A South African woman who said Botswana’s president ‘looks like a Bushman’ was arrested, detained for two days and fined for ‘insulting Botswana’.

Dorsey Dube was arrested after commenting on a portrait of President Khama at a control post on the Botswana-South Africa border. She said the President looked like her friend’s father, who has Bushman features.

The deeply-entrenched racist attitudes of many people in authority in Botswana towards the Bushmen were starkly revealed, however, when the authorities assumed it was meant as an insult. Survival International is sending a report on the incident to the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Ms Dube says she was held at the police station and not allowed to call anyone in South Africa for assistance, though her friends did eventually reach help. She was released after spending a night in a prison cell and a further full day in custody.

President Khama (who is himself half-British) has referred to the Bushmen’s way of life as an ‘archaic fantasy’. The government has banned them from hunting for food or accessing water on their land, in a bid to force the Bushmen to abandon their land and lifestyle.

A tourist lodge built on the Bushmen’s land is allowed to use all the water it needs, on condition that it does not provide the Bushmen with any.

President Ian Khama, who was returned to office after elections in October, is a board member of Conservation International.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘You couldn’t have clearer evidence of the racism towards Bushmen in Botswana than this incident. A South African person thought resembling a Bushman was complimentary, but Botswana officials took it as an insult. It’s doubly tragic when you consider that President Khama’s father, the country’s first President, himself endured a great deal of racist abuse from the colonial authorities for marrying a British woman, and that he promised the country’s Bushmen that their rights would always be protected.’

We have had enough of the corrupt CEOs who sail towards offshore banks. We do not want to hear anymore about the prime ministers who attack and invade faraway countries. What we really want is to see real pirates. While those corsair and freebooter businessmen and politicians are well-known and still at large, you can confidently expect that the two detainees will spend a long time behind Spanish bars. Everyone knows that they are poor, black, Muslim and dared to attack a Spanish fishing boat.

PRISON PREFERABLE TO FREEDOM?

However, if you think twice, you might conclude that their future in prison is not so gloomy. First of all, they will enjoy three hot meals a day and they will see a doctor, probably for the first time in their lives. Besides, they will be spared the random bombing of their land by United States F-16s, and also the bullets shot by Ethiopians and Somalis working for imperialism.

In spite of the storytelling by NATO and European Union security high priests, who make a comfortable living out of sending troops to third world lands and seas like Somalia and the Indian Ocean, supposedly swamped by pirates on a rampage after European fishing boats, in the real world things are the other way round.

Perhaps Spanish fishers could forgive Somalis for not knowing the differences between the foreigners who approach their coasts in order to take away their fisheries, from those who land in order to impose a political regime, and both from those who just choose to dump their nuclear waste in the sea bed.

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Somali fishermen live in one of the world’s poorest countries. Life expectancy is approximately 48 years. Around 60 per cent of the population is illiterate, while there is no compulsory basic education law. Close to 36 per cent of infants are underweight. There are half a million refugees and another million internally displaced. Hundred of thousands undergo similar living conditions. Almost everything is scarce, especially human rights.

Unicef announces that a Somali child’s chances of surviving to adulthood are among the lowest of children anywhere in the world. Add to this the fact that the odds of the child’s mother dying during pregnancy or in childbirth are also extremely high. These high death rates stem from the interaction of a number of causes set within a complex socio-political context, but are largely attributable to disease, dehydration, malnutrition, lack of safe water, and poor sanitation.’

GOOD PIRATE, BAD PIRATE

Perhaps Somalis could forgive Spanish fishers for not knowing the difference between illegally fishing in Somalia and in Norway, and not knowing the different ways each people has to protect their riches.

In 2005, a Norwegian Navy vessel seized a Galician boat illegally fishing halibut. The Navy communiqué says that ‘during the inspection we found out that the boat had big amounts of halibut hidden in its hold’. It also informs that ‘we ordered the boat to sail to Tromso (a north-western city), but the Spanish captain refused to comply with.’

Perhaps one could forgive the Norwegians for being so insistent. The very next day (20 November) they seized another Spanish fishing boat: ‘The Garoya is the second fishing boat captured in two days. It has been reported that it kept in the hold more than 100 tonnes of halibut, just like the Monte Meixueiro seized yesterday. Its captain has been charged with providing wrong information to the fishing authorities and tampering the books.’

Perhaps one could forgive Spanish mass media for not reporting these days about the story of the Spanish boats seized in the past, which took place in the seven seas. Boats have been captured by Norwegian, Moroccan, Irish, Canadian, South African, British patrol boats.

It is also rather ironic that the British engage today in chasing Spanish pirates, although they could be forgiven for this, since classical Spanish author Lope de Vega and Literature Nobel Prize winner Garcia Marquez – as well as various film directors – were inspired by Sir Francis Drake.

THE STATE OF SOMALIA

Somalia has not had a real government in the last fifteen years. During this period, the king of the seas (and indeed of the sky and the whole world), the greatest pirate of all times, ordered yet another military operation in Somalia.

Siad Barre, former Somalia president, was a client of the Soviets during the seventies, but this did not prevent the United States from supporting him during the eighties. When the White House decided to support the warlords in their war against the Islamists from 2000 on, the US president did not hesitate.

Westerners could be forgiven for remembering (and praising through a Hollywood film) the killing of 19 marines who took part in the Mogadishu military operation carried out by the United States in the early 90s, and forgetting the approximately 1000 Somalis that were killed in the attack.

This operation capped many years of US actions in Somalia. Somalis, like other lesser peoples, enjoyed US international aid, which mainly means shipping arms to a country in order for the beneficiaries to kill each other, and at the same time providing political support to justify the killing according to the motive in fashion: Communism, drug trafficking, Islamist terror, tribal fighting and so on.

One has to add the dumping of US-subsidised agricultural produce in Somalia, and other political and economic interventions related to oil and strategic interests, to produce a ravaged nation, physically and morally devastated.

Somali seas have not been spared foreign interventions. As Johann Hari writes, some Western countries have taken advantage of the lack of government in Somalia to dump their nuclear waste in its waters.² For Somalis, the consequences are as harmful as the consequences of war and long lasting.

To make matters worse, Somali fishers watch huge foreign ships taking away tons of fish while they barely manage to obtain some kilos with their skiffs.

Perhaps Somali fishers could be forgiven for dreaming of their sons and daughters enjoying the riches the foreigners take away for their children.

HOW THE WEST WINS

Spanish fishers fishing in the seas around Somalia and people who eat their produce back in Spain, could be forgiven for cherishing basic wishes: Working unmolested and ingesting fish proteins respectively. They could also be forgiven for electing politicians who guarantee the fulfillment of their wishes, no matter what price, other people’s life included.

These politicians could also be forgiven for setting up a Holy Alliance with their neighbours, in order to send war boats supported by war planes to compete for food with poor Somalis in the Indian Ocean, although they could negotiate fishing permits before fishing, or even pay fines if they are caught cheating, as it has happened many times in the past with Spanish vessels.

However, it cannot be forgiven that Spanish and other Westerners – who know how Somalis are mercilessly being crushed – put the blame on Somalis and hunt them when they confront the real pirates.

Pirates have traditionally been well considered by the people, in novels and in films. How revolting they became when they took over governments and corporations.

1. Operation Atalanta is campaign of the European Union to stop the ‘piracy off the Somali coast’. The joint naval patrol includes vessels from Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.
   A Spanish frigate captured two of the bunch of ‘pirates’ who seized the Spanish fishing boat Alacrana, and both are now in a Spanish prison awaiting to be taken to court.
2. Johann Hari, ‘You Are Being Lied to About Pirates,’ The Independent, January 9th, 2009.

How the monarch now follows through on decentralization will greatly determine to the extent he is able to achieve his most cherished goals: sustainable socio-economic development of the Kingdom achieved through participatory democracy; and a resolution of the Western Saharan conflict by way of meeting the self-determined needs of people in the region as part of the Kingdom.

There are four major paths to a nation’s decentralization that have been applied around the world. Morocco’s decentralization roadmap is highly innovative in that it combines three of the four approaches. The three arrangements incorporated in Morocco’s plan are devolution, deconcentration, and delegation, or what the King often refers to as the participatory democratic method (Morocco’s roadmap does not incorporate privatization, and instead intends to use public funds to implement the plan).

In the past, decentralization in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Canada, and China applied more heavily the devolution model, which emphasizes greater authority and capacities among local government. In Tanzania, under the still revered President Julius Nyerere, delegation occurred in which groups of people living as a community exercised self-government in all matters which concerned their own affairs. And India and Sri Lanka utilized deconcentration, whereby government and community groups collaborate to promote development.

Morocco’s incorporation of the three approaches would create a progressive system whereby provincial and local government, and communities and their organizations, exercise decision-making authority, newly built skills, and other capacities, including financial, to carry out greater developmental responsibilities. Furthermore, His Majesty emphasizes that ultimate determination of specific kinds of projects should rest with local communities, or the beneficiary groups. Local beneficiaries are the “engine and objective” and are to “take charge” of programs, with government and civil support.

The King of Morocco should now use his upcoming November 6th speech to build on the existing roadmap by offering more specifics on the reforms and initiatives that will carry out decentralization. Here are some suggestions:

First, local civil and government technicians (across Moroccan ministries) require training in facilitating participatory methods that assist communities in analyzing their challenges and determining project solutions (in job creation, clean drinking water, school construction, etc.). This necessitates, for example, new development studies and training programs at universities (including here at Morocco’s flagship Al Akhawayn University), well beyond the few recently created in the country. Morocco’s goal to train 10,000 new social workers and the same number of engineers per year should include in their curriculum building skills in managing project development and participatory democracy. Since universities play an indispensable role toward decentralization, the King ought to announce his intention to establish the first university in Western Sahara.

Second, His Majesty should take this opportunity to highlight important lessons from Morocco’s National Initiative for Human Development and suggest how they may guide the implementation of decentralization. Scores of Moroccans benefitted from the Initiative, and it raised the public’s consciousness about sustainable development, creating fertile ground for decentralization. However, as the King himself suggested, the Initiative has been too centrally managed, which contradicts its original intention of promoting local self-reliance. Far more non-government facilitators of community planning of Initiative projects are needed. The Ministry of Interior, charged with internal national security, has been in too much control and results unfortunately show. Therefore, although the King’s ongoing role in the decentralization process is essential, central government should not be the primary caretaker, but rather a new “third-party” agency inside the royal cabinet is probably necessary.

Finally, there are too many cases where local officials of the Ministry of Interior have stirred distrust and division, particularly in rural areas where most of Morocco’s poverty exists, impeding collaborative development. Decentralization should reform their traditional functions, and subsume them to local Communes, which are governed by elected representatives directly involved in meeting human needs. Reforming the Ministry of Interior is inevitable if genuine decentralization is to occur, and the King now stating so will increase public awareness and confidence. After all, as he recognizes, it is the people, minimally encumbered, who are to grab hold of their own development.

With regard to a contemporary program, for instance (neo)-Malthusian measures, to solve the “population problem,” such propositional theory put into wholesale praxis would essentially expand and accelerate the genocidal effects of the civilizing process. Sure that sounds like a loaded allegation and indictment upon an archaic Western archetype and his immoral conjectures, but it is true. Not only did Malthus believe that inequality was natural and good, or “at least necessary for avoiding the problem of massive overpopulation and hence starvation;” he also “denounced soup kitchens and early marriages while defending smallpox, slavery, and child murder [sic].”¹

Malthus believed that social inequality and poverty was natural, expunging from the historical record centuries, if not millennia, of social engineering, construction and stratification of a system that manifests inequality and penury by virtue of its own design. In other words, abject poverty, famine and, social stratification that unjustly engenders inequality, are tangents of social arrangements configured by sovereign powers themselves.

These same sovereign powers set up and normalized the city-state lifestyle/culture (i.e., civilization) as a way to enhance and, make more efficient, production at the expense of human and nonhuman resources in order to enhance the luxuries of those positioned at the top of the hierarchy. Surfeit resources, profits and assets, enjoyed by few, are commensurate with expanded efficiency in production and, in turn, so will a population that is organized around growing and perpetuating said social arrangements grow geometrically. In other words, “population growth correlates with economic prosperity.”² Therefore, overpopulation of humans on this planet is not necessarily a natural phenomenon as much as it is a direct result of the dominant social construct, i.e., overpopulation is moreso anthropogenic than it is organic. So, for starters, Malthus had conveniently designed the theoretical framework for the dominant culture so to fix a problem induced by the dominant culture.

Second on the list of excoriations directed toward Thomas Malthus and his legacy of villainous schemes and those who propound and argue in defense of such machinations, is the hunger fallacy. Despite the fact that the world population is, at the very least, six fold from what it was in 1800, there is still more than enough food produced the world over to support the population.³ Africa alone produces 25 percent of the world’s cereals, but yet it is the most immiserated continent on the planet. This is a direct result of global trade, orchestrated by the world’s richest coterie of individuals (i.e., the WTO, World Bank and IMF, et al.). Africa grows enough food to feed itself, but because its countries have been co-opted, if not coerced at the barrel of a gun by Western trade agents over the centuries, it has to export its very own solution to famine. Those countries who spurn compliance with Western trade agreements are subject to reprehensible sanctions that Arundhati Roy refers to as “New Genocide,” meaning the creation of “conditions [through economic sanctions] that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people.”⁴ Digression aside, what is transpiring in Africa is not an isolated occurrence. In India, where millions are the victims of starvation and malnutrition, there have been incidences, time and again, in which the government allows immorally imbalanced disbursement of food. One example that Arundhati Roy presents in her book, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, reports the Indian government allowing 63 million tons of grain to rot in its granaries.⁵ Meanwhile, twelve million tons were exported and put on sale at a subsidized price the Indian government refused to offer its country’s impoverished peoples.⁶ There is more than enough food to feed people – bottom line.

When exploring the implications of a (neo)-Malthusian program, one must ask, as Richard Robbins advises, “what social interests or purposes might be advanced by their acceptances?” Clearly, Malthus envisioned a world where the elite and upper class decide and act upon population control by advancing measures that materialized from within the very former and latter statuses. It should also be noted that Malthus was not concerned with population growth, he was concerned with the rising number of poor in England at the time and, why they should or should not exist and, “what should be done about them.”⁷ Malthus erroneously, and egregiously – might I add, saw poverty not as a consequence of “expanding industrialism, enclosure laws… or the need of manufacturers for a source of inexpensive labor…” but rather as a phenomenon that emerged from “the laws of nature…”⁷

The Malthusian premise is one that presumes poverty exists by virtue of overpopulation, which is often postulated as the fault of fundamentally flawed human beings – which is dehumanizing to say the least. And, his theory (and any other theoretical fledglings of similarity) exempts the privileged elite from any accountability for fomenting and perpetuating the framing conditions and social arrangements that engender overpopulation and poverty in the first place.

If there really were something inherently poor and laggard in large populations, then affluent places like London or Manhattan would elicit fear of overpopulation. But the truth is, such sentiment is not directed internally toward ‘civilized’ regions of high densities of people, but rather it is directed externally toward areas and regions that are sought after for resources – areas that need to be ‘managed’ and ‘civilized.’ These are areas that, unlike densely populated areas of developed countries, are impoverished and immiserated on account of sanctions, development projects, foreign debt, illicit purloining of resources, and more, perpetrated and/or effected by foreign institutions – the very institutions that not only wreak tremendous social and ecological havoc, but also castigate such ‘victim’ countries as being ‘poor’ and ‘problematic’ and as ‘jeopardizing’ the globe with overpopulation. This is pathologically depraved behavior.

Furthermore, in today’s economic climate, one who recognizes the limits of economics within an ecological context of invariable finite materials is often referred to as a ‘neo–Malthusian.’ But because one recognizes the intrinsic limits to growth does not also mean that such a realization is concomitant with Malthusian theory, or rather: Just because one recognizes the limits to growth does not mean they are a neo-Malthusian.

The crux is, there are limits to growth. The planet is comprised of finite resources. Any intelligent creature is aware of this unalterable truth. However, these facts do not warrant one group of people to assume a higher positioning over another as a means to decide who lives, who is ‘useful,’ who gets what and when and where. The truth is, as many maintain, the whole carrying capacity discussion is either a.) not discussed honestly, or at all, or b.) it is approached with a narrow set of ‘solutions,’ all of which intend to perpetuate the status quo – which translates into either not solving shit or, solving the problem in a way that keeps those in power in power to enjoy their luxuries and privileges.

More importantly, owing to the fact that overpopulation is commensurate with economic growth (which confers tremendous power and wealth upon economic architects and directors i.e., the state and financial and corporate institutions) – we should, as Derrick Jensen suggests, honestly acknowledge how different our discourse and theoretical solutions would be if we changed the language from ‘overpopulation’ problems to ‘overconsumption’ problems? Here is where we find the fundamental flaws inhered within the ‘panaceas’ that are prescribed to fix this entire conundrum. We can’t address this issue as an ‘overconsumption’ problem because mitigating consumption growth would destroy the capitalist economy. So, unforgivably, we go with ‘overpopulation.’ Does anyone see the fundamental flaw yet? Does anyone else see what’s wrong here?

According to Jensen, “The United States constitutes less than 5 percent of the world’s population yet uses more than one-fourth of the world’s resources and produces one-fourth of the world’s pollution and waste.” And, if you “compare the average U.S. citizen to the average citizen of India, you find that the American uses fifty times more steel, fifty-six times more energy, one hundred and seventy times more synthetic rubber, two hundred and fifty times more motor fuel, and three hundred times more plastic.” Nonetheless, our concepts of overpopulation are usually not comprised of “those who do the most damage, the primary perpetrators (there can’t be too many [middle-class] Americans, can there?), but instead their primary (human) victims.”⁸

There is much absurdity and arrogance, as Jensen asserts, in the call for the poor to stop having children but not minding the rich driving around in SUVs, watching plasma-screen TVs while living sedentary lives in 3500 square foot homes, etc. ad nauseam. Also, to quote Jensen in depth:

…there are those who claim—equally absurdly, and equally arrogantly—that all talk of carrying capacity is racist and classist. To even use the phrase carrying capacity in this crowd is to invite hisses and catcalls, as well as spat epithets of Neo-Malthusian. I suppose the argument is that because some of those who want to protect this exploitative way of living use carrying capacity as a means of social control against the poor—as an American Indian activist friend said to me, “The only problem I have with population control is that you and I both know who is going to do the controlling”—then the notion of carrying capacity itself must be racist and classist. This seems similar to me to suggesting that because Hitler claimed (falsely) that Germany was being attacked by Poland, and that therefore the Germans needed to attack, and that because this same argument has routinely been used (just as falsely) by the United States as well as other imperial powers, that anyone who claims self-defense is lying. These people seem to forget that the misuse of an argument does not invalidate the argument itself. Worse, this argument, that the very concept of carrying capacity is a fabrication designed for social control, as opposed to a simple statement of limits, serves those in power as effectively as does ignoring or de-emphasizing resource consumption when speaking of overshooting carrying capacity, because it goes along with the refusal to acknowledge physical limits (and limits to exploitation) that characterize this culture. What would it take, I’ve heard peace and social justice activists ask, to bring the poor of the world to the fiscal standard of living of the rich? Well, another thirty planets, for one thing. It’s a dangerous—and stupid— question. Within this culture wealth is measured by one’s ability to consume and destroy. This means that attempts to industrialize the poor will further harm the planet. Because industrial production requires the exploitation of resources, the wealth of one group is always based on the impoverishment of another’s landbase, meaning that on a finite planet, the creation of one person’s (fiscal) wealth always comes at the cost of many others’ poverty. Those reasons are why the question is stupid. It’s dangerous because it serves as propaganda to keep both activists and the poor playing a game that doesn’t serve them well, and which they can never win, instead of quitting this game and working to take down the system.”⁹

There is a term called lactational amenorrhea, which is the absence of menstruation due to lactation. As long as a mother is nursing her neonate (i.e., infant) each and every time the child wants to feed, fertility is postponed. Basically, the female body temporarily shuts off its procreational facilities because the body is taxed to its limits regarding nutrient allocation for not only the infant but the mother as well. In other words, “If you continue with exclusive breast feeding for your baby’s first six months, your risk of becoming pregnant is less then 2 percent.”¹⁰

Many indigenous mothers would sleep with their infants through the night so that their child would be able to nurse even during sleep. This beautiful communion between mother and child was practiced nightly for upwards of six months, if not more.¹¹ This practice, which is being forever lost in the dominant culture, in tandem with sustainable living practices, conduced to a natural, safe, sane and non-exploitative program of population control.

One must ask, what sort of culture would replace such population control measures with something like the Malthusian model. The answers tell us that only an exploitative culture, hell-bent on production by means of degradation of another’s landbase, thence elevating one’s luxuries on account of another’s impoverishment, would discard sane and sustainable ways of living to achieve prosperous ends.

1. R.L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
2. Richard H. Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism (4th Ed.), (Boston: Pearson, 2008), p. 153
3. Robbins, p. 150.
4. Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, (Cambridge: South End Press, 2004), p. 88.
5. N.A. Mujumdar, “Eliminate hunger now, poverty later,” Business Line, 8 January 2003.
6. “Foodgrain exports may slow down this fiscal [year],” India Business Insight, 2 June 2003; “India: Agriculture sector: Paradox of plenty,” Business Line, 26 June 2001; Ranjit Devraj, “Farmers protest against globalization,” Inter Press Service, 25 January 2001.
7. R.H. Robbins, p. 156.
8. Derrick Jensen, Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), p. 115.
9. D. Jensen, p. 115-116.
10. Katie Singer, The Garden of Fertility: A Guide to Charting Your Fertility Signals to Prevent or Achieve Pregnancy – Naturally – and to Gauge Your Reproductive Health, (New York: Avery, 2004), p.68.
11. K. Singer, p. 67-70.

By way of deception, shalt thou wage war.

– motto of Mossad, Israel’s Intelligence Service

The scenes of flag-waving Libyans welcoming home Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the man known as the Lockerbie bomber, further discredited Muslims in the minds of many. For those whose knowledge of the story is derived mainly from TV news, it appeared to be a callous celebration of mass murder, lending credence to the belief that “Islam” and “terrorism” are virtually synonymous. A closer look at the facts surrounding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, however, reveals a pattern of deception by those who have most to gain from making Muslims look bad.

While the news reports dutifully recorded the protestations of outrage by Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and others at what appeared to be an unseemly hero’s welcome for a convicted terrorist, they neglected to mention that Libyans were celebrating the release of a countryman whom they believe had been wrongfully imprisoned for eight years. Also omitted from the reports was any indication that informed observers of Megrahi’s case in Britain and elsewhere are likewise convinced of his innocence.

Robert Black, the University of Edinburgh law professor who was the architect of the trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, says that “no reasonable tribunal could have convicted Megrahi on the evidence led,” and calls his 2001 conviction “an absolute and utter outrage.” Prof. Black likens the Scottish trial judges to the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass who “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Hans Köchler, a UN-appointed observer at the trial, states that “there is not one single piece of material evidence linking the two accused to the crime,” and condemns the court’s verdict as a “spectacular miscarriage of justice.” And Dr. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was one of the 270 killed on December 21, 1988, dismisses the prosecution’s case against Megrahi and fellow Libyan Lamin Khalifa F’hima as “a cock and bull story.”

According to that “cock and bull story,” Megrahi, the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), conspired with Lamin Khalifa F’hima, the station manager for LAA in Malta (who was acquitted), to put a suitcase bomb on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt. At Frankfurt, the lethal suitcase had to be transferred to another flight bound for London Heathrow. Then in Heathrow Airport, it would have to be transferred for a second time onto the ill-fated Flight 103 destined for New York.

But for that rather implausible scenario to be true, the Libyans would have to have had an inordinate faith in the reliability of baggage handlers in two of Europe’s busiest airports at one of the busiest times of the year. Less optimistic would-be bombers would surely have slipped the bomb-laden suitcase on board in London. Fueling suspicions that this is indeed what happened, investigating police were told by a security guard at Heathrow that the Pan Am baggage storage area had been broken into on the night of the bombing.

The reported break-in at Heathrow was part of 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence that Megrahi’s defense could present at an appeal, which in 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, after a three-year investigation, recommended he be granted.

But before that appeal could be heard, the compassionate release of Megrahi, suffering from terminal prostate cancer, conveniently spared the potential embarrassment of all those involved in his dubious conviction. More significantly, it also averted awkward questions being raised, in the likely event of the Libyan being acquitted, about who actually planted the bomb, and why.

Reel Bad Muslims

Many of those who doubt Libya’s responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, perhaps not surprisingly in the current climate, tend to suspect other Muslim countries of involvement. The most popular theory is that Iran hired the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) led by Ahmed Gibril to avenge the “accidental” shooting down by the USS Vincennes on July 3, 1988 of Iran Air Flight 655, which killed all 288 civilians on board.

Others believe that Abu Nidal, the founder of the infamous Black September terrorist group, may have been involved. If they’re right, it raises disturbing questions about who was ultimately responsible for the Lockerbie atrocity. In his fine biography of Nidal, A Gun for Hire, British journalist Patrick Seale confirms long-held suspicions that many in the Middle East have had about the “Palestinian terrorist” who did more than anyone to discredit the Palestinian cause. “Abu Nidal was undoubtedly a Mossad agent,” Seale asserts. “Practically every job he did benefited Israel.”

Interestingly, one theory which has the PFLP-GC collaborating with Abu Nidal on behalf of Iran, has been espoused by a former Mossad staffer, Yuval Aviv, whose New York-based investigative agency, Interfor, prepared a report for Pan Am’s insurers on the Lockerbie bombing.

Writing under the pen name Sam Green, Aviv also authored Flight 103, a fictional account of the Lockerbie tragedy he claims is “based solidly on real-life facts,” in which the vengeful Iranians enlist a Palestinian terrorist, Ahmed ‘The Falcon’ Shabaan, to do their dirty work. Aviv, who inspired Steven Spielberg’s Munich, hopes his director friend will convert his Lockerbie tale into another Hollywood blockbuster.

Hardly any mainstream commentators, however, have questioned the trustworthiness of a former Mossad agent, who retains close ties with the intelligence service, fingering Palestinians and Iran for a terrorist attack which killed 189 Americans, thereby blackening the reputation of two of Israel’s greatest foes in the minds of those it wishes to convince that the U.S. and Israel face a common enemy.

Dirty Tricks

Not everyone in the media has been as naive about Israeli machinations though. Writing in the Guardian just before the trial of the two Libyans, veteran American journalist Russell Warren Howe, in an excellent article titled “What if they are innocent?” analyses whether the Iranian government, Palestinian terrorists or Israeli intelligence were more likely perpetrators. Howe concludes, “Even if Megrahi and F’hima are found guilty of the most serious charges, there would still be a need for a new investigation: to decide what was Israel’s possibly major role in mass murder and deception of its main benefactor, the US.” Howe is suggesting that even if the Libyans, or other Arabs, had actually planted the bomb, they may still have been duped into doing so by Israeli agents.

Intriguingly, Howe cites a reference in Gordon Thomas’ book on Mossad, Gideon’s Spies,to a Mossad officer stationed in London who showed up in Lockerbie the morning after the crash to arrange for the removal of a suitcase from the crime scene. The suitcase, said to belong to Captain Charles McKee, a DIA officer who was killed on the flight, was later returned “empty and undamaged.”

Moreover, the idea of Libyan responsibility, Howe notes, seems to have originated in Israel. Again, he quotes Thomas, who says that a source at LAP, Mossad’s psychological warfare unit, informed him that “within hours of the crash, staff at LAP were working the phones to their media contacts urging them to publicise that here was ‘incontrovertible proof’ that Libya, through its intelligence service, Jamahirya, was culpable.”

It may also have been Mossad disinformation, Howe suspects, that induced the U.S. government to believe the Libyans were guilty. The day after the Lockerbie bombing, U.S. intelligence intercepted a radio message from Tripoli to a Libyan government office in Berlin that effectively said, “mission accomplished.”

Two years earlier, a similar message intercept had induced Ronald Reagan to order air strikes against Libya, killing over a hundred people, including Qaddafi’s two-year-old adopted daughter. But the message had been faked by Israel, according to Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad case officer, who described the operation in The Other Side of Deception, the second of two exposés he wrote about the Mossad after leaving the service.

Operation Trojan began in February 1986 when the Mossad secretly installed a communications device known as a “Trojan” in an apartment in Tripoli. The Trojan received messages broadcast by Mossad’s LAP on one frequency and automatically transmitted them on a different frequency used by the Libyan government. “Using the Trojan,” Ostrovsky writes, “the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world.” U.S. intelligence, as anticipated by the Israelis, intercepted the bogus messages, and believed them to be authentic — especially after receiving confirmation from the Mossad.

Within weeks of the Trojan being installed, two American soldiers were killed in an explosion at La Belle Discothèque, a nightclub in West Berlin frequented by U.S. servicemen. Assuming that Libya was responsible, nine days later the U.S. dropped 60 tons of bombs on Tripoli and Benghazi. Few suspected that the Americans had been tricked into the “retaliation” by Israel, whose subterfuge had punished Qaddafi for his support of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and further alienated the U.S from the Arab world.

Not all Americans are oblivious to Israeli wiles, however. Commenting on the Israeli intelligence service’s penchant for deception, Andrew Killgore, a former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, wrote in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, “Mossad’s specialty was dirty tricks… Its modus operandi had always been the same: pull off a dirty trick but make it appear somebody else had done it.”

As part of any new investigation to establish whether or not the Lockerbie bombing was another one of the Mossad’s “dirty tricks,” detectives might want to interview Issac Yeffet, the former chief of security for the Israeli airline, El Al, who in 1986 was commissioned by Pan Am to survey its security at a number of airports worldwide. As Killgore, in a separate article for the Washington Report, suggestively noted: “Yeffet may have been successful in maintaining perfect security for El Al at Ben-Gurion Airport. But his efforts at Heathrow Airport in London, one of the airports he surveyed for Pan Am, and to which he and his employees had full rein, failed to save Pan Am Flight 103.”

Still protesting his innocence, the dying Megrahi told reporters on his release, “The truth never dies.” That may be so. But as long as the Western media continue to believe that only Israel’s enemies would blow up a civilian airliner, the truth about Lockerbie is unlikely to ever reach a very wide audience.

As must have been the case with all previous hegemonic societies, our nation’s pursuit of warfare abroad is inevitably cloaked in the rhetoric of national defense. Somehow the story is sufficiently twisted that it seems an inferior military force abroad poses an enormous threat to our national interest, and to such an extent that we must send our troops abroad to confront this force in its own territory and with civilian casualties almost entirely limited to its population. Intellectuals vent their doubts, so homespun Americans become indignant in response, insistent on the need once again to enforce their vision of democratic exemplification to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, our nation’s banks and defense industries reap enormous profits and increased financial liquidity benefits the rest of our population at least to a certain extent.

Warfare accordingly continues to play too big a role in our nation. There has been too much combat on foreign soil–far more than for all other nations combined since World War II. Vietnam and Iraq were illegal, the first because Secretary of State Dulles refused to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords, thereby precluding American involvement in the avoidance of a plebiscite election as dictated by the Accords, and the second by having bypassed Article 42 of the U.N. Charter, having already benefited from Article 41. The rest of the wars, if arguably legal, could have been avoided without much difficulty by effective negotiations. And too many innocent civilians have needlessly died in these wars. U.S. troops caused the deaths of as many as three million people in Vietnam and an estimated one million in Iraq, totaling two-thirds of the Holocaust victims during World War II. Throw in the two million lives lost in Korea, which was partly our responsibility, and we just about match the Holocaust. Not to forget the heavy financial burden of war, for example the congressional allocations to the military industrial complex to equip and supply the pursuit of warfare. According to Stiglitz, the total cost of our “war of choice” against Iraq will ultimately cost $3 trillion dollars from taxpayers that go into the military industrial complex.

The total financial cost of our military establishment has been no less debilitating to our economy than was the case for most of the previous hegemonic civilizations described two decades ago by Paul Kennedy in his excellent book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House, 1987). It seems that all U.S. military expenditures combined, inclusive of such items as the Veterans Administration, now consume at least 55% of our annual federal budget. This might seem useful in military Keynesian terms, but the total now equals or exceeds military expenditures for the rest of the world combined. Whether we like it or not, our nation has become addicted to warfare since World War II. Most of our military budget is spent on defense industries with trickle-down benefits to a large number of grateful subcontractors (most of them highly patriotic for obvious reasons) as well as their host communities (also highly patriotic for obvious reasons), but this can only be at a substantial cost to the rest of the nation without sufficient trickle-down access. In general Vermont farmers tend to lose; Texas laborers tend to win.

But it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the Vietnam and Iraq wars–as well as the military operations in Korea, Panama, the Persian Gulf, and even Yugoslavia–have been only the tip of the iceberg. According to Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, 725 U.S. military bases, inclusive of sixteen Main Operating Bases (MOBs), exist in as many as 41 nations. Altogether, 250 thousand U.S. troops are stationed abroad, including 118 thousand in Europe, 92 thousand in east Asia, and 14 thousand in the western hemisphere. Significantly, there was almost no military conflict in these regions at the time of Iraq’s invasion and occupation, yet large numbers of U.S. troops continued to remain deployed in these regions instead of being transferred to Iraq to participate in the fighting there. Preceding the 2007 “surge,” military spokesmen repeatedly insisted in prime time interviews that more troops were needed in order to win in Iraq. They neglected to explain why many thousands of U.S. troops were retained in military bases elsewhere in the world, apparently as a no longer necessary Cold War measure that seamlessly converted into a peacetime occupation strategy. It almost seems as if our government has had an unspoken commitment since the fall of the U.S.S.R. to dominate the entire world into the indefinite future. Proponents might argue that their purpose is to protect the world, but this is to protect the world under our nation’s authority, hence to dominate the world, just as gangland protectionist rings “protect” those they extort money from. It’s no accident that U.S. investors are active worldwide with governments fully cooperative with U.S. authority.

Also deplorable has been the ongoing effort of our government to intervene in other country’s internal affairs by manipulating elections, assassinating both enemies and potential enemies, and in general bringing into play whatever dirty tricks seemed useful. As calculated by William Blum in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, published in 2003, at least fifty such interventions can be counted for less than the four decades since World War II. Among the many countries manipulated by the CIA and other such U.S. organizations have been Greece in the late forties, the Philippines in the 1940s and 50s, Iran and Guatemala in 1953-54, Syria in 1956-57, Ecuador in 1960-63, Iraq in 1972-75, Australia in 1973-75, Angola in 1975-the 80s, Morocco in 1983, and so on. Among the many foreign political leaders targeted for assassination were Chou en-Lai of China, Lumumba of the Congo, Castro of Cuba, Torrijos of Panama, Sukarno of Indonesia, Mossadegh of Iran, Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, Sihanouk of Cambodia, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, De Gaulle of France, Allende of Chile, Manley of Jamaica, Milosevic of Yugoslavia, etc. Fortunately many of them lived to talk about it, but others didn’t.

According to John Perkins in Confessions of a Hit Man, published five years ago, the arrangement was simple enough. Bogus U.S. economists including himself (which he freely admitted) would try to convince foreign governments to “liberalize” their economies by accepting U.S. investments without imposing fees, tariffs, or other such costs. If these governments refused to cooperate, U.S. secret agents identified as “jackals” would arrive to take whatever steps seemed necessary in order to reverse the situation, even if it meant destabilizing the government or assassinating whoever seemed an impediment, presidents and friendly dictators included. And if the jackals failed, then an invasion became necessary as in the cases of Iraq, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Of course the issue was always the war against communism, but somehow the beneficiaries just as inevitably turned out to be U.S. business ventures that had financial interests to be protected and/or advanced by U.S. military forces.

Our country’s unique relationship with Israel has been the source of enough problems that it deserves to be listed here in a category of its own. The $3 billion per year of foreign “aid” to Israel ($500 per capita) is relatively small compared to our nation’s budget as a whole even when a large variety of supplemental benefits provided to Israel is taken into account. However, this supportive relationship has borne unexpected difficulties that Truman should have recognized when he hastened Israel’s creation as a campaign strategy in 1948. Without any clear mandate, Israel’s relentless effort since then to annex adjacent territories in the West Bank has led to such excessive persecution of the Palestinians that the world’s entire Muslim population has become hostile to both Israel and the United States as its primary benefactor. Bin Laden’s first public statement after 9-11, made available on October 7, primarily spoke of retaliation for the American role in Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.

The perhaps unrecognized Machiavellian advantage of our nation’s connection with Israel right now is that it has permitted military Keynesianism to persist during the Obama administration through combat with a variety of Arab nations hostile to Israel. Arab terrorists have replaced the commies as our nation’s most invidious enemies. As a result, warfare continues to play its role as a crutch to our economy exactly when it needs it the most. Obama insists the Afghan campaign is not a war of choice, but of course it has become one, and its potential economic benefit to our defense industries (i.e., all our major industries) can hardly have been overlooked. There is no doubt that bin Laden is still loose and that al Qaeda continues to thrive in Afghanistan as a potential threat to our nation. However, their role focuses U.S. aggression and thereby intensifies their appeal in almost every nation in the region. In fact, al Qaeda’s successful recruitment of guerrilla fighters thrives because of our nation’s aggressive military effort of to root it out in any particular country. And why not? If U.S. troops invaded and forcibly occupied Canada to root out murderous Canadians hostile to Americans, it wouldn’t be long before everybody in Canada could be treated as a potential enemy. The same with Afghanistan, especially now that the brutal Afghan warlord general Dostum has been allowed to return to the fold as a supporter of our puppet president Karzai.

One also asks whether Obama actually thinks combat can be limited to the mountainous region on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Or is a new full-scale war what he really wants? Because that’s what he is going to get. Of course we’ll “win” if this is his intention–but all we need to do is declare victory and withdraw any time we want, since the Taliban lacks the capacity to chase us beyond their own border. Nor do they want to. As a result the war is both unwinnable and unlosable–in other words at least as much a quagmire as Vietnam had been. But does Obama really want to mount an escalation that might be judged by history with the same disfavor as President Johnson’s fabricated 1965 Tonkin attack and Bush’s fabricated 2003 threat of Saddam Hussein’s atomic capability? Does he want to be another infamous American president for exactly the wrong reasons?

One also wonders why Obama has, if anything, expanded the use mercenary forces such as Blackwater (now identified as Xe) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Africa. It has been disclosed, for example, that roughly one quarter of our nation’s intelligence activity in Afghanistan is farmed out by the CIA to Blackwater. Once Obama and Secretary of State Clinton opposed Blackwater–now they depend on it. Also, why has Obama chosen to enlarge the size of our military by as many as 21,000 new troops, 17,000 of which will be sent to Afghanistan? And why doesn’t he put more effort into negotiating with Taliban factions who are willing to reject al Qaeda–just as was done to “win” the war in Iraq by paying once hostile Sunni tribal leaders monthly salaries between $240 and $300 per month to participate in the so-called surge? And when will our administration finally realize, if they haven’t already, that U.S. combat troops make inferior occupation troops, often provoking a hostile opposition sufficient to initiate a costly full-scale war? This is exactly what happened between March and September, 2003, when the Iraqi populace were goaded by the severe and unprovoked aggressiveness of U.S. troops into outright resistance. Many of these troops are now being used in Afghanistan. Do we truly want déjà vu all over again? Would McCain have gotten away with this sort of thing if he had been elected president? Indignant liberals would be demonstrating in Washington, New York City, and elsewhere.

As for potential conflict with Iran, why does Defense Secretary Robert Gates announce a “routine” trip to Israel to consult its leadership and deny that this consultation would involve the current standoff with Iran? And then, having concluded consultations, why does he announce in his press conference a September deadline imposed on Iran to fully cooperate with U.S. objectives? And why does he insist that if Israel chooses to attack Iran the U.S. would have no recourse but to accept this choice? Is an attack on Iran now in the works? Would this also be suggested by Dennis Ross’s reassignment to the National Security Council perhaps to take operational control of such an attack? If this is what happens, Zionists will once again succeed in diverting U.S. policy from the effort to obtain negotiations with the Palestinians to a peripheral issue that diverts our energies toward a useful and relatively harmless cause beneficial to Israel on another front–this time Iran instead of Iraq.

Speeches by Obama now and again indicate his full awareness that genuine peace is only possible in the Near East once a two-state solution has been implemented between Israel and the Palestinians. But what exactly has been done to bring this about since he came into office? Why hasn’t his administration offered Israel an obvious quid pro quo through diplomatic and trade relations with all Arab nations plus the guaranteed elimination of Iran’s nuclear weapons program–if it has one–in exchange for Israel’s full acceptance of a viable two-state solution respected by both parties? Just as our government has generously financed Israel’s aggressive foreign policy since 1967, it would even more generously finance a peace settlement based on all the agreements already in the works at Oslo, Madrid and Taba, to say nothing of Camp David, Roadmap and Annapolis. All groups and nations involved would get a fat payoff, even ourselves by once and for all terminating the crisis. Suddenly there would be an area-wide peace agreement such as has been proposed repeatedly by the Arab League. Both the Iranians and Palestinians would gladly accept such an arrangement as would most nations outside the Near East. Until this can be brought about, the United States will remain hostage to the Near East quagmire so effectively orchestrated by the Zionist lobby with lies, threats, broken promises, staged indignant rallies, and the like.

Turning to South America, why the announced establishment of three or four new U.S. military bases in Colombia near the border of Venezuela? Even if the command of these bases is turned over to the Colombian government, as Hillary Clinton promises, construction costs would obviously be paid by ourselves, and we can expect that American troops would be permitted to be stationed there. There would also be an airfield for military transport planes and fighter planes. Is this Obama’s first step to enlarge our military presence in South America in order to combat “Chavismo” at the very edge of South America’s most hostile nation? Also, why has it been disclosed that several other bases–half a dozen in all–would be constructed elsewhere in South America from the Andes to the Caribbean? Moreover, was the present military insurrection of Honduras a thousand miles away intended (or permitted) as a “friendly” takeover in the spirit of President Aristide’s forced exile from Haiti in 2004 orchestrated by the Bush administration? Is Obama actually dusting off Otto Reich’s counter-productive South American strategy a couple decades ago in order to initiate full-fledged regional imperialism once again in South America? How can an apparently aggressive shift in policy be undertaken at the same time both in South America and the Near East inclusive of Russia? Is some kind of an overarching strategy in the works to expand our military presence worldwide even further? Or is the timing simply to be chalked up to ineptitude by Washington bureaucrats? They shouldn’t want this kind of thinking to happen.

5. Running Dogs That Bark Up The Wrong Tree

American news coverage is heavy, lasting from morning to night, but with a paucity of genuine new information. Crime and human interest stories predominate, and, relevant to what might be described as “hard” news, the same stories are incessantly repeated until the topic has exhausted the public “mind,” whereupon the press switches to other such stories to fill the gap. In too many instances the primary task is to suppress crucial facts and shape and craft the stories that cannot be avoided to such an extent that they keep the American public ignorant of exactly the issues that matter the most. On the other hand, information that cannot be ignored but is found distasteful and/or ideologically unacceptable (for example, U.S. drones that accidentally kill large wedding parties in Pakistan) lasts just one or two news cycles at most.

Most obviously, the “respectable” American media has almost without exception given full support to our nation’s foreign intervention across the globe. Seldom does news coverage feature information that might discredit military operations against a foreign nation. Instead, with the current exception of Afghanistan, our press has celebrated the cause with full patriotic approval exactly when its approval has seemed the most useful. News coverage repeatedly vilifies the putative enemy and extols the American cause and those engaged in making it happen. And whenever needed, competent patriotic reporters can be found who willingly participate in bending their evidence to support a positive judgment, as illustrated by Barbara Miller’s famous coverage of U.S. preparations preceding the invasion of Iraq as well as the bias of “embedded” war correspondents in response to the fighting. The same “respectable” journalistic support, if not quite at the same level, was put into play to justify military operations in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan. All of these wars of choice were more or less illegal and ill conceived, and in at least two instances–Iraq and Vietnam–they were finally ruinous to our nation’s sense of collective decency among those who keep track of foreign policy issues. Yet the press promoted them with great enthusiasm exactly when they could have been prevented if there were more public opposition at the time.

Many claim the basic problem is that news coverage has become a commodity almost totally dominated by such media giants as Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, NBC Universal, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and the New York Times Company. Among all these corporate entities, profit predominates at the expense of keeping the public informed. In varying degrees, with Fox at one extreme and the New York Times at the other, the reporter’s “job” of telling stories with a guaranteed audience takes precedence over informing the public at large on an adequate basis. Of course a modicum of information remains important, but it plays second fiddle to the bottom line, the profits guaranteed by the size and enthusiasm of the audience. As a rule of thumb, media owners are Republicans, reporters are middle-of-the-road Democrats (with one or two liberal Democrats to enliven the package), and publishers mediate between owners and reporters, almost inevitably giving the nod to the owners when the choice really matters, for example when it comes time to endorse a political candidate. The bias–and there always is one–thus tilts toward conservatism with a sprinkling of information that might be considered middle-of-the-road liberal.

As an exception to the rule, significant bias often occurs in news coverage relevant to Israel. The news corporations listed above are dominated by billionaires and multi-millionaires incidentally friendly to the Zionist cause as illustrated by their willingness to publicize Arab atrocities and to suppress information about Israeli transgressions. This bias seems evident in the almost total suppression of information about Sivan Kurtzberg and four other Israeli citizens (two of whom were connected with Mossad) when they were arrested at the edge of a New Jersey highway cheering and photographing the 9-11 catastrophe across the Hudson River. It seemed at the time that they were somehow involved in the event, if only as witnesses who knew in advance that it was going to occur. They were held in detention for 71 days, then flown back to Israel with little if any publicity. This bias may also be observed in the almost total lack of press coverage relevant to the 2005 story about Larry Franklin, a Zionist spy who served at a high level as a Pentagon analyst, having been caught and then involved in a sting operation that trapped Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman of AIPAC in the act of accepting secret information to be forwarded to Israel. Many other Zionist spies embedded in U.S. agencies might also have been uncovered if the investigation had been pursued more effectively, but it wasn’t, and the case against Rosen and Weissman was finally closed based on the argument that the secret information was so sensitive that it could not have been used as evidence in a courtroom hearing.

On the other hand, the media’s persistent anti-Arab bias has been in in full display most recently in the media’s top billing over the better part of a week of its indignation with the release of Abdel Baset al Megrahi from prison in Scotland for the destruction of Pan American flight 103 in 1988, over two decades ago, in which a total of 270 people were killed. The official explanation for releasing Megrahi, the token culprit, was his terminal cancer. But whether or not he had any part in the conspiracy–which he has persistently denied–the U.S. media has featured his presumed guilt while totally neglecting the probable justification for this act of terrorism, either the earlier sinking of a couple of Libyan boats in the Gulf of Sidra by American fighter planes or the destruction just six months earlier of an Iranian civilian airliner, flight IR 655, by antiaircraft fire from the U.S. aircraft carrier Vincinnes under the command of Captain Will Rogers III. In this case 290 passengers died (twenty more than in flight 103), 66 of whom were children en route to a vacation with their families on a recognized civilian air route. Neither Rogers III nor President Bush ever apologized for this inexcusable “mistake,” but a couple years later the U.S. government paid slightly over $60 million in damages.

Significantly, the IR 655 incident led to Iran’s acceptance of a U.N. ceasefire that ended the war between Iran and Iraq at a time when Reagan’s administration was intensifying the conflict with its Iran-Contra strategy that just happened to benefit Israel through the mutual destruction of two potential enemies. Today, newsmen such as Wolf Blitzer, a former reporter for the Jerusalem Post, excoriate Megrahi’s release without at all mentioning the overall context. As usual, they totally ignore the full story with the justified expectation that the American public has an even shorter memory than they themselves. But some of us don’t.

Too often the media seems almost eager to convey approved misinformation without questioning it. The majority of intrepid Fox watchers, for example, did not realize for a couple years beyond the 2003 invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had no connection whatsoever with al Qaeda. Vice President Cheney kept insisting that a connection existed between the two based on false reports, and Fox kept this assumption afloat on the airwaves as an unassailable fact–which it wasn’t.

But excessive collaboration has been in effect at all levels in the media, including the three most respectable newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

Even today, for example, during the supposedly enlightened Obama administration, the American public is kept ignorant of the likelihood that our government secretly encouraged the recent coup d’etat in Honduras. Suggestive of this possibility are the facts that our nation already has 400 troops stationed there and that the military coup leaders are using the Washington lobbyist Lanny Davis, once closely connected with Bill and Hillary Clinton, to represent their case in Washington. It also seems relevant that a U.S. military airfield was used to help fly the deposed president out of Honduras and that U.S. government apologists first tried to excuse themselves with the argument that U.S. representatives in Honduras–whether military, diplomatic, or both–warned the coup leaders not to go through with their plan. How, though, could these Americans have done this if they weren’t aware that a coup attempt was being undertaken? And if they did know of it and opposed such a possibility, as they now insist to their Latin American friends, why didn’t they make an effort to prevent it?

But there are more questions as well. Honduras’ military leadership, mostly educated in Fort Benning’s School of the Americas, avoids doing anything we don’t let them do–so why did we let them do this? Why has our government belatedly cancelled its aid of $30 million to Honduras at exactly the same time as an aid package of $150 million is being provided by the IMF? Could our current administration’s manipulative involvement have anything to do with the State Department’s concern about President Zelaya’s friendship with President Chavez of Venezuela? And is its “lukewarm” support of Zelaya linked with the strategy of “waiting it out” until the next election is held on November 29, less than three months from now, when our government can once again help to manipulate election results as it has done so many times before? One wonders, though, if Zelaya might be able to run for reelection on the technicality that he has not served his full term. The answers to these and other such questions will have far-reaching impact on our nation’s relations with most of Latin America during the rest of Obama’s presidency. Yet coverage in the American press tells us very little. Everybody who is anybody in Latin America is well aware of what is involved–it is the supposedly informed American reader who remains ignorant.

Of course one cannot discount the possibility that the NYT and WP are now researching the Honduras issue to be able to give a full report later, but this did not happen after last August, when Georgia waged a surprise attack against South Ossetia. U.S. newspapers inclusive of the NYT and WP treated the counter-attack of Russian troops as having been the initial assault. But this was not true, and these news sources never fully conceded their error afterward. This left American readers with the false impression that the Russians were mostly at fault–which was not the case. Instead, the encounter began with a highly destructive midnight surprise attack on South Ossetia’s capital planned by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. One suspects his strategy was at least partly to expedite admittance in NATO in the near future. But Russians troops stationed in South Ossetia staged a successful counter-attack the next morning, and Georgian troops fled for their lives.

In his recent visit to Georgia, Vice President Biden was able to reinforce the notion that Russia was at fault in his repeated insistence that Russia had first launched the invasion, once doing so while standing arm in arm with Saakashvili. Whether he believes it himself, Biden’s misinformation is only possible because of the failure of most of the American press, especially the New York Times, to set the record straight. Now, just a couple weeks later, we hear that 750 Georgian troops are to be trained by U.S. marines, presumably to serve in Afghanistan. But who is kidding whom? If Russia retaliates, for example by supplying its most advanced technology to augment Iran’s defensive missile system, as it has already announced, the Cold War just might be effectively resurrected, and Obama will have pulled off what McCain could never have achieved if he had been elected. We also learn from a recent Nation article by Alexander Cockburn that Saakashvili has actually boasted of Georgia’s defense minister, David Kezerashvili, and Temur Iakobashvili, its minister in charge of negotiations regarding South Ossetia, having both been Israeli residents before coming to Georgia.

So the picture gets complicated. Israel demands that pressure be exerted on Russia to withdraw its offer to Iran, and the State Department seems to be making an effort to use both the training of Georgian troops and a new missile system offered to Poland, manned by as many as 100 American technicians, as leverage against Russia in order to give Israel what it wants–the opportunity to attack Iran without any possibility of high-tech Russian intervention. A little news coverage is to be found in our major newspapers relevant to some of what is happening right now, but only in bits and pieces, and without acknowledging the other side of the story or the full extent of all the tradeoffs now in play. If and when military conflict erupts in the region involving a Zionist attack on Iran, our press can take satisfaction in Israel’s “existential” justification, and nobody in the United States will know any better. And with Iran eliminated as a potential threat, Israel can junk any prospects of a regional solution for the Near East, letting it (Israel) continue doing what it pleases in its suppression of Palestinians, hopefully culminating in their transfer elsewhere within another decade or two.

6. Matters Cultural (or not)

And finally the demoralization of the American public cannot be disregarded as a byproduct of collective decline resulting from what might be described as spent expansionism. When a hegemonic civilization begins to disintegrate, in imperial America no less than our nine hegemonic predecessors, this decline bears with it with a full array of negative consequences that are more or less precipitous. Just as our economy is both broke and extravagant at the same time, and just as our military juggernaut is both powerful and ineffectual at the same time, our collective lifestyle and the social infrastructure that supports it are both wasteful and impoverished at the same time. The virtue of growth has degenerated into mere extravagance, and traces of decline can be expected to penetrate every aspect of society that has directly or indirectly shared in this excess. Enlarged rewards proportional to output become an insistence at all levels of economic behavior, and innovation (today a corporate mantra) usually consists of useless variation to suggest improvement instead of a cheapening of the product. Greed thrives, and intrinsic value almost completely takes a back seat to profit maximization.

Cherished possessions become junk too soon. Almost every feature of what we buy and use manifests planned obsolescence as first explained by Bernard London in 1932. Our cars, appliances, TV, computers, cameras, and telephone gadgetry too quickly become obsolete, far too vulnerable to damage, and far too intricate to understand for anybody but the most avid junkies devoted to their use. New houses and furniture are actually stapled together, and new cars and appliances too often depend on plastic components exactly at the sites where wear is the greatest, thus guaranteeing the need for early replacement. Metal isn’t exactly metal, nor is plastic quite plastic. Nor are wood and its various substitutes straight from the tree, if at all. Also, our food, our lawns, and everything we touch, smell or breath is laced with presumably non-toxic chemicals that somehow increase corporate profits but whose combined effect on our health can only be harmful. And so on.

Our medical system is the most expensive and least productive, dollar for dollar, in the entire post-industrial world. Our longevity statistics are actually forty-sixth from the top worldwide according to the 2008 CIA World Factbook estimates. Almost all of Europe lives longer than we do. Obesity has become rampant resulting from the consumption of processed junk food, much of it with the “diet” brand. Today an estimated one-third of the American public are both too bulky and too unhealthy, emblematic of our society as a whole. Also contributing to our nation’s bad health, as many as forty-six million Americans go without health insurance, and according to the Institute of Medicine in 2004, quoted by Wendell Potter (a former private health insurance publicist), as many as eighteen thousand Americans die each year because of the lack of health insurance. Their medical care at emergency wards is both too expensive and necessarily insufficient.

Meanwhile the 1200 private health care providers collectively reap about $30 billion in annual profits. Thirty percent of the health industry’s overall budget is spent on administration costs inclusive of profits, lobbying, and so-called “rescissions,” the ongoing effort of lawyers and medical researchers to exclude potentially unprofitable individuals (i.e., those with bad health) from its benefits programs. Trained employees scour the medical records of patients suddenly in trouble to find an earlier medical problem unmentioned in their original applications, however minor, then retroactively cancel these application for fraud exactly when these patients are the most desperately in need of this support.

No wonder the private health care industry depends as heavily as it does on lobbying elected officials in Washington and dredging up a swarm of blustering “angry” demonstrators presumably eager to retain their private health insurance. During the first three months of this year alone, it is also estimated that health-care companies and their employees have contributed almost $1.8 million to House members supervising health care reform, with the 52 Blue Dog Democrats receiving 25 percent more apiece than other Democrats. Another report says altogether $5.4 million has been spent in campaign donations, 60 percent of which went to the Blue Dog Democrats who now control the committees.

Unfortunately, single-payer insurance comparable to the programs of other post-industrial nations no longer seems a viable possibility in Congress. Moreover, even the substitution of a public option that would include single-payer insurance as a competitive alternative to private insurance plans seems likely to be sacrificed in favor of a much watered-down co-op option guaranteed to fail. Not surprisingly, conservative congressmen supportive of the health insurance industry are now suggesting that even this concession would be unacceptable to them. And it appears their lobby has the political leverage to impose their own choice. As a result, Obama’s campaign promise to obtain genuine health insurance reform if elected seems to have caved in despite its widespread public support, in large part because his public relations effort has been inadequate and he and his subordinates have been too compliant in their negotiations toward acceptable compromises. It seems he is willing to make basic concessions before obtaining an adequate tradeoff from those with whom he is negotiating.

Our educational system is also victimized by bloated costs matched with inferior results. This contradiction is relevant to both the current K-through-12 test-based improvement strategies and the steady degeneration of colleges and universities into corporate ventures that primarily treat knowledge and student enrollment as marketable commodities. Business Administration and computer technology have almost completely replaced history, philosophy, anthropology, and comparative literature as the chosen majors of students, and this is in fact the appropriate choice, given our nation’s current economic crisis. Our universities feature expensive new construction, high salaries for an excessive number of administrators, and a variety of operational costs that have escalated proportional to the total budget. If all these expenses were pegged to faculty salaries and/or student tuition at the same level as five, three, or even one decade ago, one suspects there would be no serious budget crisis. To offset these needless costs peripheral to the basic task of education, our colleges and universities jack up tuition each year and substitute instructors and teaching assistants for tenure-track faculty as much as possible–to the extent that many students do not encounter a genuine tenured professor until they reach their junior year. As a result many college-educated individuals are no longer particularly educated, only competent in making money–that is to say, in maximizing their income relative to the effort expended.

The gap between poverty and perceived respectability seems to have become almost unbridgeable. Vertical mobility has become less accessible than in the past, quite opposite the prevalent myth of poor people striking it rich one way or another. The few who do succeed (rock stars, etc.) get heavy publicity, and most others rest satisfied with the dream. The poor are mostly to be found in run-down urban neighborhoods, the middle-class in stapled split-level houses located in upscale housing projects, and the wealthy in gated communities crowded with stapled McMansions minus personal libraries except for Christmas and birthday books.

Moreover, traditional families have become almost archaic.

Among two-parent families both fathers and mothers work to support an artificial standard of living, and their children either run free or endure the supervision of nannies, many of whom have trouble coping with the English language. Similarly, the rates of divorce and single parenthood are off the chart, as is the deliberate rejection of parenthood among exactly the best and most suitable candidates for this role. Too many of our most promising potential parents don’t parent, while too many of our most challenged parents excessively test this challenge.

Meanwhile, a steady diet of teen-appeal TV movies, reality TV programming, violent computer games, and internet pornography consume the attention of too big an audience. Extravagance has become an obsession of too many Americans who live otherwise impoverished lives. Hollywood movies have become for the most part hebephrenic junk except for a few weeks preceding the March Oscar ceremonies. In response to this collective vulgarity, an ultra-reactionary tide of mindless opposition now manifests itself among our nation’s quasi-literate sub-population of supposedly concerned citizens. As to be expected, these strident misguided soldiers of democracy have latched onto arch-patriotism, fundamentalist religion, the rights of unborn babies, and the freedom to bear arms as the primary answers to our nation’s most compelling problems. A fraudulent $3 trillion war is far less offense to them than health care reform at a far lower cost that actually saves many tens of thousands of American lives.

So exactly who, then, best fits the description as our current generation’s great thinkers, great creators, great jurists and great statesmen comparable to those of previous generations? Alas, they don’t exist except for a few dozen angry iconoclasts, further testimony to our nation’s present decline into mediocrity despite its abundance of glitz and technological gimmickry.

7. Flopping on the Dock

President Obama is certainly bright and competent enough to confront this challenge under the right circumstances. However, he is far too conciliatory with the Bush-style Republicans who managed to survive the last election. It is to be conceded that his supposedly unbeatable majority in both houses of Congress is vulnerable to partisan resistance by blue-dog Democrats working in conjunction with their Republican friends equally indebted to the K-Street lobbyists. Nevertheless, Obama seems almost eager to appease these people, and if his ultra-conciliatory strategy persists much longer his administration is likely to replicate the disappointing outcome of the Carter and Clinton presidencies as opposed to the earlier successes of the FDR and Johnson administrations, the latter despite the glaring exception of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Obama’s current foreign policy adventurism should be curtailed, to begin with by coming up with an acceptable withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan. Obama might seem a more effective spokesman in defense of military operations abroad than Bush had been, but his ability to gild a sullied strategy will eventually catch up with him.

Again it is to be acknowledged that the United States enjoys dominant status in the world today similar to that of a handful of hegemonic societies–nine in all–that preceded us throughout the history of Western Civilization. But as much as anything this historic similarity suggests the likelihood of a similar outcome, of course in a manner appropriate to our particular circumstances. For history cannot entirely be forgotten. In 1909, exactly a hundred years ago, England seemed completely dominant across the entire world, and in 1809 so did Napoleon across Europe inclusive of Spain, Egypt, and soon enough Moscow. Both hegemons tumbled, England beginning with the First World War five years later, and France more decisively with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo six years later. So what about our current prospects as a world power in 2009? As with all our precursors, paradoxically, our economy and military capabilities are at once both formidable and fatally overextended, dependent on a debt level one trillion dollars in excess of the total annual GDP of the entire world combined, the United States included. This amounts to incredible extravagance. It is what has paid for everything else, and now the party is over–almost. Like a landed barracuda, our nation vigorously flops on the dock. It is dangerous to everybody who stands too close but its chances of surviving much longer as a threat to others are slim. So the question poses itself what can be done to slow down this process, if not turn it around. For, again, our nation’s particular version of hubris seems to be running on empty, unable to take things much farther in the direction we’re going.

If there’s anyone out there who is not already thoroughly cynical about those on the board of directors of the planet, the latest chapter in the saga of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland might just be enough to push them over the edge.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted for the December 21, 1988 bombing, was released from his Scottish imprisonment August 21 supposedly because of his terminal cancer and sent home to Libya, where he received a hero’s welcome. President Obama said that the jubilant welcome Megrahi received was “highly objectionable”. His White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added that the welcoming scenes in Libya were “outrageous and disgusting”. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “angry and repulsed”, while his foreign secretary, David Miliband, termed the celebratory images “deeply upsetting.” Miliband warned: “How the Libyan government handles itself in the next few days will be very significant in the way the world views Libya’s reentry into the civilized community of nations.”¹

Ah yes, “the civilized community of nations”, that place we so often hear about but so seldom get to actually see. American officials, British officials, and Scottish officials know that Megrahi is innocent. They know that Iran financed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian group, to carry out the bombing with the cooperation of Syria, in retaliation for the American naval ship, the Vincennes, shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of more people than did the 103 bombing. And it should be pointed out that the Vincennes captain, plus the officer in command of air warfare, and the crew were all awarded medals or ribbons afterward.² No one in the US government or media found this objectionable or outrageous, or disgusting or repulsive. The United States has always insisted that the shooting down of the Iranian plane was an “accident”. Why then give awards to those responsible?

Today’s oh-so-civilized officials have known of Megrahi’s innocence since 1989. The Scottish judges who found Megrahi guilty know he’s innocent. They admit as much in their written final opinion. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigated Megrahi’s trial, knows it. They stated in 2007 that they had uncovered six separate grounds for believing the conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice, clearing the way for him to file a new appeal of his case.³ The evidence for all this is considerable. And most importantly, there is no evidence that Megrahi was involved in the act of terror.

The first step of the alleged crime, sine qua non — loading the bomb into a suitcase at the Malta airport — for this there was no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, nothing to tie Megrahi to the particular brown Samsonite suitcase, no past history of terrorism, no forensic evidence of any kind linking him to such an act.

And the court admitted it: “The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [Air Malta to Frankfurt] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.”⁴

The scenario implicating Iran, Syria, and the PFLP-GC was the Original Official Version, endorsed by the US, UK, Scotland, even West Germany — guaranteed, sworn to, scout’s honor, case closed — until the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed for the broad Middle East coalition the United States was readying for the ouster of Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Washington was also anxious to achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups close to Iran. Thus it was that the scurrying sound of backtracking could be heard in the corridors of the White House. Suddenly, in October 1990, there was a New Official Version: it was Libya — the Arab state least supportive of the US build-up to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq — that was behind the bombing after all, declared Washington.

The two Libyans were formally indicted in the US and Scotland on Nov. 14, 1991. Within the next 20 days, the remaining four American hostages were released in Lebanon along with the most prominent British hostage, Terry Waite.⁵

In order to be returned to Libya, Megrahi had to cancel his appeal. It was the appeal, not his health, that concerned the Brits and the Americans. Dr. Jim Swire of Britain, whose daughter died over Lockerbie, is a member of UK Families Flight 103, which wants a public inquiry into the crash. “If he goes back to Libya,” Swire says, “it will be a bitter pill to swallow, as an appeal would reveal the fallacies in the prosecution case. … I’ve lost faith in the Scottish criminal justice system, but if the appeal is heard, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that the prosecution case will survive.”⁶

And a reversal of the verdict would mean that the civilized and venerable governments of the United States and the United Kingdom would stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for almost 20 years and imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for eight years.

The Sunday Times (London) recently reported: “American intelligence documents [of 1989, from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)] blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain’s worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal.” Added the Times: “The DIA briefing discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was ‘no current credible intelligence’ implicating her.”⁷

If the three governments involved really believed that Megrahi was guilty of murdering 270 of their people, it’s highly unlikely that they would have released their grip on him. Or is even that too much civilized behavior to expect.

One final note: Many people are under the impression that Libyan Leader Moammar Qaddafi has admitted on more than one occasion to Libya’s guilt in the PanAm 103 bombing. This is not so. Instead, he has stated that Libya would take “responsibility” for the crime. He has said this purely to get the heavy international sanctions against his country lifted. At various times, both he and his son have explicitly denied any Libyan role in the bombing.

Humankind shall never fly

All those angry people. Yelling at the president and members of Congress about how the proposed government health plan, and Obama himself, are “socialist”. (See the poster of Obama as the Joker character from Batman with “Socialism” in large letters, as the only word.⁸ ) These good folks wanna get their health care through good ol’ capitalism; better no health care at all than godless-atheist commie health care; better to see your child die than have her saved by a Marxist-Stalinist-collective doctor who works for the government. But these screaming, heckling Americans — like most of their countrymen — might be rather surprised to discover that they don’t really believe what they think they believe. I wrote an essay several years ago, which is still perfectly applicable today, entitled “The United States invades, bombs, and kills for it, but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?”

A common refrain, explicit or implicit, amongst the recent health-care hecklers is that the government can’t do anything better or cheaper than private corporations. Studies, however, have clearly indicated otherwise. In 2003, US federal agencies examined 17,595 federal jobs and found civil servants to be superior to contractors 89 percent of the time. The following year, a study to determine whether 12,573 federal jobs could be done more efficiently by private contractors found in-house workers winning 91 percent of the time, according to an Office of Management and Budget report. And in 2005, a study of tens of thousands of government positions concluded that federal workers had won the job competitions more than 80 percent of the time. All these studies, it should be kept in mind, took place under the administration of George W. Bush, who, upon taking office in 2001, declared it his top management priority that federal workers should compete with contractors for as many as 850,000 government jobs.⁹ Thus, any pressure to influence the outcome of these studies would have been in the opposite direction — putting the outside contractors in the best light.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Boys of Capital have been chortling in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century — without exception — was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies. Not one socialist government or movement — from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador — not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly.

The continual selling of the Afghanistan war

“But we must never forget,” said President Obama recently, “this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”¹⁰

Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the ultra-nationalist group whose members would not question such sentiments. Neither would most Americans, including many of those who express opposition to the war when polled. It’s simple — We’re fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. We’re fighting the same people who attacked New York and Washington. Never mind that out of the tens of thousands the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001. Never mind that the “plot to kill Americans” in 2001 was hatched in Germany and the United States at least as much as in Afghanistan. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

As to “plotting to do so again” … there’s no reason to assume that the United States has any concrete information of this, anymore than did Bush or Cheney who tried to scare us in the same way for more than seven years to enable them to carry out their agenda.

There are many people in Afghanistan who deeply resent the US presence there and the drones that fly overhead and drop bombs on houses, wedding parties, and funerals. One doesn’t have to be a member of al Qaeda to feel this way. There doesn’t even have to be such a thing as a “member of al Qaeda”. It tells us nothing that some of them can be called “al Qaeda”. Almost every individual or group in that part of the world not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wishes to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there’s a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American aggression while being a member of al Qaeda and people retaliating against American aggression while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit in your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.

In any event, as in Iraq, the American “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists. This is scarcely in dispute even at the Pentagon.

The only “necessity” that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, the establishment of military bases in this country that is surrounded by the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions, and making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran. What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire?

But the war against the Taliban can’t be won. Except by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration unsuccessfully tried to do, and then get out.

The revolution was televised

   You will not be able to stay home, brother.
   You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out.
   You will not be able to lose yourself on skag [heroin] and skip out for beer during commercials.
   Because the revolution will not be televised. …

   There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news
   The revolution will not be right back after a message
   The revolution will not go better with Coke
   The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath
   The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised

These are some of the lines of Gil Scott-Heron’s song that told people in the 1970s (which, I maintain, were just as ‘60ish as the fabled 1960s) that a revolution was coming, that they would no longer be able to live their normal daily life, that they should no longer want to live their normal daily life, that they would have to learn to be more serious about this thing they were always prattling about, this thing they called “revolution”.

Fast Forward to 2009 … Gil Scott-Heron, now a ripe old 60, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post:

WP: In the early 1970s, you came out with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” about the erosion of democracy in America. You all but predicted that there would be a revolution in which a brainwashed nation would come to its senses. What do you think now? Did we have a revolution?

GS-H: Yes, the election of President Obama was the revolution.¹¹

Oh? So that’s it? That’s what we took clubs over our heads for? Tear gas, jail cells, and permanent police and FBI files? Published a million issues of the underground press? To get a president who doesn’t have a revolutionary bone in his body? Not a muscle or nerve or tissue or organ that seriously questions cherished establishment beliefs concerning terrorism, permanent war, Israel, torture, marijuana, health care, and the primacy of profit over the environment and all else? Karl Marx is surely turning over in his London grave. If the modern counter-revolutionary United States had existed at the time of the American revolution, it would have crushed that revolution. And a colonial (white) Barack Obama would have worked diligently to achieve some sort of bi-partisan compromise with the King of England, telling him we need to look forward, not backward.

Yugoslavia

During 1998-1999, the United States used the Kosovo conflict to reaffirm its hegemonic role in Europe. US officials deliberately undercut a potential diplomatic solution to the Kosovo war; instead of using diplomacy to resolve the conflict, the United States sought a military solution in which NATO power could once again be demonstrated. The resulting air war, in 1999, succeeded in fully establishing the continued relevance of NATO, thus affirming US hegemony in Europe and undercutting European proclivities for foreign policy independence.

– David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

There’s no issue of the recent past that has caused more friction internationally amongst those on the left than the question of what really took place in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Gibbs’ new book explores many of the myths surrounding this very complicated and controversial slice of history, particularly those dealing with the supposed humanitarian motivation behind the Western powers intervention and the many alleged Serbian atrocities.

1. Washington Post, August 22 and August 26, 2009.
2. Newsweek magazine, July 13, 1992.
3. Sunday Herald (Scotland), August 17, 2009.
4. ”Opinion of the Court”, Par. 39, issued following the trial in the Hague in 2001.
5. Read many further details about the case.
6. The Independent (London daily), April 26, 2009.
7. Sunday Times (London), August 16, 2009.
8. Washington Post, August 6, 2009, p.C2.
9. Washington Post, June 8, 2005 and March 23, 2006 for this citation plus the three studies mentioned.
10. Talk given at VFW convention in Phoenix, Arizona, August 17, 2009.
11. Washington Post, August 26, 2009.

There have been numerous news stories in recent months about secret CIA programs, hidden from Congress, inspired by former vice-president Dick Cheney, in operation since the September 11 terrorist attacks, involving assassination of al Qaeda operatives or other non-believers-in-the-Empire abroad without the knowledge of their governments. The Agency admits to some sort of program having existed, but insists that it was canceled; and if it was an assassination program it was canceled before anyone was actually assassinated. Another report has the US military, not the CIA, putting the plan — or was it a different plan? — into operation, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the program.¹

All of this can be confusing to those following the news. And rather irrelevant. We already know that the United States has been assassinating non-believers, or suspected non-believers, with regularity, and impunity, in recent years, using unmanned planes (drones) firing missiles, in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, if not elsewhere. (Even more victims have been produced from amongst those who happened to be in the same house, car, wedding party, or funeral as the non-believer.) These murders apparently don’t qualify as “assassinations”, for somehow killing “terrorists” from 2000 feet is morally and legally superior to doing so from two feet away.

But whatever the real story is behind the current rash of speculation, we should not fall into the media’s practice of at times intimating that multiple or routine CIA assassination attempts would be something shocking or at least very unusual.

I’ve compiled a list of CIA assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, against prominent foreign political figures, from 1949 through 2003, which, depending on how you count it, can run into the hundreds (targeting Fidel Castro alone totals 634 according to Cuban intelligence);²) the list can be updated by adding the allegedly al Qaeda leaders among the drone attack victims of recent years. Assassination and torture are the two things governments are most loath to admit to and try their best to cover up. It’s thus rare to find a government document or recorded statement mentioning a particular plan to assassinate someone. There is, however, an abundance of compelling circumstantial evidence to work with. The list can be found here.

For those of you who collect lists about splendid US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a few more that, lacking anything better to do, I’ve put together: Attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected.

After his June 4 Cairo speech, President Obama was much praised for mentioning the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. But in his talk in Ghana on July 11 he failed to mention the CIA coup that ousted Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966,³ referring to him only as a “giant” among African leaders. The Mossadegh coup is one of the most well-known CIA covert actions. Obama could not easily get away without mentioning it in a talk in the Middle East looking to mend fences. But the Nkrumah ouster is one of the least known; indeed, not a single print or broadcast news report in the American mainstream media saw fit to mention it at the time of the president’s talk. Like it never happened.

And the next time you hear that Africa can’t produce good leaders, people who are committed to the welfare of the masses of their people, think of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the 1970s, making it impossible for him to institute progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique against whom the CIA supported a counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to Machel’s widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA.⁴

• Gross interference in democratic elections in at least 30 countries⁵
• Waging war/military action, either directly or in conjunction with a proxy army, in some 30 countries
• Dropping bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
• Attempts to suppress dozens of populist/nationalist movements in every corner of the world⁶

The Myths of Afghanistan, past and present

On the Fourth of July, Senator Patrick Leahy declared he was optimistic that, unlike the Soviet forces that were driven from Afghanistan 20 years ago, US forces could succeed there. The Democrat from Vermont stated:

The Russians were sent running as they should have been. We helped send them running. But they were there to conquer the country. We’ve made it very clear, and everybody I talk to within Afghanistan feels the same way: they know we’re there to help and we’re going to leave. We’ve made it very clear we are going to leave. And it’s going to be turned back to them. The ones that made the mistakes in the past are those that tried to conquer them.⁷

Leahy is a long-time liberal on foreign-policy issues, a champion of withholding US counter-narcotics assistance to foreign military units guilty of serious human-rights violations, and an outspoken critic of robbing terrorist suspects of their human and legal rights. Yet he is willing to send countless young Americans to a living hell, or horrible death, or maimed survival.

And for what? Every point he made in his statement is simply wrong.

The Russians were not in Afghanistan to conquer it. The Soviet Union had existed next door to the country for more than 60 years without any kind of invasion. It was only when the United States intervened in Afghanistan to replace a government friendly to Moscow with one militantly anti-communist that the Russians invaded to do battle with the US-supported Islamic jihadists; precisely what the United States would have done to prevent a communist government in Canada or Mexico.

It’s also rather difficult for the United States to claim that it’s in Afghanistan to help the people there when it’s killed tens of thousands of simply for resisting the American invasion and occupation or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; not a single one of the victims has been identified as having had any kind of connection to the terrorist attack in the US of September 11, 2001, the event usually cited by Washington as justification for the military intervention. Moreover, Afghanistan is now permeated with depleted uranium, cluster bombs-cum-landmines, white phosphorous, a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals, and a population, after 30 years of almost non-stop warfare, of physically and mentally mutilated human beings, exceedingly susceptible to the promise of paradise, or at least relief, sold by the Taliban.

As to the US leaving … utterly meaningless propaganda until it happens. Ask the people of South Korea — 56 years of American occupation and still counting; ask the people of Japan — 64 years. And Iraq? Would you want to wager your life’s savings on which decade it will be that the last American soldier and military contractor leaves?

It’s not even precise to say that the Russians were sent running. That was essentially Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision, and it was more of a political decision than a military one. Gorbachev’s fondest ambition was to turn the Soviet Union into a West-European style social democracy, and he fervently wished for the approval of those European leaders, virtually all of whom were cold-war anti-communists and opposed the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan.

There has been as much of the same “causes” for wars that did not happen as for wars that did.

Henry Allingham died in Britain on July 18 at age 113, believed to have been the world’s oldest man. A veteran of World War I, he spent his final years reminding the British people about their service members killed during the war, which came to about a million: “I want everyone to know,” he said during an interview in November. “They died for us.”⁸

The whole million? Each one died for Britain? In the most useless imperialist war of the 20th century? No, let me correct that — the most useless imperialist war of any century. The British Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire, and the wannabe American Empire joined in battle against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire as youthful bodies and spirits sank endlessly into the wretched mud of Belgium and Germany, the pools of blood of Russia and France. The wondrous nobility of it all is enough to make you swallow hard, fight back the tears, light a few candles, and throw up. Imagine, by the middle of this century Vietnam veterans in their 90s and 100s will be speaking of how each of their 58,000 war buddies died for America. By 2075 we’ll be hearing the same stirring message from ancient vets of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many will remember that there was a large protest movement against their glorious, holy crusades, particularly Vietnam and Iraq?

Supreme nonsense

Senate hearings to question a nominee for the Supreme Court are a supreme bore. The sine qua non for President Obama choosing Sonia Sotomayor appears to be that she’s a woman with a Hispanic background. A LATINA! How often that word was used by her supporters. She would be the first LATINA on the Supreme Court! Dios mio!

Who gives a damn? All anyone should care about are her social and political opinions. Justice Clarence Thomas is a black man. A BLACK MAN! And he’s as conservative as they come.

Supreme Court nominees, of all political stripes, typically feel obliged to pretend that their social and political leanings don’t enter into their judicial opinions. But everyone knows this is rubbish. During her Senate hearing, Sotomayor declared: “It’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It’s the law.”

The former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evan Hughes, would not agree with her. “At the constitutional level where we work,” he said, “ninety percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.”⁹

By Sotomayor’s own account, which echos news reports, she was not asked about her position on abortion by either President Obama or his staff. But what if she is actually anti-abortion? What if she turns out to be the swing vote that overturns Roe vs. Wade?

What if she’s a proud admirer of the American Empire and its perpetual wars? American dissidents, civilian and military, may depend on her vote for their freedom from imprisonment.

What does she think about the “war on terror”? The civil liberties and freedom from torture of various Americans and foreigners may depend on her attitude. In his 2007 trial, Jose Padilla, an American citizen, was found guilty of aiding terrorists. “The jury did seem to be an oddly cohesive group,” the Washington Post reported. “On the last day of trial before the Fourth of July holiday, jurors arranged to dress in outfits so that each row in the jury box was its own patriotic color — red, white or blue.”¹⁰ No one dared to question this blatant display of patriotism in the courtroom; neither the defense attorney, nor the prosecutor, nor the judge. How can we continue to pretend that people’s legal positions exist independently of their political sentiments?

In the 2000 Supreme Court decision stopping the presidential electoral count in Florida, giving the election to George W. Bush, did the politics of the five most conservative justices play a role in the 5 to 4 decision? Of course. Judges are essentially politicians in black robes. But should we care? Don’t ask, don’t tell. Sonia Sotomayor is a LATINA!

Given the large Democratic majority in the Senate, Sotomayor was in very little danger of being rejected. She could have openly and proudly expressed her social and political positions — whatever they may be — and the Democratic senators could have done the same. How refreshing, maybe even educational if a discussion ensued. Instead it was just another political appointment by a president determined to not offend anyone if he can help it, and another tiresome ritual hearing. The Republican senators were much less shy about revealing how they actually felt about important issues.

It didn’t have to be that way. As Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun.org pointed out during the hearings: “Democratic Senators could use their time to ask questions and make statements that explain why a liberal or progressive worldview is precisely what is needed on the Supreme Court.”

NATO and Eastern Europe resource

No one chronicles the rise of the supra-government called NATO like Rick Rozoff in his “Stop NATO” mailings. NATO has become an ever-expanding behemoth, making war and interfering in political controversies all over Europe and beyond. The United States is not the world’s only superpower; NATO is another, as it surrounds Russia and the Caspian Sea oil reserves; although the distinction between the two superpowers is little more than a facade. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the NATO/US 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. On April 23, 1999 missiles slammed into Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in downtown Belgrade, killing 16 employees. The station, NATO claimed, was a legitimate military target because it broadcast propaganda. (Certainly a novel form of censorship; not to mention the fact that NATO could simply have taken out the station’s transmitter.) What apparently bothered the Western powers was that RTS was reporting the horrendous effects of NATO’s bombing as well as passing footage of the destruction to Western media.

To mark the anniversary, Amnesty International recently issued a demand that NATO be held accountable for the 16 deaths. Amnesty asserts that the bombing was a deliberate attack on a civilian object (one of many during the 78 days) and as such constitutes a war crime, and called upon NATO to launch a war crimes probe into the attack to ensure full accountability and redress for victims and their families.

Readers might consider signing up for the “Stop NATO” mailing list. Just write to: rwrozoff [at] yahoo.com. Rozoff scours the East European press each day and comes up with numerous gems ignored by the mainstream media. But a warning: The amount of material you’ll receive is often considerable. You’ll have to learn to pick and choose. You can get an idea of this by reading previous reports here.

1. The Guardian (London) July 13, 2009
2. Fabian Escalante, Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro, (Ocean Press, 2006
3. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 32.
4. William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 23.
5. Ibid., chapter 18
6. Rogue State, chapter 17, intermixed with other types of US interventions
7. Vermont TV station WCAX, July 4, 2009, WCAX.com
8. Washington Post, July 19, 2009
9. William O. Douglas, The Court Years, 1939-1975 (1980), p.8
10. Washington Post, August 17, 2007

“In 1979, after the devastation of a decade under the tyrannical President Macias, then-Lieutenant Colonel Obiang took control of the government and was named President of the Supreme Military Council.”

What did Obiang do while working under Macias’ orders to stop the decade old devastation?

“In 1969 –the official history continues – Obiang becomes the National Guard Liuetenant, with all the forces and military quarters based in Malabo under his control.”

He became commander in chief of the Armed Forces in 1975, and “in 1979 a presidential decree made him vice-minister of the Popular Armed Forces.”

What did Obiang do in these 30 years to avoid another dictatorship?

In 1982, “Obiang became President of the Republic for an initial seven-year term. He was re-elected to additional terms in 1989, 1996 and 2003. (…) President Obiang won re-election once again in 1996. Infrastructure and housing is now being rebuilt more quickly as new water, sewage and drainage are being installed and hundreds of miles of new roadways are being built to connect all of Equatorial Guinea’s cities and towns. Healthcare and education also top the agenda as new, modern state-of-art hospitals and clinics are being built and staffed and teachers are being trained to better teach students.”

Buried under this mountain of promises about public works, lies one certain fact: Obiang wins election after election with more than 95% of the votes. In the 2002 presidential elections he got 97%, in the 2004 legislative and local elections he won 98 out of the 100 parliament seats plus 237 out of the 244 country’s municipalities. In the 2008 legislative elections he got 99 seats.

The main difference between the deposed president and the current one, is that Obiang knows how to read the signs of the times and to adapt himself accordingly. This has allowed him to hold on to power for thirty years, count on foreign support and enrich himself enormously thanks to the oil industry, also under his control.

The past thirty years can indeed be described as golden thirty years for Obiang, but not for the great majority of Equatorial Guinea’s inhabitants. Country reports published by the World Bank, the European Union and some of the United Nations agencies, let alone those by non governmental organisations, especially those devoted to human rights and human development, present a quite different reality.

Obiang is willing to play the democratic game in front of the international community, because in each game he marks the cards and keeps the best while deals the rest.

If appearances have to be kept up of regular elections, of honouring international treaties, of adhering to foreign initiatives on transparency, accountability and good governance, for Obiang this is no problem. He lets the opposition win a parliamentary seat, he signs international treaties only to honour them in the breach, and varnishes his masterwork with glowing propaganda about the government’s good works.

Obiang has many good friends who just happen to govern powerful countries. These convince public opinion that Obiang’s scam is legitimate and only needs a few tweaks and minor improvements. To that end, they offer technical assistance and cooperation, while making clear there is no great urgency. Since oil production started in Equatorial Guinea in the mid 90s, his friends have become even more reliable than ever, despite knowing the reality all too well:

The 2004 Department of State report on Equatorial Guinea accurately summarised its political situation: “Citizens did not have the ability to change their government peacefully.”

In 2009 the Department refers to the country as a “nominally multi-party Republic with strong domination by the executive branch.”

For his part, Obiang thinks it wise to take preventive measures. He sends soldiers and policemen to assassinate, kidnap and torture his “enemies”, and in general to make life difficult for political opponents.

In spite of this and of the fact that there is no shortage of people willing to get their share of the enormous oil cake in exchange for loyalty, some still remain who do not give up. Some of these string along with Obiang’s pretense of democracy. Others prefer to try and oust him.

Considering their actions so far, it can safely be said that Obiang has clearly defeated them all. He intimidates, persecutes and entertains members of the first group, according to his whims. He attacks members of the second whenever he can. These have managed to discomfit him once, but Obiang’s friends and luck have been on his side.

Neither group of the opposition can claim that their respective strategies have come anywhere close to achieving their goals. The reverse is true, as chances of success seem to be inversely proportional to the increase in their actions.

Playing Obiang’s democracy game is not an easy task. If a player does not perform as expected, other players will not take them seriously. Equatorial Guinea’s leader of the parliamentary opposition declares again and again to the international community, to the media, to various international political institutions, that his party plays by Obiang’s rules and also reassures the world that his party will only use non-violent means to achieve power.

But if the international community does not demand that Obiang play by internationally accepted rules to stay in power, why does the opposition think they have to do so? It seems the international community accepts opposition to Obiang as long as its leaders give up their people’s right to resist the Obiang regime’s human rights violations.

Philosophers dealt with the problem of using legitimate violence against an aggression many centuries ago. Since the 13th century it is accepted that “in the case of a deadly attack, there is more obligation to protect one’s own life than the attacker’s.”

If a political party which opposes a never ending dictatorship renounces legitimate defence against its violence, it is delegitimizing itself, because it actually helps the dictatorship it claims to oppose. When this party seeks support from international actors, despite their party’s poor record of resistance and even knowing full well their petition will be met with indifference, they are digging their own political grave.

It is true that a legitimate defence requires another condition, namely that there are reasonable chances of success. In this respect it has to be noted that it is all about not giving up the right to legitimate resistance. Further, there can be no likelihood of success if the possibility of resistance is totally abandoned.

The non-parliamentary opposition, made up of several small groups, has not renounced political violence. But its failure, too, is obvious and due mainly to lack of popular, militant support, to splits and internecine fighting and other shortcomings.

The option of a coup d’état has not yielded useful results. Nor is there much chance that it will. The lack of a popular militia and bad planning, along with the use of foreign mercenaries, explain the failure. Day after day, Obiang increases his own security, and he can count on foreign support. It seems that only a palace coup, like the one Obiang himself authored 30 years ago, is likely to succeed.

It can be said that the opposition too, like Obiang, have placed their hopes in foreign hands. The difference between the two camps is that European and North American Presidents and Prime Ministers prefer oil in their own countries to ensuring human rights in Equatorial Guinea.

The struggle carried out by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) is illuminating. The oil plunder plus the damages it causes to the Delta physical conditions and to its inhabitants’ health, together with the government’s repression, are the reasons the MEND mentions to explain its attacks against the interests of the foreign companies that benefit from the oil industry with the consent of the government.

What is taking place in Nigeria, taking into account its much bigger size, is similar to what happens in Equatorial Guinea: “Since 1970, $350 billion in oil revenue has flowed to Nigeria, yet 75% of Nigerians live on less than $1 a day. (…) Nigerian governments have negotiated joint ventures with multinational companies for unregulated oil production since 1958. Over 50 years of exploitation in the Niger Delta has resulted in systematic human rights abuses and environmental devastation.”

Against this the MEND has declared its aims: reparations for environmental damage and also control of the Delta’s natural riches. It has also made public its means: “Leave our land while you can or die in it. Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil.”

In recent years, its achievements have been made known. The government, heeding a request by the big oil companies, sent the army to violently repress the Delta people protests, which resulted in thousands of dead, tortured and prisoners.

Popular resistance, however, kept up the struggle and the MEND was created. It has forced cuts in oil production from almost two and half million barrels per day to less than one and a half.

Unlike what is taking place in Equatorial Guinea, the Nigerian government does not despise the MEND. This is not a gift from the government –it maintains its military actions against the guerrillas- but the MEND, through its resistance, has placed itself in a position that deserves its enemy’s respect. Nowadays, both camps are holding conversations.

Meanwhile, Obiang represses the opposition parties that he so despises. At the same time, the only opposition leader with a seat in parliament, made public a communiqué after the attack against the president’s palace in Malabo that took place last February, the 17th, 2009, which was disingenuously attributed to the MEND by the government.

The party “congratulates the State Security and Armed Forces for their quick and efficient response and declares its support and solidarity with them.” It also reiterates once again “that (the party) rejects all movements aimed to achieve power through violence.”

While the Equatorial Guinea parliament unanimously declares the MEND “a terrorist group made up of mercenaries with evil intentions and recommends maximum repression,” Nigeria president has offer the MEND an amnesty. This offer is supported by many, including Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka.

Equatorial Guinea politicians, both in power and in opposition, might do well to pay attention to what Soyinka’s said about Nigerian politicians: “In tandem with his predecessor Olusegun, President Umaru Yar’Adua must be made to recognize that he shoulders a moral and political responsibility for failure to make a decisive breakthrough in the quest to terminate hostilities in the Delta region. Much of the toll of death and destruction could, and would have been avoided if only these two rulers had lived up to their charge.

These words, of course, are also relevant to those in Europe and North America who “accompany Obiang in his efforts to improve democracy in Equatorial Guinea” and to those who claim to support the opposition camp in its political activity.

Behind the crocodile tears the news of Bongo’s death saw police and troop reinforcements hitting the streets of Gabon—France’s private Eden in Africa—as the old crocodile’s teethy security apparatus clicked into lockdown. Who are the white secret service agents behind Bongo (See the ancient photo of Gabon’s then new President, Albert-Bernard Bongo, circa 1965.) And then there’s Halliburton, nuclear weapons, secret societies… Who was Omar Bongo really?

In September 2003 the National Geographic unveiled the first in a series of feature stories about the world’s ‘least spoiled’ and ‘most threatened’ tropical forests. The ‘Saving Africa’s Eden’ series showcased elephants walking on white sand beaches, silverback gorillas in lush greenery, and hippos surfing in the salty sea. Omar Bongo—“a self-possessed man with a wide mustache and a warm smile”—was the African hero who created thirteen new national parks literally overnight.

The National Geographic series followed the adventures of the requisite modern day white-skinned Tarzan personified by American biologist J. Michael Fay—the ‘man who walked across the continent of Africa’—and photos showed Fay trekking through the equatorial jungle, crisscrossing savannahs and, later, surveying the wilderness with the charismatic black-skinned then U.S. Secretary of State—fresh out of a helicopter for a photo op—General Colin Powell.¹

It was all so captivating that I got the idea I had to go there. And so I did. Intrigued by the stories in National Geographic—which I recognized as the propaganda of the corporate empire² –in late 2004 I took a ‘vacation’ from the beauty and bloodshed in the big Congo (Kinshasa) and hitchhiked across the (not-so) little Congo (Brazzaville) for a visit to ‘paradise.’³

From Libreville I flew to Gamba, in the south of Gabon, took a boat to Sette Cama, and spent Christmas 2004 with my base camp on a bluff some 50 feet above the ocean in Loango National Park, the jewel of Gabon’s largest new protected area, the 1,132,000 hectare ‘Gamba Protected Area Complex.’ It is also the heartland of Shell, Halliburton and Schlumberger operations in Gabon.⁴

“Blue seas, white sand, elephants, whales, sea turtles, monkeys, bush pigs, unbelievable scenery,” biologist Fay was quoted to say. “Gabon has it all. It has everything that everyone ever dreams about in paradise, as far as I’m concerned.”

J. Michael Fay was right, I said to myself, many times, surrounded by beauty and wildness, warm (90 degree) mists on the ocean and elephants on the beaches, soaring ospreys and chimpanzees falling out of trees, and the peace of the deserted shores of one of the most fantastic enduring wild places on earth.

But J. Michael Fay skipped the dirty details. Fay didn’t mention the poverty and suffering of black Gabonese villagers whose mud-hut and malaria suffering stands in sharp juxtaposition to the swimming pools and golf courses for highly paid white expatriates, sport fisherman or adventure tourists. Or that the Gamba Complex is a private zone controlled by Shell Oil, with checkpoints and guards, where pipelines, oil barges, well-heads and huge toxic flames burning off natural gas are more visible than the elephants. And the medical waste, dumped at sea, that litters the ‘pristine’ beach: one day I picked 48 syringes with 2 inch needles out of the white sand where I was walking barefoot. J. Michael Fay became a personal adviser to Omar Bongo, but he didn’t tell us about the terror Gabonese people live and die with.

“It [‘Saving Africa’s Eden’] is unbelievable,” Marc Ona Essangui told me, in Libreville. It was just like another film about Africa.” In April 2009, Marc Ona received the Goldman Environmental Prize for his selfless grass roots struggle to exposing corruption and human rights violations and protect Gabon’s environment, and he was threatened, arrested and illegally detained by the Bongo government.

“They announced that setting up these new Gabon parks would bring one million tourists a year, but even Kenya couldn’t do that. The pictures in National Geographic suggested that it’s easy to encounter these animals, but it’s not. It would take many days. Even though the whole world may perceive that conservation is proceeding in Gabon, this is not the reality.”

“Why did Bongo create [gazette] these thirteen new reserves? Because of scandals that took place in the past few years, like the financial scandal with FIBA Bank and the fraudulent presidential elections here, and to create tension and play off the United States against France. Bongo needed to find some way to repair relations with the United States.”

Welcome to Gabon, a small otherwise unheard of Banana Republic in equatorial Africa. Hippos in the surf… gorillas in the mist… the adventures of the great white Tarzan, National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, J. Michael Fay, “the crazed American, the wild child who footed his way across all those nearly impassable forests and swamps, who sat half-naked atop the Inselbergs, who brought back photos and tales of a Gabon that Omar Bongo himself hadn’t known existed.”⁵

Now he’s bushwhacking through tropical lianas and serpent filled trees with machete… now’s he wading through leech-filled crocodile swamps… his trusty negro porters and trackers at hand… now he’s being gored by an elephant… Welcome to the state-of-the-art cartography and explorer-conqueror genre: Fay’s private helicopter almost daily dropping supplies in the jungle to the tune of hundreds of thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars and mom & pop conservation donations…

The coup des grace on all this propaganda was the portrait of Omar Bongo—the altruistic African President more interested in saving the environment than selling it off for the glitter of gold or the bling bang of diamonds or for parquet floors and plywood. President Omar Bongo was portrayed as the intent listener, the wise philosophical leader, the humanitarian negotiator. He was not—according to the spin-doctors of the propaganda system—your usual African dictator who packs people’s severed heads in his refrigerator (Idi Amin) and later has his ears cut off (Samuel Doe).

The National Geographic photos of Eden unveiled were splashed all over cyberspace. Films were made and speeches given to capitalize on the momentum of public interest. Maps and guides were mass produced, DVDs and coffee table picture books, interactive features—even “classroom companion African resources” to properly influence the kiddies. The travel agencies jumped on board. Everyone was echoing the mantra: “Could Gabon be the next ecotourism destination?”

The National Geographic series was a sort of public relations pitch for the big money conservation non-government organizations—Bi(g) NGOs or BINGOs—who get all the funding: corporate entities like World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, Fauna and Flora International, and the Wildlife Conservation Society. But the series also introduced and paved the way for the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), a predatory USAID⁶ initiative involving some seven African countries, U.S. logging companies, NASA, the Pentagon and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, launched under President George W. Bush.⁷ In 2002, Walter Kansteiner, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, paid a six-day visit to President Omar Bongo to negotiate the CBFP, and “Saving Africa’s Eden” whitewashed the Kansteiner story as falsely as they did the Bongo regime.

National Geographic was selling ecotourism and wildlife protection as a panacea to ‘save’ Africa’s idyllic gardens of Eden. But it was all a smokescreen, a blanket of propaganda draped over the primitive realities of the country of Gabon. The script was written by big business masquerading as conservation: the Wildlife Conservation Society wrote Colin Powell’s speeches, delivered in Johannesburg. Kansteiner was described as a humanitarianism possessed with the need for democracy, health care and peace, but the Kansteiner family profits by exploiting Africa as ruthlessly as King Leopold. Trading in columbium tantalite (coltan) out of the bloody Kivu provinces of D.R. Congo, Kansteiner is also a director of Moto Gold, a company that sprouted out of the genocide in the DRC’s bloody Ituri districts.⁸

Today the blanket of propaganda is being draped over the casket of Albert-Bernard Bongo, the elfish little man who for forty-one years ran the country of Gabon as a private enterprise for himself, his family, his foreign backers and protectors. Articles that mildly illuminate the corruption of the Bongo government merely serve to distance Western governments and cover for multinational corporations and state sponsored terrorism by blaming everything on Bongo.⁹

This was not my first visit to Gabon. In 1997 I was focused on the murder of Ken Saro Wiwa and the petroleum genocide in the Niger River Delta.¹⁰ I wanted a visa for Nigeria, and I passed through every country around or near Nigeria trying to get one. But the country was closed under dictator Sani Abacha—the butcher—and I was too frightened to enter Nigeria without a visa.¹¹

Ghana was an Anglo-American stronghold, but the others I passed through were all Francophone dictatorships: Burkina Faso, Niger, Togo, Cameroon—and Gabon. It was a wake-up call to the structural violence that enslaves Africa and enriches the West and its comprador class agents like Omar Bongo.¹² (Of course, U.S. President Obama’s recent criticisms of corruption and cronyism in Africa are extremely hypocritical, at the very least.)

In Libreville, I met Thierry (not his real name). Thierry quietly told me he had worked in human rights until he became a very outspoken critic of the government. He was on the run, living ‘underground’ and existing by moving, one day to the next, through networks of friends. He was an intellectual, and he described a climate of terror in Gabon involving extra-judicial executions, disappearances, torture, all run by Bongo’s intelligence operatives and the Deuxieme Bureau, also known as the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), the French secret service.

The most egregious repression occurred in 1990, Thierry said, when civilians were massacred during the ‘pro-democracy’ protests in Port Gentil. The true human rights situation is hidden, he said, even after numerous letters were sent to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

“President Bongo knows everything that goes on in Gabon,” said Thierry. “Everything. Nothing happens that he does not know about. And there are very sophisticated forms of terror, like torture, disappearing, ritual killings, using plain-clothes operatives, in designer blue jeans or NIKE tracksuits. Bongo knows all about it—he is involved—and they have killed a lot of people with no one knowing about it. People just suddenly disappear or turn up dead.”¹³

A white woman named Catherine who worked in language translations confirmed the 1990 massacres. “There are a lot of things you can do in the United States that you cannot do here,” Catherine told me, acerbically, “and one is to be politically curious. You just don’t go around asking these kinds of questions here. You would never get away with it, but even if there was an attempt to investigate the massacres it would be blocked.”

I also met a white expatriate consulting in the oil sector. He had just come from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, but he shuffled around between Cameron, Nigeria, Gabon and Angola. “Foreigners who work in Gabon work in wood or in oil,” he said. He confirmed that killings were routine before the mid-1990’s, and that massacres occurred in Port Gentil just as Thierry had said. He said that the stories about protestors being arrested and tortured were true. “It was not just a few people killed,” he insisted. “It was a lot of people. Protestors were taken out over the ocean in oil company helicopters and pushed out, alive or dead. It’s more than just a rumor.”

Togolese and Nigerian refugees in Benin, human rights activists in Cameroon, all have described these terrorist tactics involving petroleum sector helicopters. One Togolese refugee explained that in Togo they didn’t just push people out, they hang them from helicopters and fly low over the ‘jungle communities’ to instill them with terror.¹⁴

“Bongo used to just kill anyone he wanted, openly, before 1990,” a local Gabonese man, Maconi, told me in Libreville. Maconi’s family is involved in the timber sector in Gabon, and his mother is French and he moves within the French community. “Bongo would just kill them without trying to keep it quiet. Now [2004] it is different, it is subtle, quiet, you don’t see it, but it hasn’t stopped.”¹⁵

PARISTROIKA

From the very beginning, circa 1865, Gabon was the focal point from which France projected its military and economic power across the continent, serving as an intelligence-gathering base much as Burkina Faso has historically served that role for Israel and the Congo (Zaire) has for the USA.

In fact, France forced Gabon’s independence movement to accept France’s full economic control as a pre-condition for ‘independence’.

Gabon’s first President Leon M’ba—and his early one-party dictatorship—set the stage for the Bongo regime both through sheer corruption and the Gabonese state’s nefarious military and intelligence alliance with the French. A rapid intervention by French Foreign Legion commandoes secured M’ba’s presidency after an attempted coup d’etat in 1964: M’ba was said to be a close friend of Charles De Gaulle. Many of Mba and Bongo’s French supporters considered Gabon their private domain and were threatened by Gabon’s ‘independence’ after decades of French colonial occupation. When M’ba died of illness, Bongo took the reins and with the help of France he consolidated absolute power: one of the fledgling President’s first actions was to immediately dissolve all political parties and replace them with the ‘Democratic Party of Gabon.’

Charles de Gaulle and his ‘Monsieur Afrique,’ Jacques Foccart directly installed Bongo in 1967. Bongo was the choice of a powerful group of Frenchmen—the Clan des Gabonais—composed of key members of the French government and influential Gabonese in alliance with strategically placed French nationals who controlled the economy of Gabon.¹⁶ Foccart maintained French control in the former colonies through the Reseau Foccart, an intricate ‘network’ who collaborated with the French military and major French economic interests to guarantee access to strategic minerals. Former French ambassador and close M’ba adviser Maurice Delauney was a central figure in the Foccart network and the man who handpicked Bongo as Mba’s successor.¹⁷ French mercenaries and legionnaires like Bob Denard were (and remain) members of the Clan des Gabonais, using Gabon as home base for intelligence, covert operations and terrorism from Sao Tomé to Madagascar.¹⁸ French soldiers operate within the Gabonese military and French pilots in the Air Force; elite Mirage and Jaguar aircraft from the French air force are based on the military side of the Leon Mba airport in Libreville.

Petroleum exploration in Gabon was begun in the early 1930s by the French national oil company and Gabon was the first African country to host French oil giant Elf in the 1960s, from where Elf operated as a state within a state, serving as a base for French military and espionage activities, and for many decades Libreville remained the French nerve center of covert operations in central and southern Africa.¹⁹

Shell Oil entered Gabon in 1960 (Nigeria in 1958). Other oil companies in Gabon today include: AGIP (Italy), Amerada Hess (USA), AMOCO (US), BP (British Petroleum), Occidental Petroleum (USA), Energy Africa Gabon (South Africa), Pan African Energy, Marathon Oil (USA), Exxon/Mobil (and subsidiary Esso Exploration West Africa), Broken Hill Petroleum and Tullow Oil, a U.K.-based profiteer also involved in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in eastern Congo and Uganda.²⁰ The French oil conglomerate Total acquired Belgium’s PetroFina in 1999 and Elf-Acquitaine in 2000, creating one of the world’s nastiest multinational oil companies.

For almost 50 years, France’s entire international security policy—its classified nuclear weapons strike force (le force de frappe atomique) and atomic reactor complex —revolved around access to uranium from Gabon and Niger. Uranium in Gabon was discovered in 1956 and exploitation began through the Compagnie des Mines d’Uranium de Franceville (COMUF), a consortium involving multinationals like Total and AREVA, in 1958.²¹ COMUF is 68.4% owned by French multinational COGEMA, which is also one of Canada’s largest uranium producers; COGEMA is partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy in the production of nuclear fuel for the U.S. weapons complex. The infamous U.S. multinational Union Carbide, responsible for crimes against humanity in Bhopal, India, was heavily involved in another catastrophe: uranium mining in Gabon. A hospital near the remote Mounana uranium mine has documented the long history of under five children living and dying with disfigured bodies, gynecological tumors, blood and skin diseases, cancers and leukemias, or the epidemics of radiation poisoning that quietly obliterated so many adult miners over 38 years of operations.²² It is the same, ugly story in Niger, only uglier, due to higher populations of Tuareg and Toubou nomads; National Geographic writers who have whitewashed Gabon hide the same ugly imperial realities of uranium.²³ ,²⁴

Also involved in uranium in Gabon are: Motapa Diamonds (U.S.A.); Mineral Services International (Cape Town, Vancouver, London, Gaborone and Libreville); Pitchstone Exploration (Canada, U.S.A.) and CAMECO (U.S.A., Canada)—a DeBeers connected company also tied to the Washington D.C. law firm Winston & Strong.²⁵ ,²⁶ ,²⁷

Manganese is essential for superalloys essential to the western aerospace and defense complex: Gabon is the second largest producer behind South Africa and manganese is Gabon’s third largest export earner. U.S. Steel owned 44% of Gabon’s manganese producer, the Compagnie Miniere de l’Ogooue (COMILOG), which U.S. Steel set up with France in 1953; U.S. Steel reportedly sold out in the 1960’s, but 60% of COMILOG was controlled by French and U.S. interests until 1996 when Eramet Group (France) bought 57%, leaving the Gabon government with 27% and ‘other private parties’ (read: U.S. & French businessmen) with 16%. ¹⁷ COMILOG has a capital value of over $80 billion and its profits soared from US$ 4.2 million in 2003 to US$ 183 million in 2004; about one-third of COMILOGs production is used by Eramet’s manganese plants in France, Norway and USA (two-thirds goes to China, India and Ukraine).

COMILOG also controls the TransGabonese Railway—crucial to the massive devastation of rainforest logging. (Due to heavy metals emissions, Eramet Marietta is under fire in Ohio and West Virginia for epidemics of disease.²⁸ ) Repression in the logging sector in Gabon is widespread: foreign companies penetrate rural areas, dividing and conquering forest people with cash and conflict, bringing alcohol, hunting, prostitution, traffic in endangered species, and direct paramilitary violence. The entire western NGO (e.g. BINGOs like WWF, WCS, Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, the Great Apes Survival Project, Jane Goodal Institute) narrative on the ‘bushmeat trade’ ignores the role of state repression backed by western institutions and the private profits and white supremacy of the BINGOs. ²⁹

Directors of the mighty French nuclear conglomerate AREVA also serve on the boards of Lloyd’s of London, Goldman Sacs (USA), Power Companies of Canada, Euro Disney, Total Oil and others. AREVA’s connections to the Belgian establishment include intelligence insider Viscount Etienne Davignon, a man deeply tied to the depopulation of the Congo (DRC) through his long-time directorship of Belgium’s Societé Generale—one of the DRC’s longest and most lasting enemies and the copperbelt giant Union Miniére. Davignon is also an affiliate of Donald Rumsfeld and George Schultz through Gilead Sciences, a U.S. pharmaceutical (read: biowarfare) firm, and he is a director of Kissinger Associates.³⁰ Davignon was Belgian Minister of State during the ‘independence’ transition (1960) and the installation of Colonel Joseph Mobutu. A 2001 Belgian parliamentary enquiry explored Davignon’s role in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, but the enquiry was a political tool from the start and, naturally, exonerated Belgian officials of all but ‘moral responsibility’ in the assassination.³¹

Successive government’s of Japan have also supported the corruption and terror in Gabon through mining and oil and direct financing provided by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to the Bongo regime.³² Mitsubishi holds four major petroleum concessions, one in partnership with Tullow Oil, but Gabon was also critical to Japan’s nasty atomic reactor industries.

The stranglehold of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) economic austerity plans led to civil unrest as labor taxed, wages were cut, education and public health sectors, never much to begin with, were gutted. By the late 1980’s Bongo was overseeing a massively oppressive regime predicated on state terror backed by France and, more poignantly, multinational corporations.

With the fall of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Perestroika the veneers of stability in Gabon gave way to deep, festering wounds of decades of state oppression: students, onshore oil workers, civil servants and the general public took to the streets in pro-democracy protests. It was the same story in Burma, South Korea, Indonesia and China, but only Tiananmen Square made the news: China is considered an ‘enemy state’ of Western predatory capitalism, while the others are client states.³³ It was the same story in Port Gentil and Libreville, Gabon as in Colonel Joseph Mobutu’s Zaire, General Gnassingbe Eyadema’s Togo, Paul Biya’s Cameroon, and General Ibrahim Babangida’s Nigeria: all Western client states which saw massive repression of civil society, with student massacres, 1989-1991. This state orchestrated terrorism occurred at Jos and Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and in Lubumbashi, Zaire (May 11-12, 1990), and massacres were covered up by the West and its propaganda system; subsequent student-government clashes in Zaire occurred in Kisangani, Mbuji-May, Bukavu, Kinshasa and Mbanza-Ngungu during the communications blackouts, and were never known to the world in any details.³⁴ Meanwhile, Dennis Sassou-Nguesso and Omar Bongo collaborated with Mobutu to prevent all news of the Lubumbashi massacre from leaking out. And then, a few weeks later, Bongo had the same problem: corpses needing to be disappeared.

The violence in Gabon reached a local peak in March, April and May of 1990. Pressured to declare the ‘end of one party rule,’ Bongo and his one-party state set about to neutralize all significant opposition. The people protested fearlessly. The state terror apparatus clicked into action after foreign oil sector executives (e.g. Shell Gabon’s director André-Dieudonne Barre) complained.³⁵

On May 21, 1990, France sent in several hundred elite paratroopers. Dubbed ‘Operation Requin’ (Shark), the rapid intervention forces of the French Foreign Legion 2nd Paratroopers Regiment (REP: 2eme Regiment Etranger des Parachutistes)—the elite of the world’s elite soldiers—were sent to support the French Foreign Legion Infantry Regiment (REI: 2eme Regiment Etrangere d’Infanterie) troops permanently based in Gabon. The REP was known to attach U.S. covert operatives on missions and is described as “some of the most skilled and dangerous soldiers on earth.”³⁶

From May 21-30 some 500 French troops were dispatched to the luxury oil city of Port Gentil. Bongo, furious, arrogant and absolute, declared a ‘state of siege’ throughout the coastal province of Ogooue-Maritime, the only significant population center in the country. Quite literally overnight, key opposition leaders were assassinated or disappeared. But the French troops collected all French nationals at the Elf Corporation compound in Port Gentil and together with the Presidential Guard they battled with ‘rebel forces’ [read: civilian protestors]. The Presidential Guard was ‘credited’ with the killing and not the French troops —it is always black Africans who are credited with massacres in partnership with foreign troops.³⁵

While reporting that “several people had been shot in the unrest”—official reports today suggest only five dead³⁷ —international media also reported that the Presidential guard crushed civilian barricades “deploying tanks, automatic weapons and grenades” and, in the last days, finally “began to round up demonstrators” amidst “continued intermittent gunfire.”³⁵ But people in Gabon report that at least 500 to 600 civilians (some say 2000), many of them students, were massacred on the streets of Port Gentil—from May 21 to May 31, 1990—by the orders of President Omar Bongo.³⁸

The appearance of tolerance for any ‘opposition’ in the country was provided by a faux opposition connected to Bongo’s and France’s multinational corporate competition: any true opposition was bought off by Bongo and/or compromised by their participation in secret societies (like the Freemasons).³⁹ The intelligence networks and terror apparatus targeted anyone unable to be silenced by bribery or blackmail. The long arm of Omar Bongo’s assassinations squads even reached outside Gabon: in 1996 one opponent of Bongo was assassinated in France on the orders of Libreville.⁴⁰

All so-called ‘elections’ that have occurred in Gabon (Cameroon, Togo, Nigeria, post-1994 Rwanda, etc.) are demonstration elections meant to legitimize nasty dictatorships serving western capital.⁴¹ Of course, President Omar Bongo Ondimba always won—in 1993, 1998 and, most recently, 2005—and Bongo’s foreign patrons characteristically whitewashed elections violence.

Meanwhile, Bongo visited the White House, and its counterparts in France, England, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Canada, Germany, China and Saudi Arabia.

Military relations between the U.S., Canada, France, England and Israel on the one hand, and the dictators like Bongo on the other, continued throughout their decades long tenures, no matter their brutalities: under the Clinton Administration, for example, the Pentagon sent U.S. covert forces to train General Eyadema and Paul Biya’s elite killers under a new program, the Africa Crises Response Force (‘Force’ was later changed to ‘Initiative’ to soften it, transforming ACRF to ACRI); troops also trained at the Pentagon’s Special Operations School at Fort Hurlburt, Florida.⁴²

Bongo meddled in weapons and money-laundering: one of Bongo’s private arms dealers, Frenchman René Cardona, fell out with Bongo and was imprisoned in Gabon in 1996: a corruption investigation in France found that Cardona’s son paid 300 million CFA francs into Bongo’s personal account to buy his father’s freedom.⁴³

Gabon grew to become an unprecedented example of the success of the national security client state, where the offshore petroleum industry was designed to operate as an independent state, with its own private communications, transport, and supply chain infrastructure thus making offshore oil operations immune to onshore civil strikes or public protests. The oil operations grew to become islands of stability staffed by foreign expatriate labor and management, supplied by independent shipping and aviation, protected by elite networks of the foreign and domestic security apparatus.

DIALING FOR DICTATORS

For some forty-one years the Elf-ish Albert-Bernard Bongo ruled Gabon. Was Bongo the international humanitarian and peacemaker that the propaganda system has universally portrayed him as? Why do so many people know so little about the realities of life and death in Gabon?

In his widely lauded 2004 book, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Howard W. French, the former New York Times bureau Chief for Africa from circa 1993-1998, had only this to say of Gabon: “It has long been said that even tinier, oil-rich Gabon next door [to Congo-Brazzaville] was the world’s leader in per capita champagne consumption.”⁴⁴

However, back in 1995, Howard W. French reported that Bongo and friends patronized lavish prostitution scandals run by Europeans; one Italian fashion designer who ended up in a French court admitted to personally furnishing Bongo with French call-girls charging $15,000 a visit in exchange for $600,000 tailoring contracts.⁴⁵ French also reported: “the French engineered a partly successful boycott of an international investors conference in Gabon this year because it was organized by an ex-American Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman Cohen.”

What the New York Times forgot to add was that Herman Cohen, who worked in the George H.W. Bush administration, was a lobbyist whose firm Cohen & Woods (C&W) was paid $300,000 to present Gabon as a “politically stable and economically successful country” and to “generate awareness of President Bongo and his national and international accomplishments,” including the “very concrete process of democratization and democratic reforms.”⁴⁶

C&W also whitewashed the crimes of another blood-drenched client near Gabon, the government of Eduardo Dos Santos in diamond and oil-studded Angola. While C&W were peddling influence for Bongo and Dos Santos, the U.S. State Department was flagging human right in Gabon for extra-judicial killings, torture, corruption and election rigging; Angola was far more grim.⁴⁷ It was the tip of the iceberg on the brutal dictatorships and plunder of the oily Gulf of Guinea.

It was Herman Cohen and James Woods that convinced African countries to participate in the Pentagon’s ACRF, the precursor to the current Africa Contingency Operations Training Program (ACOTA), two programs training killers under a ‘peacekeeping’ smokescreen: Gabon has participated in both. C&W were also pimping for Military Professional Resources Inc., the private military company out of Virginia; MPRI and LOGICON, another Pentagon contractor, advanced the ACRF/ACOTA cause, and benefited from it.⁴⁸ One of the primary architects of ACRF was Susan Rice, Barrack Obama’s foreign policy adviser and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. since January 2009.⁴⁹

Over the past two decades the Bongo regime has been publicly whitewashed by public relations agencies connected to power in Europe, Japan and to both political parities in the USA. These included Cohen & Woods, Cassidy Associates, Powell Tate, and Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand in the USA, and UK-based Shandwick Public Affairs.⁵⁰ PR firms also sanitized the French language markets with customized propaganda. Cassidy & Associates spent between $20-30 million lobbying Congress between 1998 and 2009. In 2000 and 2001, Gabon also hired the public relations firm Manatt, Phelps and Phillips.

The son of Jacques Foccart’s affiliate Mahmoud Bourgi, French lawyer Robert Bourgi is considered Foccart’s francafrique successor. As an example of media censorship and postcolonial control, his brother Albert Bourgi is the editor of Jeune Afrique, Francophone Africa’s popular news publication coming out of Paris since 1964, but a disinformation front billed as the ‘number one Pan-African magazine.’ Robert Bourgi was one of former President Joseph Mobutu’s most intimate security advisers and an intimate adviser and lawyer to Omar Bongo.⁵¹ On September 27, 2007 at the Palais de l’Elysée, French President Nicolas Sarkozy honored Robert Bourgi with the Medal of the Knight’s Insignia in the National Order of the Legion of the French Republic; Bongo’s daughter was also in attendance.⁵² According to Robert Bourgi, Omar Bongo had President Sarkozy’s overseas-aid minister Jean-Marie Bockel removed due to a ‘bold’ speech denouncing patronage and corruption. ⁵¹

Gabon also maintained a three-year-old relationship with Jacqueline Wilson, the ex-spouse of senior U.S. diplomat and Gabon Ambassador Joe Wilson, who received tens of thousands of dollars for special projects and reports to President Omar Bongo’s daughter, Pascaline Mferri Bongo.

In another well-publicized case, lobbyist Jack Abramoff was the supposed mover-and-shaker behind the 2003 meeting between Bongo and George W. Bush—a meeting where President Bongo pledged support for the Pentagon’s “war on terror” and signed an “open skies agreement” between the two countries. Abramoff, who was also a Washington lobbyist for President Joseph Mobutu in Zaire (DRC), sought $9 million for his services for the Maryland public relations firm GrassRoots Interactive.⁵³ Abramoff also reportedly worked with Bongo through David Safavian, a former business partner, former White House budget official and a registered agent in Washington for President Bongo, and also through another of Bongo’s paid influence peddlers in Washington named Joe Slavik, a mysterious insider who is apparently also very close to Bongo’s eldest daughter, Pascaline Bongo who also served as her father’s principal secretary, and is reportedly a director for several large French firms operating in Gabon, including Total Gabon.⁵³ President Omar Bongo left the White House and later attended a lavish dinner organized by the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA), the public relations wing of the world’s most negligent and destructive corporations in Africa, as everywhere; later still he showed up in Houston as a guest at the Baker Institute. The CCA chairman at the time was diamond magnate and Democratic Party financier Maurice Tempelsman, the United States’ equivalent of France’s ‘dirty tricks’ operative Jacques Foccart.

Tempelsman’s role in interventions in Africa and his networks of organized crime involved in diamonds and cobalt are legendary, but wholly hidden by the bling bling of the propaganda system. One of Tempelsman’s stellar roles was serving as a broker for the Oppenheimer and De Beers diamond cartel—another friend of the Bongo regime. Given the blood diamond wealth in the nearby countries—Angola, Namibia, the two Congos—there is no chance De Beers would overlook Gabon.

Years of prospecting in Gabon by the De Beers cartel led to the development of a cartographic minerals database based on 13,513 sq. kms of terrestrial surveys and 36,580 km of airborne magnetic surveys. One company affiliated with De Beers in Gabon is the Canada-based SearchGold Corporation, which is licensed to exploit 7,865 sq. kms of concession in partnership with the U.K. company Zambezi Gold and its Luxembourg subsidiary Arc Mining and Investment.⁵⁴ Also mining Gabon is Cluff Mining, a shareholder in Banro Mining Corporation—the Canadian powerhouse that is plundering and depopulating eastern Congo; Anglo-American Corp., the Oppenheimer/DeBeers conglomerate, is a majority shareholder in Cluff.

“Gabon was the only one of France’s former African colonies to vote to become a French department, or administrative district, on the eve of independence in 1960, a request that President Charles de Gaulle turned down,” Howard W. French wrote. “Since independence, however, as the extent of the Gabon’s oil, forest and mineral wealth has become known, France has fought ferociously to keep the influence of other Western powers in the country to a minimum.”⁵⁵

Seven French soldiers died recently when a French army AS 532 Cougar helicopter crashed into the sea off Gabon during joint military exercises.⁵⁶ While the propaganda system is always advertising withdrawals of French troops from bases in Africa, the French contingents in Gabon will certainly remain.⁵⁷

BONGO THE PEACEMAKER

While France was consolidating its control over Gabon it was also arming neighboring regimes: Omar Bongo was their African kingpin.

Under the cover of ‘humanitarian’ flights, the Bongo government shipped weapons from Libreville to the Biafran war in Nigeria 1967-1970, and Bongo imported Biafran rebels connected to secessionist leader Emeka Ojukwu to luxurious lives in Gabon. France also supported the Biafra struggle, where a U.S./NATO/U.S.S.R. blockade led to some 500,000 to 2,000,000 deaths from starvation, disease and war. Shell-British Petroleum and the French state company Société Anonyme Française des Recherches et d’Exploitation de Pétrole (SAFRAP; now Elf Petroleum Nigeria Ltd.), were centrally involved in the bloodshed and exploitation.⁵⁸

From 1970-1975 France provided over 300 Panhard armored cars to Mobutu in Zaire: this is a footnote in the long history of French arms transfers to dictatorships that served their interests in Africa.⁵⁹ President Richard M. Nixon met with Bongo on August 2, 1973. At the time, the SDECE (Service de Documentation Exterieure et Contre-Espionage) and CIA were collaborating against the MPLA (Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola) government in Angola by training and arming UNITA and FNLA guerrillas.⁶⁰ Elf Acquitaine backed both the MPLA government and UNITA rebels: Bongo was certainly involved in French interventions.⁶¹ In 1975, the SDECE hired the infamous Congo mercenary Bob Denard and twenty French mercenaries, all paid by the CIA station out of Zaire —Maurice Tempelsman’s gang Lawrence Devlin, Mark Garsin and others—for covert operations in Angola; the SDECE and CIA also worked with Bureau of State Security (BOSS) agents out of South Africa at the height of the Apartheid struggle.⁵⁹ Omar Bongo was clearly aware of Washington’s covert terrorist operations in support of UNITA from the 1970’s to 1990’s. Bongo’s government allowed individuals in Gabon to back UNITA rebels in the brutal civil war in Angola, and in 1990’s Gabon was caught red-handed violating United Nations sanctions against UNITA.⁶²

When Ian Smith’s white supremacist government needed support against the imperialist forces seeking to put a black face on power in Rhodesia, it was Omar Bongo who helped Smith bust the international sanctions by routing through Libreville aircraft ferrying contraband to and from Rhodesia and Europe; networks of organized crime worked through Switzerland and Lichtenstein, and Bongo’s officials in Gabon issued false certificates of origin and other fabricated documentation, while also taking their cut in profits.⁶³

Bongo also maintained relations with Harvard University’s Liberian warlord Charles Taylor; Bongo was known to receive Taylor at his presidential mansion and certainly benefited from the blood diamond cartels Taylor was involved with.⁶⁴ ,⁶⁵

The Bongo government was complicit with the successive Nguema dictatorships (1968-1979, 1979-present) and their campaigns of terror and depopulation in Equatorial Guinea (E.G.). Under Bongo’s rule, Gabon violated the territorial sovereignty of E.G. through military occupation of southern E.G. islands and military incursions in the southwest near Rio Muni, all in search of oil and profits.⁶⁶

Before his ascendancy to President by coup d’etat in 1979, Teodoro Obiang Nguema personally ran the notorious Black Beach prison in E.G.: his regime is today considered one of the most corrupt, ethnocentric, oppressive and undemocratic states in the world. U.S. corporate backing of the Obiang regime involved corruption and profiteering that was exposed in the U.S. Rigg’s bank investigations in 2004. U.S. companies—Exxon-Mobil, Amerada Hess, Chevron-Texaco, Marathon Oil and others—paid for scholarships for children of the country’s leaders to attend elite schools like Pepperdine University (CA), formed business ventures with government officials, hired companies linked to Obiang and rented property from government officials and their relatives.⁶⁷ Petroleum-connected U.S. officials like Condoleeza Rice have called Obiang a ‘good friend’ of the U.S., while Obiang has for years paid Cassidy & Associates some $120,000 a month to whitewash the regime. While the arrogance of oil wealth caused a small rift between the two dictators, Bongo’s importance to E.G. can be measured by Nguema’s decree of three days of national mourning after Bongo’s death.

Albert-Bernard Bongo is the son-in-law of Dennis Sassou-Nguesso, another dictator who has reigned for two decades, with a gap from1992-1997, sustained with millions of Elf petrol dollars: Sassou-Nguesso’s elite Cobra militia were also trained by French advisers and, like Mobutu, Sassou-Nguesso relied on Israeli security and intelligence for protection. Omar Bongo backed bloodshed in the recent Congo-Brazzaville war (1997-2000) by offloading planeloads of weapons and shipping them across the border to Sassou Nguesso’s home village of Oyo.⁶⁸ Bongo’s government was also accused of airlifting Rwandan and Moroccan mercenaries into Congo-Brazzaville, even as Bongo was preparing to lead negotiations between Sassou-Nguesso and Congo-Brazzaville’s more openly U.S.-backed President Pascal Lissouba, and after a ceasefire had been declared in July 1997.⁶⁹ All sides were involved in ethnic cleansing. The French military, the Elysée Palace and Elf Aquitaine all actively supported Sassou-Nguesso, who fought his way back to power on October 25, 1997 with the assistance of Chadian troops backed by French logistical support.⁷⁰

After France, Bongo maintained his closest alliance with Joseph Mobutu’s CIA client state in Zaire.

On the morning of March 3, 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter had a conversation with French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing. Later in the afternoon President Carter met with Omar Bongo; also in attendance were Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, Assistant for National Security Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Robert Bongo, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Gabonese Republic and nephew of President Bongo.⁷¹ Less than 10 days after Bongo met with Carter the U.S. and Belgium shipped weapons to Shaba (Katanga), Zaire, and on March 16 Secretary of State Vance appeared before the U.S. Congress to justify the intervention as critical to protect the flow of Shaba’s copper from Zaire, but it was the cobalt of the copperbelt veins, stockpiled by the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency and essential to the western permanent warfare enterprise, that the national security apparatus was concerned about.⁷² , ⁷³ ,⁷⁴ Bongo met with Carter again on October 17, 1977, and he thus played a definitive role in backing the western terror apparatus in Zaire, in sharp contradistinction to the propaganda system’s salutations as ‘peacemaker’ on the continent.

In June 2002, Robert Bongo was appointed as a United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary General in the DRC.⁷⁵ Brzezinski is a high level adviser to the International Crises Group, a flak organization promoting peace through war in Sudan, Uganda and Congo, and was advising Barack Obama in 2008. As National Security Advisor under Carter, Brzezinski reportedly commissioned the March 17, 1978 document Presidential Review Memorandum/NSC 46; entitled Black Africa and the U.S. Black Movement, the classified ‘Secret’ document advocated for clandestine U.S. support to (Apartheid) South Africa and called for a special covert U.S. program to “perpetuate divisions in the black movement; to neutralize the most active groups of leftist radical orientation and diminish their influence among blacks; and to stimulate dissension and hostility between organizations representing different social strata of the community…”⁷⁶ ,⁷⁷

“For 20 years President Bongo has led his country in an era of stability and progress,” said President Ronald Reagan during an October 2, 1987 meeting with Bongo in Washington. “Under his leadership, Gabon has consistently encouraged the peaceful settlement of regional disputes, siding with reason, dialogue, and moderation over bloodshed, war, and terror.”

Reagan pledged to increase U.S. investment in Gabon—and it happened—and Gabon’s financial programs were subsequently restructured in keeping with western ‘shock doctrine’ economics of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) arranged with and for Bongo’s elite clique. The U.S. media called the deal ‘U.S. Aid to Gabon.’ Meanwhile, SAPs shattered the social fabric and further ruined hundreds of millions of ordinary people’s lives from Gabon to Bolivia to South Korea.⁷⁸

The strategic and corporate alliance with Bongo thrived under every U.S. president who sat during Bongo’s reign—Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, G.H.W Bush, Clinton, G.W. Bush—and the imperial relations and structural violence were perpetually whitewashed by the western propaganda system.

Gabon provided military logistical support to the Laurent Kabila government during the second phase of war in DRC (1998), but later and/or simultaneously Bongo backed Jean-Pierre Bemba and his Movement for the Liberation of Congo. Bemba was another Mobutist warlord who was close to Congo-Brazzaville’s Dennis Sassou-Nguesso. Until his death, Bongo was sending $US 20,000 a month to Bemba’s legal fund, along with Sassou-Nguesso, Moamar Gadhafi and a fourth (unidentified) African President (for a total of $US 80,000 a month).”⁷⁹

“Bongo even financed small politicians with no hope,” says one Congolese businessman, “he gave money to everyone, that’s how he maintained access. In DRC, for example, he even gave money to Alou Bonioma Kalokola—a lawyer who has lived his entire life as a hustler. Bonioma was married to [Dennis] Sassou-Nguesso’s step-daughter, and Sassou-Nguesso’s wife is from DRC. Alou knew he would get money from Bongo so he ran for president [in the 2006 elections].”⁸⁰

THE KING OF BLING

Bongo was connected to the Corsican mafia through the French ministers and shady businessmen, including Michel Tomi and son Jean-Baptiste, and Robert Feliciaggi (assassinated in a professional hit in Corsica, March 10, 2006), his son Jean-Jerome and brother Charles. Alleged to run French money-laundering schemes through casinos, lotteries and betting shops in Togo, Benin, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon, Jean-Jerome is close to Sassou-Nguesso, and Charles’ business supplies the Presidential Guard of diamond and petroleum magnate Jose Eduardo Dos Santos in Angola; the brothers held the second biggest bank accounts —after Elf-Aquitaine—at France’s now defunct FIBA bank, the conduit for Gabon and Angola’s plundered oil wealth.⁸¹

Gabon’s wealth was also siphoned off through the BGFI Bank, Gabon’s biggest investment bank. Created in Libreville in April 1971, the Bank was born out of a partnership between private Gabonese investors and the Banque de Paris, under the name Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas Gabon. In view of the majority share of capital held by private Gabonese, the Bank took the name of Banque Gabonaise et Française Internationale (BGFI) in April 1996. To reap the plunder of nearby dictatorships, BGFI opened major branches in Equatorial Guinea (2001) and Congo-Brazzaville (2004). BGFI directors include Jean Ping (once married to Bongo’s daughter) and Christian Bongo; director Yves Abouab is also an executive with the Banque Belgolaise in Paris. Christian Bongo is also a director of the Banque Gabonaise de Development.

Jean Ping is one of the most powerful members of Bongo’s clan des Gabonaise, and an unapologetic agent for western capitalism’s enterprise of plunder and depopulation in Africa. Ping has played a pivotal role, for example, in furthering the ‘new humanitarian’ [read: same old imperialist] policy doctrine of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’.

Corsican Michel Tomi operates through Groupe Kabi in Gabon, involved in private airlines, communications and gaming, and winning lucrative construction contracts from the Bongo government.⁸² An adviser to Omar Bongo in the 1990’s, Corsican Andre Tarallo was boss of Elf-Corsica from 1987-1988, and he funded the anti-Marxist guerrilla movement FLEC in neighboring Angola in the 1980’s.⁸³ Tarallo managed Elf’s Africa interests for more than 30 years, and he ended up in a French jail (2004) over the Elf petroleum bribery scandals, where he testified about payoffs to Bongo, Sassou-Nguesso and Teodoro Obiang Nguema.⁸⁴ ,⁸⁵ Another member of the ‘Clan Corsican’ at Bongo’s disposal was former French Minister Charles Pasqua, one of Jacques Chirac’s former aides, described as a mafia godfather.⁸⁶

Omar Bongo, Charles Pasqua, Jean-Christophe Mitterand and other officials were involved in Angolagate, the French arms-for-oil scandal involving shady arms merchants, oil executives, intelligence operatives and others in France and Africa. In 1999, the U.S Congress flagged Bongo’s huge accounts at Citibank in a money-laundering probe.⁴⁶ Omar Bongo and friends have also bankrolled French politicians: Former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing accused former President Chirac of receiving party financing from Omar Bongo in a 1981 campaign.⁸⁷

Gabon received $850,000 dollars in foreign military financing from the Pentagon from 2005 to 2008, with $1,597,000 in International Military Education & Training funds from 2001-2007, and with 192 Gabonese military trained in the US IMET program from 1950-2007; ninety of these Gabonese soldiers were trained in the U.S. between 2000 and 2007.⁸⁸ ,⁴⁸

Through the Pentagon’s Gulf of Guinea Initiative, Gabon is involved with the US Navy’s Maritime Partnership Program and the Africa Partnership Station, programs that militarize the Gulf of Guinea to assure and secure U.S. control of oil infrastructure, shipping lanes, offshore sea-bed mining, illegal fishing, toxic dumping and other corporate piracy. Gabon also provides the Pentagon with air naval base access for Cooperative Security Locations (CSLs) and Forward Operating Locations (FOLs). All of these programs are conduits for U.S. covert operations and facilitate the involvement of private military companies and transnational corporations in resource plunder and depopulation.⁸⁹

THE CALCULATED IMPOSITION OF IGNORANCE

Gamba town is the urban centre of the wild Gamba Protected Area Complex, an enclave of white, gated western privilege surrounded by dense forests, impenetrable swamps and deep estuaries where you might see an elephant swimming across open water or ambling across a grassy field. This is Shell country in Gabon, and the only way in is on an expensive Air Gabon flight.

“If I have to describe Gamba to someone,” confided one French expatriate in “Shell’s Best Kept Secret,” a blurb in a Royal/Dutch Shell public relations brochure, “I always say it is a Club-Med in the middle of the jungle. You have the freedom and opportunity to do things you thought you’d only ever dream of and all with an amazing backdrop of jungle and unspoilt beaches and lots of wildlife right on your doorstep! … We are quite a sporty bunch in Gamba. We have our own 18 hole golf course, there is the Yenzi Boat club a sailing club, tennis, football, tae-kwon-do, yoga, fitness, swimming, aerobics & step classes, volleyball, badminton, squash, hockey, rugby and much, much more…not to mention that every so often you can take part in our triathlon!”⁹⁰

In October 2004, paramilitary police in Gamba killed two locals who protested against Shell’s injustices. A survey of local attitudes revealed a climate of fear seething beneath the surface. Locals reported routine oil spills where Shell and contractors Halliburton and Schlumberger have for years and years burned off oil spills as a form of remediation.⁹¹

With a certain arrogance that comes with white society beliefs about entitlement, French expatriates have considered Gabon their private property since the colonial era, and Gamba is one of their hideaway playgrounds.⁹² One French expatriate in Gamba, Louis Rigon, runs a high-end sport fishing and ‘ecotourism’ business, with private luxury camps and powerboats in the bush.⁹³ He also provides a logistic base for oil exploration when companies like Transworld Exploration Gabon—a Houston Texas oil company—arrive in Gamba (2006) for seismic testing in Loango National Park. It is families with names like Louis Rigon and Pierre Goods—a Transworld director based in Port-Nice, Gabon—who float their 4-WD safari land rovers from Sette Cama, across the estuary on a barge, off-load in Loango National Park, and casually joy-ride some 50 kilometers down the pristine beach—as they did when I was there. This is their version of ‘ecotourism’—another buzzword and the cutting edge of the white, western, corporate invasion of wilderness.

Oil exploration in the Loango wilderness was not the only reality I found incongruent with the slick propaganda about “Saving Africa’s Eden.” The western diamond firm Southern Era was prospecting in the newly designated Lope Reserve—J. Michael Fay’s newly ‘discovered’ Eden in northeastern Gabon—and all the BINGO conservation groups involved in the Congo Basin Forest Partnership knew this. None had said a word.

Southern Era began prospecting in Gabon in 1999 and when the CBFP came along—and Bongo created the new parks—they were issued permits for the Lope region from the Bongo regime. Southern Era is a fully owned subsidiary of Mwana Africa—another secretive mining company involved in the blood-drenched mining operations in eastern Congo (also Angola and Botswana’s blood diamond areas)—connected to the U.S., U.K. and South Africa.⁹⁴

Tracking elephants in the Loango reserve turned up the remains of a research camp in the savannah. My local guide and WWF-paid ranger Robert (not his real name) took me to the place where the Smithsonian Institute set up a massive animal and plant collection operation; teams of researchers descended on the Loango wilderness and began catching, counting, cataloging, categorizing, and collecting species and genetic material. Claiming a universal benefit to all humanity—and to the people of Gabon, of course—the Smithsonian’s Gabon Biodiversity Monitoring and Research Program involves U.S. universities and scores of western researchers and tens of millions of dollars in funds; it is also backed by Shell Oil Corporation. These funds cycle to and from western economies bringing little benefit to Gabonese people like Robert, and nothing of benefit to the average Gabonese citizen. Smithsonian scientists reported that they have ‘recorded’ over 2019 species of trees and thousands of species of birds, reptiles, snakes and amphibians, but they didn’t merely ‘record’ these species, they collected them.⁹⁵ “Voucher specimens were injected with formaline (5%), then preserved in 70% ethanol, and will be housed in several scientific institutions.” ⁹⁵

“They paid us 6000 CFA (US $12) per day to collect birds, snakes, lizards,” says Robert, “They killed them and packed them up in jars and boxes. We worked hard, setting traps and checking nets, all day and night sometimes. It wasn’t much money.”

Robert was hired because he knew how to catch birds, where to hang nets, where bat species might be found, the habitat of rare snakes—you know, simple stuff, like where a rodent will hide—but based on years of painstaking study and intimate knowledge of the local environment for which Robert has dedicated his heart and soul all his life. Robert didn’t know anything about genetic engineering, cloning, or intellectual property rights, and that’s why it was easy for the Smithsonian to come in to Gabon and steal Robert’s intellectual property and pay him approximately one dollar and fifteen cents (sic) an hour.

Robert was hired as a grunt for an exclusive western program that offers the perfect example how white supremacy operates in Africa: lucrative contracts, travel perks, capital equipment budgets, romantic interludes in paradise for whites; hard labor, theft of expertise, downward mobility, obtuse explanations for blacks. It’s all about access. People like Robert will always be collecting dead birds, while someone else will be flying in and out of Gabon, presenting papers at conferences, getting PhDs, ostensibly saving the earth, murdering wilderness as fast as they are murdering the truth.

“Under Bongo life is hard,” Robert told me. “Many people are malnourished, many people are poor. There is no work. It’s terrible.”

The Smithsonian proceeded with the support of President Omar Bongo, the Pentagon, U.S. State Department, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, NASA and other predatory agencies. Massive physical, economic and intellectual (property) thefts are underway, and it occurs on the backs of eager, willing, hopeful, yet unfreedomed Africans.⁹⁶

The markets in Gamba are muddy, dirty, run-down sites of suffering where a scattering of local people peddle bush-meat, manioc, cassava, little packets of salt and sugar, some traditional foods and forest products, bananas and mangos, and whatever manufactured commodities they can get their hands on and resell at a small profit. In the enclave of Sette Cama, a few miles across the estuary and down the beach, the people live by small-scale fishing and farming cassava. But for a few crumbs splashed their way—where the (mostly white) benefactors reconcile their entitlement and privilege behind assumptions that their pitiful charity is further evidence of their goodness and morality—the local people do not benefit from the itineraries and budgets of foreign eco-tourists. Misery is endemic.

Gabon has been a major oil producer since 1962. Historically, oil revenues accounted for approximately 60% of the government’s budget, more than 40% of GDP, and 75% of export earnings. Despite half a century of production from Sub-Saharan Africa’s third largest oil reserves, the majority of Gabon’s citizen’s exist in a Hobbesian nightmare where life is nasty, brutish and short.

In a country of approximately 1 million people, only about eight percent (80,000) have access to any kind of running water or electricity. Adding insult to injury, in 1992, the French corporation Lyonnaise des Eaux took control of the state-owned Societé d’Electricté et d’Eaux du Gabon (SEEG): Bongo signed on with the U.S. International Finance Corporation and IFC/Japan to privatize Gabon’s water and electricity sectors, leading “one of the first privatizations of electricity and water services in sub-Saharan Africa,” over a decade ago.⁹⁷

In 2003, another beltway Maryland (U.S.A) company—Decision Analysis Partners (DAP)—won a lucrative contract ostensibly to map out the eco-tourism infrastructure for five of Bongo’s newly gazetted Gabon parks. But DAP’s deep ties to the Pentagon and intelligence networks suggest that there is, as usual, some hidden military agenda.⁹⁸

There are no accurate census figures for Gabon because the Bongo government benefited by inflating population statistics to maximize the regime’s profits skimming off the so-called ‘development aid’ business sector. Infant mortality is very high in Gabon due to malaria, malnourishment, diarrhea and starvation. Malaria, the principal cause of hospitalization, is of epidemic proportions: 40 per cent of children aged 0 to 5 years and 71 per cent of all pregnant women suffer from the disease. Some 64 percent of all households are in communities where waste is disposed of untreated.⁹⁹

There are separate schools in Gamba for white expatriate children, and for black African children: Shell and Elf back the expatriate schools.¹⁰⁰ The housing and levels of health and community development are also unequal. Whites hire blacks as maids, nanny’s and housekeepers, and blacks are used for the most grueling and dangerous physical labor. The educational books that are produced in France and sent to Gabon are different for African children than the books for French children of the same ages and developmental levels. “Less content, less substance,” said one French woman. “It is the calculated imposition of ignorance and it’s happening throughout French speaking Africa.”¹⁰¹

Companies like Shell, Elf and Total are deeply tied into dictating public policy through their control of advertising, schools, arts venues, TV news and wildlife programming—both in Gabon and the USA, Europe and Japan—and funding for all of these: their corporate logos are branded everywhere.

Education is also privatized: Shell is partnered with WWF and the Ministry of Education through the Shell program L’Ecole Que J’Aime (The School I Like). Further, the basic commodities (and luxury goods) available to expatriates connected to the oil industry are denied to poor Gabonese, and the black slave sector couldn’t afford them if they were, and there are stores (pools, clubs, etc.) where most blacks are not allowed.

This is Apartheid. It is also environmental racism.

“It’s family living in an African Paradise,” wrote expatriate Louise Tasker in a Royal/Dutch Shell magazine for expatriates, “Apart from wildlife and beaches, Gamba offers children a chance to really enjoy childhood rather than grow up too fast… Flights in Gabon are very expensive, so you may not have as many visitors as you’d like.”¹⁰²

Just as there is Apartheid on the ground, you won’t see the average Gabonese flying on Air Gabon: it is an airline for people of the privileged classes—and the black people allowed to join the club.
All air travel in Gabon was for more than 45 years controlled by the so-called “government-owned” national airline whose financial interests were also held by Air France,¹⁰³ and whose directors included Omar Bongo’s relative Robert Bongo. Journalists in Gabon were jailed and whole publication runs confiscated in March 1997 after they reported that Air Gabon was involved in ivory smuggling.¹⁰⁴ In another international scandal, Air Gabon—the airline of the elite in Gabon, tied to petroleum companies and run by the most powerful people in Gabon and France—went belly up in 2005.

Amongst the greatest causes of sickness in Gabon and its neighboring countries are unregulated corporate mining and pollution from extractive industries: gas flaring, uranium and manganese mining, all contribute to toxic environments. Gas-flaring by Royal/Dutch Shell, alone, in Africa, alone, is a leading cause of global warming.¹⁰ Yet, looking at the fancy public relations of the Shell Oil Foundation, we find that the corporate perpetrators of violence and destruction are blaming the victims for their own suffering. “More than half the world’s population uses open fires or traditional biomass-burning stoves to cook in their homes,” reads the disingenuous propaganda, where Shell wields a World Health Organization statistic. “There is also growing evidence that this pollution contributes to global warming.”¹⁰⁵

Does the World Health Organization challenge Shell, Elf, Total or Mobil for the massive and devastating carbon footprint of gas flaring? No. Of course, next to Shell’s support for dictatorships where petroleum flows are insured through rape, torture, and murder—the case of the Niger River Delta offering the most thoroughly documented example—Shell’s gas-flaring is perhaps one of the less troublesome aspects of petroleum operations in Africa.¹⁰⁶ Meanwhile. In 1999, Shell flared some 25.6 million standard cubic feet of gas per day, in the Gamba complex Rabi concession alone—and this in a year where Shell—as supposed evidence of their benevolence—reported ‘reductions’ in their flaring footprint from 30 mmscf/d in 1998.¹⁰⁷ On this basis, and given the past six decades of their operations, Shell’s contribution to global climate mayhem is unimaginable.

The evidence that multinational corporations and their government, academic, scientific and ‘philanthropic’ partners are decimating cultures and landscapes is overwhelming.¹⁰⁸ What is underwhelming is the extent to which the general public—U.S., Canadian, European, Australian and Japanese citizens, ostensibly concerned about human rights and the environment, for example—are unable to recognize and name these rich-man poor-man relationships for what they are: genocide.¹⁰⁹ An agent of predatory western capitalism, Omar Bongo played a major role in that, too. Gabon offers a perfect example of how the propaganda system covers for the western terrorist apparatus, always maximizing profits for the white-based economies of permanent warfare, depopulation and elite control.

On the cutting edge of this massive project of conquest over people and places of color are white people like J. Michael Fay, with their mega-transects and mega-flyovers,¹¹⁰ and their Pentagon connections, and the agendas they serve, even as they deny that they are in any ways involved, while peddling the new, old white power projects of conservation and humanitarian intervention in Africa. Meanwhile, the Hollywood dimension of modern day genocide involves such reality TV productions as Survivor Gabon—Earth’s Last Eden.¹¹¹

“I’d be more than happy to meet a couple of cute girls on the island,” says Survivor’s arrogant tarzan-stud Marcus Lehman, who thinks the ‘remote Gabon coast’ is an island. “It is Earth’s last Eden, so I’ll be Adam, she can be Eve, and see what goes on.”

Such is the nature of white supremacy, with all its attendant obliviousness, and assumptions of innocence, and power relations, and subliminal sexuality, and this is the true face of the globalization of terror.¹¹² The history of Gabon is the history of slavery, alive and well in Africa’s gardens of Eden.

1. See: David Quammen, “Saving Africa’s Eden,” National Geographic, September 2003; J. Michael Fay, “Gabon’s Loango National Park: In the Land of the Surfing Hippos,” National Geographic, August 2004; Quammen, “Views of the Continent,” National Geographic, September 2005; and J. Michael Fay, “Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma,” National Geographic, March 2007.
   [2] E.g., Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic, Univ. of Chicago, 1993.
2. E.g., Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic, Univ. of Chicago, 1993.
3. The Gabon mission was partly funded with a small grant from the Rainforest Foundation U.K.
4. Halliburton has been subcontracting to Shell in Gabon for many, many years.
5. Quammen is one of the Outside magazine editorial gang (David Quammen, Donovan Webster, Jon Kracauer, Randy Wayne White) who guided Outside when it went astray of any substantive reportage in the late 1980’s, becoming a corporate travel and beauty rag, and who now unquestionably serve the Empire in producing whitewashed features about Africa for National Geographic, IMAX cinema productions, Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, New York Times Magazine, and other white institutions; their reportage has been directly funded by big corporate entities. See, e.g.: David Quammen, “Saving Africa’s Eden,” National Geographic, September 2003; Quammen, “Tracing the Human Footprint,” National Geographic, September 2005; Donovan Webster, “Journey to the Heart of the Sahara,” National Geographic, March 1999; “USADF Hosts Writer & Editor Donovan Webster as Part of Distinguished Lecturer Series: Talk Focuses on Water Projects Funded in Niger by USADF.”
6. United States Agency for International Development—another Pentagon-intelligence conduit.
7. CBFP involves too many agencies, countries, corporations and NGOs to list here.
8. keith harmon snow, “Merchant’s of Death: Exposing Corporate-Financed Holocaust in Central Africa: White-Collar War Crimes, Black African Fall Guys,” Black Star News, December 4, 2008.
9. E.g., “Omar Bongo,” The Economist, 6/18/09.
10. Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas, Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil, Verso, 2003.
11. The nature of the west’s partnership with, and disposal of, General Abacha is unappreciated and opaque.
12. An excellent writing on the nature of race relations and control is: Frances Nesbitt Njubi, “Migration, Identity and The Politics of African Intellectuals in the North,” Paper Prepared for CODESRIA’s 10TH General Assembly on “Africa in the New Millennium”, Kampala, Uganda, 8-12 December 2002.
13. Private interview, “Thierry,” Libreville, Gabon, 1997.
14. keith harmon snow, personal interviews with UNHCR officials and Ogoni refugees in Cotonou, Benin, 1997. See also keith harmon snow (pseudonym Zak Harmon), “No Safe Haven: Even in refugee camps, Nigeria’s Ogonis Face Abuse and Intimidation,” Toward Freedom, Vol. 46, No. 6, November 1997.
15. Private interview, Maconi, Libreville, Gabon, December 29, 2004.
16. See: Nicolas Shaxon, “Gabon: Omar Bongo; Franco-African Secret Society,” The East African, June 22, 2009; “French Secret Services: African Debate,” Africa Confidential, date uncertain; James F. Barnes, Gabon: Beyond the Colonial Legacy, 1992; “Gabon: Oil, Money, Paristroika,” Africa Confidential, Vol. 31, No. 12, June 15, 1990.
17. James F. Barnes, Gabon: Beyond the Colonial Legacy, 1992.
18. See: Aidan Hartley, “Paradise Lost,” Africa Report, March-April 1990.
19. “French Secret Services: African Debate,” Africa Confidential, date uncertain.
20. Tullow Oil. See: keith harmon snow, “The War That Did Not Make the Headlines: Over Five Million Dead in Congo,” Dissident Voice, January 31, 2008; and keith harmon snow, “The Rwanda Genocide Fabrications: Human Rights Watch, Alison Des Forges, and Disinformation on Central Africa,” Dissident Voice, April 13, 2009.
21. COMUF publication on Gabon’s uranium mining in the author’s possession.
22. See: “Gabon: AREVA sets up its observatory of health at Mounana,” Gaboneco, April 4, 2009.
23. See, e.g., “Desert residents pay high price for lucrative uranium mining [Niger],” UN Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN), March 30, 2009; and “Niger Uranium: Blessing or Curse?” IRIN, October 10, 2007.
24. Donovan Webster, “Journey to the Heart of the Sahara,” National Geographic, March 1999.
25. See: Motapa Diamonds web site.
26. Pitchstone Exploration Ltd.
27. See: CAMECO and Wise Uranium.
28. Ohio Citizen Action, “Eramet Marietta Inc.”
29. The Jane Goodall Institute, for example, has directly backed war in eastern Congo. See the KING KONG series at All Things Pass.
30. Of course Henry Kissinger ran covert wars in Zaire and Angola, and other places, and has been for years affiliated with the International Rescue Committee, an intelligence and propaganda front agency that is all over the Congo and Sudan today. See: Eric Thomas Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA, M.E. Sharpe, 1995.
31. On Davignon see David Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money, and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crisis, University of Chicago, 1991: p: 177; Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, Verso, 2001: p. 24; Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry in Charge of Determining the Exact Circumstances of the Assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the Possible Involvement of Belgian Politicians, Belgium, final report released Nov. 16, 2001; and a discussion of the politics of the commission in Mark Gibney et al, ed., The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past, University of Penn., 2008. See also the BBC whitewash “Belgian Link in Lumumba Death,” BBC, November 16, 2001.
32. “Gabon: Oil, Money, Paristroika,” Africa Confidential, Vol. 31, No. 12, June 15, 1990.
33. On ‘enemy’ versus ‘client’ states see Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon, 1988; Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, South End, 1979; William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military & CIA Interventions Since WW-II, Common Courage, 1995.
34. There were “estimates of at least 100 killed” in Lubumbashi (e.g., “Zaire: Mobutu Takes to the Water,” Africa Confidential, Vol. 31, No. 12, June 15, 1990, pp. 1-3), but DRC experts attest to more than 2000 casualties as the murderous Division Spéciale Présidentielle massacred throughout the night on a campus with a student body of 7000 resident and 3000 external students. By the time the U.S.-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights issued its 1990 report, the U.S. had “confirmed that one person had died” at Lubumbashi (see Zaire: Repression As Policy, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 1990).
35. “Gabon: Opposition Leader’s Death Unleashes Riots,” Africa Research Bulletin, June 15, 1990.
36. Howard R. Simpson, The Paratroopers of the French Foreign Legion: From Vietnam to Bosnia, Brassey’s, 1997.
37. E.g., Nicolas Shaxon, “Gabon: Omar Bongo; Franco-African Secret Society,” East African, June 22, 2009.
38. Interviews in Gabon, keith harmon snow, 1997, 2004.
39. See, e.g., Nicolas Shaxon, “Gabon: Omar Bongo; Franco-African Secret Society,” The East African, June 22, 2009; and Shaxson, Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil, Palgrave, 2007: p. 75-78.
40. Africa Research Bulletin, Vol. 45, No. 3, March 2008, p: 17479.
41. On ‘demonstration elections’ see: Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon, 1988; Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, South End, 1979.
42. “Africa-US,” Africa Research Bulletin, July 1-31, 1997, p: 12770. On ACRI, see Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen, 1999, p. 251-257.
43. Africa Confidential, Vol. 48, No. 14, July 6, 2007.
44. Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Knopf, 2004: p. 72.
45. Howard W. French, “Prostitution Trial Upsets France-Gabon Ties,” New York Times, April 23, 1995.
46. Ken Silverstein, “Good Press for Dictators,” The American Prospect, April 8, 2001.
47. Ken Silverstein, “Good Press for Dictators,” The American Prospect, April 8, 2001.
48. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen, 1999, p. 251-253.
49. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen, 1999, p. 356-358.
50. Silverstein reported that in 2001 the U.K. firm bought out Powell Tate and Cassidy & Associates. Ken Silverstein, “Good Press for Dictators,” The American Prospect, April 8, 2001.
51. “They Came to Bury Him Not to Praise Him,” The Economist, June 18, 2009.
52. “Robert Bourgi, l’héritier des secrets de la Françafrique,” Le Monde, March 26, 2009.
53. Philip Shenon, “Lobbyist Sought $9 Million to Set Bush Meeting,” New York Times, Nov. 10, 2005.
54. “Searchgold options two Au properties in Gabon,” Searchgold News Release, September 5, 2007.
55. Howard W. French, “Prostitution Trial Upsets France-Gabon Ties,” New York Times, April 23, 1995.
56. Africa Research Bulletin, Vol. 46, No. 1, January 1-31, 2009, p. 17839.
57. Africa Research Bulletin, Vol. 45, No. 3, March 2008, p. 17479.
58. Biafra-Nigeria, 1967-1969, Political Affairs, Confidential U.S. State Dept. files, ISBN 0-88692-756-0.
59. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story, Replica Books, 1978: p. 176-192.
60. União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA) and Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA).
61. Toby Shelley, Oil: Politics, Poverty & the Planet, Zed Books, 2005.
62. See: “Report of the Panel of Experts on Violations of Security Council Sanctions Against UNITA,” UN Doc S2000/203, 10 March 2000. See also Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law, 2002.
63. James Mukuwire, “Omar Bongo Rescued Ian Smith,” Zimbabwe Times, June 11, 2009.
64. Charles Taylor has the distinction of having attended Harvard University; being arrested in Boston (MA) for international warrants relating to embezzlement of funds in Liberia; being held in a Charlestown (MA) prison; and being ‘broken out’ with no trace or trail of his having been there.
65. See: keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink & Deception Over Those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June & July 2007.
66. Max Liniger-Gourmaz, Small is Not Always Beautiful: The Story of Equatorial Guinea, 1988.
67. Justin Blum, “U.S. Firms Entwined in Equatorial Guinea Deals,” Washington Post, September 7, 2004.
68. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen, 1999.
69. “Congo: Truce Broken,” Africa Research Bulletin, July 1-31, 1997, p.12760.
70. See, e.g., Guy Robert, “France’s African Policy in Transition: Disengagement and Redeployment,” Paper prepared for presentation at the African Studies Interdisciplinary Seminar, Center for African Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Il, March 3, 2000.
71. Daily Diary of Jimmy Carter, March 3, 1977.
72. Bernard Gwertzman, “Vance Says Invaders in Zaire Threaten Vital Copper Mining; Calls Situation ‘Dangerous’,” New York Times, March 17, 1977: p. 61.
73. On western interventions in Shaba (Katanga) during the Ford/Carter years see: Antonio Tanca, Foreign Armed Intervention in Internal Conflict, Martinus Nijhoff, 1990; and William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WW-II, Common Courage, 1986.
74. See, e.g., Defense National Stockpile Center, Gecamines (DRC) Cobalt; Rae Weston, Strategic Minerals: A World Survey, Croom Helm, 1984.
75. Decisions of the Seventy-Sixth Ordinary Session of the OAU Council of Ministers / Eleventh Ordinary Session of the AEC, 28 June to 6 July 2002, Durban, South Africa, CM/Dec. 661-670.
76. “US-Africa: Genuine Leak or Disinformation?” Africa Confidential, 1984.
77. Of course, the African American community had long (since the 1960’s) been under attack in the U.S. through domestic COINTELLPRO terrorist operations. See, e.g., Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party an the American Indian Movement, South End, 1988.
78. “Reagan Promises to Boost U.S. Aid to Gabon,” Washington Post, August 2, 1978.
79. Personal communication, businessman, Democratic Republic of Congo, June 2009.
80. Personal communication, businessman, Democratic Republic of Congo, June 2009.
81. “France/Africa: Professional Risks,” Africa Confidential, Vol. 47. No. 6, March 3, 2006.
82. See: AG Pertners.
83. Frente para a Libertação do Enclave de Cabinda, FLEC.
84. “President Bongo Loses Court Case Against Ex-Official at Oil Group Elf,” African Oil Journal, December 26, 2007; and Toby Shelley, Oil: Politics, Poverty & the Planet, Zed Books, 2005.
85. Sophie Coignard & Marie-Théres Guichard, French Connections: Networks of Influence, Algora, 2000.
86. “France/Africa: Professional Risks,” Africa Confidential, Vol 47. No. 6, March 3, 2006.
87. “They Came to Bury Him Not to Praise Him,” The Economist, June 18, 2009.
88. Historical Facts Book, U.S. Department of Defense, December 30, 2007.
89. Wayne Madsen, “AFRICOM: The Recolonization of Africa by Uncle Sam,” Wayne Madsen Report, January 3, 2008; see also Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen, 1999, p. 251-253.
90. Jet Hoeve and Sue Garrone, “Shell’s Best Kept Secret,” Destinations, a Royal/Dutch Shell public relations expatriate magazine, Issue 39, Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2006, p. 8; see also Yenzi Boat Club.
91. Private interviews, Gamba Complex, December 2004.
92. See: “Les Anciens de Gamba.”
93. Rigon also operates in Madagascar and Senegal.
94. keith harmon snow, “Merchant’s of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa,” September 2008,; see also: http://www.southernera.com/ and http://www.mwanaafrica.com/ .
95. Gabon Biodiversity Program, Publication No. 20, February 2003, http://nationalzoo.si.edu/ConservationAndScience/MAB/documents/GabonBriefingPaper6.pdf.
96. Nobel economist Amartya Sen describes “unfreedoms” in his book Development as Freedom (Sen, 1999).
97. “Lyonnaise to Manage SEEG,” Africa Intelligence, December 10, 1992.
98. “decision/analysis partners Awarded National Park Transportation Development Study for Gabon,” PR Newswire, September 14, 2004; and DAP.
99. Draft Country Programme Document for Gabon (2007-2011), United Nations Development Program, May 1, 2006.
100. Kees Cline, Tracey Cripps and Terry Boyle, “Schooling in Camp Yenzi, Gabon,” Destinations, a Royal/Dutch Shell public relations expatriate magazine, Issue 39, Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2006, p. 7.
101. Interview in Libreville: Elaine Muerat (Responsable Librairie), SOGAPRESSE, Libreville, Gabon.
102. Louise Tasker, “Family Living in an African Paradise,” Destinations, a Royal/Dutch Shell “OUTPOST” public relations document, Issue 39, Vol. 11, No. 2 June 2006, p. 13.
103. Flight International, March 29, 1986.
104. Committee to Protect Journalists, Country Report: Gabon, December 31, 1998.
105. “Breathing Space,” Shell Foundation web site.
106. Royal/Dutch Shell’s involvement in crimes against humanity and genocide in Nigeria is incontrovertible.
107. Royal /Dutch Shell statistics, 1998, 1999.
108. See, for example: Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas, Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil, Verso, 2003; Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon, Harper Collins, 1995; Max Liniger-Gourmaz, Small is Not Always Beautiful: The Story of Equatorial Guinea, 1988; and Bruno Manser Fonds.
109. See: Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, City Lights, 2001.
110. See: David Quammen, “Views of the Continent,” National Geographic, September 2005; and J. Michael Fay, “Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma,” National Geographic, March 2007.
111. “CBS reveals the castaways of ‘Survivor: Gabon—Earth’s Last Eden’,” Reality TV staff, 8/27/08.
112. See: keith harmon snow, “Towards an Anthropology of White Man in Africa: A Call to Explore the Militarized White Project of Dark Continentalism,” Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, December, 2007.

"Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror" by Mahmood Mamdani

In Errol Morris’s 2004 film The Fog of War, former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the fire-bombings of Japan during WWII, saying that “if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” LeMay was merely articulating an unacknowledged truism of international relations: power bestows, among other things, the right to label. So it is that mass slaughter perpetrated by the big powers, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is normalized through labels such as “counterinsurgency,” “pacification” and “war on terror,” while similar acts carried out by states out of favor result in the severest of charges. It is this politics of naming that is the subject of Mahmood Mamdani’s explosive new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.

Like the Middle East, parts of Africa have been engulfed in conflict for much of the post-colonial period. While the media coverage in both cases is perfunctory, in the case of Africa it is also sporadic. To the extent that there is coverage, the emphasis is on the dramatic or the grotesque. When the subject is not war, it is usually famine, disease or poverty — sometimes all together, always free of context. The wars are between “tribes” led by “warlords,” that take place in “failed states” ruled by “corrupt dictators.” Driven by primal motives, they rarely involve discernible issues. The gallery of rogues gives way only to a tableau of victims, inevitably in need of White saviors. A headline like “Can Bono save Africa?” is as illustrative of Western attitudes towards the continent as the comments of Richard Littlejohn, Britain’s highest-paid columnist, who wrote at the peak of the Rwandan genocide “Does anyone really give a monkey’s about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them.”

Darfur is the conspicuous exception to this trend, though Rwanda did enter Western vocabulary after the 1994 genocide. This, Mamdani argues, is primarily due to the efforts of one organization — the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) — whose advocacy has been central to turning this into the biggest mass movement in the United States since the anti-Vietnam mobilization, bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. While the mobilization did have the salutary effect of raising awareness about an issue otherwise unknown to the majority of US citizens, its privileging of acting over knowing renders this less meaningful. Indeed, the campaign’s shunning of complexity, its substituting of moral certainty for knowledge, and its preference for military solutions, precludes the very end that it purports to strive for. Invoking what it claims are lessons of the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide, it combines slogans such as “never again” with the battle cries of a new “good war”, such as “boots on the ground”, and “out of Iraq and into Darfur”. Mamdani contends that SDC is not a peace movement, it is a war movement.

The SDC was established in July 2004 through the combined efforts of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service. It has since been joined by a broad spectrum of political and religious organizations, a gaggle of celebrities and prominent intellectuals. It has spawned student chapters all across the country that range from the high school to university levels. Led by an advertising executive, it is the only organization capable of bringing together such unlikely partners as the Reverend Al Sharpton and author Elie Wiesel, actor George Clooney and former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. If the signature activity of the anti-Vietnam war movement was the teach-in, for the SDC it is the advertising campaign. The expert has been replaced by the celebrity, the campaigner by the advertising agent. With an annual budget of $14 million the SDC employs the DC-based PR firm M+R Strategic Services (M&R) for its publicity. While M&R boasts a clientele comprising mainly green and humanitarian non-profits, in 2002 it was exposed by PR Watch for using its progressive credentials to greenwash DuPont, one of the world’s leading polluters. The centrality of propaganda to the SDC’s success was underscored by the fact that in the period between Spring 2007 and January 2008, the president of M&R Bill Wasserman also served as Save Darfur’s executive director.

The apparent diversity of the SDC’s affiliates also obscures the fact that its agenda is mainly driven by Zionist organizations and the Christian Right. However, Mamdani pays scant attention to the composition of the SDC even though he devotes a whole chapter to its politics and methods. As The Jerusalem Post reported ahead of the SDC’s rally in Washington on 30 April 2006, it is “[l]ittle known … that the coalition, which has presented itself as ‘an alliance of over 130 diverse faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organizations’ was actually begun exclusively as an initiative of the American Jewish community.” It noted that even in 2006 that coalition was “heavily weighted” with a “diverse collection of local and national Jewish groups.” The Washington Post reported the same day that “[k]eeping the peace within the diverse Save Darfur Coalition has not been easy” due to tensions, in particular, between evangelical Christians and the mostly Muslim Darfuri immigrants. The Sudanese immigrants also objected to the lineup of speakers which, according to the paper, included “eight Western Christians, seven Jews, four politicians and assorted celebrities — but no Muslims and no one from Darfur” (two were eventually added at the last minute). Ned Goldstein has suggested in his investigation of the Zionist interests behind the SDC that Darfur is being deployed as a strategic distraction from Israeli crimes against the Palestinians (most recently at the UN anti-racism conference). The salient feature of the SDC propaganda is to paint the conflict as war between “Arabs” and “Africans” and to label the violence “genocide.”

The genocide debate hinges on two factors: numbers and identity. For mass violence to qualify as genocide the killing has to be on a large enough scale, and the intent to eliminate a discrete racial, ethnic, or religious group has to be established. Mamdani argues that in order to sustain its claim of genocide, the SDC has inflated casualty figures and racialized the conflict.

The mortality figure of 400,000 has become a staple of SDC propaganda even though it has been repeatedly discredited. In 2007, the British Advertising Standards Authority chided the SDC (and the Aegis Trust) for breaching “standards of truthfulness” in its use of the figure for its UK advertising campaign. The number had already been challenged when a panel convened by the US Government Accountability Office in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences concluded that of the six estimates they studied, the figures presented by the SDC were the least reliable. The most reliable estimate was the study carried out by the World Heath Organization-affiliated Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) that had recorded 131,000 excess deaths at the peak of the conflict of which only 30 percent were due to violence. The violence had dropped sharply after January 2005; this, Mamdani avers, was due mainly to the intervention of African Union peacekeepers. By 2008, the total deaths for the whole year had dropped to 1,500. These numbers are far lower than what constitutes an emergency according to the UN, let alone genocide.

The conflict began as a civil war in 1987-89, driven less by race or ethnic rivalries than by a struggle for land and resources — it pitted the mostly nomadic landless Arabs against the mostly sedentary Fur peasants. Compounded by Khartoum’s botched attempt at land reform during the 1990s, turning it into a party to the civil war, the simmering conflict erupted into a full-scale insurgency in 2003. This eventually led to the government’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign where it turned to nomadic tribes from Darfur and Chad to serve as proxies.

Mamdani identifies three causes as having contributed to the conflict. First, is the history of colonial rule wherein the British went about a project of retribalizing Darfur through a system of native administration which created tribal homelands and introduced a principle of discrimination that privileged “natives” over “settlers.” This led to the dispossession of nomadic tribes, especially the camel nomads of the north. The tribal identities were further solidified through a census that required each registrant to choose a “race”; a written history that presented Arabs as “settlers” from the Middle East; and laws that gave preferential treatment to whoever was deemed a “native”. This narrative also allowed the British colonizers to present themselves as merely following the precedent of an earlier Arab colonization.

Drought and desertification was the second contributing factor. The Sahara’s southern rim expanded by 100 kilometers, forcing nomadic tribes further south and eventually to encroach on the lands of the sedentary Fur tribes.

Finally, the civil war in neighboring Chad where opposition groups armed by Cold War rivals — the US, France and Israel on one side, and Libya and the Soviet Union on the other — had frequently taken refuge in Darfur, leading to a proliferation of weapons and militias. Mamdani explains that the Western powers were involved in the conflict long before the Sudanese government was; and Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist regime wasn’t even in power at the time.

The Arab-versus-African narrative obscures the fact that since at least the British colonial era, Arabs have been Darfur’s most deprived constituency. “If Darfur was marginal in Sudan,” writes Mamdani, “the Arabs of Darfur were marginal in Darfur.” Contrary to the British historiography — whose assumptions have since been reproduced in 20th century nationalist writings — most Arabs arrived in Sudan as refugees fleeing persecution in Mamluk Egypt. Moreover, the diffusion of Arab culture was more a consequence of commerce than of conquest. Mamdani demonstrates that “Arab” is not a racial, ethnic, or cultural identity. It is an assumed political identity that is more a reflection of preference and power than of genealogy. For example, former slaves once freed would become Fur in Darfur, and Arab in Funj, the Sultanate in riverine Sudan where Arabs dominated. To be an Arab in Darfur therefore signifies nothing so much as weakness. The conflict in Darfur today is as much between Arabs (the Abbala camel nomads against the Baggara cattle nomads) as it is against the relatively privileged Fur and Massalit, and the less privileged Zaghawa. The SDC however emphasizes the north-south axis of the conflict that pits Arab against Fur and ignores the south-south Axis which pits Arab against Arab.

The Darfuri rebels likewise defy easy classification. When the insurgency began in 2003, there were two major groups — the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) — they have now split into 26. JEM, which is the largest rebel organization, has an Islamist orientation and draws its inspiration from Hassan al-Turabi, the influential Sudanese Islamist and one time ally of Omar al-Bashir. In contrast, the SLA is secular-Africanist with ties to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the South (led by the late John Garang). Before the split between the Islamists in Khartoum, the government had employed Darfuri Islamists led by future JEM founder Khalil Ibrahim for its counterinsurgency in the south. (Ibrahim opposed the power-sharing agreement that ended the war in the south.) However, according to Sudan scholar Alex de Waal, both organizations learned “to characterize their plight in the simplified terms that had proved so effective in winning foreign sympathy for the south: they were the ‘African’ victims of an ‘Arab’ regime.” The government’s response to the insurgency was at first a half-hearted attempt at reconciliation, followed by the arming of a proxy force comprising nomadic militias, many of them from Chad, who have come to be known as the Janjawid. The consequences were devastating, with large-scale bloodletting and the displacement of 2.5 million people.

Khartoum’s use of proxies to quell an insurgency and the resulting death and displacement parallel US policies in Iraq, where ethnic-sectarian militias have been deployed against the mostly-Sunni insurgency. Yet, unlike Iraq, where in excess of a million have died according to the lates ORB poll, and five million displaced, the violence in Darfur has been labeled a genocide. Darfur has also spawned domestic mobilization in the US on a scale for which there is no parallel in the case of Iraq. Mamdani argues that this is due to the fact that Iraq requires Americans to act as citizens, with all the responsibility and complicated political choices it entails, whereas Darfur only requires them to act as humans where they choose to take responsibility out of a sense of philanthropy. He notes that “In Darfur, Americans can feel themselves to be what they know they are not in Iraq: powerful saviors.” As the Nigerian writer Uzodinma Iweala observed, “It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption.” In adopting the language of good and evil, Mamdani observes, the SDC has acted as “the great depoliticizer” in precluding political reconciliation in favor of a moral (read military) solution.

In Saviors and Survivors, Mamdani emphasizes regional over international solutions. Western modes of conflict resolution in Africa resemble nothing so much as the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programs: “Those who made decisions did not have to live with their consequences, nor pay for them.” The Western emphasis on the humanitarian crisis in lieu of a political solution merely prolongs the conflict. By contrast, the AU’s approach is both humanitarian and political. The African Union’s (AU) intervention in Darfur had been largely successful in reducing the violence, yet its operation was undermined by Western powers that failed to deliver the support they had pledged when the AU brokered the N’DJamena ceasefire agreement in April 2004. It was also vilified in SDC propaganda. Mamdani asserts that much of the foot-dragging was to discredit the AU so that the notion of an African solution for an African problem could be discredited. The aim was to “blue hat” the AU forces and bring them under Western command. In a Washington Post op-ed pointedly titled “Stop Trying To ‘Save’ Africa,” Iweala asked, “How is it that a former mid-level US diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis?”

The recent International Criminal Court case has further entrenched the Khartoum government in its defiant stance. Criminal prosecutions during an ongoing conflict merely exacerbate matters, Mamdani argues. More so when the adjudicating body has a demonstrable record of bias. The model for justice must be the post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission rather than Nuremberg — survivors’ justice rather than victors’ justice. The well-being of surviving multitudes must not be subordinated to the imperative of punishing individual perpetrators. Mamdani offers a trenchant critique of what he calls the “New Humanitarian Order,” which has supplanted traditional colonialism and turned human rights into the new pretext for intervention. The “international community”, which Mamdani argues is nothing more than a “post-Cold War nom de guerre for the Western powers”, has created “a bifurcated system whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East” reducing citizens to wards in “an open-ended international rescue operation”.

The Obama Administration already appears to be making a break with its predecessor’s approach and has ordered a review of its Sudan policy. Scott Gration, the new envoy, has already visited Khartoum and Darfur, as has John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the case of the Bush Administration, the SDC was able to mobilize Congress against the State Department that was seeking a political resolution modeled on the power-sharing agreement that ended the longstanding conflict in the south. It remains to be seen how much the Obama Administration is able to resist the formidable lobbying power of the SDC. While Mamdani maintains that the aim of the SDC is to induce the US government to intervene militarily in Sudan, it appears that the real interest of its core organizations is to perpetuate the conflict so as to continue using the image of the Arab as the perpetrator to distract from the regional reality of the Arab as the victim.

* A shorter version of this first appeared on the Electronic Intifada.

US tactics and strategy toward the region becomes relevant, only if we take account of the recent historical, economic and political changes in Latin America and the evolving political alignments.

A realistic assessment of US policy by necessity must go beyond policy pronouncements and Washington’s ‘projection of power’ to an analysis of its existing capabilities and the resources available to implement Obama’s agenda for Latin America. In evaluating Washington’s policy, the key is to analyze its coherence and feasibility in light of its political diagnosis of Latin America. This provides a basis for determining the compatibility or conflict of interests between the two regions. A basic question arises: How do the Obama regime’s policies, objectives, and available resources square with the development needs of different Latin American countries in a time of deepening world depression?

To answer that question, requires we examine the recent policies and political alignments in Latin America. It would be utterly foolish to over or underestimate the degree of US “hegemony” or Latin American “autonomy,” especially in light of major shifts in power relations over the past two decades, and continuing today.

Latin America’s relations with the US are decisively influenced by internal events, including class conflicts, which determine the correlation of political forces, as well as external events such as US intervention and outward expansion, and world market conditions. The shifts in Latin America’s political-economic relations can be divided into distinct periods, which provide an overview of the relative degree of hegemony and autonomy with regard to the US empire.

The Changing Contours of US-Latin American Relations: 1990-2009

Any “general overview” of US-Latin American relations is subject to exceptions and variations in particular country experiences, even as it highlight ‘dominant trends’ in the region.

The first two decades from 1980-2000 establish certain parameters for recent policies particularly the conflicts and divergences of interests.

The period from 1980-1999 was defined for Washington and Wall Street as the ‘Golden Age’ in US-Latin American relations. The regimes accepted and promoted US hegemony, following the precise terms of the IMF, the Washington Consensus and a US centered model of capital accumulation.

This included the lifting of trade barriers, the privatization of public enterprises (including banks, oil wells, mines, factories and telecoms) and their subsequent denationalization or transfer to US and European multinational corporations (MNCs).

The US and EU took over these public enterprises at exceptionally favorable prices and terms, which led to the massive transfer of profits, interest and ‘rent’ payments to the MNCs and provided them with extensive leverage over the entire financial/credit-system and access to local savings in the Latin American countries.

On the political level, the incumbent regimes embraced and promoted the US sponsored free market ideology known as “neo-liberalism” and backed US diplomatic and political intervention in the region as well as overseas.

The plunder of public treasuries and private savings by the MNCs and the resulting concentration of wealth and political power polarized society and precipitated major political economic crises. This led to popular upheavals throughout most of the region during the period from 2000-2004. Latin America witnessed the ousting of several US client regimes, serious widespread questioning of the free market ideology and a growing potential for radical structural changes.

As a consequence of the new correlation of forces, US political power declined and its influence was largely confined to political and economic elites at the margins of governance and under political siege from mobilized movements and disaffected electorates.

The ‘third period’ reflected ‘hybrid regimes’, which spoke to the populist demands and critiques of ‘neo-liberalism’ (empire-centered economic structures and policies) without actually reversing any of the unpopular structural/property legacies imposed by the earlier client regimes. The rise and consolidation of a wide range of highly differentiated ‘center-left regimes’ benefited from world economic conditions, especially high commodity prices, which facilitated social welfare programs and economic recovery as well as the relative ‘decline’ of US political power. This decline was intensified by the US involvement in a series of prolonged wars in the Middle East and South Asia and its ‘global war on terror’.

The ‘third period’ featured an increase in the relative autonomy of Latin America aided by huge windfall profits from exceptional prices and expanding markets in Asia, and from the regional political-economic initiatives of Venezuela’s Chavez government.

The end of the primary commodity boom and the emergence of a world-wide depression mark the beginning of the fourth period. Two contradictory phenomena impacted on US-Latin American relations. Because the US was the epicenter of the world economic crisis and its financial and investment institutions turned insolvent, finance and investment fled or were repatriated, weakening the US presence in Latin America and its economic leverage in a region with huge foreign reserves. Secondly, the over-extension of US military forces in other regions (Middle East/Asia/Eastern Europe) lessened its capacity for military intervention in Latin America. While developments in the world-economic and military situation opened opportunities to exercise greater Latin American autonomy, the decline of export markets, the drying up of credit markets and foreign capital inflows exposed the vulnerability of the ‘center-left’ regimes with their dependency on ‘export strategies’. The contradictory features of the ‘fourth period’ shaped the framework for contemporary US-Latin American relations and define some of the key issues facing Latin American rulers and the Obama regime.

Rising Militarism, Financial Protectionism and Declining Trade

The policies of the Obama regime toward Latin America are negatively framed by its three top policy priorities. The Obama regime’s foreign policy builds and expands the military-driven empire building of his predecessors. Contrary to the hopes and expectations of many of his progressive and leftist advocates of peace, Obama has staffed his regime with committed militarists, Zionists and Cold Warriors.

The major difference between Obama and Bush’s policy is the diplomatic language, which accompanies empire building and the scope and depth of military activity. Obama has adopted a rhetoric of ‘reconciliation,’ ‘negotiation’ and ‘change’ as opposed to Bush’s overtly bellicose rhetoric of confrontation, even as Obama has accelerated and extended military activities beyond the Bush regime.

A systematic analysis of the Obama regime’s policies reveals the overriding emphasis on projecting military power as the main instrument for sustaining the empire throughout the world.

South Asia

The Obama regime has increased US military forces in Afghanistan by over 40% — by 21,000 troops added to the current 38,000 — and increased financing for doubling the size of the Afghan mercenary army and police to over 200,000. Washington has extended the field of warfare in Pakistan, escalated its bombing attacks in the Swat Valley on a daily basis and increased cross-border commando operations. The Obama regime has formally extended the US war-zone deeper into Pakistan territory and extended its reach into Pakistan intelligence institutions.

Despite Obama’s intense pressure on the European Union and its allies and clients around the world, few countries have pledged combat forces in support of Obama’s military strategy. Just as during the Bush era, Obama unilaterally pronounces a major military escalation and then expects his allies to follow. The Obama military and intelligence apparatus has moved even more intrusively into Pakistani institutions with the clear intent to purge nationalist officers and select officials who will more aggressively repress the communities, organizations and leaders opposed to US intervention in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Iraq

The contrast between Obama’s diplomatic rhetoric of military withdrawal and military escalation is most blatant in the case of Iraq. The Obama regime has extended the time frame of US military occupation and increased funding for permanent military bases and related infrastructure. His military strategy envisions a massive mercenary Iraqi army and police force to control the population and repress any nationalist resistance. Obama will double the number of Iraqi mercenaries spread throughout the country under the Pentagon’s command.

Iran

The most striking policy adopted by the Obama regime toward Iran is his adding new and even harsher sanctions to the existing economic embargo. Obama continues to threaten Iran with a pre-emptive military assault in line with the contingency war plans developed by top Pentagon officials held over from the Bush regime. In pursuit of this saber-rattling posture, Obama appointed two of the most bellicose Israeli-American ideologues, includng Dennis Ross, as chief emissary to Iran and Stuart Levey to the Treasury in charge of imposing economic sanctions. Washington is making a major diplomatic effort to isolate Iran, through negotiations with Syria, Russia and China. In the face of these ‘facts on the ground’ Obama’s public rhetoric about offering Iran a ‘new policy,’ is blatant propaganda stunt. The massive US air and naval armada off the coast of Iran continues to threaten Teheran with a blockade or even massive air and naval strikes. The Obama regime continues to fund and train terrorist groups to infiltrate Iran from their bases in Iraq and Pakistan and to attack Iranian government facilities and officials. Israeli military threats to strike Iran are made more probable with the Obama regime’s transfer of new military technology, including the most advanced anti-missile system and ‘bunker-buster’ bombs designed to destroy underground Iranian government facilities.

Palestine/South Lebanon/Syria

The Obama regime’s military policy is clearly evidenced in its unconditional backing of Israel’s murderous military assault on Gaza, its selective assassination of Palestinian activists in the West Bank and its threats against Hezbollah.

The Obama regime, together with both houses of Congress, has backed every Israeli act of war– including its brutal economic blockade of Gaza and the systematic eviction of Palestinian residents in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The Obama administration is deeply infested with prominent pro-Israel Zionists at all levels precluding any change in Washington’s robust military ties even with the far right militarist Netanyahu-Lieberman regime.

East Africa

Obama’s regime continues to pursue a confrontational policy toward Muslim Sudan by funding the armed separatists in South Darfur and by a recently reported air attack on a Sudanese military convoy. In the face of its failed military intervention in Somalia by its Ethiopian proxy, Washington has opted for a new Somali client coalition backed by African mercenaries from Uganda.

Russia/Eastern Europe

Under Obama, the provocative military encirclement of Russia continues via the recruitment of new client NATO ‘members’ among the former Soviet Republics and the building of bases on the very frontiers of Russia. Obama combines a double discourse of diplomatic conciliation while building new military bases, missile sites and advanced radar stations from Poland southward toward Ukraine and Georgia. Washington’s ‘diplomatic overtures’ to Russia are driven by its logistical needs in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and especially its war preparations toward Iran. The Obama regime is demanding that Russia provide logistical support for the US/NATO Afghan-Pakistan war and occupation while demanding Russia cancel its sale of advanced missiles as well as its nuclear power plant contract agreement with Iran in exchange for US ‘good will’…

China

Although the Obama regime is acutely aware of its dependence on China’s continued financing of the US economic deficits, it has nevertheless engaged in a high risk naval confrontation in China’s off shore economic zones. Recent Pentagon reports on Chinese military preparedness are laced with lurid Cold War rhetoric designed to inflate China’s ‘threat’ to US dominance in Asia and its ‘lack of transparency’. Once again, the Obama regime presents the double discourse of friendly diplomacy and aggressive militarist policies.

China faces a US military encirclement along an arc of US bases from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Japan, to South Korea, as well as a new military doctrine labeling China a ‘threat’ to be ‘contained’ in Asia.

Obama’s Latin American Policy

To decipher the real content of the Obama regime’s policy to Latin America one needs to look at the foreign policy priorities, the allocations of financial resources and public policy commitments and ignore its inconsequential diplomatic rhetoric. The first major pronouncement, in line with its global military policies, was to militarize the US-Mexican frontier, allocating nearly one-half billion dollars in military and related aid to the right wing Calderon regime. The entire focus of White House policy toward the Mexican and Colombian regimes over the problem of narcotics and narco-violence is the military ignoring its socio-economic structural roots:

Millions of young Mexican peasant and small farmers driven into bankruptcy, unemployment and poverty by the North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA), created a large pool of recruits for the narco traffickers.

The expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrant workers from the US and the new militarized borders has closed off a major escape for Mexican peasants fleeing destitution and crime. In contrast to the formation of the European Union, which provided tens or billions to the less competitive countries, like Spain, Greece, Portugal and Poland, entering the European Union, the US has provided Mexico with no compensatory funds to upgrade its productive competitiveness and provide needed employment for its people.

The highly militarized Colombian regime, notorious for its violation of human rights, is currently the biggest recipient of US military aid in Latin America. Under Plan Colombia, the US financed counter-insurgency program, Bogota has received over 5 billion dollars, the most advanced military technology and thousands of American military advisers and sub-contracted mercenaries. The Obama’s support for the right-wing Colombian regime is his response to the emergence of democratically elected populist and radical governments in Ecuador and Venezuela.

Obama’s policies toward Latin America are driven by his extension of the military defense/priorities of the Bush Administration, including the economic embargo of Cuba and its virulent hostility toward Venezuelan nationalism. There are no new economic initiatives. Beyond the rhetorical support for free trade, Obama upholds past quotas and tariffs on more competitive imports from Brazil, even adding new protectionist measures against Mexican trucks and truck drivers.

Obama’s relentless pursuit of military-driven empire building while in the midst of an ongoing and deepening domestic economic depression forms the basis for understanding Washington’s contemporary relation with Latin America today. His regime’s military approach to Latin America is reflected in his inability or unwillingness to allocate economic resources and underscores his concern to sustain two major US clients, Colombia and Mexico through military aid programs. Obama’s limited interest and sparse commitment of economic resources to Latin America reflects the very low foreign policy priority it has in the current White House. Latin America is a fifth level priority after the US domestic economic depression, the Middle East and South Asian wars, coordinating economic policies with the European Union and formulating economic strategies and military relations with Russia and China. With these priorities, the Obama regime has little time, interest, or programmatic offerings to help Latin America cope with the onset of the economic recession.

At the most basic level the Obama regime is following a three-fold strategy of (1) retaining support from rightist regimes (Colombia, Mexico and Peru); (2) increasing influence on ‘centrist regimes’ (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay); and (3) isolating and weakening leftists and populist governments (Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua).

What is most striking about the supposedly “progressive” Obama regime’s policy for Latin America are the continuities with the previous reactionary Bush administration in almost all strategic areas. These include:

   1. Latin America’s very low priority in US global policy;
   2. The US emphasis on military (“security”) drug enforcement collaboration over any long term socio-economic poverty alleviation and drug addiction treatment programs;
   3. Its close collaboration with the most rightwing regimes in the region (Mexico and Colombia);
   4. The continuation of the US economic embargo of Cuba, despite the loss of its last two Latin American backers;
   5. Obama’s double discourse of talking free markets while practicing protectionism;
   6. The US financing and strengthening the role of the IMF as an instrument of imperial expansion;
   7. The US policy of driving a wedge between ‘centrist regimes’ (Lula in Brazil, Fernandez in Argentina, Vasquez in Uruguay and Bachelet in Chile) and ‘left and center-left nationalist regimes’, (Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador and Ortega in Nicaragua) and
   8. Its support for separatist regional elites’ actions to destabilize center-left governments operating from their traditional far right-wing bases in Sta Cruz (Bolivia), Guayaqul (Ecuador) and Maracaibo (Venezuela).

In other words the Obama regime has embraced overall the strategic agenda of the Bush Administration essentially intact, while making several secondary changes having to do with adaptations based on the decline of US power. In addition, Obama has facilitated a few major negative changes, which go further than the Bush administration in harming Latin America’s financial and trading position. While reiterating the anachronistic demands for Cuba to convert to capitalism (dubbed a “democratic transition”) as a condition for ending the US embargo, Obama has slightly eased travel restrictions for US-based Cuban families to visit relatives in Cuba and send them money. The State Department relies less on confrontational diplomatic language and has made overt gestures to centrist regimes, including White House meetings with Lula Da Silva (March 2009) and Vice President Biden’s attendance at a meeting with centrist Presidents (March 27-28, 2009) in Chile. Obama’s resort to “soft power”, which is not backed by any new economic initiatives and which continues the basic policies of his predecessor has not gained him new allies.

However, there is one set of ‘changes’ resulting directly and indirectly from the US depression and Obama’s gigantic deficit financing, which has a very negative impact on Latin America’s economic recovery. The Obama regime is absorbing most of the Hemisphere’s credit to aid the financial bailout. This policy makes it difficult for Latin American exporters to finance their sales. Moreover, the Obama regime’s demands on the financial sector to expand their capital reserves and to direct their lending to the American domestic market has led banks to repatriate capital from their Latin American subsidiaries at the expense of Latin American borrowers — extending and deepening the recession in Latin America.

The Obama regime’s diplomatic and linguistic changes and affirmation of free trade have little substance: the White House continues the double discourse of talking up “free trade” while introducing a new and more virulent financial protectionism. In addition to the twenty billion dollar subsidies to agricultural exporters, the Democrats have pushed the “Buy American” provisions in Federal procurement policy and multi billion dollar subsidies to the auto industry.

Latin America faces a rising tide of US protectionism as the Obama regime reacts to the domestic economic depression by forcing Latin America to seek new trading partners, to protect their internal markets and to seek new sources for trade and credit.

Latin America Faces the World Crisis

Throughout Latin America, the economic depression is wrecking havoc on the economy, the labor market, trade, credit and investment. All the major countries in the region are headed toward negative growth, and experiencing double digit unemployment, rising levels of poverty and mass protests. In Brazil in late March and early April, a coalition of trade unions, urban social movements and the rural landless workers movement convoked large scale demonstrations — including participation from the union confederation, CUT, which is usually allied with Lula’s Workers Party.

Unemployment rates in Brazil have risen sharply, exceeding 10%, as massive lay-offs hit the auto and other metallurgical industries. In Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, strikes and protests have begun to spread in protest over rising unemployment, the increase of bankruptcies among exporters facing world-wide decline in demand and unable to secure financing.

The more industrialized Latin American countries, whose economies are more integrated into world markets and have followed an export growth strategy, are the ones most adversely affected by the world depression. This includes Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico. In addition, countries dependent on overseas remittances and tourism, like Ecuador, the Central American and Caribbean countries and even Mexico, with their ‘open’ economies, are badly hit by world recession.

While the US financial collapse did not have a major and immediate impact on Latin America- largely because the earlier financial crashes in Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador and Chile led their governments to impose limits on speculation — the indirect results of the US crash, especially with regard to the credit freeze and the decline of world trade, has brought down productive sectors across the board. By mid-2009, manufacturing, mining, services and agriculture, in the private and public sector were firmly in the grip of a recession.

The vulnerability of Latin America to the world crises is a direct result of the structure of production and the development strategies adopted the region. Following the ‘neo-liberal’ or empire-centered ‘restructuring’ of the economies which took place between the mid-1970s through the 1990s, the economic profile of Latin America was characterized by a weak state sector due to privatization of all key productive sectors. The de-nationalization of strategic financial, credit, trading and mining sectors increased vulnerability as did the highly concentrated income and property ownership held mainly by small foreign and domestic elite. These characteristics were further exacerbated by the primary commodity boom between early 2003 until the middle of 2008. The regimes’ further shift toward an export strategy relying on primary products set the stage for a crash. As a result of its economic structure Latin America was extremely vulnerable to the decision taken by US and EU policy makers in charge of key economic sectors. De-nationalization denied the state the necessary levers to meet the crisis by reversing the direction of the economy.

Structural changes imposed by the IMF/World Bank and its domestic ‘neo-liberal’ ruling class partners ‘opened’ the countries to the full blast of the world depression while dismantling the very state institutions which could have protected the economy or at least avoided the worst effects of the crisis.

Privatization led to the concentration of income, lessened local demand and heightened dependence on export markets while depriving the state of levers to control investment and savings, which could counteract the decline of overseas inflows of capital and the collapse of its overseas markets.

Denationalization facilitated the outflow of capital especially in the financial sector, deepened the credit crises and adversely affected the balance of payments. Foreign ownership made Latin American countries subject to strategic economic decisions made by overseas economic elites looking at the costs and benefits to their economic empires. For example, in Brazil the closing of US-owned auto factories and the mass firings of workers are based on ‘global market’ cost calculations, totally divorced from the needs of the Brazilian labor market.

The ‘export strategy’ was dependent on the state subsidizing the expansion of agro-business plantations producing staples for export markets. This came at the expense of small farmers, landless peasants and rural workers, weakening the domestic market as an alternative to a collapsing overseas markets, increasing dependence on food imports and undermining food security.

Export strategies depend on holding down labor costs, wages and salaries, thus weakening domestic demand and making employment dependent on the fluctuations of overseas demand. Specialized production in a vast complex international division of labor is central to the multinational corporation. This has dramatically reduced the national diversification of industry and integral manufacturing where all components of a product are produced within a single geographic region. Under the current division of labor, a Brazilian manufacturer of car brakes is totally dependent on external demand determined by the MNC. The strategic disadvantages of this ‘specialization’ in a global capitalist chain of production have become strikingly evident in this depression.

Despite these deep structural weaknesses, inherited from previous regimes, the current center-left regimes in Latin American have not moved toward any structural changes to decrease their economic vulnerabilities, with the partial exception of Chavez’s Venezuela.

The March 2009 summit of self-styled ‘third way’ regimes (plus the Obama-Biden and British Labor governments) met in Santiago, Chile where they studiously avoided even mentioning the flawed internal structures which have brought on the economic crises and promise to deepen it.

The consensus proposals of the “third way” regimes repeated anachronistic appeals for greater capital flows divorced from reality of the current crises. They called on the US, EU and Japan to resurrect collapsing markets and to promote trade. Specifically the Santiago meeting called for increased funding for the Inter American Development Bank (IDB, BID in Spanish), and encouraged the G20 leaders to promote stimulus packages and to pledge against protectionism. They called on Latin American regimes to increase spending and liquidity, to lower interest rates and to prop up, financial institutions and promote exporters.

The center-left regimes meeting in Santiago made no mention of plans to increase domestic demand through intervention in the labor market by preventing industrialists from firing workers. They did not mention increasing the minimum wage. They avoided any discussion on increasing demand in the rural areas through income generating agrarian reforms. They did not consider establishing publicly funded import substitution industrialization, which could generate employment for workers dismissed from export sectors.

In the face of rising food prices, no provisions were proposed to subsidize low income families, the unemployed, children and pensioners on fixed income. The center-left regimes’ proposals demonstrated high structural rigidity and their incapacity to break with failed strategies tied to the powerful agro-mineral export ruling class. Instead their proposals reaffirm their dependence on the ‘expansionary’ stimulus programs of the ruling classes in the US and Europe. Their repeated calls for ‘free trade’ and appeals to avoid ‘protectionism’ fell on deaf ears as all the imperial countries follow a dual policy of promoting free trade for their dynamic overseas multinationals and protectionism for their financial and troubled manufacturing sectors at home.

While eschewing any structural domestic changes that would favor unemployed workers, peasants, public employees and small businesses, they persist in following policies favoring the bankers, export elites and multi-national corporations. The main economic focus of Latin America’s center-left regimes is not internal reform; it is the pursuit of new overseas markets and investors.

In early April, Latin American leaders and their business elite met with their Arab counterparts in Qatar to expand investments and trade through joint ventures. Similar missions to China, Russia and Japan have led to investments almost exclusively in capital intensive extractive industries (petroleum and minerals) and mechanized export agriculture. Inter-regional trade via MERCOSUR has been highly asymmetrical as evidenced by Argentina’s $4 billion dollar trade deficit with Brazil. The center-left is structurally incapable of recognizing that the world depression has in large part undermined the ‘export strategy’; that the elites cannot overcome their internal contradictions and class constraints by ‘exporting’ their way to economic recovery. The search for new markets and investors in Asia and Middle East may provide a limited boost to the export enclaves but they will have little or no impact on the industry, service and related sectors, which employ the mass of workers and employees. Moreover, the Middle East and Asian countries are in serious crises as trade (both imports and exports), manufacturing and employment decline. Moreover, China has opted for a vast economic stimulus plan based on increasing domestic demand. Asia can provide Latin American regimes with little relief from the crises.

The one country absent from the Santiago meeting of the center-left regimes was Venezuela, in part because President Chavez has pursued an alternative economic strategy to the world depression.

Chavez strategy includes the nationalization of key economic sectors like and oil and gas, which increases state revenue; protection of strategic social sectors/food processing and distribution sectors; and the expansion of agrarian reform to increase local production of food. The government has a program of subsidized food prices, a 20% increase in the minimum wage to cushion the effects of inflation and public spending on labor intensive infrastructure projects which has resulted in a drop in unemployment with the creation of 280,000 new jobs in Jan-Feb 2009.

Chavez is pursuing a radical Keynesian program, which depends on large scale public investments to expand the domestic market and social subsidies targeting a large swath of the lower classes. His state investment policy relies on the ‘cooperation’ of the still-dominant private sector, especially finance, construction, agro-mining and manufacturing, either via financial incentives and state contracts or through threats of intervention or nationalization.

Chavez’ domestic structural reforms are complemented by his promotion of regional political-economic pacts, like PETROCARIBE and ALBA, with Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and several Caribbean and Central American states. He is counting on the growing financial and investment agreements with China, Middle East, especially Iran, and Russia, particularly in joint ventures in the petroleum and mining sectors.

While Chavez’ strategy represents a clear break with and alternative to the center-left ‘export-elite’ centered approach, it still confronts a series of serious contradictions. Venezuela is over-dependent on a single export (petroleum) for 75% of its foreign exchange earnings and a single market (the US). Secondly it is rapidly depleting its foreign reserves. Thirdly, its efforts to promote regional integration have not prospered as the principle countries in Latin America look toward the G20 for salvation. State intervention and nationalization have increased national leverage over the economy but has not confronted the mal-distribution of income, property and power. As a result, a wave of worker/employee strikes in education, mining, smelting and manufacturing have hit the economy.

Equally serious a 30% rate of inflation has eroded buying power for those with fixed incomes and salaries undermining recent increases in the minimum wage. Increases in the price of foodstuffs, over 90% of which are imported, adversely affects the balance of payments. The immediate future could pose a threat to the social stability of the Venezuela.

Latin America and the Deepening Depression

The participation of several major Latin American countries in the G20 meeting in London, April 2, 2009, and the subsequent agreements reveal the political bankruptcy of the current political leadership. The declaration of a major new “stimulus” package was belied by the fact that most of the funds cited ($1.1 trillion dollars) were already allocated before the meeting and would have no effect. The actual amount of ‘new money’ was only a “fraction” ($250 billion dollars) and mostly geared to rescuing the financial sector.

The G20 solemn agreement to oppose protectionist legislation was belied by an OECD report that 17 of the 20 countries have recently adopted measures protecting local industries and restricting overseas financing. The biggest winner at the G20 was the IMF, which was promised an additional $500 billion dollars to provide credit lines and financing. Given the US-EU dominance of the IMF and given its past history of imposing restrictive conditions favoring the imperial countries, the strengthening of the IMF poses a major obstacle to any progressive Latin American recovery. The high expectations of Latin America’s center/left and rightist regimes that G20 would provide a meaningful stimulus were dashed.

On the left, Fidel Castro and like-minded allies in Latin America cite China as an alternative market and investment partner. Yet China’s overseas investments are almost always directed to the extractive export sectors (minerals, petrol) and, to a lesser degree, agriculture. As a result, Chinese investment in Latin America has created few jobs while favoring sectors that pollute the environment. Latin America’s export profile with China is reduced to a primary goods monoculture, highly vulnerable to the fluctuations of world prices. Moreover, China’s trade agreements with Latin America include the import of Chinese manufactured good produced by non-union, super-exploited workers which undermines any recovery of Latin America’s manufacturing sector.

Latin American leaders, who look to China to pull them out of the depression, are committed to a neo-colonial style recovery based on a raw material export model. Likewise, the turn to Russia as a new market and stimulus is a highly dubious proposition, given Russia’s petrol-gas dependent economy, its lack of competitive industries and above all its deepening depression with an economic decline of over 7% for 2009.

The Latin American leaders’ search for a new stimulus package from the US and EU or new trade alternatives with China and Russia are desperate efforts to save the failing elite export model. The idea promoted by Brazil that since the imperial countries caused the world depression, they should provide the solution, is a non-sequitor, especially in light of their incapacity to stimulate their own economies. The US promotion of the IMF is directed toward undermining any progressive Latin American policies and independent regimes, and not helping them recover from the crisis.

Conclusion

Because of the Obama regime’s profound and costly commitment to military-driven empire building and the multi- trillion dollar refinancing of its banking sector (while backing credit-financing protectionism), Latin America’s ruling classes cannot expect any “stimulus package” from US.

The deep political divisions between the US and Latin America (and between the classes within Latin America), divergent national and class strategies preclude any ‘regional strategy’. Even among the left nationalist regimes, apart from some limited complementary initiatives among the ALBA countries, no regional plan exists. In this regard it is a serious mistake to write or speak about a “Latin American” problem, or initiative. What we can observe today is a generalized breakdown of the export-driven model and divergent social responses, between income protecting policies of Venezuela and export subsidy policies of Brazil, Argentina and Chile, Peru and Colombia. Throughout the recession, these center-left regimes have demonstrated a high degree of structural rigidity, making no effort to deepen and expand the domestic market and public investment, let alone nationalize bankrupt enterprises. The crisis highlights the process of de-globalization and the increasing importance of the nation state.

The deepening economic crisis adversely affects incumbent regimes, whether they are center-left or right, and strengthens their opposition. In Argentina the right and far-right have dominated the streets, with a growing power base in the ‘interior’ among the Argentine agrarian elite and the middle class in Buenos Aires. The progressive trade union, CTA, which has organized strikes and protests, is not connected with any new left alternative political organization.

Brazil has witnessed similar protests by social movements and trade unions against rising unemployment of over 10% and the decline in export-oriented industries. But the principle political beneficiary of the declining popularity of Lula’s self-styled “Worker’s Party” is the Right.

In contrast, the center-left will benefit where rightist regimes are currently in power — namely Mexico, Colombia and Peru. But as is the case elsewhere, the mass movements lack an organized political response to a collapsing capitalism.

Moreover neither Cuba nor Venezuela offers a ‘model’ for the rest of Latin America. The former is highly dependent on a vulnerable tourist economy while the latter is a petrol economy. Given the systemic collapse of capitalism, these countries will need to move beyond ‘piecemeal reforms’ (such as Chavez food subsidies) and piecemeal nationalizations and toward the socialization of the financial, trade and manufacturing sectors.

Mass protests, general strikes, and other forms of social unrest are beginning to manifest themselves throughout the continent. No doubt the US will intensify its support for rightist movements in opposition and its existing rightist clients in power. US ‘hegemony’ over the Latin American elite is still strong even as it is virtually non-existent among the mass organizations in civil society. Given the overall militarist-protectionist posture of the Obama regime, we can expect intervention in the form of covert operations as class struggle escalates and moves toward a socialist transformation.

Mamdani called Save Darfur “the most successful piece of single issue organizing since the Vietnam era antiwar movement, really more successful than the antiwar movement.” But Save Darfur, with slogans like “boots on the ground,” “out of Iraq, into Darfur” and persistent demands for the creation of “no fly zones” is far from being an antiwar movement.

As Black Agenda Report (BAR) pointed in a 2007 article, “Ten Reasons Why ‘Save Darfur’ is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa,” Save Darfur is no grassroots movement either.

The backers and founders of the ‘Save Darfur’ movement are the well-connected and well-funded U.S. foreign policy elite. According to a copyrighted Washington Post story this summer,

The “Save Darfur (Coalition) was created in 2005 by two groups concerned about genocide in the African country — the American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum . . .

The coalition has a staff of 30 with expertise in policy and public relations. Its budget was about $15 million in the most recent fiscal year . . .

‘Save Darfur will not say exactly how much it has spent on its ads, which this week have attempted to shame China, host of the 2008 Olympics, into easing its support for Sudan. But a coalition spokeswoman said the amount is in the millions of dollars.’

Though the “Save Darfur” PR campaign employs viral marketing techniques, reaching out to college students, even to black bloggers, it is not a grassroots affair, as were the movement against apartheid and in support of African liberation movements in South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique a generation ago. Top heavy with evangelical Christians who preach the coming war for the end of the world, and with elements known for their uncritical support of Israeli rejectionism in the Middle East, the Save Darfur movement is clearly an establishment affair, a propaganda campaign that spends millions of dollars each month to manufacture consent for US military intervention in Africa under the cloak of stopping or preventing genocide.

None of the funds raised by the “Save Darfur Coalition”, the flagship of the “Save Darfur Movement” go to help needy Africans on the ground in Darfur, according to 2008 stories in both the Washington Post and the New York Times.

The Appeal of Save Darfur to US Audiences

Mamdani explained the unique appeal of the Save Darfur Movement to US audiences by noting that unlike US responsibility for the one million Iraqi dead over the last six years, the Save Darfur Movement does not demand that we understand Darfur’s history, ethnography, or the complexities of the current conflict there, or acknowledge any culpability of our own. Unlike the killings in Iraq, Save Darfur does not demand that Americans respond as citizens, with a need to account for responsibilities and actions, but merely as human beings with a need to feel powerful and justified. Save Darfur, Mamdani argued, has de-historicized and de-politicized the conflict for its American audience, presenting them with a simple morality play in which they can be the heroes.

Everybody wants to be a hero. Nobody wants to be a citizen.

And what could be more heroically self-justifying and self-affirming than intervening on the side of the angels in the picture of straight-up racial conflict presented to us by the Save Darfur Movement? The trouble is, it’s an utterly false picture. The historic and present uses and definitions of race in America are not nearly the same as those in Africa. Most of Darfur’s janjaweed who committed atrocities against civilians in Darfur are as black as those they murdered, and just as indigenous. The prosecutors at the International Criminal Court who recently indicted the Sudanese president are accountable only to the wealthy nations of the UN Security Council, not to anybody on the African continent. And the casualty figures thrown out by Save Darfur are wildly inflated.

Darfuri Casualties Inflated by Save Darfur and US Authorities

Professor Mamdani noted that in response to a request from members of Congress, GAO, the independent US government agency whose job it is to monitor the accuracy of information disseminated by other organs of government assessed the widely varying casualty figures coming out of Darfur in 2006. 2004-2006 was the time when the atrocities in Darfur were at their height. They took the low-end figures of 50 to 70 thousand dead, which came from the World Health Organization, and the much higher ones of 200 to 400 thousand coming from people affiliated with Save Darfur, and submitted them to the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists told GAO that the lower figures were more accurate, and those were used in its 2006 assessment of the Darfur situation.

The State Department however, produced reports with two different sets of casualty figures, low numbers for the use of its policymakers, and the higher ones produced by Save Darfur and its allies for public consumption.

To this day, Mamdani contended, the US public is being fed grossly inflated on Darfuri casualties. He recounted a briefing he attended where the commander of the African Union’s forces reported 1,500 deaths in Darfur in all of 2008, as many as Save Darfur and the US government claim are dying every month.

Comparing Darfur and the Congo, Fake vs Real Genocides

Nobody disputes that there is a bipartisan military industrial complex in the US, which creates the “facts” it requires to justify interventions around the world. The Save Darfur coalition, comprising as it does figures who trace their activism to the Freedom Movement like Congressman John Lewis, along with the compatriots of the late Jerry Falwell, would not hold on any other issue under the sun. It is a creation of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, which urgently needs “humanitarian” cover for its imperial ambitions to control Africa’s oil and other resources.

The blatant hypocrisy of the Save Darfur Movement is most evident when one compares the manufactured concern over 50 to 70 thousand dead in Darfur to the ink and air devoted to five million dead in neighboring Congo. But using professor Mamdani’s yardstick, it’s not hard to understand. Intervening in Darfur makes us heroes. But in the Congo, proxies of the US and the West have been instigated the invasion and depopulation and plundering of the whole of Eastern Congo. There is a lake of oil beneath Sudan, much of it in Darfur. But the Chinese are pumping that oil, not Chevron or BP or Exxon.

To return to our own 2007 article on the Save Darfur movement”

The selective and cynical application of the term “genocide” to Sudan, rather than to the Congo where ten to twenty times as many Africans have been murdered reveals the depth of hypocrisy around the “Save Darfur” movement. In the Congo, where local gangsters, mercenaries and warlords along with invading armies from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola engage in slaughter, mass rape and regional depopulation on a scale that dwarfs anything happening in Sudan, all the players eagerly compete to guarantee that the extraction of vital coltan for Western computers and cell phones, the export of uranium for Western reactors and nukes, along with diamonds, gold, copper, timber and other Congolese resources continue undisturbed.

Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young and George H.W. Bush both serve on the board of Barrcik Gold, one of the largest and most active mining concerns in war-torn Congo. Evidently, with profits from the brutal extraction of Congolese wealth flowing to the West, there can be no Congolese “genocide” worth noting, much less interfering with. For their purposes, U.S. strategic planners may regard their Congolese model as the ideal means of capturing African wealth at minimal cost without the bother of official U.S. boots on the ground.

Responding to the very real genocide in the Congo would require ordinary Americans to think like citizens rather then heroic self-affirmers. But that’s a hard sell.

We can only hope that the members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other members of Congress who last month lent their credibility to the Save Darfur people can get over their self affirming “heroism” and begin to meet Dr. Mamdani’s challenge: to act like citizens and the leaders of citizens, to do the homework, to help others do the homework and to face up to our responsibilities for real genocide in the Congo, and prolonging the war in Sudan. It’s not too late.

The Tripartite Alliance

Currently ruling South Africa is what’s called the “Tripartite Alliance”, which consists of the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. The friendship between these organizations goes back to the struggle against apartheid. During this period of “National Democratic Revolution”, the movement was relatively homogeneous in its orientation towards the abolition of tyrannical white-rule. However, after majority rule was institutionalized following the 1994 all-races election, a rift in the Alliance began to form between those that represented the interests of the impoverished majority and those that represented the interests of the national bourgeoisie: the black elites.

The African National Congress is both a member of the Tripartite and the parliamentary vehicle for all three constituents. The ANC itself is a social democratic organization, which supports some social programs while ignoring the systemic root of the widespread poverty that grips South Africa (although this may soon change). Its true loyalties are made evident in the ANC’s highly touted Black Economic Empowerment program, which gives substantial state support to black capitalists. In doing so, the ANC continues the marginalization and exploitation of workers, especially black workers, that the very apartheid system it fought to overthrow was conceived for.

On the other hand, there exists a wing of the Tripartite that upholds the interests of the working class (both urban and rural). It’s composed of the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, two organizations closely allied in the common struggle for a socialist South Africa (the former somewhat more vocally than the latter). COSATU is the largest trade union in the country, while the SACP has a rich history of struggle that has earned it the loyalty of many South Africans.

In the aftermath of the 1994 election, the right wing of the Alliance slowly rose to dominance. During the presidency of Nelson Mandela, it became clear that the socialist society many envisioned after the end of apartheid was not going to materialize without further struggle. However, it was not until 1999 and the ascension of Thabo Mbeki that neo-liberalism fully descended on South Africa. Corruption, privatization, and all the other hallmarks of neo-colonialism deepened as a result, leading to a great amount of tension within the Tripartite Alliance and finally a major split.

The roots of the schism go back to 2005, when the Deputy President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, was dismissed by Mbeki. Zuma, a fiery populist, was then faced with several politicized charges of corruption. However, during the course of these high-profile legal battles, Zuma became a symbol of the mass base of the ANC that opposed the neo-liberal betrayal of its founding principles. The Mbeki and Zuma camps fought a definitive battle at the 52nd National Conference of the ANC, held in Polokwane in 2007.

What transpired was an overwhelming victory for the left. Strengthened by the hardships the people have endured under neo-liberalism, the SACP and COSATU flexed their muscles in favor of the leftist Zuma, who won the ANC presidency with over 60% of the vote, defeating Thabo Mbeki. Furthering the defeat of the neo-liberal right was the victory, with nearly 62% of the vote, of Kgalema Motlanthe, a close ally of Zuma, who became deputy president of the ANC and later President of South Africa while Chairman of the South African Communist Party Gwede Mantashe became the General Secretary of the ANC with 62.4% of delegates supporting him.

In response, the most right-wing of the ANC national bourgeoisie left the party in 2008. Led by Mosiuoa “Terror” Lakota, these die-hard opponents of Zuma founded the Congress of the People (COPE), which espouses a mix of neo-liberal and center-left views, much like New Labour in the UK.

But for Zuma to even have a chance to change the nation, he would have to secure a crushing mandate from the people, and that’s exactly what he did. Last week’s election results revealed a landslide victory for the Tripartite Alliance, although it did lose its two-thirds supermajority. Specifically, 65.9% of the vote went to the ANC, 16.66% to the centrist, white-led Democratic Alliance, and an embarrassing 7.42% to COPE. Furthermore, a superb 77.3% of voters participated, which should prompt the social movements that called for a boycott to reevaluate their tactics.

Zuma — Glass Half Empty

So now that Zuma has won, let’s take a closer look at his political orientation. The new president of South Africa is a complex man with complex views, indicative of the ideological schizophrenia of the Tripartite. It’s important to analyze both his progressive and reactionary sides. First: a pessimistic look.

Zuma’s personal conduct leaves a lot to be desired. Although he was quick to apologize, the president made a high-profile homophobic remark, calling homosexuality “a disgrace”. This chauvinistic attitude can also be seen in his repeated participation (Zuma has had four wives) in the lobolo custom. Lobolo involves the payment of a woman’s family for the right to marry her, reducing the bride to a piece of property. Also, the President was a close friend of Schabir Shaik, a capitalist that was convicted of corruption in a high-profile trial.

In word, Jacob Zuma is by no means a model revolutionary. For example, here’s an excerpt from a speech he made to the American Chamber of Commerce at its Thanksgiving dinner in 2008:

Ladies and gentlemen, I said earlier during some of my business meetings in the United States I encountered a common question, based on media reports back home.

There appeared to be a concern about the role played by the SA Communist Party in particular, and our Alliance partners in general in policy making.

ANC policies are formulated by the ANC. Our alliance partners participate in the process, and bring to the fore the interests of the constituencies they represent. This brings much-needed balance to the broad church.

However, they cannot and do not dictate to the ANC what its policy should be. We also cannot dictate their policies as well. We have a relationship based on mutual respect.

Here Zuma spinelessly goes out of his way to ease the minds of the western bourgeoisie and reveals quite clearly that he is at least partially loyal to the capitalist system that is the bane of the South African people.

Zuma — Glass Half Full

It should also be recognized that the President-elect of South Africa has many qualities that set him apart from the run of the mill career politician. His oratory is inspiring and down to earth; free of the condescending double talk that characterizes the rhetoric of bourgeois statesmen. Zuma is also found of singing the militant anti-apartheid song “Umshini Wami” (“Bring Me My Machine Gun”).

There are plenty of statements Zuma has made that could be cited as support for an optimistic outlook. For example, he stated on December 16th, 2008 at the 47th Anniversary of the formation of Umkhonto We Sizwe (the armed wing of the ANC during the fight against apartheid):

Comrades, the ANC is a learning organisation. We have learnt from the mistakes of the past 15 years, especially the manner in which we may have, to some degree, neglected the people’s movement in our focus on governance.

From 1994, we had to focus primarily on transforming the State and the country, and to deliver on the basic needs of our people. We have to a large extent done well. Thousands of people have water, electricity, roads, public health care, access to education, houses and other basic services.

However, we may not have balanced our governance and party work well. In this context, all who led the ANC in the past 15 years should take collective responsibility for any possible weaknesses, as well take credit for the successes.

The various problems that developed could have been averted and some of our key structures and sectors would not have been neglected as they have been.

This statement reflects exactly the kind of honest, self-critical reflection necessary to prepare the path for radical anti-capitalist inroads.

Conclusions

Faced with a leader of unpredictable loyalties, what is the left-wing of the Tripartite to do? Abandoning the ANC and starting fresh would consume a tremendous amount of resources and those involved would have to face a long and treacherous path to get their foot in the door of state power. However, should the leftists choose to keep the alliance intact, which they very clearly are doing, the socialist forces will have a good deal of leverage to push Zuma in a revolutionary direction. It’s important to keep in mind that the future of South Africa rests not with one man, but with the constructive struggle of millions. The organizations potentially capable of leading this struggle are COSATU and the SACP, but for them to reach this potential they must first take a serious look at their actions over the last fifteen years and commit themselves to standing up when rightist elements of the ANC try to exert influence counter to the interests of the people.

Should the progressive forces of South Africa succeed in establishing 21st Century Socialism outside of Latin America , the ramifications will be earth-shattering. No longer will the ideology be confined to a single region, a single national liberation movement, but will spread to all oppressed nations and peoples, becoming the banner around which revolutionary elements the world over will rally. This internationalization is of paramount importance to the struggle against the rule of capital and to establish a just, democratic, and egalitarian world.

That said, we should not become too emotionally and politically invested in the radical trajectory of Zuma, which is dubious. However, working-class victory is, now more than at any other time since the defeat of apartheid, within reach. As legendary freedom fighter and SACP leader Joe Slovo said: “It’s not difficult in South Africa for the ordinary person to see the link between capitalism and racist exploitation, and when one sees the link one immediately thinks in terms of a socialist alternative.”

1. Development and Globalization: Facts and Figures. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development 2004: 25.

Allison Des Forges presents a lecture on ‘genocide in Rwanda’ at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Photo keith harmon snow, 2007.

On 12 February 2009, Alison Des Forges, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch (HRW) for more than 20 years, was killed when Continental Airlines Flight 3407 crashed on route to Buffalo, New York. Des Forges was widely cited as a staunch critic of the Rwandan military government controlled by Paul Kagame and the victors of the war in Rwanda, 1990-1994.

In the ongoing life-and-death struggle to reveal the truth about war crimes and genocide in Central Africa, competing factions on all sides have posthumously embraced Alison Des Forges as an activist challenging power and a purveyor of truth and justice against all odds. Meanwhile, in March, 2009, based on false accusations of genocide issued by the Kagame regime—and given the close relations between Rwanda and the Obama administration’s former Clintonite officials—the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began the process of revisiting all immigration cases of Rwandan asylum seekers and criminalizing innocent refugees.

“In May of 1994, a few weeks into the killings of Tutsis in Rwanda, [Alison Des Forges] was among the first voices calling for the killings to be declared a genocide,” reported Amy Goodman, after Des Forges’s passing away, on Democracy Now. “She later became very critical of the Tutsi-led Rwandan government headed by Paul Kagame and its role in the mass killings in both Rwanda and neighboring Congo after 1994. Last year, she was barred from entering Rwanda.”

To say that Des Forges was “amongst the first voices calling for the killings to be declared genocide” in 1994 is an Orwellian ruse. The genocide label applied by Alison Des Forges and certain human rights bodies in May of 1994 was misdirected, used to accuse and criminalize only the majority Hutu people and the remnants of the decapitated Habyarimana government (much as the genocide and war crimes accusations have been selectively applied against President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan).

The Clinton administration refused to apply the genocide label: to do so might have compromised an ongoing U.S.-backed covert operation: the invasion of the Pentagon’s proxy force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A).

According to U.S. intelligence insider Wayne Madsen, Des Forges’ criticisms of the U.S.-brokered pact between presidents Paul Kagame (Rwanda) and Joseph Kabila (Democratic Republic of Congo or DRC) in December 2008 “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 nothing to prevent them from looting the DRC’s vast mineral and energy resources.”

“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,” wrote Madsen on 16 February 2009, “with hundreds [sic] 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, columbium-tantalite (coltan), platinum and natural gas.”

Massive oil reserves are also at stake, with major concessions bifurcated by the international border. Ongoing petroleum sector investment (exploration and exploitation) in the region involves numerous western extraction companies—many being so-called petroleum ‘minors’ likely fronting for larger corporations—including Hardman Resources, Heritage Oil and Gas, H Oil & Minerals, PetroSA, Tullow Oil, Vangold Resources, ContourGlobal Group, Tower Resources, Reservoir Capital Group, and Nexant (a Bechtel Corporation subsidiary).

Billed as a “tireless champion” and “leading light in African human rights,” there is much more to this story than the western propaganda system has revealed: Alison Des Forges and HRW provided intelligence to the U.S. government at the time of the 1994 crises, and they have continued in this role to the present. Des Forges also supported the show trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), institutionalizing victor’s justice and shielding the Kagame regime.

Alison Des Forges came across to many people as a wonderful human being with great compassion and impeccable integrity. Indeed, this was my impression upon meeting her as well. She is said to have helped people who were being persecuted—no matter that they were Hutus or Tutsis—by the Rwandan regime that has for more than 19 years operated with impunity behind the misplaced and misappropriated moral currency of victimhood. In the recent past, Alison Des Forges spoke—to some limited degree—against the war crimes of the Kagame regime.

The volcanoes region of the Zaire-Uganda-Rwanda border in 1991, seen in relative peace here, was then just beginning to suffer the destabilizing effects caused by the U.S.-backed invasion of Rwanda by Ugandan troops and the Rwandan Patriotic Army. Photo keith harmon snow, eastern Zaire, 1991.

In life she did not speak about the deeper realities of ‘genocide in Rwanda’, and she had plenty of chances. In fact, she is the primary purveyor of the inversion of truth that covered up the deeper U.S. role in the Rwanda ‘genocide’, and she spent the past 10 years of her life explaining away the inconsistencies, covering up the facts, revising her own story when necessary, and manipulating public opinion about war crimes in the Great Lakes of Africa—in service to the U.S. government and powerful corporations involved in the plunder and depopulation of the region.

THE MYSTERIES OF A PRESIDENT

“Alison des Forges is a liar,” Cameroonian journalist Charles Onana told me, in Paris, France, several years ago. Onana is the author of numerous exposés on war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity in Central Africa, and he is the author of the book The Secrets of the Rwandan Genocide, Investigations on the Mysteries of a President, published in French in 2001.

Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s one-party president ‘elected’ through rigged elections, sued Charles Onana for defamation in a French court in 2002; Kagame lost the original trial and the appeal. Kagame was the commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A) and a leading agent—with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and their U.S., U.K., Belgian and Israeli backers—behind the massive bloodshed and ongoing terrorism in Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Congo, Sudan and Somalia.

“Leading light in African Human Rights killed in Buffalo Crash,” reported the Pentagon’s mouthpiece, CNN. “Human Rights Watch, which is based in New York, said she was ‘best known for her award-winning account of the genocide, Leave None to Tell the Story.’ She was truly wonderful, the epitome of the human rights activist—principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and to using that truth to protect ordinary people.”

Alison Des Forges first worked as a HRW agent in Rwanda in 1992; in 1993 she helped produce a major international document highly biased against the Rwandan Government and protective of the RPF/A invaders: Report of the International Commission of Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda since October 1, 1990.

In late 1992, the International Federation of Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, the Inter-African Union for Human Rights and the Rights of Peoples, and the International Center for the Rights of the Individual and the Development of Democracy created the International Commission of Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda since October 1, 1990. With ten members from eight countries, the commission reported its findings in March 1993: Des Forges was co-chairperson, one of the three principal writers, and translator of the French to English version.

The report noted that ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Rwandans were made homeless and forced to flee, prior to January 1993, but these casualties of the RPF/A invasion were not attributed to international crimes of peace against a sovereign government committed by an invading army—the RPF/A guerrillas covertly backed by the U.S., Britain, Belgium and Israel—but instead merely to ‘war’. In other words, the initial act of aggression, the RPA/F invasion, was institutionally protected and the war crimes that set the stage for the conflagrations in Rwanda and Congo went unpunished.

Later in 1993, Rwandans Ferdinand Nanimana and Joseph Mushyandi, representing four Rwandan organizations under the Rwanda Associations for the Defense of Human Rights, challenged the Des Forges commission in their 26-page document, “A Commentary on the Report of the International Commission’s Inquiry on the Violation of Human Rights in Rwanda since October 1990.”

“How can an international commission be taken seriously when its members spent only two weeks extracting verbal and written evidence on human rights violations for a period of two years?” the authors wrote. They also pointed out that the commission spent less than two hours in areas controlled by the RPF/A rebels and that they could not visit all the 11 prefectures in the country because of demonstrations that blocked the roads. “Can there be any objective and credible conclusions in their report?”

Ferdinand Nanimana was later sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide. Many members of the Rwandan human rights organizations he worked with prior to April 1994 were subsequently killed.

The rights and due process of Rwandan Hutus are systematically violated due to victor’s justice secured by the U.S., Europe, Israel and the proxy states Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. Bernard Ntuyahaga, a Major of the former Rwandan army (ex-FAR) accused of killing 10 Belgian soldiers and Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, surrendered to the ICTR to avoid extradition to Rwanda; he was tried in Belgium and sentenced to 20 years in prison on July 4, 2007. Photo keith harmon snow, Tanzania, 2000.

The rights and due process of Rwandan Hutus are systematically violated due to victor’s justice secured by the U.S., Europe, Israel and the proxy states Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. Bernard Ntuyahaga, a Major of the former Rwandan army (ex-FAR) accused of killing 10 Belgian soldiers and Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, surrendered to the ICTR to avoid extradition to Rwanda; he was tried in Belgium and sentenced to 20 years in prison on July 4, 2007.

Like other researchers who have endlessly perpetuated the disinformation, Des Forges made no attempts to correct the record. 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, another pivotal ‘human rights’ report that manufactured the ‘genocide’ fabrications, set the stage for victor’s justice at the ICTR, and began the process of dehumanizing millions of Hutu people and protecting the true terrorists. In 1995, Omaar and de Waal recycled the disinformation in the left-leaning Covert Action Quarterly under the title “U.S. Complicity by Silence: Genocide in Rwanda.” Since 2003, Alex de Waal has been one of the primary disinformation conduits on Darfur, Sudan.

“This woman [Omaar] of Somali origin is an RPF agent,” says Jean-Marie Higiro, former director of the Rwandan Information Office (ORINFOR). “[Today] she has her office in Kigali. In 1994 she was at Mulindi [Rwanda], the headquarters of the RPF. As the RPF conquered territories from the Rwandan Government Forces [FAR], she collected information fed to her by the RPF.”

“An intensive back and forth activity between this so-called British human rights organization, African Rights, and the intelligence services of the [Kagame] President’s office and the Rwandan military, has been observed,” wrote Hotel Rwanda star Paul Rusesabagina. “Her investigators are very close to the [RPF/A] military intelligence apparatus, and the modus operandi of both appears to be similar.”

Alison Des Forges’ years long ‘investigations’ into the bloodshed of 1994 resulted in the fat treatise on genocide in Rwanda, Leave None to Tell the Story, a book co-researched and co-written by Timothy Longman, now Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Vassar College. 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 documents, all skewed by hidden interests.

According to a recent PBS Frontline eulogy, less than two weeks into the killing in April 1994 Des Forges met with officials in the U.S. State Department and National Security Council (NSC) and lobbied for their help. “We were not asking for U.S. troops,” Frontline quotes her to say, “it was clear to us that there was no way that the U.S. was going to commit troops to Rwanda.”

But the U.S. military was heavily backing the RPF/A tactically and strategically already. Key to the operation were ‘former’ Special Operations Forces (Ronco Company) providing military equipment and ferrying RPA troops from Uganda to Rwanda; the Pentagon’s logistical and communications support; Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA operatives. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), was also collaborating with the RPF/A, serving the Pentagon interest.

Genocide in Rwanda became a massive psychological operation directed against media consumers using ghastly images—produced by RPA-embedded photographers like James Nachtwey and Gilles Peres—to infer that all cadavers were Tutsi victims of an orchestrated Hutu genocide; meanwhile the text was racist disinformation produced by Joshua Hammer. Newsweek, June 20, 1994.

ICTR defense attorney Christopher Black reports that reliable sources confirm that US Special forces were with the RPF all the way through the war. “My client testified in June that U.S. Hercules [C-130 military aircraft] were seen dropping troops in support of the RPF…”

Further, on 9 April 1994, three days after the so-called ‘mysterious plane crash’ where Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira and President Habyarimana were assassinated, some 330 U.S. marines landed at Bujumbura’s airport in Burundi, ostensibly to ‘rescue Americans’ in Rwanda. More centrally however, Uganda—with U.S. trained forces and U.S. supplied weaponry—launched its war against Rwanda as a proxy force for the United States of America. The result was a coup d‘etat: we won. The 2003 Frontline interview with Alison Des Forges exemplifies her continuing role in whitewashing U.S. involvement in war crimes and genocide in Central Africa.

“Kagame received his military education under the Pentagon’s Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) at the Command and General Staff College of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, beginning in 1990,” wrote John E. Peck of the Association of African Scholars (2002). “His sidekick, Lt. Col. Frank Rusagara, got his JCET schooling at the U.S. Naval Academy in Monterey, California. Both were dispatched to Rwanda in time to oversee the RPF’s takeover in 1994. Far from being an innocent bystander, the Washington Post revealed on July 12, 1998 that the United States not only gave Kagame $75 million in military assistance, but also sent Green Berets to train Kagame’s forces (as well as their Ugandan rebel allies) in low intensity conflict (LIC) tactics. Pentagon subcontractor Ronco, masquerading as a de-mining company, also smuggled more weapons to RPF fighters in flagrant violation of UN sanctions. All of this U.S. largesse was put to lethal effect in the ethnic bloodbath that is still going on.”

“This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power,” Des Forges wrote, blaming ‘Hutu Power’. However, her assertions about a ‘planned’ Hutu genocide—“They seized control of the state and used its machinery and its authority to carry out the slaughter”—collapse under scrutiny.

From 1990 to 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), comprised most heavily of Ugandan soldiers led by Ugandan citizens like Paul Kagame, committed atrocity after atrocity as they forced their way to power in Kigali, always falsely accusing their enemies—the power-sharing government of then President Juvenal Habyarimana—of genocide.

“Kagame assigned some people to work with Alison Des Forges,” says Ugandan Human Rights expert Remigius Kintu, “and also to assist her in fabricating and distorting stories to suit Tutsi propaganda plans.”

According to the International Forum for Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, whose discoveries resulted in the high courts of Spain issuing international indictments against 40 top RPF/A officials: “Between 1990 and 1994, the RPA waged a systematic, pre-planned, secretive but highly organized terrorist war aimed at eliminating the largest number of Rwandan people possible—bodies were hacked to pieces and incinerated en masse. From 1994, once the RPA violently seized power, a terror regime was created, and developed, and a criminal structure parallel to the state was set up to pursue pre-determined kidnappings; torturing and raping of women and young girls; terrorist attacks (both directly and by simulating that the same had been perpetrated by the enemy); illegal detention of thousands of civilians; selective murdering; systematic elimination of corpses either by mass incineration or by throwing them into lakes and rivers; indiscriminate attacks against civilians based on pre-determined ethnic categories for the elimination of the predominant ethnic group; and also to carry out acts of war in Rwanda and Congo.”

Before former President Habyarimana’s assassination on 6 April 1994, Des Forges, and the organizations she worked with, blamed the whole war crimes show on President Habyarimana and his government, they dismissed the illegal invasion and atrocities of the RPF/A, and they began calling it genocide against the Tutsis as early as 1992.

“In the Military II case Alison Des Forges admitted that she was funded by USAID when she was part of that so-called International Commission condemning the Rwandan Government [Habyarimana] for human rights violations,” reports Canadian Chris Black, a defense attorney at the ICTR, “and she admitted that she just took the word of the RPF and pro-RPF groups and that she did not deal with RPF atrocities, as she did not have the time.”

Chris Black notes that Des Forges presented reports to the ICTR in certain legal cases that were decidedly doctored from the original reports presented in previous cases against other accused Hutu genocidaires, and that it was necessary to cross-examine Des Forges ‘very forcefully’ to get her to agree that changes had been made to the reports presented as evidence in the case being tried.

Twelve year-old Hutu child soldiers with the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in Congo—so-called genocidaires who purportedly fled Rwanda in 1994 and have served as Kagame’s justification for plundering and depopulating Congo since. Photo keith harmon snow, South Kivu, DRC, 2006.

“In her expert report in the 2006 Military II trial against General Ndindiliyimana,” Chris Black adds, “she removed all the positive things she had said about him in her book and in her previous expert report in the [Colonel Théoneste] Bagasora case. When asked by me why she deleted the positive view of him at his own trial, and why she tried to hide the fact that he saved a lot of Tutsis, among other things, she had no explanation. It was a cheap, low thing to do and I can tell you even the judges here at the ICTR were not too happy about it.”

On December 18, 2008, after the protracted ‘Military I’ trial, the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda ruled that there was no conspiracy to commit genocide by former Rwandan military leaders affiliated with the former Habyarimana government. It was war, and the actions—far from a calculated genocide—were found by ICTR judges to be ‘war-time conditions’.

“The media reports of the December 18 judgment [Military I] at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda focused primarily on the convictions of three of four former top military leaders, who were the supposed ‘masterminds’ of the Rwandan genocide,” wrote ICTR defense lawyer Peter Erlinder. “But, as those who have followed the ICTR closely know, convictions of members of the former Rwandan government and military are scarcely newsworthy.”

Since the inception of the ICTR its decisions have been decisively biased—victor’s justice—in favor of protecting the Kagame regime and its backers. Thus it is no surprise that the former top military leaders of the Habyarimana government—Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and Major Aloys Ntabakuze—were sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, an act of genocide is not an organized, calculated, systematic genocide.

“The real news was that ALL of the top Rwandan military officers, including the supposedly infamous Colonel Bagosora, were found not guilty of conspiracy or planning to commit genocide,” writes Erlinder. “And General Gratien Kabiligi, a senior member of the general staff, was acquitted of all charges! The others were found guilty of specific acts committed by subordinates, in specific places, at specific times—not an overall conspiracy to kill civilians, much less Tutsi civilians.”

Now, after more than fifteen years of massive western propaganda proclaiming an organized, systematic elimination of the Tutsi people by the Hutu leaders of the former Rwandan government, the official Rwanda genocide story has finally collapsed.

THE GENOCIDE FACTS

In contradistinction to the establishment narrative accusing the ‘Hutu leadership’ of an ‘organized’ and ‘planned’ genocide were the countless acts of genocide committed through a spontaneous uprising of the Hutu masses—people who had been brutalized, disenfranchised, uprooted and forced from homes; people who had witnessed massacres and rapes of family members; people who were themselves the victims of brutal atrocities. These were more than a million internally displaced Rwandan Hutus, people who had been terrorized by the Rwandan Patriotic Army from October 1990 to April 1994, as it butchered its way into Rwanda; and possibly a million Burundian refugees, Hutus who suffered massive reprisals in Burundi after the first civilian President, Melchior Ndadaye, a democratically elected Hutu, was assassinated by the Tutsi military in October 1993. There is evidence that the RPA/F pursued “pseudo-operations”—death squads committing atrocities disguised as government soldiers—and evidence that at least some of the infamous Interahamwe militias pursued their campaigns of terror in the pay of the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army.

“She [Des Forges] concealed the fact that from 1990 the war caused an unprecedented economic poverty and that the one million internally displaced people tore the social fabric apart!” wrote Dr. Helmut Strizek, a former German official who had called for Des Forges’ resignation from HRW. “And these people knew that Tutsi rebels [RPA] caused their misery. They did not wait for ‘instructions’ in order to revenge, once no one was able to maintain public order after the April 6 [1994] assassination [sic] and resumption of hostilities by the RPF.”

“Alison Des Forges is no longer,” writes Charles Onana. “Peace be with her soul! She nonetheless leaves behind her many victims of injustice, who she painstakingly accused, using false testimony, before the International Criminal Tribunal Court for Rwanda (ICTR).”

Alison Des Forges provided expert testimony in 11 genocide trials before the ICTR, including the ‘Military I’ trials that condemned Col. Theoneste Bagosora and two others on December 18. Des Forges also testified in genocide trials in Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada.

Charles Onana continues:

Among her victims there is Jean-Paul Akayesu, the first to be condemned to life imprisonment for genocide. This man, who Alison Des Forges had accused without any proof against him, was even defended by a Tutsi from the Patriotic Rwandan Army [RPA] who had been party to the fabrication of the ‘incriminating’ evidence against him in Rwanda. The Tribunal never listened to this witness, but they did listen to Alison Des Forges.

I have also discovered during the course of my investigations into the ICTR that, at the start of the trial in 1997, she introduced a forged fax that was purported to be written by General Dallaire in 1994. This fax, maintained Des Forges, concerned the ‘planning of genocide’.

New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch spread the mythology of “The Genocide Fax” far and wide. Gourevitch’s first pro-RPF/A disinformation piece appeared in the New Yorker in December 1995; in May 1998 the New Yorker published Gourevitch’s “The Genocide Fax,” a charade fed to him by Madeleine Albright’s undersecretary of state James Rubin. Gourevitch’s fictional book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families was funded by the euphemistically named U.S. Institute for Peace and written in league with the Kagame regime. It is certainly possible that Alison Des Forges was unaware of the original fabrication, but she and Human Rights Watch never changed their tune, and they never denounced the fabrication.

Charles Onana continues:

It was on the basis of this false document that she called for the condemnation of Jean-Paul Akaseyu. To lend credibility to this first trial process, the ICTR, with astonishing lightness and irresponsibility, condemned this man to life. The Tribunal had no proof. The judicial dossier is slapdash and skimpy, but that has no importance. This was Alison Des Forges first great victory.

She then decided to pursue a Rwandan refugee living in Canada: an ideal target. He had the misfortune to be Hutu. For her, this man was a ‘planner of genocide’. But where is the proof? Alison Des Forges has none, but she wants to see this man [Leon Mugesera] in prison. Having deciphered or seen through Alison Des Forge’s arguments, the Judge of the Canadian Federal Tribunal concluded witheringly and without pity: ‘I note above all the relentlessness with which Mme Des Forges launched her diatribe against M. [Leon] Mugesera, and am astonished by the lack of care she has demonstrated in drawing up the report for the International Commission of Enquiry and in her Expert Assessment.’

The Canadian judge did not hesitate to qualify Mme. Des Forges as partisan, demonstrating ‘a prejudice or preconceived position against Léon Mugesera’. He concluded that she could not be considered an objective witness, adding that no correctly informed tribunal could take her allegations seriously. Nevertheless it was on the basis of the same arguments, and of the same fantasy report published in 1999, that she accused numerous Rwandans, all Hutu.

“CONTINENTAL SHIFT,” one of Philip Gourevitch’s pivotal disinformation essays that appeared in the New Yorker, outlined the “new brand of African leader” exemplified by Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame: it is a whitewash of U.S.-backed terrorism.

It was thus that she devoted the penultimate day of her examination, during the process against the military, to presenting Colonel Bagosora, Hutu, as the king pin in the genocide. The Tribunal in the long-running ‘Military I’ trial did not accept the ‘planning of genocide’ that Alison Des Forges never ceased to hammer on about by means of her pseudo-fax of 11 January 1994. She lied, lied and lied again. She tried a come-back or to recover her credibility by criticizing her ‘hero’ Paul Kagame, the organizer the 6 April 1994 assassination of two presidents.

Alison Des Forges finally dared to speak of the crimes committed by the Tutsi rebels of the RPF/A: the great taboo. It was a bit late but it assuaged her conscience. For those who were condemned by the ICTR, deliberately and unjustly recorded by her, there will be no justice for them. Can Alison Des Forges still hear their suffering and their pain? She who has done them so much harm—along with their families? She who claimed to defend the Rights of Man has without doubt violated the rights of many Rwandans, who will undoubtedly never forget her. Their homage to Mme. Des Forges would have been different, very different, to what her many friends in the media have to say.

Timothy Longman and Des Forges, the co-authors of the HRW treatise, Leave None To Tell The Story, both worked with USAID, the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. Des Forges was a member of the HRW board from 1988 and was “principal researcher” on Rwanda and Burundi, 1991-1994. In this period Des Forges also consulted for USAID, and collaborated with the State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Council. Simultaneously, Des Forges worked with, informed and influenced U.S. Congress-people, Permanent Representatives at the United Nations, the U.N. Under-Secretary General, and U.N. Special Rapporteur for Rwanda and Special Rapporteur for Summary and Arbitrary Executions. Des Forges also pumped the disinformation into the academic world through her high-level ties to human rights committees, African and Africana Studies departments and the elite African Studies Association.

In the same period, Des Forges constantly influenced the U.S. media through special briefings to the editorial boards and reporters of the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and Associated Press, and she was frequently presented as an “expert” on genocide in Rwanda for CNN, 60 Minutes, Nightline, All Things Considered, BBC, Radio France Internationale, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Such relations explain the mass media’s consistency in producing the monolithic disinformation about Rwanda that shielded the illegal U.S.-backed and covert RPF/A (Ugandan) guerrilla insurgency. The blanket media coverage falsely situated the “Rwanda genocide” as it is now widely misunderstood: 100 days of genocide, 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis killed with machetes; the ‘highly disciplined’ RPF/A stopping the genocide. Such is the disinformation that indoctrinated the English-speaking media consumers and created a mass psychological hysteria about Rwanda that persists to this day.

Timothy Longman worked with Des Forges in Rwanda in 1994 and has worked regularly with both USAID and HRW on contracts in Congo, Burundi and Rwanda, throughout the late 1990’s and into the present; Longman worked in Rwanda on one USAID contract for Management Systems Incorporated, a firm whose clients include the Pentagon. Longman also worked as a consultant for HRW in the spring of 2000 conducting field research in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and producing “a detailed report on human rights conditions in rebel-controlled areas.”

The Des Forges and Longman position vis-à-vis their whitewashing of the Tutsi-led RPF/A-organized genocide in Rwanda certainly explains the sanitation of HRW reports, and it raises questions, for example, about how Human Rights Watch ‘researchers’ navigate their ‘work’ in rebel (read: Rwandan and Ugandan) controlled areas in DRC. It also raises questions about how, why and when HRW does or doesn’t expose the western operatives, non-government organizations and multinational corporations: a singular example is the Human Rights Watch report that mildly exposes the criminal operations of Anglo-Gold Ashanti—a company partnered with the Bush-connected Barrick Gold Corporation—in eastern DRC. HRW says nothing about Moto Gold, Mwana Africa, Banro Resources, Hardmann Oil, Tullow Oil, De Beers, H Oil & Minerals, OM Group, Metalurg, Kotecha, International Rescue Committee—and the many proxy armies, militias, gun-runners and other organized white collar war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Congo.

The role of HRW as an intelligence conduit to the U.S. Government is incidentally confirmed by Samantha Power in her book A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide—a whitewash of U.S. and allied war crimes for which she was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize. While Power’s “bystanders to genocide” thesis about Rwanda is a total inversion of the facts, she notes in passing that “Human Rights Watch supplied exemplary intelligence to the U.S. Government and lobbied in one-on-one meetings” in April and May 1994, and that Alison Des Forges and other HRW staff visited the White House on April 21, 1994. Samantha Power is currently a member of the National Security Council in the administration of President Barack Obama.

The mass media was flooded with “Rwanda genocide” disinformation between April and July of 1994, and advertising that served up subliminal seduction and white supremacy often surrounded these ‘news’ clips. This adverts’ sexualized message—MODERN MEANS STAYING COOL, CALM AND DIRECTED—is augmented by a sanitized ‘news’ clip that described the double presidential assassination as a “mysterious plane crash.” New York Times, June 12, 1994.

Alison Des Forges continued to remain silent about western corporate and military interests in the Great Lakes region to her death. A perfect example of this silence is the very unrevealing March 2008 interview by the U.S. nationalist and Zionist U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum titled “Alison Des Forges: The Impact of Rwandan Genocide in Congo.”

Timothy Longman also produces significant pro-US propaganda about Sudan. Thus it is important to note that amongst the key USAID conduits for disinformation and covert operations in Sudan today is Roger Winter, one of the primary architects of the RPF/A guerrilla war, organized from Washington in 1989, that led to the loss of at least twelve million lives in the Great Lakes of Africa since October 1990. Alison Des Forges, of course, never mentioned Roger Winter or his colleague in covert operations, Susan Rice, the Obama Administration’s Ambassador to the U.N.

“Roger Winter was with the RPA on the front lines in Rwanda and he regularly briefed the Clinton Administration of the RPA’s military achievements,” says Jean Marie Vianney Higiro, former Rwandan official. “Alison Des Forges contributed to the RPF/A takeover of Rwanda. I have no doubt about that… I met her three times, first in 1995, and in 2004 she encouraged me to testify at the ICTR. I said no way: I will only testify if RPF officials are arrested. She insisted I should testify, she was confident that the RPF were going to be arrested. I think she did not realize that the U.S. government would never accept that. She was something of an opportunist.”

“I don’t know how assassins could control icing on the wings or why it was necessary to bring down 50 other people just to silence her,” says ICTR lawyer Chris Black, commenting on the speculation that Alison Des Forges was assassinated by ‘plane crash’. “It would have been much simpler to kill her in all sorts of other ways. But she was no big critic. She made some noises, but it was just to give Human Rights Watch some credibility.”

“I hold a strong belief in the plane crash being planned,” says Remigius Kintu. “These international cabal members have no mercy to hide their crime in something like this and could care less about the other people on the plane. As for Roger Winter, he was the chief logistics boss for [RPF] Tutsis until their victory in 1994, operating from 1717 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington D.C.”

The zeal displayed by Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch in the pursuit of justice and human rights appears in sharp contradistinction to their absence of zeal in pursuing the architects of the criminal invasion of Rwanda on 10 October 1990, the double presidential assassinations of 6 April 1994, and all kinds of other nasty corporate conspiracies in Central Africa.

Thus while the world commemorated the 15th Anniversary of the “Rwanda Genocide” on 6 April 2009, innocent Rwandan asylum seekers and critics of the Kagame terrorist regime, all over the world, live under perpetual fear of being hunted down, branded as genocide perpetrators, ostracized, and persecuted by an illegitimate one-party dictatorship comprised 40 military officials indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by two international courts.

According to insiders from Rwanda, Kagame’s ruthless Directorate of Military Intelligence has dispatched some 300 agents to Europe to kill RPF opponents; some of these agents are operating under cover as bogus asylum seekers in Europe and North America. As of January 20, 2009 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began reopening all cases of Rwandan asylum seekers, and is criminalizing and threatening to deport legitimate refugees to Rwanda, actions that violate the 1951 United Nations High Commission for Refugees Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.

Many economists assure us the current recession will begin to subside by 2010, but the paradigm from which they conceptualize reality is incomplete, ignoring costs externalized by markets, such as the encroaching effects of habitat destruction. The fledgling and contagious social unrest at hand must be quickly organized, attitudinized and mobilized, for existing environmental, geopolitical and financial upheavals threaten the survival of many. Firstly, the outlook for food yields in 2009 is dismal: Many analysts have warned of a 20 to 40 percent drop in agricultural production, depending on the harshness and duration of the current global drought. Two years ago, however, Science published predictions of “permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” of the United States, and forecast levels of aridity akin to the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s that would envelope swaths of land from Kansas to California. The Hadley Center in the UK reported in November 2006,

“Extreme drought is likely to increase from under 3% of the globe today to 30% by 2100 —areas affected by severe drought could see a five-fold increase from 8% to 40%.”

This, of course, is a recipe for widespread desertification. The NOAA foresees drought of considerable duress—“ largely irreversible for 1,000 years”—and identifies the following key regions as facing, insofar as our contemporary purviews are considered, permanent Dust Bowls: (Romm )

• U.S. Southwest
• Southeast Asia
• Eastern South America
• Southern Europe
• Southern Africa
• Northern Africa
• Western Australia

Countries yielding two thirds of the world’s agricultural output are on the precipice of serious climatatic discontinuities reminiscent of the Global Climate Optimum of the 900 to 1300 variety. Food prices will soar, and, in poor countries where food is scarce, millions will starve. One thing we have to fall back on is our natural humanity, —not just our braininess and know how, but also the fact that the collective wet dream that constitutes our social reality skews how many of us can actually live now and in the future. Simply put, by ditching the wet dream and downsizing, we significantly better our plight. There are plenty of atavistics (those who are like, so last dark ages) among us, like Dianne Feinstein, who said that it is Californians “god-given right to water their lawns and gardens.” Southern Californian Scott Thill offers, in an article published by AlterNet, a new definition of the front lawn: “Gorgeously tended middle fingers to reality, which, like death and taxes always, has a way of winning in the end.”

The California drought is anticipated to be the worst in modern times. Already thousands of acres of crops are fallow, with no sign of slowing. Furthermore, the Northern Sierra snowpack for this past winter turned out to be 51% lighter than usual. According to the Los Angeles Times, the state is nearly out of water, leaving it with prayers of rain and a dwindling Northern California supply. Los Angeles has already begun allocation of water, which, as Scott Thill points out, means water to the rich (north) and away from the poor (south). He then portends evacuations and realignments, “by 2100, you will not recognize it.” East of southern California, 18 percent of Texas is burdened by severe drought.

In some countries historical relief efforts have been undertaken. The Chinese government has allocated 86.7 billion yuan (roughly $12.69 billion) to affected regions, and, moreover, lent a helping hand to its western colleagues during the financial crisis, but also to nature itself. Officials in Beijing blasted silver iodide into clouds over northern China to create precipitation as a means of alleviating the most severe drought experienced by the region in half a century. King your fingers crossed (or maybe not, there’’s no telling with these things!), as China produces 18% of the world’s grain each year.

Australia has been in the midst of an unremitting dry spell since 2004, as 41% of the country’s agriculture suffers the worst drought in the 117 years of record-keeping. Rivers have stopped flowing, lakes are being eradicated by toxicity, and farmers have left their land.

Shall we proceed? Argentina’’s worst drought in half a century has turned that country’s verdant landscapes to dust. The country has declared emergency. Soy plants are scorched by the sun and Argentina’’s food production is set to go down a minimum of 50 percent or greater. 2008’’s wheat yield was 16.3 million metric tons, whereas 2009′’s is projected to be merely 8.7 metric tons.

Africa faces food shortages due to lack of rainfall. Half the agricultural soil has lost nutrients necessary to grow plant. The Middle East and Central Asia, to boot, are suffering from contemporary nadir droughts and food grain production is at the lowest levels in decades. A major shortage of planting seed for the 2010 crop is expected.

Stocks of foodstuff are dangerously low worldwide. Agricultural commodities must rise in price so as to obviate even larger food shortages and famine. Wheat, corn, soybeans, etc. must become expensive enough so that every available acre is harvested with the best possible fertilizers. With food prices steady, production will continue to fall and millions would starve.

A spike in food price is likely to spark competitive currency appreciation in 2009. Foreign exchange reserves exist for this. Central banks the globe over would lower domestic food prices by either directly selling off their reserves to appreciate their currency or buying grain from the market. Appreciating a currency is the fastest way to control food inflation. The more valuable a currency the more monopolistic a nation over global resources —so, for example, an overvalued dollar enables the US to consume 25% of the world’s oil, despite only having 4% of the world’s population. Were China to sell off its US reserves, its population of over one billion would then suck up the world’s food supply. Prices soar around the world.

This process, however, would most likely not end up in the impoverishment of nation states per se, though almost certainly the disintegration of the modern middle class, already long past its youthful heyday. The American Dream has been repeatedly resuscitated over the last thirty years through portfolio insurance, Long-Term Capital Management, the internet, the housing market, and now the looters have taken to the streets—oh, excuse me; I mean to their theoretical electronic world—and pillaged the landscape.

Social unrest and soaring food prices go hand in hand, from sea to shining sea. Countries, so as to avoid revolutionary reform from the bottom up, would have no choice but to appreciate their currencies in order to cheapen food imports. China holds the best deck, and so then would sell off more of its reserves. The world’s reserve currency, the dollar, floats into precarious waters. As a fiat currency, the US dollar is, by its very nature, worthless. Trillions of US holdings could be liquidated in favor of food.

“”We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger.” (President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address 24 Feb 2009)

In Washington, talk of bailouts and relief are framed in the realm of economics and economics only, with no considerable deliberation of our species ecological outlook. The budget proposal is sold as a demand oriented New Deal-esque expansionary program, with health, education, renewable energy, investment infrastructure and transportation at its forefront. The hope is to stimulate employment, boost social programs and to revive the real economy. Michel Chossudovsky reports in a recent article published by Global Research, that —– surprise, surprise— — the “stimulus package” is the most substantial diverging of public spending ever, and serves the interests of Wall Street, in particular, the finance, oil and defense cartel. This in and of itself should cause social unrest, and certainly makes more likely the potential evaporation of the middle class.

The 2010 fiscal year, which begins on October 1st, will represent an increase in spending of 32%. The nucleus of the proposal inflates defense and the Middle East War funds, the Wall Street bank “bailouts that never end,” so-called by the New York Times, and interest on a debt that exceeds ten-fold the world’’s GDP. The bailout— financed, in part, by the recipients themselves, the creditors, which, as understood by the Treasury and the banks in the first place, meant the FED enjoyed sweeping authority over how the money was to be spent from the onset of this collapse—continues under the new proposed budget. Unlike Keynesian style deficits, this piling on of debt through the proposed budget would not stimulate investment and consumer demand; there will be no expansion of production and employment, for the giveaway of tax dollars to the financial oligarchs is no more than a monumental concentration of wealth and centralization of world banking power.

Washington places defense spending at $739.5 billion, though some estimates assert aggregate defense and military related spending at more than $1 trillion. The total of both bailouts—, Obama’s $750 billion piled on top of Bush’s $700 billion dollar bailout, —is 1.45 trillion dollars paid for by the Treasury. Virtually all federal government revenues would be expended to finance the bank handouts: 1.45 trillion, the war; $739 billion, and interest payments on public debt; $164 billion. And then the well is dry. There are no funds available for the social programs encapsulated in the stimulus package. Therefore, programs for healthcare and education will most likely be sold to private enterprise to fund the bankrupt state. Education is not the only state asset that is at risk of being privatized: Public infrastructure, urban services, highways, national parks, etc. are all at risk. The worsening fiscal collapse coalesces in the privatization of the state, tilling the land for a much more lucrative market in governance and social control.

Many economists hypothesize that the Obama administration is employing Zimbabwe School of Economics policies, where by hyperinflation is produced through the incessant printing of money, resulting in that currency’s fall to zero. Currently, we are seeing the simultaneous devaluation of the currency and the purchase of the world’’s commodities by corporations, government assets included; a process that will presumably leave the rest of us with toilet paper.

So, that leaves us with a raped resource base and a new system of globalized neo-feudalism. In 1800, —around the time of the Industrial Revolution—, there were 969,000,000 humans on earth. That leaves more than five billion redundant individuals whose lives were made possible by fossil fuels and abundance of water. A ubiquitous and enduring reorientation of human cognition is the key to survival: in short, reprioritization. This problem is of the utmost importance. A change of consciousness would result in a change in mass behavior. This starts at the obvious level: short-showers, low-flow everything, no lawns, total conservation and the reorientation of the economy based on renewable resources and sustenance. We must then work on disbelieving in our governments and the moribund banking system.

An all-pervasive insurgency, attacking multi-laterally the global industrial grid oligarchy, with broad but explicit aims— among which a new harmony with the natural world is foremost— must, before all else, work towards dismantling tyrannical corporations. Computers and electricity are the lifeblood of civilizations. Coordinated attacks against the electric grid, financial markets, and destroyers of the environment could be wildly successful, but could only be so as part of a talented and colossal movement with army-like discipline. Specialization comes in handy. The average American city has food for about half a month, which means economies will need know-how to localize and quick.

Another option would be to create companies of our own to challenge the global giants. Max Keiser, host of the Oracle on the BBC, has championed the idea of creating huge syndicates of boycotters against companies such as Coca-Cola and Exxon/Mobil. The money saved would be diverted to the world’s top activism organizations. The biggest take-home lesson when it comes to boycotts is this: the consumer wields enormous power. You’’ve been told it before and it’’s true. Boycotts of certain market elements such as the Fed Cartel (Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America), in which we move our money, refinance with another bank, sell our stock or quit our jobs, is a major step in the right direction.

Your television lies. Propagandistic news networks like CNN, NBC, ABC, Fox, etc are the only companies from whom Americans get their daily dose of news. The panoply of diverse news websites on the internet forms the most active resistance community around; further privatization and censoring of the internet must be actively challenged. The corporate attitudinized mass media dangles carrots in front of the consumer’s face from the confines of a hallucinatory feedback loop. Awash in an onslaught of terroristic American-style boulevard journalism, dimension is hard to find. The axioms with which the corporate-owned media frame reality are so far off base that it can be taxing for many of us to find the right ripostes while discussing our world with Nationalists. A good example is the recent slandering of Michel Phelps, caught toking with a relatively impressive piece of glass. The pro-marijuana movement has failed utterly, —though they are indeed going up against a billion dollar smear campaign— to gain traction with this simple notion: That had Michel Phelps not indulged in marijuana, his record breaking Olympic performance would have been inconceivable. There are many doctors who have championed the medical benefits of marijuana, some going so far as to suggest THC promotes brain cell growth.

Don’t join the military, for the US government and mercenaries view soldiers as cannon fodder or expendable assets; one in four soldiers in the US is homeless.

Wine-making vats are an excellent habitat for a multitude of micro-organisms. By fermenting the juice of crushed fruit, the organisms explode at first before depleting the once abundant nutrients needed for survival. They eventually die from the accrual of alcohol and carbon dioxide they themselves produced. We choke just the same on our industrial discharge, especially in agglomerations such as Southern California and BosWash on the eastern seaboard. By making our communities self-sustainable with clean energy such as solar, wind, geothermal, and magnetic— forever replacing the obsolete 80-year long enterprise known as the combustible engine—, we make ourselves and our families less dependent on the broken state-enterprise apparatus. Not to mention less toxic.

It’s important to remember, there’’s always the future. We must keep our humanity; —it’s much too late in the ballgame to be weighed down by our razor-thin ideologies, be they Marxism, Capitalism, Christianity, Islam, Nudism, Obamaism, Indie Rockism, Hyphy, Fuck the’ policeism, or what have you. Understanding, compassion, and altruism are the chords deep within our souls, and once struck it is clear that they are the essence of humanity.

Allow me to introduce you to a peculiar form of denial called anosognosia, the condition in which a person suffering from a disability due to brain injury appears unaware or denies the existence of the malady. This ailment applies to radical changes in one’s life, affecting the newly blind or paralyzed. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, suffered from anosognosia after a stroke on October 2, 1919. After the bloodletting of “the war to end all wars” subsided, Wilson’’s first priority was the establishment of the League of Nations, which he believed would help ensure world peace. With the help of those by his side, Wilson ignored the seriousness of his stroke, and continued to look forward to more campaigning in favor of the League, and even the possibility of a third term. Wilson was no more than wool gathering with such hopes in light of his incapacity.

The industrialized world’s superego is suffering from a terminal form of anosognosia: We have all gone insane. That we find solace in proclamations from economists that the current financial crisis will subside in a year’’s time, while momentarily watching the corporate nanny state’s complete submission to corporate rule, is further evidence of our aloofness. Our capacity for widespread social reform is great if only we exercise our power. Malcom X expressed his belief that one day there would be a clash between the rich and poor of the world, and, in all likelihood—, details of how it may or may not play out aside—, we are headed towards such a clash. So, before we starve between a stream and a berry bush, now is the time for us to reconsider our goals and desires. Next week is the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq. I suggest we all consider penciling it into our day planners.

After some weeks of back and forth discussions and me revisiting notes and photos to see what I had, I sent them an e-mail 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, some one else remarked.

On 4 March 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 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. 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 heels 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 ten international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Darfur under the pretense of being purely ‘humanitarian’ organizations.

What has not been reported anywhere in the English press 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 the 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 General 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.

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.¹

CARE International has received funding from Lockheed Martin Corporation, 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 peek 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 leverage 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 Crises 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 hi-jacking 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 15 June 2008.

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 for 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 SPLA provides military and logistics support to Uganda from the Pentagon 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 General James Kazini, a nephew of Ugandan dictator Museveni and the chief of staff of the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF); General 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 — back 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 from 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, DC 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 HELIOCOPTER

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 ten or twelve 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.

Roger Winter is intimate with USAID, and is 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 pressing for action to “stop genocide” in Darfur, Sudan. Payne sponsored the Darfur Genocide Accountability Act and 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 front-runner 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 1,717 Massachusetts Avenue NW 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 Prof. 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/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.

On 25 September 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 5 February 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 Mombassa, Kenya, the Pentagon’s primary base on the east coast of Africa.

The U.S. Navy’s 5th 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 Mombassa on February 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.

1. See: keith harmon snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia?” Global Research, 7 February 2007.

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 tiptoe around the mountainous facts of Barack Obama’s actual presidency — not the wishful one they have invented.

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 US-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.

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.

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.

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 have charged their top leadership with war crimes and crimes against humanity. 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.

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 to 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.

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.

We have reasons to doubt that Laurent Nkunda has been arrested. Rwandan Maj. Jill Rutaremara said that Nkunda was in Rwanda but “not in jail.” If Nkunda has in fact been arrested it would be a positive development but not a massive change as some analysts would like you to believe. A true marker of the veracity of Rwanda’s claims of arresting Nkunda will be the extradition of Nkunda to the Congo where he committed the crimes against the Congolese people. If Nkunda is not extradited to Congo in short order then that will be a clear sign that this is part of the shell game that Rwanda has been playing for the past 12 years, a period during which they replaced one proxy leader with another while they continued to occupy Eastern Congo. Even if Nkunda were to be arrested, it would be a fundamental flaw in one’s reasoning to believe that Nkunda was the primary cause of the conflict in the east. In essence, what has happened is that Nkunda’s National Congress for the Defense of the People has been replaced by thousands of Rwandan troops. The problem is Rwanda’s and Uganda’s aggression against the Congo backed primarily by the United States and British governments and corporate interests since 1996.

If Rwanda did in fact arrest Nkunda, doesn’t this mean that they never supported him as the December 12th UN Report documented?

No, to the contrary, over the past twelve years Rwanda has shuffled different rebel leaders according to its interests. It is in part for this reason there were so many versions of the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD, former rebel militia backed by Rwanda), which Nkunda was a part of in 1998 – 2002 war. Nkunda’s apparent replacement, Jean-Bosco Ntaganda, also has an arrest warrant out for him issued by the International Criminal Court; one human rights offender has been replaced by another as Bosco now proclaims to head the CNDP.

A systemic and historical analysis is warranted in order to demystify current events in the Congo and arrive at prescriptions that will lead to lasting peace and stability. Unfortunately, the majority of Great Lakes analysts offer Rwanda-friendly analysis and prescriptions as Rwanda represents the US and British foreign policy interests in Central Africa. These analysts’ job is to provide intellectual and advocacy cover for an otherwise disastrous policy across now two US and British administrations that have led to the deaths of millions of Congolese and the systematic looting of Congo’s wealth to the benefit of U.S. allies Rwanda and Uganda as well as Western corporations.

Isn’t the new collaboration between Congo and Rwanda a good sign on the road to peace and stability in the region?

On December 5th, Rwanda and Congo signed a secret pact in Goma that the Congolese people know nothing about (President Kabila is scheduled to speak to his nation on this issue on Saturday, January 31, 2009). James Kabarebe, Chief of General Staff of the Rwandan Defense Forces and former private secretary and aide-de-camp of Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame was later dispatched to Kinshasa to consummate a deal with President Kabila. Thus, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, James Kabarebe, and President Kabila worked out a deal that resulted in over 5,000 Rwandan soldiers entering Congo. These are the same characters that collaborated in 1996 when Congo was first invaded by Rwanda during the Clinton administration. During that period they traversed the Congo slaughtering Hutu man, woman and child and anyone else who was in the way. The United Nations says that the killings were so massive and systematic that they can be considered crimes against humanity and possibly genocide. The United Nations investigation into these crimes against humanity by the Rwandan army, Kabarebe and Kabila was blocked and still remains to be resolved (see the UN investigations). Once a responsible and credible government is in place in Congo all these crimes must be investigated and justice must be delivered so that the Congolese people can be made whole. Find out more about the Kagame, Kabarebe, Kabila connection in our January 20th Blog. In the final analysis, more troops and further militarization of the region is not the answer. A robust political path must be established in order to lead to peace and stability in the Great Lakes region.

So are you saying that President Kabila allowing Rwandan troops on Congolese soil to hunt down those responsible for the 1994 genocide is not a good thing?

The logic that allowing Rwandan soldiers on Congolese territory to hunt down Hutu rebels will bring about peace is fundamentally flawed. Below are some factors to consider:

1. The deal allowing Rwandan soldiers on Congolese soil was not between the Congolese government and the Rwandan government. It was between the Congolese president Joseph Kabila, whom many suspect is not even Congolese and the Kagame regime in Kigali. Neither the Congolese parliament nor the Congolese people were either consulted or addressed regarding Rwandan troops entering Congolese territory. In fact some Congolese are calling for the impeachment of Kabila. When it comes to matters in Africa, we tend to drop all critical faculties and common sense. Can you imagine troops entering US territory without the US Congress knowing about it and the president not even addressing the population to explain why? What is even more farcical is that some Congolese government officials are trying to convince the world that thousands of Rwandan soldiers are coming into the Congo as advisers to the Congolese troops. It has even been stated that the Rwandan troops will be under Congolese command. Will they be under the same compromised command that Nkunda chased out of North Kivu?

2. It is beyond imagination that Rwanda is going to do in a few weeks what it was not able to do or interested in doing when it occupied the Congo from 1996–2002. During this period of the occupation of eastern Congo they did not wipe out the so-called Hutu militia. In fact, the biggest battle they had was with their ally Uganda over mining concessions. Also, during this time they systematically looted Congo of its wealth. (See UN Reports from 2001–2003). It is this looting of Congo’s wealth that spurred the economic miracle that President Clinton and other Western officials wax eloquently about in Rwanda. You will notice that they never mention the degree to which ill-gotten wealth from the Congo contributed to Rwanda’s “economic miracle.” Former Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman Cohen says it best when he notes “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”.

3. What is almost certain is that Rwandan troops on Congolese soil will lead to more suffering of the people of the Congo. Analysts in the West have not fully appreciated the enmity that the average Congolese holds toward Rwanda. Remember, it was the US and British backed Rwandan and Ugandan invasions of 1996 and 1998 that unleashed the deaths of estimated millions of Congolese. So, for one to say that Rwandan soldiers are now going to make things better for the people of the Congo does not take history into account. One merely has to look at the Congo-Ugandan action against Ugandan rebels inside Congolese territory to see where this latest action is heading. Over 600 Congolese civilians lost their lives as a result of military action against the Lord’s Resistance Army in Congo, which began over a month ago. Moreover, that operation was supposed to take a few weeks and now Uganda is requesting more time on Congo’s soil, while Congo’s gold and timber continue to find its way into Uganda.

What role are great powers playing in what is unfolding in the Congo?

It is key to understand how the game is played to keep Africa dependent and impoverished. Because the West is more powerful than the divided and weak African nations, they have been able to assassinate or systematically sideline leaders who truly serve the interest of the people. They facilitate the ascension to power of those who demonstrate a proclivity for killing their fellow Africans. Once these feckless leaders are in power and predictably incapable of governing, western diplomats condescendingly intervene on the premise that those they have assisted in acquiring power either through elections or otherwise cannot in fact justly govern. This narrative is buttressed by superficial media coverage of African society, intellectuals for hire by Western powers and the humanitarian industry. It is in this context that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman Cohen, have proposed the balkanization and economic neutering of the Congo. They have made proposals to reward Rwanda and their Western support structure for the systematic looting of Congo, which has resulted in unmatched death and terror for the Congolese people. Nearly 125 years since Europe gave Congo to King Leopold II of Belgium as his own personal property, the situation is fundamentally the same whereby the affairs of the Congolese people are not determined by themselves; but rather by external forces.

So what can be positively drawn from recent events?

Several things can be looked at positively:

1. It is clear that international pressure works. It has moved Rwanda to at least announce the arrest of Nkunda. As was said, the litmus test for whether Nkunda has actually been arrested is his extradition to Kinshasa, otherwise for all intents and purposes he is vacationing in Rwanda at the behest of Kagame while Rwandan troops roam the hillsides of Eastern Congo with the blessing of Joseph Kabila. The U.S. is finding it increasingly difficult to defend its proxy, Rwanda, as both French and Spanish courts (the same Spanish court that ruled against Pinochet of Chile ) have arrest warrants out on President Kagame’s top officials for commission of war crimes, one of whom, Rose Kabuye, was arrested in Germany in November 2008. Despite such repeated damning evidence against the Kagame regime, under the auspices of Donald Rumsfeld’s AFRICOM program, the US sent a shipment of military equipment to Rwanda for peace keeping purposes in Western Sudan in early January 2009, coinciding with Rwandan troops intervention in Congo. The military shipment is supposed to be used for peace keeping in Western Sudan. Both Sweden and the Netherlands suspended aid to Rwanda and of course the damning December 12th UN Report have made it difficult for anyone to defend Rwanda except for some ideologically-driven humanitarian institutions. Even the New York Times editorial board continues to call for international pressure on Rwanda.

2. Kagame felt a necessity to adjust to the new realities in Washington. He could not necessarily count on President Obama to give him carte blanche as he has received from Presidents Clinton and Bush. Rwanda is certainly still a staunch ally of the U.S. However, Kagame cannot be certain that President Obama will fully support him in spite of some of the old guards (Susan Rice at the UN and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State) being in the administration. The Obama administration can hardly present itself as an administration of change with an old policy for the Great Lakes in particular and Africa in general. The new administration would be best served to implement policies that serve the people and not strongmen like Kagame and Kabila.

3. The US and British baked resource war of aggression is being disrobed on a daily basis. The hunt for the Hutu rebels is an attempt to recast the conflict in an ethnic context. The Hutu rebels, otherwise know as the Interahamwe or Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR in French) need to be dealt with, but not in the manner currently underway. Remember, it has been the Congolese people who have been the primary victims of the presence of the Hutu rebels in the Congo. Nonetheless, what is happening in Central Africa is a high stakes geo-political battle for precious and strategic resources that are vital to the world’s military, aeronautics, electronics and technology industries. This interview with British Foreign Minister David Miliband provides some insight and perspective on the vital corporate interests in Central Africa.

4. The average person is becoming better informed and more engaged about the root causes of the deadliest conflict in the world since World War Two. They are better equipped to demand action from their elected officials and challenge humanitarian institutions that come to their communities peddling warmed over ethnic explanations for the suffering of the people of Congo.

We are confident that with persistent education, organization and mobilization, the people of Congo will be free from the forces that have her sons and daughters living in absolute misery while we in the West benefit from her riches.

Join the global movement in support of the people of the Congo and strike a blow for justice and human dignity.