are not alone. Africa, Asia and free and liberated people from every corner of the world will always be found at the side of the Congolese.” I hope you will stay engaged in our quest to bring peace and stability in our Congo and finally start rebuilding our country and help it rise like a phoenix.
When the Congo won independence in 1960, Lumumba pointed the way: “Together, my brothers, my sisters, we are going to begin a new struggle, a sublime struggle, which will lead our country to peace, prosperity and greatness.”
Thank you, God bless you, God bless the Congo!
Kambale Musavuli is spokesperson and student coordinator for Friends of the Congo. He can be reached at Kambale@friendsofthecongo.org. Call 1-888-584-6510 or visit CongoWeek.org to arrange for the Break the Silence Spring Speakers Tour to come to your community - your university, high school, organization, labor union or business group. Become a Friend of the Congo at FriendsoftheCongo.org.
January 30, 2009
Congo: One hundred years of colonialism, dictatorship and war (1908-2008)
by Kambale Musavuli and Maurice Carney
http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/congo-one-hundred-years-of-colonialism-dictatorship-and-war-1908-2008/
Congo's holocaust by Khalil Bendib
2008 marked the 100-year anniversary of the removal of the Congo from King Leopold II of Belgium as his own personal property. Global outrage at the King’s brutal rule resulted in his losing the Congo treasure trove on Nov. 15, 1908.
Leopold II accumulated spectacular wealth for himself and the Belgian state during his 23-year dominion (1885-1908) over the Congo. During this period, an estimated 10 million Congolese lost their lives while Leopold systematically looted the Congo of its rubber and ivory riches. Congo was then handed over to Belgium, which ruled as a colonial power from 1908 to 1960.
Congo finally got its independence on June 30, 1960, when Patrice Emery Lumumba, its first democratically elected prime minister took office. Unfortunately, the Western powers, primarily the United States and Belgium, could not allow a fiercely independent African to consolidate his power over such a geo-strategic prize as the Congo. Lumumba was removed from power in a Western-backed coup within weeks and assassinated on Jan. 17, 1961.
Belgium apologized for its role in Lumumba’s assassination in 2002, yet the U.S. still downplays its role in murdering this great young leader. The U.S. replaced Lumumba with the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and backed him until he was overthrown in 1997.
The overthrow of Mobutu unleashed an ongoing resource war that has caused deep strife and unbearable suffering for the Congolese people, particularly the women and the children. It is estimated that nearly 6 million Congolese have been killed since the 1996 invasion by Rwanda and Uganda with support from the United States and other Western nations.
A century later, Congo is at another crossroads. In spite of the advances in technology and the shrinking of the world, it is curious that there is such silence around the suffering of the Congolese people due to the exploitation of powerful corporate and foreign forces beyond its people’s immediate control. Unlike the early 1900s, remarkably, today there are few if any voices the likes of Mark Twain, who wrote “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness” (often misread as Congo or Africa being dark, but he was referring to the dark hearts of the exploiters of the Congo), and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame, who wrote “Crime in the Congo.”
The Congo Reform movement that drew from the work of African Americans such as William Sheppard and George Washington Williams and led by European figures such as Robert Casement and E.D. Morel gave birth to the modern international human rights movement.
One hundred years later we are again calling on the global community to be at the side of the Congolese. This time, there is one fundamental difference: The Congolese are agents in this narrative and the call this time is not for a handover to a colonial power or neo-colonial institutions but rather to the people of the Congo.
The clarion call is for combating the forces - local elites and rebels, foreign governments, foreign corporations and multi-lateral institutions - that have the Congolese people in a death trap. The charity prism of the humanitarian industry is not the answer. It only perpetuates dependency and dis-empowerment.
Should Congo be truly liberated, the Darfurizaton (emptying of agency from the afflicted people) of the global movement in support of the Congo must be avoided at all costs. Congolese must be agents rather than objects in the pursuit of the control of their land and their lives.
The sovereignty of the people and control and ownership of the riches of their land is the fundamental human right for which we must advocate. It is a call not only for the Congo but the entire African continent.
Become a part of the global movement to “Break the Silence” as the Congolese pursue true sovereignty and liberty.
Maurice Carney is executive director and Kambale Musavuli is student coordinator of Friends of the Congo, 1629 K St. NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20006, (202) 584-6512, info@friendsofthecongo.org, www.friendsofthecongo.org. Friends of the Congo is led by people of African ancestry and others of goodwill. With strong support from friends of the Congo throughout the globe, the vast human and natural resource potential of the Democratic Republic of Congo can serve as an instrument to meet the great needs of the people of Congo and Africa.
December 31, 2008
White couple, black man battle for claim to South Africa farm
White couple, black man battle for claim to South Africa farm
Their colliding dreams reflect the challenge the government faces in restoring land to blacks without driving whites off productive farms and destroying the country's economy.
By Scott Kraft
December 19, 2008 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-southafrica19-2008dec19,0,1671924.story?page=1
Reporting from Middelburg, South Africa -- Like so many corporate executives, Ed Meyer dreamed of retiring to the countryside. And so, seven years ago, he and his wife, Sally, left Cape Town to settle on the 3,500-acre ranch that had been in Ed's family since 1916.
It's not hard to see what fueled the dream. Their Cape Dutch-style farmhouse, all curved gables and whitewashed walls, is perched on rust-colored savanna, dusted with the scent of 50 species of blooming aloe. The view from their lawn is an oil painting of gentle hills, puffy clouds and long shadows.
"This is such a beautiful, tranquil valley," Ed says, digging into a lunch of kudu pie, hot from Sally's oven. The kudu was a gift; the antelope "was encroaching on our neighbor's fruit trees."
But their peaceful retirement was interrupted a little over a year ago when Andries Mahlungu, a gardener in nearby Marble Hall, said the farm belonged to him. In a formal claim with the government, he contended that his ancestors were there first.
Now the white couple and the black man are locked in a battle over the farm -- and, in a sense, over the past and future of South Africa.
The legal pillars of white minority rule came tumbling down with South Africa's first democratic elections almost 15 years ago, and the oldest of those laws was the Natives Land Act, which had severely restricted black land ownership since 1913.
The challenge that the new black-majority government faced was how to restore land to blacks, in a legal and orderly way, without creating a panic that would drive whites off productive farms and destroy the country's economy -- a scenario that was soon to strangle neighboring Zimbabwe.
The solution the government came up with was to create a Commission on Restitution of Land Rights to adjudicate land claims and, when valid, compensate the current owners. So far, the commission has settled about 75,000 of 80,000 claims, returning hundreds of thousands of acres to blacks and paying white farmers market rates that have totaled more than $2 billion.
With the deadline for filing claims now past, the government has pledged to settle the 5,000 outstanding claims in the next two years. But the commission is running short of money, and many of the remaining claims, like Mahlungu's against the Meyers' property, are being hotly contested.
All across post-colonial Africa, governments have struggled to correct past injustices, with mixed results. In Zimbabwe, violent land seizures have driven away white farmers and sent the economy into a tailspin of mind-boggling inflation and catastrophic food shortages.
The South African government vowed to carefully investigate land claims and provide fair compensation to white farmers. Many of the country's 40,000 white farmers willingly sold their property.
Even so, the effect on the country's agricultural economy has not been overwhelmingly positive. Whereas the global trend is toward larger, more commercially successful farms, South Africa is breaking many of its large farms into smaller, less economically efficient pieces to meet the claims of new black farmers.
Partly as a result, South Africa in the last year has gone from a net exporter of food to a net importer. And, in another worrying trend, some of the whites who sold their farms have been recruited by other African countries, where their skills are much in demand. Now once-impoverished countries such as Mozambique are becoming more self-sufficient -- and taking a share of South Africa's export market.
Piet Kemp is the regional manager for the Transvaal Agricultural Union, which represents mostly white farmers in the province that includes the Meyer farm. He is skeptical of many of the land claims.
"You have a family that has farmed for 150 years and then you have a guy who worked on the farm for 12 or 15 years suddenly making a claim," he says. "It's not right. But in the end, many farmers don't want to fight, so they sell."
In some cases, whites have sold their farms without a fight because a neighboring property was divided into small pieces for multiple black owners; Kemp says the whites felt it would be too difficult to run their farm "next to a squatter camp." In other cases, farmers have agreed to sell but the government has been slow to finalize the purchase.
"Much of the farming has come to a complete stop," Kemp says. "In the end, we'll be the same as Zimbabwe."
Molefe Pulane, a spokeswoman for the national land claims office, acknowledges that the process is slow, hobbled in part by a corruption scandal at the Land Bank, which provides money for the purchases. "It's not going well," she says. "There are some problems, and we're addressing them."
But the land rights commission maintains that the country's redistribution of land is playing an important role in alleviating poverty and allowing the black majority, who outnumber whites 8 to 1, to fully participate in the country's economy.
"Everyone has got an obligation to ensure that there is restorative justice for those who suffered the loss of their rights to land in the country of their birth," the commission said in a recent statement. "It cannot be business as usual until all the victims are compensated for their loss."
Continue reading "White couple, black man battle for claim to South Africa farm" »
In Kenya, land is the root of most problems
In Kenya, land is the root of most problems
Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP/Getty Images
In western Kenya, Masai warriors gather in a battle field armed with bows and arrows as they clash with members of the Kalenjin tribe in the Transmara district in March. As the East African nation struggles with food shortages, a sluggish economy and wounds from post-election violence, there’s a growing consensus that one issue rests at the heart of Kenya’s woes: land.
Kenya's land is owned mostly by politicians who grabbed millions of acres in questionable deals over the last 45 years. Above, Masai warriors with bows and arrows clash with a rival tribe in a postelection land dispute in March. Now the new lands minister has an ambitious redistribution plan.
Edmund Sanders
December 20, 2008
Reporting from Limuru, Kenya -- Africa's Land Battles:
the second of two parts
From his tented refugee camp, James Karanga Ngugi seethed as he scanned a vast horizon of fallow, unoccupied land -- most of it owned by two of Kenya's most prominent political families.
"Why do they have so much and I have nothing?" he asked.
His grandfather once prospered here, before he was displaced by British colonialists. After independence, villagers regained control, but were soon forced out again, this time by a rich Kenyan businessman with ties to the president.
As compensation, Ngugi received 10 acres of land about 100 miles away, but residents there, from a different tribe, always resented his presence. During the election turmoil late last year and early this year that grabbed headlines worldwide, his house and business were burned down.
"Now I have to restart with nothing," he said.
As this East African nation struggles with food shortages, a sluggish economy and wounds from post-election violence, there's a growing consensus that one issue rests at the heart of Kenya's woes.
It's the land, stupid.
All across Africa, battles over land continue to simmer, largely a fallout of European colonialism. During most of Africa's history, sparse population and tribal traditions meant land was plentiful and disputes were rare. Colonialists introduced alien concepts such as borders and private ownership. Since independence began to sweep the continent 50 years ago, fledgling African governments have struggled to unwind injustices, sometimes with disastrous results. The Zimbabwean economy was devastated by President Robert Mugabe's campaign to seize and redistribute land owned by white farmers.
Kenya suffered a similar colonial legacy, but has taken a different route. As is the case in many African nations, more than half of Kenya's land is owned by a minority of its richest families, including some white foreigners. But unlike Zimbabwe and South Africa, where the struggle has pitted whites against blacks, the land here is owned mostly by Kenyan politicians who have grabbed millions of prime agricultural acres in questionable real estate deals over the last 45 years.
"This is really an issue between us as Kenyans," said Paul Ndungu, head of a landmark 2004 report that investigated more than 40 years of land fraud. "It's Kenyan versus Kenyan."
Tribal clashes that killed more than 1,000 people after the disputed presidential election last December, were rooted largely in historic disputes over land. As Kenya struggles to feed its people, vast swaths of its most productive terrain sit idle and underutilized -- and the land grievances remain unresolved.
"Peace, tranquillity and stability in Kenya is predicated on sorting out this land issue," said Odenda Lumumba, head of the Kenya Land Alliance, a land-reform advocacy group.
Newly installed Lands Minister James Orengo, a former student activist who was once jailed for aiding a 1982 coup attempt, has vowed to take on Kenya's rich and powerful with a progressive new land policy.
Among other things, he wants to reclaim stolen public lands, bar foreigners from owning property, introduce taxation on idle land and increase squatters' rights.
Orengo also is pushing to computerize Kenya's aging system of land records, which hasn't changed since colonial times. Paper records have made forgery and corruption easier. When one shady developer was investigated recently, police believe he covered his tracks by burning down the local survey office where records were stored.
Opposition is quickly building. Critics have dubbed Orengo the "doyen of radicalism." One group of landowners said his "Marxist ideologies" would lead to a "Zimbabwe-style economic meltdown."
But Orengo's biggest obstacle probably will come from within the government. Members of the political elite have been the nation's biggest land grabbers over the decades, which is why Kenya never pursued land reform and redistribution, as other African nations did, experts say. Many of those leaders remain in power.
"The people responsible for this mess still find themselves in government and they've used their influence to delay [reform]," Ndungu said.
Continue reading "In Kenya, land is the root of most problems" »
Merchants of death: Exposing the corporate-financed holocaust in Africa
Merchants of death: Exposing the corporate-financed holocaust in Africa
by 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.
Rape is used as a systematic means of instilling terror in the people all over DRC. Bebiche, 20, fled eastern Congo and crossed the country on foot to find some refuge in western Congo. Countless women and girls in DRC have no options for existence but to pursue survival sex. – Photo: Keith Harmon Snow
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 lie 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-47s 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 tribes. But the real story is not quite so black and white. Or is it?
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.
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 Kivu 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
Congolese men in South Kivu, falsely accused of being FDLR militia from Rwanda, are brutalized and detained by FARDC. – Photo: © 2007 Keith Harmon Snow
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 Desiré 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 Gen. 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 Gen. 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” who “fled Rwanda after committing genocide” there. This is how millions of innocent Hutu people - comprising over 85 percent 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 FDLR 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 Gen. 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 Gen. 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, Nov. 18, 2008). 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 Col. Ntasibanga and the commander of the FDLR is Col. 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.” She in fact works for Richard Leakey’s organization, Wildlife Direct, a shady paramilitary entity involving Walter Kansteiner.
A little matter of genocide
This woman died and the world press took no notice. “God help us if we have become so numb as to ignore even one death,” says writer Georgianne Nienaber. – Photo: © 2007 Keith Harmon Snow
The international arrest warrants issued by Spain and France against some 40 former RPF/A and current Rwanda Defense Force (RDF) members 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, who 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.[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 Desiré Kabila exemplifies the embraceable Black leader transformed almost overnight into the unembraceable Black fall guy. In the end, a bullet dispatched Laurent Kabila on Jan. 16, 2001, exactly 40 years after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (Jan. 17, 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 advisors and 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.[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 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 Zaniand 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, Col. 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 15 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 Co. 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 Nkunda’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
FDLR "genocidaires” – children with guns – in eastern DRC
“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 (internally displaced people) 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 Sept. 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]
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.
Petroleum companies that have recently emerged and are 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 Générale - 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 to 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.[33] [34]
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.[38] The 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.[39]
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.[40] 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.[41] 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.[42]
The mass media and foreign policy discourses are saturated with the writings, op-eds and policy briefs of “experts” who 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.[43] This propaganda is unassailable by Western “news” consumers, because consumers are not otherwise privy to, interested in or compelled to discover the deeper truths.
‘Raise Hope for Congo’ initiative
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 grassroots 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 Oct. 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.[44]
Western propaganda campaigns proscribe ideas and possibilities, and they subvert popular movements. The voices of the voiceless are crushed, along with their bodies.
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.[45] Similarly, the Pentagon seconded its lawyers from the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps 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.[46]
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 Co., 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.”[47]
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.[48]
Sen. 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.[49] 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 “grassroots” 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 Corp. 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.[50] ICG director Zbigniew Brzezinski is an advisor to President-elect Barack Obama.
In July 2008, Sen. 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 …”[51]
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.[52] 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.[53]
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.[54] 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.”[55] British soldiers stationed in Kisangani said the American fusion cell “monitors intelligence on tantalum extraction.”
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.
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.[56] [57]
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.[58]
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 $1 billion a year occupation of Congo.[59]
“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.”[60]
Congolese sources everywhere confirm the widespread involvement of MONUC [U.N.] soldiers in guns-for-minerals swaps and sexual violence.
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.[61]
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.[62]
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.”[63]
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 Gen. 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).”[64]
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.”[65]
“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.”[66]
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.[67]
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 northeast 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, Texas, insider; and an Israeli military agent identified as David Agnon.[68] Kilo Moto’s gold, then as now, usually exited Congo (Zaire) through remote airstrips.[69]
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.[70] Ken Overseas Co. 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.[71]
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.
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.[72]
The balkanization of Congo appears to be a major objective behind the current organized chaos in the Great Lakes region.[73] 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.[74] 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.[75]
Kansteiner is a director of the precious metal firm Titanium Resources Group, a company deeply tied to Sierra Rutile Ltd., a firm pivotal to the bloodshed in Sierra Leone.[76] 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.[77] 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.[78]
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.”[79]
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 be 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. Gen. 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.
The children of the Congo need us to call out the merchants of death and leave the wealth of the Congo for the Congolese people. - Photo: foto_morgana
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 Dec. 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.[80] 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.[81] 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.[82]
Notes
[1] There are exceptions to the rule, including the extensive publications by this author and those by Africa researcher David Barouski. See, e.g., David Barouski, “Mining in the Ituri Province of the Congo: A Contemporary Profile,” Z-Net, April 15, 2008; and David Barouski, “Laurent Nkundabatware, His Rwandan Allies, and the ex-ANC Mutiny: Chronic Barriers to Lasting Peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Feb. 13, 2007.
[2] Wayne Madsen, “Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999,” Mellon Books, 1999.
[3] Investigations into the 1994 events in Rwanda and documents presented at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda reveal a huge body of evidence supporting what soon become obvious conclusions.
[4] Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski, “Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in Congo,” Z Magazine, March 1, 2006; and Human Rights Watch, “The Curse of Gold,” June 1, 2005.
[5] See Keith Harmon Snow, “Gertler’s Bling Bang Torah Gang,” Dissident Voice, Feb. 9, 2008.
[6] Private investigations, North Kivu, DRC, 2005-2007, and private communications, 2008.
[7] Private communications, July through November 2008.
[8] See Wayne Madsen, “Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999,” Mellon Books, 1999; and Keith Harmon Snow, “Darfurism, Uganda and U.S. War in Africa: The Spectre of Continental Genocide,” Dissident Voice, Nov. 24, 2007; private interviews, eyewitnesses working in western Uganda at the time, October 2007.
[9] The Acholi people - non-combatant men, but mostly women and children - have suffered decades of genocidal treatment by UPDF soldiers deployed by Yoweri Museveni, president in Uganda, and top military commanders Gen. James Kazini, Gen. Salim Saleh, Gen. Kahinda Otafiir, Gen. Aronda Nyakairima, Lt. Gen. Katumba Wamala, Maj. Gen. Jim Owoyesigire and Brig. Gen. Robert Rusoke.
[10] Private interview, eyewitness working in western Uganda at the time, October 2007; see also Wayne Madsen, “Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999,” Mellon Books, 1999.
[11] Howard French, “A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa,” Vintage, April 2005.
[12] Mahmood Mamdani, “Understanding the Crisis in Kivu: Report of the CODESRIA Mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo September, 1997,” Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, Nov. 20, 1998, http://hrp.bard.edu/resource_pdfs/mamdani.kivu.pdf.
[13] “ZAIRE: Peace Possible?” interview with Bill Richardson, PBS Online News Hour, May 9, 1997, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/africa/may97/zaire_5-9.html.
[14] Friends of Rwanda advisory board: http://www.friendsofrwanda.com/foractivity/.
[15] “A Brief Profile of Joe Ritchie,” The New Times, Nov. 26, 2008, http://www.newtimes.co.rw/index.php?issue=13707&article=10610.
[16] Marc Kaufman and Robert E. Pierre, “Rich Brothers Mission to Save Afghanistan Stirs Suspicions,” Washington Post News Service, International Herald Tribune On-Line, Nov. 9, 2001, http://www.uni-muenster.de/PeaCon/global-texte/g-notes/IHT%20RichBrothersMission-IHT.htm.
[17] Quotes are used because the “genocide” label and realities on the ground are highly contested.
[18] Moto Gold Mines website: http://www.motogoldmines.com/board_of_directors.9.html.
[19] Private interviews, Bunia, Kisangani and Zani, DRC, March 26-28, 2007; and Mwana Africa presentation, 30th Minesite Mining Forum, March 28, 2006: http://www.mwanaafrica.com/ir/files/presentations/2006/minesite_mar06.pdf.
[20] Mwana Africa presentation, 30th Minesite Mining Forum, March 28, 2006: http://www.mwanaafrica.com/ir/files/presentations/2006/minesite_mar06.pdf.
[21] See Keith Harmon Snow, “Northern Uganda: Hidden War, Massive Suffering: Another White People’s War for Oil,” Global Research, May 26, 2007.
[22] See Keith Harmon Snow, “Three Cheers for Eve Ensler? Propaganda, White Collar Crime and Sexual Atrocities in Eastern Congo,” Z-Net, Oct. 24, 2007.
[23] Jeffrey Gettleman, “Congo’s Riches, Looted by Renegade Troops,” New York Times, Nov. 18, 2008, p. 1, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/world/africa/16congo.html.
[24] See Keith Harmon Snow, “A People’s History of Congo’s Jean-Pierre Bemba,” Toward Freedom, Sept. 18, 2007.
[25] See Dr. Enoch (Helan) Page, “‘Black Male’ Imagery and Media Containment of African American Men,” American Anthropologist, March 1997, Vol. 99, No. 1, pp. 99-111.
[26] See, e.g., William K. Lietzau, http://www.defenselink.mil/news/May2003/d20030522liet.pdf.
[27] Interview with human rights investigator, Bunia, DRC, March 23, 2007.
[28] Private communications, Orientale, DRC, November
[29] Private interview, Aru official, Aru, DRC, March 26, 2007.
[30] See “An Industry Rebirth? Oil in the DRC,” Consultancy Africa Intelligence; and Tower Resources: http://www.towerresources.co.uk/corporate.html; H Oil and Minerals Ltd. website: www.hoilminerals.com.
[31] Tower Resources website: http://www.towerresources.co.uk/operations.html.
[32] Ken Silverstein, “The Arms Dealer Next Door: International billionaire, French prisoner, Angolan weapons broker, Arizona Republican. Who is Pierre Falcone?” In These Times, Dec. 22, 2001.
[33] Christopher Hitchens, “Childhood’s End,” Vanity Fair, January 20076, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/01/hitchens200601.
[34] After querying Vanity Fair editors with a story idea about war in Africa, the editors responded that Christopher Hitchens is their sole source correspondent on Africa.
[35] See Richard Bartholomew, “American Pastor Helps SPLA Battle LRA in Sudan,” Jan. 25, 2005, http://barthsnotes.wordpress.com/2006/01/25/american-pastor-helps-spla-battle-lra-in-sudan/; and Keith Harmon Snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia?” Global Research, Feb. 7, 2007, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20SN20070207&articleId=4717.
[36] Jo Becker, “Children as Weapons of War,” Human Rights Watch World Report 2004, Human Rights Watch, January 2004, http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k4/index.htm.
[37] Interviews with U.N. official in eastern DRC, August 2006 and February 2007. See also “U.S. asked to arrest Ugandan-American rebel Jongomoi Okidi-Olal - The real brain behind LRA leadership?” Xinhua, April 9, 2006, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-04/09/content_4402556.htm.
[38] Mwana Africa presentation, 30th Minesite Mining Forum, March 28, 2006, http://www.mwanaafrica.com/ir/files/presentations/2006/minesite_mar06.pdf.
[39] See Charles Onyango Obbo, “Soon the guns of Goma might be heard in Kampala,” Monitor On-Line, Nov. 19, 2008, http://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/11dd77ace1d4c3d0.
[40] Private interviews, Bunia and Kisangani, February and March 2007.
[41] The international rhino conservation programs at Garamba are reportedly somehow tied to the political interests of the opposition party in Zimbabwe; private interview, U.N. investigator, Kisangani, DRC 2007.
[42] See Keith Harmon Snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia?” Global Research, Feb. 7, 2007, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20SN20070207&articleId=4717.
[43] See Keith Harmon Snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia?” Global Research, Feb. 7, 2007, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20SN20070207&articleId=4717.
[44] “ICC calls for renewed efforts to arrest Joseph Kony,” RNW International Justice Desk, Oct. 6, 2008, http://www.rnw.nl/internationaljustice/icc/Uganda/081006-uganda-kony.
[45] Paul S. Reichler and Lawrence H. Martin. See “Public sitting held on Monday 18 April 2005, at 10 a.m., at the Peace Palace, President Shi presiding, in the case concerning Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo v. Uganda),” International Court of Justice, CR 2005/7, 2005
[46] Ralph G. Kershaw, “Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: International Justice According to Washington,” Covert Action Quarterly, No. 74, Fall 2002.
[47] Jeevan Vasagar, “Uganda hires PR agency to buff up its image,” The Guardian, May 21, 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/may/21/jeevanvasagar.
[48] See Wayne Madsen, “Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999,” Mellon Press, 1999.
[49] http://www.americanprogress.org/aboutus/staff/DaschleSenatorTom.html.
[50] Private interview with U.N. special investigator XXX XXX, Kisangani, DRC, 2006; investigations in Goma and Bukavu, DRC, 2005-2007.
[51] See “Senator Tom Daschle Leads Delegation in Rwanda,” Alston & Bird website, July 22, 2008, http://www.alston.com/firm/News/Detail.aspx?news=2612.
[52] Alston & Bird website: http://www.alston.com/firm/News/Detail.aspx?news=2612.
[53] Private interview with U.N. special investigator XXX XXX, Kisangani, DRC, 2006.
[54] Investigations of “American Intelligence Fusion Cell,” Kisangani, DRC, July 31, 2006.
[55] Investigations and interviews in Kisangani, DRC, 2006.
[56] Private interview with U.N. special investigator XXX XXX, Kisangani, DRC 2007.
[57] See “Silverback Cargo Freighters Rwanda,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, http://www.sipri.org/contents/armstrad/Air_Cargo_Operators/Silverback_Cargo_Freighters.html and Silverback Cargo Freighters website: http://www.silverbackcargo.com/inside.php?photo.
[58] Marianna Brungs, “EU: Coalition of Leaders Calls for EU Force in Congo,” Crisis Watch Press Release, Human Rights Watch, London, Nov. 27, 2008.
[59] Private interviews, Bunia, DRC, February and March 2007.
[60] Private interviews, Bunia, Aru and Zani, February 2007.
[61] Renzo Martens, “Enjoy Poverty,” International Documentary Festival, Amsterdam, http://idfa.nl/en/festival/schedule/film.aspx?id=781e5666-0d52-43d5-ba66-67c6815ce198.
[62] See Keith Harmon Snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia? The New, Old, Humanitarian Warfare in Africa,” Global Research, Feb. 7, 2007, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20SN20070207&articleId=4717.
[63] Kevin Funk and Steven Fake, “The Scramble for Africa: Darfur - Intervention and the USA,” Black Rose Books, 2008.
[64] René Lemarchand, “Scholarly Review: Rwanda: The State of Research,” November 2007, http://www.massviolence.org/Rwanda-The-State-of-Research?artpage=4.
[65] Private communication, Jean-Marie Higiro, Oct. 17, 2008.
[66] Paul Rusesabagina, “Rusesabagina responds to Rwanda government book on ‘Hotel Rwanda,’” EUX-TV (Brussels), April 12, 2008, http://eux.tv/article.aspx?articleId=20114.
[67] “More Than Humanitarianism: A Strategic U.S. Approach Toward Africa,” Council on Foreign Relations, Task Force Report No. 56, January 2006, http://www.cfr.org/publication/9302/#author.
[68] Private interview, keith harmon snow with OKIMO Company officials, Bunia, March 24, 2007.
[69] Private interview, Keith Harmon Snow with OKIMO Co. officials, Bunia, March 24, 2007.
[70] Legal Brief Today, July 27, 2006, http://www.legalbrief.co.za/article.php?story=2006072709081497; and “Local Companies in Scramble for DRC Oil,” Johannesburg Sunday Times, Aug. 18, 2008; and H Oil and Minerals Ltd. website: www.hoilminerals.com/index.php/news/entry/local_companies_in_scramble_for_drc_oil/.
[71] The others included the Groupe Van De Ghinste, Demimpex, Chanic and OSS; both OSS and Demimpex are De Moerloose companies. See “Report of the United Nations Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Also see Keith Harmon Snow, “Gertler’s Bling Bang Torah Gang,” Dissident Voice, Feb. 9, 2008; and Keith Harmon Snow, “Congo’s President Joseph Kabila: Dynasty or Travesty?” Toward Freedom, Nov. 13, 2007.
[72] “Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999,” United States 107th Congress, Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, First Session, May 17, 2001, comp. Centre for Research on Globalization: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD111A.html.
[73] “The U.S. (Under)mining Job of Africa,” http://cryptome.org/us-africa.wm.htm.
[74] See the King Kong series published by Keith Harmon Snow and Georgianne Nienaber, Op-Ed News, 2007 and 2008.
[75] Africa Wildlife Foundation, http://www.awf.org/section/about/trustees.
[76] Titanium Resources Group, http://titaniumresources.com/about-us/management-team.
[77] See Wayne Madsen, “Genocide and Covert Operations In Africa, 1993-1999,” Mellen Books, 1999.
[78] See Wayne Madsen, “Genocide and Covert Operations In Africa, 1993-1999,” Mellen Books, 1999.
[79] Mahmood Mamdani, “The New Humanitarian Order,” The Nation, Sept. 29, 2008, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080929/mamdani.
[80] Jeffrey Gettleman, “Rwanda Stirs Deadly Brew of Troubles in Congo,” New York Times, Dec. 3, 2008; and Jerome Delay, “Many of the most powerful people in Congo have close ties to Rwanda’s elite in Kigali,” New York Times, Dec. 3, 2008.
[81] See Roxanne Stasyszyn, “A World Playground: Congolese People Sacrificed for International Games and Profits,” Dissident Voice and Global Research, Nov. 8, 2008, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10848.
Keith Harmon Snow is a frequent contributor to Global Research, where this article first appeared. To learn more, visit his website, All Things Pass, and Friends of the Congo. He can be reached at keith.harmon.snow@gmail.com.
Hope Afloat for Congo
Somali woes: The perils of intervention
Somali woes: The perils of intervention
by Mumia Abu-Jamal
![Somali pirates – fishermen who have been forced out of their fishing grounds by foreigners – hijack the MV Faina on Sept. 24 in Somali waters. A Ukrainian cargo ship loaded with heavy weaponry, including 33 Russian-designed T-72 battle tanks, the Faina is still being held, for $35 million ransom, 89 days later. Newsweek quotes a leader of the pirates, interviewed by phone from the bridge of the Faina, who explains, “If we are forced to avoid fishing our waters, then those [commercial] ships are all our fish.”](http://www.sfbayview.com/wp-content/uploads/somali-pirates-hijack-mv-faina-092408-by-afp.jpg)
Somali pirates – fishermen who have been forced out of their fishing grounds by foreigners – hijack the MV Faina on Sept. 24 in Somali waters. A Ukrainian cargo ship loaded with heavy weaponry, including 33 Russian-designed T-72 battle tanks, the Faina is still being held, for $35 million ransom, 89 days later. Newsweek quotes a leader of the pirates, interviewed by phone from the bridge of the Faina, who explains, “If we are forced to avoid fishing our waters, then those [commercial] ships are all our fish.” – Photo: AFP
On the coastal outcrops of East Africa, in an area known as “the horn,” Somalia sits like a sentinel jutting into both the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
Although Somalis have recently been in the Western press because of a half-dozen sensational cases of piracy, the nation has a long and distinct history, centuries before the era of European colonialism.
As long ago as the 1400s, Somalis fought border wars with their western neighbor, Ethiopia. But like many African nations, interference by the West has meant disaster for the people.
Somalia was colonized by the French, the Italians and, later, the British, who split the country into separate territories. But throughout the colonization era, the people kept their language (Somali), their culture, their history and sense of Somali nationhood.
The MV Faina off Somalia’s Indian Ocean coast – Photo: AFP
In 2006, as part of the U.S. misguided “War on Terror,” the U.S. supported an Ethiopian invasion and occupation of Somalia that transformed a bad situation into a worse one. The occupation stirred up Somali nationalism, which strengthened hard-core Islamist forces, which have spearheaded Somali resistance against the Ethiopians.
Now comes word that the Ethiopians are rushing for the exits. By January 2009, they should be gone.
In the aftermath of this bloody, unpopular occupation has grown a deeply radicalized and militarized generation of youth that has no lived memory of schools, of peace or of communal well-being - only of war and strife.
When the U.S. supports proxy wars against nations it doesn’t like, it rarely reaps anything better than bitterness.
For the U.S., as one of the world’s richest countries, can often afford such expenses, but it doesn’t know the time or form of repayment.
Seven years ago, the U.S. experienced one form of repayment from an offshoot of the mujahadin army, which had forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan, growing stronger in men, money and material by the day.
If Sept. 11th has taught us anything, it should be that wars abroad can become strikes at home.
We’ve not heard the last of Somalia.
http://impoetryious.com/blog-mt7/mt.fcgi?mode=view&_type=entry&id=441&blog_id=1&saved_added=1
© Copyright 2008 Mumia Abu-Jamal. Read Mumia’s latest book, “We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party,” winner of the 2005 People’s Choice Award, available from South End Press, www.southendpress.org or (800) 533-8478. Keep updated by reading Action Alerts at www.mumia.org and www.moveorg.net. To download mp3s of Mumia’s commentaries, visit www.prisonradio.org or www.fsrn.org. For recent interviews with Mumia, visit www.blockreportradio.com. Encourage the media to publish and broadcast Mumia’s commentaries and interviews to inspire progressive movement and help call attention to his case. Send our brotha some love and light at: Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM 8335, SCI-Greene, 175 Progress Dr., Waynesburg PA 15370.
From Fanon to Africa, with love
From Fanon to Africa, with love
by Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.sfbayview.com/2008/from-fanon-to-africa-with-love/
President of the Congo Patrice Lumumba, shown here under arrest in December 1960, wrote in his last letter to his wife before his assassination: “We are not alone. Africa, Asia, and free and liberated people from every corner of the world will always be found at the side of the Congolese. They will not abandon the light until the day comes when there are no more colonizers and their mercenaries in our country. … History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach … Do not weep for me, my dear companion. I know that my country, which suffers so much, will know how to defend its independence and its liberty. Long live the Congo! Long live Africa!”As the economies of the West and East tumble, tremors may also be felt in African economies, as heightened food prices push populations to the breaking point of near starvation. In country after country the struggle for life becomes even harder, and it seems like leaders are more remote than ever.
Whenever I read of economic or ethnic strife in any part of Africa, I’m reminded of Dr. Frantz Fanon, the ethno-psychiatrist born in the Caribbean island of Martinique, who became a revolutionary, working on behalf of the Algerian Revolution, and writer of the masterpiece, “The Wretched of the Earth” (1966).
Fanon’s work was widely read on three continents and is still worthy of study, not least because the insightful thinker predicted how African rulers would rule if they didn’t unite the continent’s various peoples and failed to develop truly independent and socialist governing systems.
Many African post-colonial leaders, trained as they were in Eurocentric schools, sought to replicate such theories in African societies which could only result in disaster. Fanon is cutting when he describes the role of these Eurocentric African leaders who were attempting to recreate little pieces of Europe in their former colonies:
“In underdeveloped countries, we have seen that no true bourgeoisie exists; there is only a sort of little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it. This get-rich-quick middle class shows itself incapable of great ideas or of inventiveness. It remembers what it has read in European textbooks and imperceptibly it becomes not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature.”
When leaders were trained in capitalist colonizing economic theory, the most important lesson they learned was how to recreate colonialism, not to destroy it.
Many African nations have been riven by deadly and destructive ethnic clashes, such as Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Mauritania and beyond.
Fanon wrote in “Wretched” that the “national bourgeoisie … which has totally assimilated colonialist thought in its most corrupt form, takes over from the Europeans and establishes in the continent a racial philosophy which is extremely harmful for the future of Africa.”
Thus, long inculcated into the European practice of “divide and conquer,” African leaders exploit ethnic differences - so-called “tribalism” - to stir the pot between communities. So, Hutus fight Tutsis, Zulus fight Xhosas, Kalenjins fight Kikuyus and on and on, while communal unity seems like an unattainable mirage. While people think of their ethnic identities, few think of national identities, and fewer still think of what African unity really means.
Divided into clans, Africa remains ripe for the plucking by the new colonialists, who see it as a vast stealing ground, from which resources can be looted with relative ease.
Fanon foresaw this half a century ago. Nkrumah tried to organize against it. But, regrettably, we are where we are.
It is almost painful to read Fanon today, over 40 years after his publications (in English), so accurate and cutting is his analysis. Yet, the truth remains that many African states have Black presidents and prime ministers who preside over systems that are tied with a thousand chains to the old colonials powers, which continued under new management old exploitative relationships.
Indeed, in “Toward the African Revolution” (1967), Fanon wrote of the global significance of the imperialists’ murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected president of the Congo:
“Africa must understand … that there will not be one Africa that fights against colonialism and another that attempts to make arrangements with colonialism … Our mistake, the mistake we Africans made, was to have forgotten that the enemy never withdraws sincerely. He never understands. He capitulates, but he does not become converted. Our mistake is to have believed that the enemy had lost his combativeness and his harmfulness. If Lumumba is in the way, Lumumba disappears. Hesitation in murder has never characterized imperialism. Look at Ben M’hidi, look at Moumie, look at Lumumba. Our mistake is to have been slightly confused in what we did. It is a fact that in Africa, today, traitors exist. They should have been denounced and fought. The fact that this is hard after the magnificent dream of an Africa gathered together unto itself and subject to the same requirements of true independence does not alter facts. … Let us be sure never to forget it; the fate of all of us is at stake in the Congo.”
‘Our mistake is to have believed that the enemy had lost his combativeness and his harmfulness. If Lumumba is in the way, Lumumba disappears. … Let us be sure never to forget it; the fate of all of us is at stake in the Congo.’ - Frantz Fanon
In February and March, several African states had food riots - or should we say “hunger riots”? Some countries have sold staples at lower costs in special stores. Other countries have reached almost apocalyptic levels of hyperinflation where their currency is virtually worthless.
In general - at least as of several months ago - the following were equivalent to one U.S. dollar: in Algeria, 65 dinars; in Cote d’Ivoire, 420 francs; in Nigeria, 118 nairas; in Tanzania, 1,396 shillings; in Malawi, 140 kwacha. Only in one African country, Ghana, was its New Cedi equal to a dollar.
Half a century after most African states gained independence, and the continent is still a social, economic and political basket case. Fanon, if he were still alive, would weep.
© Copyright 2008 Mumia Abu-Jamal. Read Mumia’s latest book, “We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party,” winner of the 2005 People’s Choice Award, available from South End Press, or (800) 533-8478. Keep updated by reading Action Alerts at www.mumia.org and www.moveorg.net. To download mp3s of Mumia’s commentaries, visit www.prisonradio.org or www.fsrn.org. For recent interviews with Mumia, visit www.blockreportradio.com. Encourage the media to publish and broadcast Mumia’s commentaries and interviews to inspire progressive movement and help call attention to his case. Send our brotha some love and light at: Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM 8335, SCI-Greene, 175 Progress Dr., Waynesburg PA 15370.
Mugabe Under Siege As International Leaders Call for His Ouster
Mugabe Under Siege As International Leaders Call for His Ouster
The International leaders have voiced there concern over a growing political impasse in the Republic Zimbabwe, even as Mugabe remains defiant to share power. French President Nicholas Sarkosy, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Prime Minister Raila Odinga and the ANC Chairman Jacob Zuma have called for an urgent ouster of the Zimbabwean freedom fighter Robert Mugabe to salvage the nation once termed as the “breadbasket of Africa” from sliding into anarchy…
Archbishop Desmond Tutu says Mugabe must step down or be removed by force. African Union or the SADC would have the capacity to remove Mugabe, 84.
The South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe must step down or be removed by force.
“I think now that the world must say: ‘You have been responsible with your cohorts for gross violations, and you are going to face indictment in The Hague unless you step down’,” Tutu, a Nobel peace prize winner, told Dutch current affairs TV programme Nova.
Asked if Mugabe, who has been in power since independence from Britain in 1980, should be removed by force, Tutu said: “Yes, by force — if they say to him: step down, and he refuses, they must do so militarily.”
Desmond, is the continent’s leading voice against the former apartheid regime in South Africa, said the African Union or the Southern African Development Community (SADC) would have the capacity to remove Mugabe.
“He has destroyed a wonderful country. A country that used to be a bread basket — it has now become a basket case,” Tutu said.
Tutu’s comments came on the day Zimbabwe declared a national emergency to halt a cholera outbreak that has killed more than 560 people.
Once hailed as a model African democrat, Mugabe has become increasingly criticized, particularly in the West over a worsening political and economic crisis that critics blame on his policies.
In Kenya, Prime Minister Raila Odinga also fired salvo at the Zimbabwean leader terming his 28 year rule as a “vile dictatorship” that must be stopped by all means.
Like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Raila has called for the urgent deployment of African Union troops to end the humanitarian crisis.
“Crisis in Zimbabwe has reached a point where other African states should not turn a blind eye,” he said in a press statement at the Serena Hotel in Nairobi city.
The Prime Minister Raila Odinga, urged Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete, who is the AU chairman, to call an urgent Heads of state summit and send troops to Zimbabwe.
“The international community must respond to the call of the African people and help end this murderous reign of Mugabe.”
He supported the calls for the armed intervention to remove Mugabe from power, he said, “If AU has no troops, it must allow the UN to send forces to Zimbabwe to take control of the country and ensure flow of humanitarian assistance.”
The Kenyan Prime Minister also accused the South Africa Development Cooperation (SADC) which has been mandated by AU to mediate the Zimbabwe crisis, of acting without convictions or resolve.
Elsewhere, the European Union (EU) also joined calls for President Mugabe to step down or be removed from power as the crisis has become more severe. Mugabe blames Western sanctions for Zimbabwe’s collapse. Critics pile blame on his increasing authoritarian rule.
In Brussels, the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said, “I think the moment has arrived to put all the pressure for Mugabe to step down”
The French President, Nicolas Sarkosy, whose country holds the rotating EU Presidency said, “I say today, that the Zimbabwean leader must go. Zimbabwe has suffered enough”
The United States under the secretary of State and Britain have also voiced their concern for the ouster of the Zimbabwean leader.
Zimbabwe has the highest inflation rate in the world standing at 231,000,000 per cent. At least 600 people have died of cholera as health infrastructure collapses. The biting food shortage is exemplified by empty supermarkets shelves.
The life expectancy in the Republic of Zimbabwe is tracked as the lowest in the world at 37 years, while infant mortality rate is 81 for 100 births. The country went to the controversial polls on March, 29, 2008 in which Mugabe claimed victory.
Source: http://www.blackpower.com/business/kenya-like-everybody-else-is-sliding-into-a-recession/
©2008 Starlin Media Nework. P. O BOX 1194-40400 Suna-Migori, Kenya.
December 30, 2008
Was the US Behind Kenya’s Election Debacle?
Was the US Behind Kenya’s Election Debacle? By Samuel Starlin
Continue reading "Was the US Behind Kenya’s Election Debacle?" »