Iran says it looks forward to the talks and promises to be forthcoming. But judging by the stance of the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany last week at the UN conferences in New York and the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, draconian sanctions may be enacted against Iran in a few months. This would result in yet another crisis that the world doesn’t need just now.

Russia and China — which hold veto power in the Security Council that can weaken or prevent additional sanctions — have up to now resisted the Obama Administration’s drive for tough new UN punishments. President Barack Obama met separately during the week with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao in an effort to obtain their agreement to threaten more stringent sanctions should Iran procrastinate during the talks.

The White House later suggested to the press that Medvedev may be coming around to Obama’s point of view, but this seems to be based on very skimpy evidence — a remark that “in some cases sanctions are inevitable.” Hu evidently didn’t even go that far. China opposes sanctions in principle as a means of resolving international disputes.

Moscow and Beijing do not subscribe to the negative depiction of Iran promoted by Washington, Tel Aviv, London, Paris and Bonn. They understand the situation to be far more complex than the U.S. and its allies publicly acknowledge.

The Iran question suddenly took center stage Sept. 25 during a week of hectic political activity. The White house set up a hastily arranged and theatrically produced press conference at the start of the G20 meeting in order to detonate a political bombshell intended to destroy Tehran’s contention that it is only interested in nuclear power, not nuclear weapons.

The conference opened with Obama standing at the microphone with French President Nicholas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown positioned solemnly to his left and right. It was explained that German Chancellor Angela Merkel would have joined the trio but was delayed.

Obama then declared that Iran had for several years been secretly building an underground plant in mountainous terrain to manufacture nuclear fuel near the city of Qom about 100 miles from Tehran, in addition to the plant and facilities in Natanz already known to the world. He suggested the new plant was intended to produce weapons without the world’s knowledge, though that was not proven.

Obama then charged that “Iran’s decision to build yet another nuclear facility without notifying the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] represents a direct challenge to the basic compact at the center of the non-proliferation regime … Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow … and threatening the stability and security of the region and the world.” Refusal to “come clean,” he said, “is going to lead to confrontation.”

Sarkozy and Brown followed Obama and seemed to go even further than the American leader in denouncing Iran, explicitly demanding harder sanctions. Said Brown: “The level of deception by the Iranian government, and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitments, will shock and anger the entire international community.”

The New York Times reported that “after months of talking about the need for engagement, Mr. Obama appears to have made a leap toward viewing tough new sanctions against Iran as an inevitability … American officials said that they expected the announcement to make it easier to build a case for international sanctions.”

The majority of House and Senate members have long been critical of Iran’s government and the new allegations have only fanned the flames of their hostility. Right wing Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the leading Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, declared: “The U.S. and other countries must immediately impose crippling sanctions on the Iranian regime, including cutting off Iran’s imports of gasoline. The world cannot stand by and watch the nightmare of a nuclear-armed Iran become reality.” Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stated “now is the time to supplement engagement with more robust international sanctions.”

As intended, the hyped disclosure created headlines around the world. It probably convinced many Americans, already primed to detest Iran, that Tehran is building nuclear bombs to obliterate the U.S. and Israel. This is not an unlikely conclusion for many people to accept after 30 years of Washington’s incessant campaign to demonize the government that overthrew and replaced America’s puppet, the dreaded Shah of Iran. The U.S. broke diplomatic relations with Iran after this act of lèse majesté and the subsequent “hostage crisis,” and has nourished a grudge to this day.

If push does come to shove with Iran it is important to remember how effortless it was to hoodwink the majority of American politicians and the masses of people into backing a completely unnecessary war against Iraq. As in the buildup to the unjust invasion of Iraq, today’s U.S. corporate mass media is playing its principal part to perfection — uncritically echoing government distortions about the danger of Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons. The Iran situation is different, but yet similar in terms of mass public manipulation and the possibility of a future confrontation getting out of hand.

Can this be, once again, a situation of high-stakes geopolitics where things are rarely as they seem? We think so. Let’s look at the immediate charge against Iran, based on the “revelations” of the last week, then take on the bigger picture in Parts 2 and 3.

The “shocking” news may have been delivered with a sense of surprise and high urgency, but U.S. intelligence agencies, joined by their counterparts in some allied countries, were aware since 2006 that Iran was constructing a second uranium processing plant that still remains under construction and is not operational. According to a Sept. 26 article circulated by the McClatchy newspaper group quoting a U.S. intelligence official, “There was dialogue with allies from a very early point.”

Bush Administration Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnel first informed Obama about the facility soon after he won election. He has been kept up to date since then. Before going public with the information last week, the president saw to it that several other governments were told in advance, as was the IAEA and others.

Washington officials claimed Iran became aware “in late spring” that the U.S. was spying on the “secret” facility. They said Iran then informed the International Atomic Energy Agency Sept. 21 about the existence of its project, implying Tehran did so because its cover was blown. In a statement Sept. 24 the IAEA acknowledged that Tehran had informed them that a “pilot fuel enrichment plant is under construction in the country,” and that it “also understands from Iran that no nuclear material has been introduced into the facility.”

Iran insisted to the Vienna-based IAEA and the world that the enrichment plant under construction is designed only for fueling nuclear power installations. Soon after Obama’s G20 speech, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization declared the new “semi-industrial enrichment fuel facility” was “within the framework of International Atomic Energy Agency’s regulations.” Press reports said “The head of Iran’s nuclear program suggested UN inspectors would be allowed to visit the site.” The invitation was extended before Washington’s demand that it do so.

A quite unruffled Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared at a press conference in New York after Obama’s disclosures. He seemed to regard the American president’s allegations, and the staged manner in which they were delivered, not only the making of a mountain out of a molehill but an act of bad faith just before the talks are to begin, suggesting non-threateningly that Obama will come to regret his confrontational demeanor.

Ahmadinejad told the press that the plant in question wouldn’t be operational for 18 more months and that it did not violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). He went further and said nuclear weapons “are against humanity [and] they are inhumane,” comments in keeping with his recent calls for eliminating all nuclear weapons. The Iranian leader also said that Iran informed the IAEA about the plant only a few days ago instead of when ground was broken because construction had reached the stage where it should be reported, not because it found out that a U.S. spy agency was watching.

What are we to make of this? First it must be understood there is a dispute over the IAEA’s safeguard provisions governing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Iran considers itself to be in total compliance with the NPT, and this appears to be true. Inter-Press Service reporter Jim Lobe wrote Sept. 25 that “Under the basic Safeguards Agreement of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a signatory, member states are required to declare their nuclear facilities and designs at least 180 days before introducing nuclear materials there.”

According to an article in the Sept. 26 New York Times by Neil MacFarquhar, “Tehran’s stance hinges on different interpretations of the agency’s regulations, said Graham Allison, the director of Harvard University’s Belfer Center and an Iran nuclear expert.

“For two decades, the agency required Iran to report only when nuclear material [for uranium enrichment] was introduced to a facility. By 2003 it rescinded that, in line with the guidelines for most [but not all] countries, demanding reporting when construction began, Mr. Allison said. But the agency never declared Iran out of compliance when Tehran claimed the old agreement was still in place.”

In talking to the press after Obama’s speech, Ahmadinejad said that the new facility would be completed in 18 months, so under Iran’s understanding of its responsibilities, the notification was a year in advance. The U.S. maintains that Iran informed the IAEA when it learned U.S. spy agencies had become aware of the plant, but if that were so, why did Tehran wait three months before contacting the nuclear agency? Had they acted out of fear of being exposed as non-compliant wouldn’t they have contacted IAEA immediately?

“What we did was completely legal, according to the law,” the Iranian president said. “We have informed the agency, the agency will come and take a look and produce a report and it’s nothing new.” According to the Associated Press Tehran’s notice to the IAEA specified that the enrichment level would be up to 5%, suitable only for peaceful purposes. Weapons-grade material is more than 90% enriched.”

The AP also noted that the IAEA now “says Iran is obliged to make such a notification when it begins design of such facilities” and that “a government cannot unilaterally abandon such an agreement.” This is confusing, of course. But since Iran was never designated as non-compliant and was allowed to proceed under the previous rules for years after it registered its rejection of the new terms, the thunderous criticism emanating from the U.S., Britain and France appears to have no serious merit.

       All these nations and city-state societies listed here over the past twenty-five centuries enjoyed obvious hegemonic status or were in direct competition with others that did. They were all in possession of major urban epicenters, a distinctive culture of their own, and–with the exception of Italy during the Renaissance–the military capacity to expand their authority well beyond their borders in order to obtain favorable markets and adequate resources from abroad.  Moreover, as in the case of Rome described by Gibbon, they were all susceptible to decline, and their collapse resulted more from reckless expansionism than the success of their enemies.  In historical terms it can be blamed as much as anything on their bad judgment, their mistaken policies, and, most of all, their obsessive commitment to military and financial aggrandizement.  Again with the exception of renaissance Italy, all of them ceased being hegemonic states when their enlargement could no longer feed on itself.
 
2. American Civilization
 
This brings us to the United States, the latest hegemonic society in the history of Western Civilization.  We became a nation during the Revolutionary War by defeating Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781. Before Yorktown, British troops were more than holding their own; afterward they ceased to be much of a military threat.  At the time, however, we were hardly a world power, and in fact our decisive victory at Yorktown was planned, financed, and mostly carried out by the French.  The 1787 Constitution was also largely inspired by the French Enlightenment, and several of our top leadership–Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Monroe, among others–spent a lot of time in France.  Moreover, the 1803 Louisiana Purchase was essentially a gift from Napoleon. In effect our nation was a byproduct of the French effort to defeat England in the New World, thereby contributing to its defeat in Europe.  The French failed in their effort, but the U.S. carried on as a relic of their effort in the western hemisphere.
 
              Our primary collective task over most of the rest of the nineteenth century was the forcible transfer of Indian lands to the possession of settlers from Europe. This effort began as early as King Philip’s War in 1675-76, when most of the Indians in New England were killed, driven away, or sold into slavery.  But it went into high gear during Jackson’s presidency and persisted throughout the nineteenth century.  The Mexican War [more accurately: war against Mexico] was obviously a “grab” of territory from Mexico. The Civil War intervened as a regional war in which slavery provided the excuse for giving northern financial interests dominant economic power at the expense of southern plantations dependent on slave labor. This was followed by the Spanish-American War, which was no less a “grab” than the Mexican War, this time with the capture of the Philippines setting the stage for a more “ambitious” policy with China, Japan, and other Asiatic states.
 
              It was the First World War that first gave our nation its hegemonic advantage on a truly international scale.  The creation of the Federal Reserve Board in 1913-14 under the ownership of New York banks (and thus of those who owned the banks) effectively centralized our nation’s collective financial wealth, among other things providing the funds sufficient for American allies to conduct massive warfare in Europe during World War I.  It was the belated involvement of U.S. troops starting in 1917 that tipped war’s balance to the allies. As a result of the war, European nations inclusive of Germany became heavily indebted to American banks, giving our nation de facto control of the world’s economy.  This reality was confirmed by negotiations at Bretton Woods in 1944, just before victory in World War II, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was created and the dollar became the world’s reserve currency.
 
              Hitler’s most useful discovery during the thirties was the value of military expenditures in helping to buttress aggregate demand sufficient to keep factories running, thereby preventing a full-scale depression. Demand levels had plummeted below productive capacity, so military expenditures were used to augment demand as justified by the supposed threat of enemies abroad.  This so-called military Keynesian expedient also helped the United States during World War II, and it helped carry on what seemed an endless Cold War against the Soviet Union.  The beauty of this strategy was that Russians impoverished by combat with Germany were unable to restore their non-military industries because of the heavy military production needed to match American production committed to the struggle against them.  In effect, the United States was suffering from severe over-production and the Soviet Union from severe under-production, so we doubled our advantage by using relentless military competition to augment our economic growth while hurting theirs. As a result our society thrived, theirs suffered. Two costly “wars of choice” can also be mentioned, in Korea and Vietnam, as well as the U.S. subsidization of the Afghan rebellion against the Soviet Union before its tattered economy finally collapsed in the late eighties because of its inability to match the latest U.S. escalation with a star wars strategy devised under President Reagan.
 
With Russia no longer a military threat, some kind of an alternative was needed to supplant the Cold War in stretching aggregate demand.  The first President Bush rose to the challenge by conducting limited wars of choice against both Panama and Iraq in the Persian Gulf, but these ventures were insufficient to prevent a recession just preceding the 1992 election. Bush’s successor, President Clinton, limited military conflict to relatively modest operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia and Sudan. His principal effort, however, was to sustain our economy by means of economic globalization under the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other such trade organizations that would presumably benefit both advanced and developing nations on a win-win basis.  U.S. corporate profits would increase resulting from the export of production (in effect factories) to such countries as Mexico and China in order to benefit from their reduced labor costs and environmental constraints, and no less profitable would be the opportunity for U.S. investors to extract natural resources in other non-western nations restricted by treaty from imposing heavy taxes and export duties. Meanwhile, non-western nations would benefit from sufficient growth subsidized by western investment to provide “takeoff” into truly competitive economies as had been proposed several decades earlier by the American economist Walt Rostow.
 
 However, it soon became obvious that globalization was far more lucrative for Wall Street investors than for the indigenous population of non-western states, and moreover that the pursuit of economic ties in and of itself was insufficient to prevent a major depression in the near future in the United States. At this point deregulation must have seemed a perfectly reasonable means of augmenting our nation’s GDP.  Burdened with the threat of impeachment, President Clinton cooperated with Republicans and Wall Street in deregulating the financial markets first with the 1999 Financial Services Act and then the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act, effectively rescinding the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act for bringing Wall Street financial markets under control.  As a neo-liberal, Clinton was willing to loosen up the markets, but not to the extent that was permitted by this legislation.  If he had more time to study it in depth, he would undoubtedly have tightened its application.
 
              A depression nevertheless began to gather momentum soon after the second (and less talented) President Bush came to office.  As to be expected, he resorted to every possible expedient that might help in diminishing its impact. His effort included going to war in both Afghanistan and Iraq as justified by the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center (one excuse sufficing to justify two wars), along with a sharp reduction in taxation, especially for the wealthiest Americans. This was the very first time in U.S. history that full-scale military Keynesianism and large tax reductions were combined to stimulate our economy.  For good measure, Bush also helped to pump up the economy by letting the housing and oil bubbles supplant the defunct dot-com bubble, and he encouraged the further deregulation of industry, banks, and Wall Street speculation.  Not surprisingly, the 2001 depression soon abated, and an artificial surge of prosperity followed until mid-September, 2008, just two months before the election and four months before Bush’s departure from office. This was when Wall Street imploded and Bush’s desperate economic legerdemain was finally over. Extravagant funding provided by the  federal bailout legislation saved the biggest Wall Street banks and brokerages, leaving the rest of our nation to cope what now amounts to a serious depression whose effects can be expected to persist for at least another couple of years.
 
              Barack Obama was elected president mostly because of the economic crisis, but as far as can be determined at this point, his measures for dealing with this crisis will probably be insufficient as predicted by the Nobel prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman.  Obama has also retained an essentially conservative staff to deal with both the domestic economy and U.S. military policy in Asia. Unfortunately, too many key figures he has brought into his administration are either what might be described as constituency choices or seasoned experts who had themselves played major roles in creating the problems we now confront.  Apropos of talented but relatively ineffectual constituency choices would be the selection of Kathleen Sebelius instead of Howard Dean as the Secretary of Health and Human Services despite Dean’s superior qualifications as a doctor, author, politician and the former governor of Vermont who led the effort to initiate its successful health care program for children and pregnant women. One suspects the principal reason for Dean’s rejection was his hostile relationship with Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff regarding campaign funding, Dean having emphasized a 50-state strategy as opposed to Emanuel’s effort to target the swing states.  However, if true, this feud is insufficient reason for rejecting Dean’s appointment.  One of Obama’s most appealing promises during his campaign was his intention to bring individuals who aggressively disagree with each other into his inner circle in order to benefit from their dialogue.  Having been deprived of Kennedy in the current health reform struggle, it would be a pity if Obama falls short of his goal in health care reform because of the absence of Dean as well from his inner circle. 
 
                Apropos of the economic crisis, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke` played central roles in events leading up to the September crash, yet they have been put in charge of the current recovery effort.  As in the case of Dean, it seems unfortunate that Obama skipped over both Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman from his inner team for dealing with the current economic crisis, apparently because Summers has taken a dislike to them, especially Stiglitz. The collapse of our nation’s economy has been severe enough that all of these economists should be able and willing to work together in the interactive manner earlier suggested by Obama.

And finally, apropos of the transfer of combat from Iraq to Afghanistan, Henry Gates and the two Generals Petraeus and McChrystal played central roles in the misbegotten occupation of Iraq, yet have been put in charge of operations in Afghanistan. True, they can be identified with the apparently successful “surge,” but it remains to be seen if it was truly a success. What seems most needed in Afghanistan right now is an effective occupation force rather than combat troops, and McChrystal in particular seems a dubious choice for this task.  His leadership of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq from 2003 to 2008 featured heavy combat, excessive interrogation techniques, and other such dubious responsibilities that necessarily antagonize the host population under occupation.
 
              It can also be mentioned that Obama has gone along with too many precedents established by Bush.  For example, he has continued Bush’s practice of adding his own “signing statements” to legislation passed by Congress, if not to the same extent, and his first official act as president was to issue an Executive order banning the release of presidential records just as Cheney had done eight years ago to prevent the disclosure of oil corporation executives with whom he had negotiated an energy policy in Iraq.  Obama’s cap and trade legislation also seems as much as anything a capitulation to Republican lobbyists. And why can’t Obama nudge public radio’s Democracy Now into at least balanced reportage if not a liberal bias equivalent to its pro-administration bias during Bush’s term in office.  And why can’t Obama put a stop to the incessant airport orange alerts that blare over the loudspeaker every half hour or so, apparently intended as much as anything to keep air travelers scared, therefore more willing to acquiesce to personal searches. And why is Obama willing to retain too many of Bush’s oppressive policies, especially in homeland security and the imprisonment and mistreatment of prisoners labeled as terrorists into the indefinite future. Despite his election promises, the Guantanamo prison camp continues to hold prisoners who die under suspicious circumstances, for example the individual al-Hashani as reported by Naomi Klein after her recent visit there.  All of this should be stopped.
 
              Admittedly, the multiple tasks that now confront Obama’s administration seem almost insurmountable after the collapse of an economic policy equivalent to the use of steroids for almost seventy years now. Severe deterioration set in well before Obama’s presidency, and he is stuck with cleaning up the mess, so he can and should be given slack in performing his mission.  But when does slack become free rein to abandon most of his campaign promises?  For the current situation requires the best effort from the very best experts and leaders in dealing with it.  It also requires genuine integrity on the part of these individuals rather than the greed and power-hungry gamesmanship that have dominated Washington politics for too many decades now.  Everything is beginning to fall apart, and the question remains whether it is possible to obtain some kind of a “soft landing” least harmful to the American people. 
 
3. The American Economy
 
              Numbers alone are daunting as an indication of our current financial crisis.  Our total Gross Domestic Product (GDP), including all goods and services produced in a single year, is now $14 trillion, almost exactly a quarter of the world’s total GDP.  However, our government’s annual deficit this year will be in the range of $1.75 trillion, having exceeded more than a trillion dollars for the first time; our gross national debt (specifically the total debt of our government alone) is now somewhere between $9 and $12 trillion; and our nation’s total debt including all household, business, financial, and government debt is now in the range of $57 trillion, about a trillion dollars more than the world’s total GDP inclusive of our own. As estimated by our nation’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), $2 trillion is now in the process of being spent to cover the cost of our present economic crisis, and it is estimated that the total cost will eventually amount to $23 trillion.  Incredibly, the total debt of derivatives traded on Wall Street before the September crash was between $600 and $650 trillion dollars–well beyond anybody’s ability to pay.  Moreover, our nation now owes at least a trillion dollars apiece to China and Japan as well as many hundreds of billion dollars to the sovereign wealth funds (SWF) for such nations as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Russia.
 
              Whether intended or not, the dollar has dropped 40 percent of its value compared to the euro over the past five years, effectively reducing our national debt to foreign borrowers by means of inflation just as happened with the collapse of the German mark during the twenties. This likelihood can only be intensified by the Federal Reserve Board having circulated more than a trillion dollars in order to maximize “liquidity” in order to combat depression. The dollar can accordingly be expected to continue its decline, probably setting the stage for its wholesale abandonment as the world’s reserve currency in the relatively near future.  This in turn would result in further and more dramatic losses for our economy as a whole.
 
              Meanwhile, our nation’s unemployment rate is 9.4 percent pushing 10 percent, underemployment is 16 percent, and the country has lost 6.7 million jobs since December, 2007, many of which will probably not be restored by “improved” productivity levels as well as a permanent decline in our nation’s affluence.  Not surprisingly, income disparities have considerably widened between the rich and the poor.  In 2006, two years before the current depression, the top one percent of U.S. households received 22.9 percent of all pre-tax income, more than double the ratio in the 1970s and by far the biggest concentration of wealth among the most prosperous Americans since 1928.  As reported recently by the Wall Street Journal, corporate executives now account for more than one-third of all salary compensation earned in the U.S.  On the other hand, there was only a 24 percent pay increase for the average worker from 2002 to 2007, less than 5 percent per annum, half of the 48 percent increase for highly paid individuals and less than double the official rate of inflation.  In sum, the income gap has steadily widened between the wealthiest Americans and average and poor Americans, and this is not a healthy trend for the nation as a whole. For this kind of plutocracy does not work in the long run.  Such an imbalance is like being fifty pounds overweight with a pulse of 120, a blood pressure of 180-125, a 300 mg/dL cholesterol level, a PSA of 12 going on 15, and a robust 9 on the Gleason cancer scale. These might seem impressive numbers, but they are anything but healthy.
 
              It should also be of major concern, as explained by Kevin Phillips in his 2008 book, Bad Money, published before September’s financial meltdown, that our economy has shifted in emphasis over the past century from agriculture to manufacturing and to the financial sector led by Wall Street.  Farm production has been brought almost entirely under corporate control, and far too many of our factories have been exported to non-western nations in order to minimize both wages and environmental costs.  Just as junk has become the Port of New York’s principal export, debt as wealth owed by one party to another has become our nation’s principal commodity. According to Phillips, the so-called credit market debt roughly quadrupled from nearly $11 trillion to $48 trillion between 1987 and 2007  (p viii).  As a result, financial services amounted to 20 percent of the GDP in 2005, as compared to manufacturing’s 12 percent of the GDP (Phillips, p. 5).  In effect, the two-to-one ratio favorable to manufacturing as our nation’s principal source of income just three decades ago has almost completely reversed itself.  It should therefore be no surprise that our major banks now wield extraordinary influence unprecedented in the previous history of our nation. As Senator Durbin of Illinois recently explained, banks currently “own” Washington, and this is not a healthy development. According to Phillips, this shift in power from manufacturing to the banking sector often sets the stage for the collapse of modern hegemonic powers just as happened for Spain and England when they ceased to play a dominant role (p. 36).
 
              As to be expected, our current depression resulted from a major breakdown on Wall Street.  Virtually all its major investment banks went bankrupt simultaneously last September.  They were only saved by an enormous federal bailout effort that entailed $700 billion in promised loans by the federal government. Of the funds received so far, the top nine of these banks have as yet paid back only $50 billion while awarding their top executives almost $33 billion in bonuses for the year 2009.  It seems they are confident that the crisis has been eliminated and our economy is on the brink of recovery as indicated by several variables. The Index of Leading Indicators, for example, has risen for the third month in a row with seven of the ten leading indicators having risen in June.  Bank and corporate stocks have improved, and the stock market has shot up, surging 725 points or 8.6% in July.  Even the oil bubble is beginning to expand once again, suggesting that oil speculation has resumed on Wall Street.  On August 22 at Jackson Hole Wyoming, Bernanke has boasted, “The prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good,” as demonstrated by a 7.2 percent jump in home sales in July and a stock market leap of 156 points the same day (perhaps in part because of his announcement).  But he conceded that “cautious confidence” is still appropriate, given unexpectedly weak sales last week, increased unemployment claims, and the likelihood that hundreds more American banks would fail in the next year. And indeed there are many additional problems preventing full recovery in the near future.  In fact, it still seems probable that our nation will undergo what has been described as a “double dip” depression (what might also be described as a “W” depression rather than a “V” or “L” depression). 
 
              As explained by Jack Rasmus in his informative article, “Green Shoots or Stinkweeds?” published in the July 2009 issue of Z Magazine, economic dislocations have been too pronounced for anybody to be too hopeful about an economic reversal.  The job market is worse than it has been in decades, and with every possibility that as many as 22 million workers will go jobless before economic recovery fully happens. Even then, however, it seems unemployment could remain high because of improved productivity levels as well as the transfer of labor costs abroad. Similarly, the foreclosure rate on homes can be expected to rise to 8 million and housing prices to fall another 20 percent in the near future. Pension plans have already dropped a third and will continue to fall, and the simmering credit card crisis will expand even further than the $406 billion losses incurred so far in 2009.  Similarly, auto and student loans are likely to crash the same way sub-prime loans did.  Business expenditures can also be expected to drop at least a quarter more in the near future, and global exports that have fallen by 50 percent in early 2009 cannot be expected to recover soon.  Likewise, state and local budgets deprived of adequate revenue sharing in the May omnibus package will also reach crisis proportions. Last but not least, the 27 percent increase in corporate bankruptcies in 2008 can be expected to be exceeded by the end of 2009 by as much as 35 percent.  Many of these statistics can be reversed with a general rise in the economy, but it is difficult to believe that all of them will, and any three or four in combination just might be sufficient to produce the double-dip depression that worries Obama’s chief economists right now.
 
              Nor can much help be expected toward an effective solution from our government in Washington, D.C.  Congressmen, for example, are almost entirely in the pockets of industries opposed to economic reform that might bear a negative impact on their profits. These elected officials are amazingly unprincipled in their acceptance of hefty campaign contributions in exchange for services rendered, and indeed big business, big banks, big agriculture, big labor, and inclusively anything “big” engages in the practice of paying them off. The amount of these contributions might seem large, but it turns out to be nominal compared to the yield, often more than 100-1 in federal subsidies obtained through earmark legislation and comparable services provided by these congressmen. The few Congressmen unwilling to go along with this arrangement quickly disappear from politics because of inadequate campaign funding. When others more willing to depend on corporate donations finally retire, most find the means to transfer their remaining campaign funds to their own bank accounts and often join the ranks of lobbyists who, like themselves, had first learned the ropes as congressmen. The situation is strictly plutocratic verging on klepto-plutocracy when the law is broken to make it happen. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens have little if any influence except to the extent that they belong to issues-related public constituencies represented by their own variety of lobbyists.

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.

Needless to say, the 1400 or so Palestinians who had suffered the fate rhetorically sanitized under the rubric, ‘collateral damage,’ were not the victims of the Israelis, according to the logic of Dershowitz; rather, they were victims of Hamas.

After all, Hamas members failed to extricate themselves from the densely populated territory, wherein Hamas provided social services, in order to line up in some type of military formation, so that they would become the unmistakable target for the Israelis. Therefore, the mounting civilian casualties were the fault of Hamas, because the organization neglected to cooperate with its adversaries.

Never mind the fact that it was the Israelis who dropped the bombs – destroying all sorts of Palestinian institutions, such as the university, various government edifices, including the Ministry of Culture; and numerous domestic dwellings that happened to be located next to the residencies of Hamas officials, whom the Israelis have been assassinating through the use of missiles.

When questioned about the year-long embargo, which has been waged by the Israelis, preventing humanitarian aid from entering the besieged territory, Dershowitz indicated that Israel was not to blame. In order to understand the logic behind the claim leveled by Dershowitz, one must ignore every ostensible aspect to this situation, because one’s plain perceptions and commonsensical reasoning are obfuscated and circumvented by the polemic that Dershowitz has constructed.

I would compare Dershowitz’s argument to something stereotypically spouted by the abusive male in a dysfunctional heterosexual relationship. Similarly to the wife-beater who screams at the object of his physical abuse, “Why do you make me hurt you?” the illegal embargo is not the fault of the party that implements and maintains it; it is the fault of the victim, the Palestinian population.

According to the law professor, Dershowitz, the people of the Gaza Strip should overthrow their democratically elected leaders – who are members of the political section of Hamas – in order for the Israelis to accomplish their military-politico objectives, so that the Israelis can cease with their ongoing strangulation of the Palestinian population.

Finally, we come to the crescendo of Dershowitz’s apologia for the Israelis. The Professor from Harvard generalized the war being waged by the Israelis against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip as embodying a struggle that all democratic nations face. Therefore, in order to ascertain the essence of the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, one must ignore the historical specificities that led to the current state of affairs.

Push aside and ignore the fact that the Israelis are colonists who have displaced millions of Palestinians from their traditional homeland. Forget about the hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese captives who are illegally held in extrajudicial limbo by the Israelis. Neglect to consider that the Israelis had suffered zero casualties, resulting from the missile attacks launched from Gaza, prior to the Israeli incursions, which have led to over 500 Palestinian deaths, including women and children.

According to Dershowitz, all of these facts are epiphenomena, and matter not at all when arriving at an understanding of the present situation. Dershowitz argues that this ongoing conflict is reducible to the following: A democracy defending itself against terrorism.

In response to Dershowitz, we can say, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

The IMF calls for devaluation of the currencies of these “economies”, which are not really economies at all after their deindustrialization over the past two decades, but the euro-agreements prevent this. And even if they could do the IMF number, their huge mortgage debts contracted in euros and Swiss francs over the past decade would still be unrepayable.

Latvia’s government was trying to comply with IMF-imposed measures to qualify for an emergency loan, much like Argentina in 2001, when brutal cuts to education and social programs sparked a general strike and radicalized the entire nation (except, or course, those responsible for the crisis). The riots in Lativa brought the government down and its credit rating was just lowered to junk status.

It’s no better inside euroland. Q: What’s the difference between Ireland and Iceland ? A1: The letter “c”. A2: Six months.

We haven’t even mentioned Greece, which is already considered a failed state, virtually in a state of civil war since last September. And now the very pillars of the European Union are crumbling. In January, hundreds of thousands marched in French cities in the biggest protest in two decades. An ongoing month-long strike in France’s far-flung Guadeloupe is now full-scale urban warfare, with the dead including a trade union leader. The ruling white elite and tourists are at this very moment fleeing in panic. Martinique and Reunion have joined in.

In Britain demos are breaking out across the country protesting unemployment and the bank bailouts. The British National Party shocked the establishment by winning a council seat in Kent, “penetrating” the south of England, and are expecting major gains in the EU elections in June. Spain lost a million jobs in 2008 and the unemployment rate is expected to reach 25 percent this year. Spain’s (and Ireland’s) so-called wage inflation now requires wage deflation, workers are told. With Spain’s high debt levels, this is impossible. Even if it were possible, wage deflation is a recipe for revolution.

Marches protesting the economic plight of the people are expected to grow and lead to further violence throughout Europe, with Greece as the prequel. Suddenly, the specter of the end of the EU, certainly the end of the common currency, is being raised. Coined to convince the “free world” of the dangers of Communism, the domino effect is back with a vengeance.

The string pullers over the past two decades managed to transform the face of Europe, destroying the Soviet Union and expanding the EU and NATO rapidly eastward. But just as Napoleon and Hitler before them, the over-confident conquerors moved too far too fast, and now face the prospect of losing everything. The marvel of the euro zone is now derided as the Völker-Kerker (prison of nations) recalling the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Italian journalists have begun to talk of Europe’s “Tequila Crisis,” referring to the collapse of Mexico’s peso in 1993 when the elite took their money to the US. A similar capital flight from Club Med could set off an unstoppable process and even bring the euro down.

What is the euro, except a fixed exchange rate agreement among members? Skeptics have always dismissed it as a dangerous straightjacket, since Europe is far from uniform. It means national governments are highly restricted in their monetary and fiscal policies to deal with crises. It also means that ripples in Europe become tidal waves, as all the countries’ economic successes or failures happen together.

This is fine if governments are united in pursuing a common agenda to promote stability and prosperity for the common Europeans, but neoliberalism allows for no such political will. The common economic space has merely allowed large companies and banks to take control of the whole market, supposedly to be equal competitors to their big brothers in the US, China and elsewhere. But riding the wave of privatization and euro-expansion, they threw caution to the winds, with no strong national governments to clip their wings. The EU “government” is exposed as worse than useless, a rubber stamp for this Thatcherite mania, fooling Europeans into thinking there was someone controlling the private chaos.

As the euro begins to slide against the worthless dollar (that’s right), no one is seriously preparing for the possibility of its immanent collapse and what to do about it. Instead, incredibly, a Financial Times columnist calls on the EU to drop its euro-entry requirements for the “economies” of eastern Europe and quickly shepherd them into the “safe” euro-fold. Just as mad as this strategy may seem is the one presently being implemented: to pump endless cash into the banks that have recklessly moved into this economic wasteland.

It is vital to keep the edifice afloat, after all. Virtually all of Eastern Europe is in hock to Western banks and as they go bankrupt, or for the “lucky” ones, their exchange rates plummet with respect to the euro, they represent bargain-basement fire sales for the West. The Polish zloty plunged 50 percent in the past six months, making it impossible to repay the countless euro-Swiss loans contracted by unwitting Poles, lured by low interest rates.

The banks have lent Eastern Europe about $1.7 trillion, since “independence” and this must be saved from disappearing at all costs. The currently proposed $31 billion to be pumped into the banks is peanuts — as long as national governments (that is, the people) pay it, of course.

If the steely-nerved bankers can stay the course, the pay-off is potentially immense. Lured into euro-clutches, these orphan nations can now be squeezed. Integration with a vengeance, on a par with their WWII and post-WWII occupations. At least under post-WWII socialism (which many Eastern Europeans remember fondly), the common people were provided for and the ruling party’s privileges circumscribed. But if today’s unsupervised elites keep sending their money abroad, the pit becomes bottomless. Riots turn into revolutions.

France will no doubt lead the way. Students occupied the Sorbonne recently in a long-running battle against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s education reforms, supported by 70 percent of the population. French radical politicians Jose Bove and the popular New Anti-Capitalist Party leader Olivier Besancenot have already traveled to Guadeloupe in solidarity with the strikers. “Their fight is our fight — against capitalism, exploitation, the big supermarkets,” exhorted a newly radicalized Bastille district activist.

Sarkozy’s popularity is at its lowest at 36 percent, with a similar number of French saying they would welcome strikes “on a huge scale.” The pollster Dabi said, “There is a sense of incoherence and a sense that Sarkozy does not really know where he is taking France. But that’s largely because there is an incoherence and Sarkozy doesn’t know here he is taking France.”

The same can surely be said of all Western leaders these days. United States President Barack Obama has it easy. He at least has a clear agenda to tear up — the Reagan-Bush one. But the only common policy of Western leaders so far is one dictated by the banking elite: “Bail us out, but leave us alone.” If anything, they are demanding coordinated bailing out and calling for a new international banking institution, which of course they will control, and which, we are supposed to believe, will avert any further unpleasantness. Such an institution may well act to avert capitalism’s collapse, but there will be lots of “unpleasantness”, evenly distributed among the common people.

The sunny euro-vistas of yesterday are no longer. Eastern Europe risks being eaten alive by Western banks. Western Europe risks mere stagnation and endless political unrest. All indications are that this is a dead-end; that the only way forward is to break the hold that the economic system has on both East and West. The upheavals have begun and the real domino effect will spread throughout Europe this summer. That the European parliament elections in June will take place in a hostile atmosphere is an understatement.

Using a crisis to push through unpopular measures doesn’t work anymore, as Greek and Latvian politicians have discovered. The streets are already ringing with the cry: “We won’t pay for your crisis!”

While Americans focus on nonsense, the worldwide economic crisis strengthens its grip. Fortunately, citizens of other countries are not going quietly into the night. The usually peaceful people of Iceland threw out their government after international banksters destroyed their economy. The French, never shy about protesting, took to the streets to show their government that they wouldn’t be silent as unemployment rises and wages fall. The rest of the world may make demands on their political leadership, but Americans are stuck in a morass of apathy and ignorance brought about by corporate media disinformation.

If the millions of Americans who voted for Barack Obama were to make demands on the system, there might be some hope for the nation. Unfortunately they are singularly unprepared to do anything they should do in order to save themselves. They ought to demand true health care reform. A system guaranteeing access for all would help individuals and also businesses such as the auto industry that are going bankrupt in part because of the cost of health care. Citizens ought to demand drastic cuts in military spending for the nation that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined. Instead they are foolishly impressed when Obama puts on a show and pretends to be concerned about corporate jets and billion dollar bonuses on Wall Street.

Obama could have had an anti bonus provision in the TARP bail out bill if he had wanted one. As his party’s nominee for president, he gave TARP his full blessing. He said nothing that his banker backers didn’t like and now pretends that he is shocked, shocked, to find out that his fund raisers like to make and take as much money as possible.

The much discussed stimulus bill is also a meaningless distraction. The “shovel ready” infrastructure projects do nothing to save homes or jobs or loosen credit. The stimulus bill is instructive only in that it demonstrates how two-faced Barack Obama has turned out to be. He added tax cut provisions to the legislation not because he thought he would get Republican support. He already knew he would not. He added those provisions because he wanted them all along, knowing full well that Democratic House members would look and feel like chumps in the deal making process. Speaker Nancy Pelosi acknowledged as much but demurred when asked if the tax cuts provisions might be removed. “It’s something that we can live with,” said the House Speaker. Nancy should speak for herself.

Easily fooled Americans were glued to the television watching the Obama inauguration while simultaneous ignoring their own worsening financial situation. Who can bother to look at the fine print on multi-billion dollar deals when HISTORY is being made? Now the same zombified population ignores presidential inaction on bankruptcy “cramdown” legislation that could save their homes, explicit threats to Social Security, and backtracking on employee free choice for labor unions.

In their delusion and despair, the only reaction left to non-class conscious Americans is to turn on themselves. Murders and suicides are too often the reaction to financial disaster instead of righteous indignation directed towards a failed political and economic system. Americans are losing their minds when they might alleviate their depression by taking to the streets or at the very least giving their elected leaders a piece of their minds.

Americans never had the tools to fully understand the system that is failing them so terribly. Now they are enthralled by a man who explicitly instructs them not to confront the people and institutions that have brought them to the brink. The economic meltdown will continue for a long time and so will the individual meltdowns and disasters for millions of people who will literally not know what hit them or where they ought to turn after the crash.

If true, this accusation would put France directly into the Belgrade-Khartoum axis of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing and genocide. To date, Paris’ only response has been to dismiss the allegations as ‘inacceptable’ and to suggest that the report was in some way a retaliation on the part of Rwandan President Paul Kagame who himself had recently been named by a French judge as the likely assassin of the Rwandan President Habyarimana. This is a blame game with no possible good outcome.

If all this sounds like convoluted, tit-for-tat pinning the tail on the genocidaire it also masks an underlying set of troubling circumstances, that in 1994 French support for the Hutu led government of Habyarimana — and its fear of losing Rwanda as an African client — may have led it down the dark road of complicity in one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century.

It is not difficult to believe that the French viewed the Uganda-based Kagame-led Tutsi insurgency through the eyes of it Hutu clients. The Hutu hierarchy were all Francophone. Rwanda’s army had been trained and supported by French military advisors and supplied by French arms manufacturers. They may even have gone so far as to believe the Hutu rhetoric that Tutsi’s were undermining French interests and had to be dealt with in such as way as to neutralize them for the foreseeable future.

Whether such a line of thought led French military personnel to directly participate in the killing of Tutsi’s or whether the French authorities allowed the genocide to continue in the so-called safety-zone they had established during their Operation Turqouise (as the report alleges) is something for the French government to respond to.

Rather than dismissing the Rwandan report the French government ought to step out in front of it and send special investigators to Kigali to look at all the evidence and if there is evidence of complicity then tribunals should be set up in Paris to track down the guilty.

The report mentions former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin and other Mitterand-era big-wigs such as Edouard Balladur and Allan Jupe. In addition, members of the military and civil service are also named and all are accused of being part of an organized campaign on behalf of the French government to keep Rwanda in the French sphere of influence.

Is this plausible? Is it possible to believe that the French were so cynical and so fearful that they allowed murder to occur (and may even have had a hand in it?) One thing that is undeniable is that the French had for years been strong supporters of the Hutu-led regime. It is also the case that the French have been acting with impunity in central Africa for decades and no one can accuse them of looking out for the best interests of the average African. (One of their major clients for a time was ‘Emperor’ Bokassa of the Central African Republic who was suspected of cannibalism while serving as his country’s head of state.)

As for the issue of whether or not President Kagame ordered the shooting down of the presidential plane: that is a different matter altogether. Kagame vehemently denies this allegation, but does take the trouble to explain that as far as he was concerned his forces were in conflict with the brutal anti-Tutsi regime in Kigali, and therefore, the shooting down of the plane, no matter who did it, was a legitimate act of retaliation. In any event, it does seem a stretch for a French judge to be issuing such an indictment just weeks before Rwanda’s own report was to be released.

By all accounts, Rwanda has had a remarkable turnaround and is haltingly on the way to reconciliation and true development under the leadership of Paul Kagame. History will probably forget most of the details of what happened in Rwanda in 1993-1994 but the French people should insist that its government doesn’t, at least not quite yet.

After the TV cameras were off, Sarkozy put his Foreign Minister, Bernie Kouchner in charge of negotiations with the FARC by long-distance mobile phone. Kouchner’s background as an ardent supporter of the US war in Iraq (his first trip in office was to fly to Iraq and announce his backing of US troops), a lifetime unconditional supporter of Israel’s war against the Palestinians, including its genocidal war against Palestinian Gaza and his presiding over the ethnic cleansing of over 200,000 ethnic Serbs from Kosova in the late 1990s made him a less than reliable interlocutor with the FARC. Kouchner established phone contact with FARC leader and negotiator Raul Reyes, joining President Chavez of Venezuela and President Correa of Ecuador… The CIA and Colombian intelligence agents monitored Kouchner’s phone conversations with Reyes, with or without Bernie’s knowledge.² Reyes (perhaps unaware of Kouchner’s role as imperialist enabler) negotiated in good faith, even promising to release Ingrid and other prisoners in exchange for a promise of a reciprocal response from the Colombian government to free 500 imprisoned FARC members and sympathizers. In the meantime, the Colombian government continued its massive and brutal military sweeps of the countryside where hundreds of villagers suspected of pro-FARC sympathies were massacred. Colombian President Uribe’s stated goal was to militarily ‘liberate’ the prisoners.³ Sarkozy’s abject failure to convince Uribe to negotiate and Kouchner’s unwillingness to pressure him led to the breakdown of the humanitarian mission.

A month later Sarkozy once against convoked the world’s mass media and read a letter addressed to FARC leader Manuel Marulanda demanding he immediately free Ingrid or else face the opprobrium of the international community and eternal condemnation for a crime against humanity.⁴ Once again, the mass media gave top coverage to his speech with accompanying photos broadcast throughout the world. Needless to say, as the conductor orchestrating the entire ‘humanitarian’ act, Sarkozy thought it inconvenient to mention the FARC demands for a reciprocal exchange of prisoners and a demilitarized zone for negotiations. Maestro Sarkozy’s silence on Colombian President Uribe’s (and US President George Bush) ongoing bombing campaign in the Colombian countryside and their refusal to negotiate was never mentioned during or after his press extravaganza. Ignored by the FARC as well as by Uribe and Bush, Sarkozy turned to President Chavez and asked him to demand the FARC provide fresh proof including recent photos of the FARC captives.⁵

The FARC notified Chavez and Sarkozy that they would comply by sending two emissaries, who were promptly captured by the Colombian military, tortured and jailed. Evidently the Kouchner-Chavez communication lines were actively monitored. Throughout the ‘negotiating process’, the US backed Colombian regime never received a single public message (let alone demand) from Sarkozy urging it to respond positively to the good will gestures of the FARC by releasing some of their political prisoners. On the night of March 1, 2008, US satellite intelligence pinpointed the precise location of Reyes just across the Ecuador frontier, Uribe directed the Colombian armed forces to bomb the FARC negotiators’ camp — a cross border raid which killed Reyes, the head of the FARC’s negotiators and 18 other guerrillas, 4 Mexican university students and one Ecuadorian civilian.⁶ Colombia’s cross-border military operation was a blatant violation of Ecuadorian sovereignty and destroyed the negotiations in progress. Uribe deliberately killed off the principal FARC negotiator working with Sarkozy, Chavez and Correa.⁷ Clearly, the FARC’s unilateral humanitarian concession was extremely costly in terms of loss of key leaders increasing its vulnerability to Colombian military detection and assault. At no point did Sarkozy or Kouchner criticize Uribe. In fact Kouchner praised Uribe’s ‘anti-terrorist’ assaults.

Sarkozy, like those actors whose stale jokes no longer evoke laughter except when they strike a solemn tragic pose, once again convoked the world’s mass media to inform the FARC that they should allow the International Red Cross to meet with Ingrid. He announced that he was sending a plane to Colombia with French medical personnel and that the FARC should prepare a welcoming contingent to escort the ill Ingrid Bentacourt to the French delegation for medical treatment. Relegating the FARC to playing second fiddle, Conductor Sarkozy assumed that they had no choice but to follow his baton, because refusal, he stated, would reveal their ‘inhumanity’ in not allowing a ‘near terminally ill captive’ elementary medical care.⁸

Like all moral blackmailers, Sarkozy followed the practice of escalating demands after the first payment. Having secured the earlier ‘proofs’ of the captives’ existence, he returned to demand new unilateral concessions. In early April, Sarkozy mounted his show accompanied by a ‘Free Ingrid’ demonstration in Paris: The planeload of medical personnel landed in Colombia and as usual Sarkozy made a grand show of offering to go to the jungle if necessary, knowing full well that it was a cheap publicity stunt.

This time, however, there was no Latin Americans to offer to ‘backup’ his media show. Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, who was in Paris on an official visit, told the mass media that the freeing of Betancourt should be part of a reciprocal exchange of prisoners, sounding a dissonant note in Sarkozy’s show.⁹ President Chavez was even more direct. He told Sarkozy that he should address his humanitarian message to Presidents Bush and Uribe since they were the principle obstacles to any reciprocal exchange of prisoners.¹⁰

Sarkozy’s airplane sat on a Colombian runway, the French contingent sat bored and eager to return to Paris. The International Red Cross received no message. The FARC made no response, aware that any communication or humanitarian mission would once again facilitate another military assault on the FARC negotiators.

Sarkozy’s demands and dictates to the FARC went unanswered. The show failed to retain the attention of the mass media.

The FARC was predictably silent, knowing that any communications with Bernie Kouchner would be monitored by his friends in the CIA. No exchanges, no consultation, no security, no answers. The Latin Presidents who had attended Sarkozy’s previous humanitarian media shows failed to send even third echelon officials to accompany the bored French medical and media personnel lolling about in a mosquito-infested airport. Several days later, the FARC e-mailed a public communiqué (April 4, 2008) to Sarkozy and to world public opinion in which it made clear why Sarkozy’s ‘One Man Show’ was predetermined to failure. The FARC communiqué emphasized four points.¹¹ It affirmed that the previous unilateral release of six prisoners was a ‘sovereign decision’ of the FARC and not a product of weakness or pressure — thus making it clear that they were not to be forced into making any further concessions. Secondly they underlined their priority in freeing their 500 guerrilla comrades incarcerated in Colombian and US prisons as part of a reciprocal agreement. They emphasized that Uribe had not met any of the essential conditions for negotiations, namely a demilitarized zone where the humanitarian exchange could take place. This was a reminder to Sarkozy that his lopsided and distorted emphasis on a unilateral release of FARC-held prisoners was a non-starter. The FARC further reminded public opinion and Sarkozy that the Uribe and Bush Administrations’ militarization of the countryside were a mortal threat to any FARC negotiating team.

The third part of the communiqué pointed Sarkozy directly to the murder of their previous negotiating team by the Uribe government, including the killing of Reyes, which made any humanitarian exchange impossible. Sarkozy, by totally ignoring the murder of Reyes and his colleagues, and failing to recognize and condemn Uribe’s deliberate policy of murdering negotiators, ended any possibility of proceeding with the humanitarian mission.

In the final section, the FARC made clear that under the above conditions, they would not cooperate with the medical mission. And in a pointed reference to Sarkozy’s unilateral arrogant, but impotent, impositions and his pretensions of being a world-class humanitarian, the FARC clearly stated: ‘We do not act in response to blackmail and media campaigns. If, at the beginning of the year, President Uribe had demilitarized Pradera and Florida (two municipalities) for 45 days, both Ingrid Betancourt, as well as the military prisoners and the guerrilla prisoners would have recovered their freedom and that would have been a victory for everyone.’

Curtain Time

The plane and medical-media entourage flew back to Paris. There were no media waiting on the empty, dark tarmac. Once more, Sarkozy, the conductor and sole actor in his one-man-show, had demonstrated his virtuosity as a failed performer and a mediocre politician.

Epilogue

Two months later Bernard Kouchner hailed the death of FARC leader, Manuel Marulanda, and the killing of other FARC leaders as opening the way for the freeing of Betancourt — echoing the line of the Uribe regime. This effectively put an end to any French role in the process and was in line with Kouchner’s long affinity with gangster regimes.

1. BBC December 6, 2007 and AFP, February 28, 2008.
2. Reyes last interview, February 28, 2008 by Anibal Gurgon and Ingrid Storgen, found in KAOSENLARED.NET.
3. ‘Uribe order the Army to ‘localize’ the kidnapped by the FARC’, La Jornada, March 30, 2008.
4. La Jornada, March 26, 2008.
5. La Jornada, March 30, 2008.
6. Miami Herald, March 6, 2008. On the collaboration of US, see Expresso/Guayaquil “Colombian pilots Operated from the (US) base in Manta.”
7. Richard Goff ‘Uribe’s Illegal Cross Border Raid’, Counterpunch, March 3, 2008.
8. La Jornada, April 3, 2008. On April 8, just 5 days later, Kouchner admitted that Ingrid Betancout’s health was better than Sarkozy had presented it.
9. La Jornada, April 7 and 8, 2008.
10. La Jornada, April 4, 2008.
11. FARC Communique, April 4 2008. Agencia Bolivariana de Prensa.

The Myanmar regime is not a regime that I will defend. It is a militaristic clique that has seized power and rules by force. Nevertheless, much the same can be said about the US regime. Unlike the US regime, however, the Myanmar regime, basically, confines its perfidy to within its own borders.

Of course, whenever humans are in trouble, a responsible government will see to it that those humans are attended to, fed, and cared for.

The Myanmar government is accused by western governments and western media of negligence and worse towards its own citizens.

UK prime minister Gordon Brown declared: “It is being made into a man-made catastrophe by the negligence, the neglect and the inhuman treatment of the Burmese people by a regime that is failing to act and to allow the international community to do what it wants to do.”

“Man-made catastrophe.” Isn’t that what the UK engineered in Iraq as junior partner (poodle) to the US? Over a million excess Iraqi civilian mortalities estimated since March 2003 (and there is no reason to ignore the US-UK supported UN sanctions that killed another million or so Iraqi civilians after 1991).² That is genocide, and genocides are always man-made.

Brown added, “The responsibility lies with the Burmese regime and they must be held accountable.”

Fine, and to be fair and honest, at the same time, Brown and erstwhile prime minister Tony Blair must be held accountable for their role in the murderous carnage in Iraq.

If being accountable is to have any meaning, then Britain must, at long last, also be judged and do penance for its crimes, among others, in the Chagos archipelago, on the Indian subcontinent, against the Indigenous peoples in the western hemisphere and Oceania, throughout the Middle East, particularly its complicity in wiping of Palestine off the map.

The Plank Stuck in the Western Eye

The Europeans are calling for a forced intervention, and some US members of the House of Representatives are imploring president George Bush to intervene in Myanmar.

The Europeans, US, and Canada are complicit with Zionists in the starvation of Palestinians. This is in addition to demolishing homes, carrying out assassinations, withholding money transfers, destroying vital utilities, etc. in Gaza,³ and yet they are calling for an intervention elsewhere.

French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert called for immediate action in Myanmar: “We are shifting from a situation of non-assistance to people in need to a situation that could lead to a true crime against humanity if we go on like that.”

One might wonder why the British and French “leaders” wail and moan about disaster-stricken Myanmar but are silent about disaster-stricken New Orleans. Almost three years after Hurricane Katrina struck the coast of Louisiana, people in New Orleans are waiting on assistance.⁴

The 43 US representatives calling for intervention in Myanmar are apparently unaware of the tardy US response to the victims of Katrina⁵ or that the US regime rejected aid from certain countries, such as Cuba. ⁶

Venezuela, which contributed generously to the victims of Katrina, was reportedly rebuffed initially by the Bush administration.⁷ An excuse proffered by a senior State Department official, according to the Washington Post, was that “unsolicited offers can be ‘counterproductive.’”⁸

And, where are the voices of British and French government figures about the genocide Israel perpetrates against Palestinians? Obviously, these western government figures are selectively speaking out on man-made catstrophes and crimes against humanity.

Corporate Media Deluge on Myanmar vs. Silence on Palestine

A sampling of corporate media headlines reveals an animus toward the Myanmar government:

“Aid stymied off Myanmar shores and borders,” International Herald Tribune
“Myanmar Neighbors Seek Ways To Press Country on Cyclone Aid,” Wall Street Journal
“International Pressure on Myanmar Junta Is Building,” New York Times
“Diplomats tour cyclone zone, but Myanmar still refuses aid,” Euronews.net

That the corporate media would go into a frenzy over Myanmar while ignoring the man-made catastrophes in Palestine and in Iraq is telling.

In the case of Myanmar, the western corporate media is behaving as it should: criticizing a non-democratic regime and, supposedly, putting the interests of the Myanmarese people front and center.

But one must ask: why is this same media falling over itself to celebrate 60 years in power by Jewish segregationists who contrived and meted out a catastrophe (al-Nakba) to the Palestinians? Why has this same media remained so quiescent over the travails that still bedevil the citizenry of New Orleans? Why does the same media collaborate in the ultimate international crime of aggression-occupation against Iraq?

The contrasting response to cyclone-ravaged Myanmar with other contemporary disasters — whether man-made or acts of nature — scathingly exposes the nasty double standards of western governments and their corporate media.

1. In this fluid situation, there are reports of 78,000 dead, 56,000 missing, and an estimated 2.5 million survivors. The Red Cross reported that the total cyclone death toll may be as high as 127,990, and that up to 2.5 million people are in urgent need of food, water and shelter.AP, “Red Cross: Myanmar death toll as high as 128,000,” newsday.com, 15 May 2008.
2. Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey,” Lancet, 368: 21 October 2006: 1421-1428. Gideon Polya, “Two Million Iraq Deaths, Eight Million Bush Asian Holocaust Deaths And Media Holocaust Denial,” Countercurrents.org, 7 October, 2007.
3. Saleh Al-Naami, “Darkness, starvation and imminent death,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 24-30 January 2008.
4. Bill Quigley, “Half New Orleans Poor Permanently Displaced: Failure or Success?” Dissident Voice, 4 March 2008.
5. Julian Borger and Duncan Campbell, “Why did help take so long to arrive?” Guardian, 3 September 2005.
6. Hector Carreon, “Bush accepts aid from Mexico, silent on Venezuela but rejects help from Cuba,” La Voz de Aztlan, 8 September 2005.
7. Duncan Campbell, “Bush rejects Chávez aid,” Guardian, 7 September 2005.
8. Cited in Cleto Sojo, “Venezuela Offers $1M, Oil, Food and Equipment for U.S. Victims of Hurricane Katrina,” Venezuelanalysis.com, 1 September 2005.

These valiant black slaves, although tired from the painful yoke of slavery, quickly understood that if “Divide and Conquer” succeeded so well for the slave owners, it became imperative for the revolted slaves to unite, blacks and mulattos, poor and rich in order to win the battle for independence. “Union is Strength” enabled them to win the fight against slavery — as Haiti became the first black independent republic in the world.

Tribute to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who after two hundred years of independence, no one has been able to match his vision of cohesion for the daughters and sons of Haiti, irrespective of their social status or clan. He envisioned a Haiti fair for all. After two hundred years of structural ills, we have no choice but to educate our people to the concept of the Haitian nation, citizenship and patriotism.

The Dessalinienne — written by the famous Justin Lhérisson — contains exactly the words we needed to trigger national awareness that is necessary for a better Haiti. One which respects the right of its people, a strong and fair justice system, and an economy linked to the needs of the poor for inclusion, ensuring their economic security for a Haiti free, happy, and prosperous in the 21st century, capable of sprinting feverishly towards a modern economy capable of taking care of its citizens.

For the country and for our fathers, train our sons, train our daughters. Free, strong and prosperous, we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper. Train our sons, train our daughters for the country and for our father’s legacy. Train, train, train our sons, for the country and for our fathers legacy.

Being Haitian, free Negroes on Haitian soil are sacred rights bequeathed to us by our parents. Under no circumstances should we put these privileges to compromise, because our ancestor’s souls will revolt in their graves.

Helping Haitians find and understand the country’s history and its legacy are key issues for the renewal of the Haitian nation. Very often, the intelligentsia believe that to be a patriot or a nationalist coincide with the notion of hatred for other people in order to promote your own ideals, however, the notion that we’re promoting today on May 18, 2008 has nothing to do with this definition of patriotism or nationalism.

The concept for us is to put the interest of our country Haiti above personal interests in order to achieve a Haiti as it was meant to be based on its history. Our ancestors did not have so many opportunities that are offered to us today in the era of globalization, our responsibility is to advocate and promote our ideals in order to enhance the understanding and shed light on our struggle. Having for a compass-freedom and human rights as sacred instruments for the renewal of the country and our environment.

At the dawn of the celebration of the Centennial of our independence, a mental giant like Lhérisson was able to highlight our duty as citizens in the national anthem for us to analyze or think about our duty towards our motherland. But our disbelief and lack of vision we have stopped us from having a common vision for our people, which resulted in a U.S. invasion. That is the result of our lack of vision and cohesiveness: the return of France on the Haitian political scene by demanding and collecting a ransom from Haiti for over a hundred years, the American occupation, the occupation of the United Nations and its members from the third world that we had helped gain their own independence. The Préval government has the responsibility to declare its national plan for regaining our sovereignty specifying the date of departure for Minustha from our territory.

Haitian Priorities Project calls upon all Haitians and the French government, to think about the possibility for France to prove that it is really an ally for its former colony, which despite its setbacks and calamities, still remains an example of bravery and endurance.

The annual budget of Haiti stood at 77.6 billion gourdes/38.56gdes, or about $2,012,448,133.00. If we capitalize the amount of the ransom of independence that France forced the Haitian government to pay, we end up with a sum of $21,685,136,000.00 capitalized for fiscal year end 2003. If you take this value divided by the current annual budget of Haiti ($21,685,136,000.00 / $2,012,448,133.00), we get a value equal to the total financing of the program of René Préval’s government for a period of 11 years.

The most important step that France could make would be to demonstrate its humanitarianism and its respect for human rights and settle the debt that France owed to Haiti, accepted by former President Jacques Chirac and the French parliament. While celebrating the creation of the Haitian flag, it would be a great gesture on the part of the French Government to repay all of this unjustified ransom collected by the French Government, which would allow the Haitian government to equip the country with the infrastructure needed, in addition, this will allow the Haitian government from reaching out to the rest of the world in order to complete its annual budget for at least a period of 11 years. This would certainly bring economic stability in the country; a prerequisite condition for revitalizing the economy and sustainable development for the reconstruction of the Haitian society.

On this day while we celebrate the creation of the Haitian flag, let us unite friends of Haiti, let’s re-light the torch of bravery which motivated the warriors for the independence of Haiti and give value to their slogan “Union is Strength”

Haitian Priorities Project calls upon all Haitians and friends of Haiti to unite in order to demand from France the handing over of the ransom of independence extorted from Haiti. More than ever, we need the support of 8.5 million Haitians to demonstrate to France and the world that we are united in a single voice fighting for Restitution of over 23 billion dollars and the time has come for France to return to Haiti this ransom collected unfairly.

In a recent debate between Marine Le Pen, vice president of the National Front of France and heir to her notorious father, and Tariq Ramadan, the Egyptian-Swiss intellectual, grandson of founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hassan Al-Banna, dubbed the Muslim Martin Luther, both agreed that Sarkozy and his ilk pose the biggest threat to Europe’s social fabric. Le Pen grumbled that they steal arguments and votes from the NF; Ramadan complained that they make Le Pen’s ideas acceptable to the average voters.

Ex-Mossad agent Sarko is able to piggy-back on the Zionist stranglehold in European intellectual life to cow the likes of Le Pen into dropping their anti-Jewish rhetoric and focus their racist instincts on Muslims. At the same time, he is able to build on the Thatcherite legacy to undermine the welfare state. In less than a year in office, he has thrown together this poisonous stew and serves it up as his new program to meet the demands of 21st century France.

Ramadan is one of the few media personalities who is given a chance to counter this slide towards a Euro-Reich, arguing that forcing Muslim immigrants to abandon their traditions, capitulating to the likes of Sarko, merely reinforces racism. “What we need is a new narrative, a new ‘we’, a multicolored, multicultural European identity. Europeans need to psychologically integrate that into their world view.” This is light-years from the subtle but inherently racist project that Sarko is busy trying to implement. By the way, he is not always subtle, as his hate-filled reference to Arabs as scum when minister of interior in Jacques Chirac’s cabinet revealed.

On the international scene, Sarko has been even busier, if that’s possible, despite the lack of any clear foreign policy program in his election campaign. In addition to his reputation as a latter-day Tartuffe, Sarkozy is also being called a reincarnation of Pétain, the general who governed Nazi-occupied France from 1939-45, allowing the Germans (read: Americans) to carry out their imperial agenda without any French resistance. This rather startling parallel of current European politics with the 1930s has also surfaced, of all places, in the Czech Republic, where citizens are strongly against one of Sarko’s pet schemes — to tear Kosovo away from Serbia, seeing it as a reenactment of the Munich agreement of 1938, when Britain served up Sudetenland to the Nazis, which was completely illegal not to mention immoral. Strikingly, Russia played and is now playing the role of the only major power to oppose such submission to the imperial bully du jour.

So far opposition to the present world bully is weak. While France, Germany and with some delay Spain refused to tow the line on Iraq, the election of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and now Sarkozy has undone this feeble protest. However, Russia’s resistance to US world plans has begun to gain respect around the world, even in once hostile Eastern Europe, with Poland and Bulgaria being the latest to begin thawing their relations with Russia, responding to popular pressure, despite unremitting anti-Russia US/European media.

One startling development — remember, Sarko’s been at the helm of state less than a year — is either a pièce de résistance or a recipe for disaster, depending on your culinary tastes. During a visit 15 January to the UAE, he unveiled his plan to set up France’s first permanent naval base in the Gulf, just across from Iran. The base will be built in Abu Dhabi, and is intended to put France in the big league alongside the US in the Middle East. The agreement is a “sign to all that France is participating in the stability of this region of the world,” Sarko told reporters. “France responds to its friends. France and the Emirates signed a reciprocal defense accord in 1995. Our friends from the Emirates asked that a base with 400 personnel be opened.” Earlier accords were signed with the threat of Iraq under Saddam Hussein in mind; today it is Iran that is the bête-noire, awaiting invasion by the US and France , to be served up as Sarko’s latest cordon bleu monstrosity. Or so this megalomaniac imagines in his wild fantasies.

The closest French military base to the Gulf is in Djibouti , a former French colony on the Red Sea . That base will be scaled back as a result of the new one. “This is quite a revolution,” said an anonymous French government official. “We are no longer in our historic sphere of influence. Now we’re in a country we never colonised.” Out with the old imperialism, in with the new.

Does he need a reminder about the bloody wars for Algerian and Vietnamese independence? Dien Bien Phu, anyone? How clever — arm Hussein to the teeth (good for the French arms industry), frighten his UAE neighbors into giving you bases, then use them to attack Iran . Is this really happening?

It is in this context that we must consider his supposedly enlightened offer to compliant Arab states to provide nuclear energy cooperation. The Emirates will soon start construction on a $6 billion nuclear reactor with the generous assistance of France’s EDF. Egypt has been offered a similar radioactive white elephant. Another brilliant coup — bring coals to Newcastle and sell them for big bucks. In the land of the eternal sun, floating on a sea of oil, get your “friends” to pay you billions of euros to build radioactive furnaces which produce eternal waste. The quintessential snake oil salesman. I rest my case.

Quelle affreux. There are a few cracks in his many dishes, however. His inimitable ex-wife Cecilia did her level best to stab him in the back, leaving him very publicly at a crucial moment in his political intrigues — her stand-up of not one but two US presidents at Kennebunkport last autumn is the stuff of legend. She recently published tell-all memoirs revealing his 4 am Karaoke and booze-laced shenanigans with ladies of the night while France was burning, the result of his stand-off with the unions. He has shown his inner Tartuffe more than once on his numerous frantic visits to Russia, America and Africa . He was forced to flip-flop on his plan to scuttle the 35 hour work week, one minute saying it was toast, the next — the bedrock of the state’s understanding with labor.

Despite a flurry of appointments and speeches about a new relationship with Africa, demanding less corruption and more democracy, etc., there is little likelihood that his southern neighbors will pay any attention to him. His diplomatic coup of saving Bulgarian nurses in Libya and of retrieving adoption agents kidnapping Chadian children left him with more egg on his face than on his platter. As a cook he is just too ambitious, introducing spices and turning up the flame in a seemingly chaotic manner as he tries to win approval.

And just as he is able to manipulate liberal left and chauvinist right to forge an unholy alliance and pursue his Petainesque neocon-neoliberalism, he is stirring up leftists, true French patriots and anti-neocon conservatives into a new French résistance.

Pétain or Tartuffe? Whatever he is, we are sure to be in for more indigestion. Let’s hope that’s all.

“If it’s Sarkozy on May 6th, it will be war,”¹ a youth from the suburbs is quoted as saying in reaction to Sarkozy’s strong showing in the first round of the presidential election, and many commentators are expecting a violent explosion throughout the country if he does indeed win the second round two weeks from now. But surprisingly, the reaction of the left abroad (especially in the United States) to the Sarkozy phenomenon has been mostly negative but rather blasé, certainly nothing like the international horror produced by the popularity of LePen in 2002.²

For example, in CounterPunch, Diana Johnstone and Jean Bricmont have written: the Sarkozy conversion, if it happens, will be only a surface event on a highly unstable and volatile social reality. The rebellious nature of the population makes it unlikely that any president will be able to impose his will, short of establishing a real dictatorship.³

So why is a large portion of the population here so worried? I think something can be learned from observing the images that have spontaneously arisen from the French consciousness, even the most hateful and spiteful among them. The violence of the characterizations of Sarkozy and their grave implications are by no means the result of a mass hysteria, or exaggerations made lightly by young and mischievous vandals, but rather arise from the bitterness created by Sarkozy’s actions in the past, and from a defiance in the face of the real dangers posed by his candidacy. I try to illustrate below how a reasonable evaluation of Sarkozy’s record leads to some very troublesome conclusions, which in no way contradict the various images of vilification that have accrued, in the hope that an international cry of outrage against a demagogue who opposes democratic principles might be raised, as it was in 2002. After all, if the result for LePen was much lower this time (11%, as opposed to 16.86% in 2002), it is because Sarkozy stole his rhetoric, and with it his votes; and if Sarkozy is elected, it will be thanks to the fact that 75% of LePen voters are expected to vote for him in the second round (so much for “the party of the working class”)⁴.

LePen posed a serious threat in 2002: the banalization of xenophobic, nationalistic, extreme-right rhetoric. Sarkozy poses a far greater danger today: the legitimization of this same rhetoric, and its execution in law. If the cry of shock from the French suburbs at Sarkozy’s 30+% receives no echo in the world, Sarkozy has already succeeded in the first goal.

Image 1: Authoritarian, “facho,” violent, capable of anything, out-of-control; a divider

The graphics: Two graffiti images of Sarkozy posters: the Hitler moustache (a long-time favorite for LePen) and dripping blood (i.e. red paint)

The anecdote: Sarkozy screams at a fellow minister, “I’m going to break your face, asshole!”⁵ (The fact that it was the former Minister of “l’Égalité des chances” [Equal opportunities], Azouz Begag, who had criticized Sarkozy’s immigration proposals and his infamous statements about the “scum” of the suburbs, is not insignificant.)

The reality: The American left finds the label “fascist” unsophisticated, and seems to want to keep it in reserve for some unspoken evil yet to come. But if one wants to know why Sarkozy is so often called a fascist, rather than attacking those who use the term, one might begin by looking at what criteria might be in play. To begin with, if a fascist needs to have an ideology of an elite or superior race or class, Sarkozy has made no secret of his: genetic predestination of character traits, such as pedophilia and propensity for suicide.⁶ If some people are born with such genetic “weaknesses,” it doesn’t take a huge logical leap to assume that others are innately superior. In practical terms, this has led to proposals by Sarkozy — as Minister of the Interior — to detect supposed criminal tendencies in the form of “behavioral problems” in young children, starting with nursery school (the maternelle, where children start at about 3 years old).⁷

Sarkozy’s campaign promise to create a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity doesn’t seem inconsistent with a fascist ideology either. As far as propaganda and demagoguery, there are ample examples to his credit (discussed further in the section below). Furthermore, a fascist would also necessarily show disrespect for the rule of law, an authoritarian approach to power as opposed to a democratic, participative model. There is evidence that Sarkozy’s authoritarianism is not limited to a personal lifestyle, and that he is not squeamish about breaking state and international law. He began his law-breaking as mayor of Neuilly, by refusing to conform to state regulations for low-income housing, earning the rich suburbs a mandatory fine. (LCR [Ligue communiste révolutionnaire] candidate Olivier Besancenot has made the reasonable suggestion that politicians who break these regulations should be banned from running for office in the future, starting with M. Sarkozy.)

But his greater crimes have gone unpunished: as Minister of the Interior, he showed complete disregard for international law against the arbitrary treatment of immigrants by engaging in expulsion quotas and charter flights. On a national level, Sarkozy’s tenuous relation with the rule of law has put him into conflict on numerous occasions with legal associations and judges. In terms of the European Union and participatory democracy, Sarkozy would be likely to push through the passage of a constitution similar to that rejected by referendum in several member countries, including France.⁸

Image 2: The opportunist, propagandist, manipulator; more clever than intelligent

The graphics: More graffiti: devil’s horns and tail, the word “liar”; cartoon images as a moustache-twirling villain

The anecdotes: Sarkozy is reputed to have made his political career through calculation and sheer unbridled ambition, despite lacking the prestigious political education shared by most of his colleagues (he failed the Sciences Po — Institute for Political Studies — entry exam due to his sub-standard performance in English). He made nice to Chirac in order to insure his rise to power, and even dated his daughter, then betrayed him by supporting another candidate against him and eventually rallied support to take over the UMP party from the Gaullists (Chirac, of course, among them). When Paris Match published a photo of Sarkozy’s (then-estranged) wife Cécilia with her lover of the moment, Sarkozy allegedly called the owner — his friend Arnaud Lagardère — and had the editor fired.

The reality: For Sarkozy, the dissemination of information consists largely of manipulation, disinformation, and intimidation. The numerous allegations that he has prevented this or that book or article from being published may be difficult to prove (the latest controversy is over Serge Portelli’s recent book on Sarkozy, Ruptures, made available on the internet when a pre-election publication was refused), but his bullying of the press is public and in the open: according to Sarkozy, the very mainstream newspaper Libération contributes to criminality by criticizing him. This charge was made after the events in the in the Gare du Nord last month, when protests against the police and Sarkozy (crowds shouted “CRS [French riot police], SS” and other anti-Sarkozy chants) were followed by incidents of looting and destruction of property. Sarkozy prefers his own approach to informing the public about the facts of the case: he joined the new Minister of the Interior, François Baroin, in spreading misleading, grossly exaggerated, and simply false information about the criminal record and immigration status of the passenger whose brutal arrest sparked the protests.

Sarkozy’s information manipulation is intimately linked to policy and, as shown by the Gare du Nord case, the desire to crush all possible dissent in regard to it. Leftists who think that it would be relatively easy to resist oppressive measures under a Sarkozy presidency should look at the example of how Sarkozy managed to undermine the solidarity movement of parents, teachers, and school administrators against the deportation of immigrant children enrolled in French schools. As this popular resistance movement gained public support, both out of sympathy for plight of the children, admiration for those who fought to defend them, and notes of resemblance to the resistance under Nazi occupation, Sarkozy cynically proposed a regularization of status for the families of these children, supposedly according to objective criteria.

Sarkozy carefully orchestrated the regularization process to run smoothly at first in critical areas of resistance, such as Paris, while families in less strategically important regions often faced a bureaucratic nightmare when applying. Once the publicity stunt worked, and the solidarity movement’s cause seemed to have been appropriated by Sarkozy himself, an arbitrary cut-off quota for regularizations was fixed behind the scenes, applications meeting the criteria began to be massively rejected, and the hunt for immigrant children resumed. The resistance has continued, as it must, but it is important to note that Sarkozy would not be likely to follow the same route of arrogant, intransigent inactivity that led Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to his humiliating defeat at the hands of the labor-law protesters.

Image 3: The little dictator, security freak surrounded by cops, future head of a police state

The graphic: A favorite photo of the anti-Sarko movement: a seemingly endless line of riot police in front of the UMP headquarters, just under the Sarkozy campaign slogan, “Imaginons la France d’après” [Let's imagine the France of the future]

The anecdotes: Sarkozy’s campaign has been dogged by tales about hordes of police who accompany him, sometimes nearly outnumbering the people in the audiences he addresses.

The reality: Proving that the respect of the police for the public deteriorated during Sarkozy’s term as Minister of the Interior is like proving that water is wet while you are drowning: the evidence is all around you. You can watch a plethora of cell-phone videos showing a wide range of maltreatment at the hands of the police, mostly of young men in poor urban suburbs. The abuses range from the disrespectful use of the “tu” form of address to death threats (specifically, offers to share the fate of the two young men electrocuted when they hid from police in a transporter), while the latest example of physical abuse — filmed near Rouen in April — shows two young men in handcuffs being beaten and strangled.

When one considers that this is only the tip of the iceberg, that most of the humiliation and abuse meted out by the police goes undocumented, one can easily understand how this society has become so polarized, to the point that some ordinary, law abiding citizens (particularly those living in areas where ID checks by the police constantly create tensions) hesitate to call the police because they are afraid of an overreaction, or have simply lost confidence in the enforcement of the law.

It is important to stress this latter point: law enforcement became more brutal but less efficient under Sarkozy, and violent crime in certain categories has significantly increased.⁹ The Gare du Nord example is a stunning case in point: the police reaction to the original spontaneous, non-violent protests was enormous in terms of numbers, but at no point did the police try to close down the public entrance to the station, nor did they issue any warning to the passengers entering the station that something was going on, even once the violence began later in the day. Evidently mixing it up with the protesters is more important (or maybe more fun) than assuring the safety of passengers in a busy station with international train service. This is why largely disproportional numbers of riot police have been employed against such major threats to public safety as students sitting-in at the Sorbonne during the labor-law protests.

Image 4: The extreme-right revisionist, nationalist, xenophobe — in a word: LePen II

The graphics: Posters from the anti-Sarko campaign: the classic “Votez LePen” (with a picture of Sarkozy) of Act Up-Paris and the 9ème collectif des Sans-Papiers¹⁰; a variation on the same theme, Sarkozy’s picture with the text “Votez Berlusconi”¹¹; and recently seen in the subway, pictures of Sarkozy and LePen with the Sarkozy campaign slogan, “Ensemble tout devient possible!” (Together, everything becomes possible!)

The anecdote: I start a conversation with a middle-aged man of North-African descent in a park in Strasbourg. He asks me if I would help him to write a letter to his wife at home: “Of course we speak in Arabic, but I can only write in French, and not very well.” A letter full of hope and promises that she and the children will soon join him in France. But in reality, he is depressed, nearly desperate. “I spend all day in their offices, for nothing.”

The reality: Sarkozy is a historical revisionist, denying any crimes against humanity committed against indigenous peoples in the course of French colonialism. While campaigning in the South, trying to gain votes from LePen supporters, he stated that only harkis and their dependents and the French who were forced to repatriate are owed apologies for France’s colonial past. “By what right does one ask the sons to repent for faults that often weren’t committed by their fathers other than in the imagination of those who profess repentance”, Sarkozy blasted (not LePen, in case you lost track for a moment).¹² Too bad that doesn’t fall under France’s laws against revisionist denial of crimes against humanity.

Sarkozy didn’t just begin to espouse racist ideology for his campaign in the last few weeks or months. One year ago, in April 2006, Sarkozy claimed that one of the origins of the Fall 2005 riots was the regroupement familial (laws allowing immigrant workers to be joined by their spouse and children), especially when there are “five, six, seven” children. It is apparently also the cause of the housing crisis, “squats, ghettos”, etc; he thus implies that the tragic deaths which occurred in 2005-6 in state-owned housing units were in fact the fault of the victims, because they shouldn’t have been there (i.e., in France) in the first place.

Considering all of the problems that they cause, he feels that immigrants should at least take on certain “responsibilities”, such as learning French. Here he adds a special list of what Muslims (although they are not named, it is perfectly clear) must “accept”: cartoons will criticize their religion, women must appear without a veil in identity cards, and women should not have the choice to consult a female physician, because “It is not up to France to adapt to other cultures and other laws.” What else is the fault of immigrants? Racism itself: in a stunning inversion of logic, he blames the imagined leniency of French immigration law (and by implication, supposedly unchecked immigration) for the rise of the extreme right (and thus for the success of his campaign… should he maybe be thanking immigrants?) and racial hate crimes.¹³

The connection between Sarkozy’s denial of the crimes of colonialism and his attacks on immigration crystallizes in his repeated targeting of the regroupement familial. These laws were a response to an example of domestic colonialism: the massive immigration of North African men to provide cheap labor during the waning post-WWII era of French colonialism. When young people in urban suburbs refer to systematic police harassment combined with a denial of access to opportunities in education and employment as colonialism at home, this is a reasonable assessment with a historical basis. Now Sarkozy — already responsible for toughening immigration law two times in the space of three years — wants to make proficiency in written French (with a test a little bit easier at least than the one in English he failed) a requirement for those — including children — who want to join family members living and working in France. This latest monstrosity evokes the shameful memory of indigenous peoples who were forced to learn to read and write French at the risk of remaining illiterate in their own languages — part of the colonial history that Sarkozy denies.

Which is why I was surprised to see Johnstone and Bricmont calling for the left to “overcom[e]… its own tendency to ‘hate France’ for its bad moments in history: colonialism and Pétain in particular.” There are times in history when it is not appropriate to say, “I love America”, or “I love Germany”; since Sarkozy has joined LePen in saying that immigrants must “love or leave” France, it is no longer an ethical act to say “I love France” because the implication is that there may be an implicit “And you, immigrant, or son of immigrants, do you love the country that occupied your homeland, that tortured your countrymen? Yes or no?” tacked at the end, with grave consequences. As for the ideals that “set France apart”, I’ll believe that France is as secular as, for instance, Spain once it recognizes gay marriage and not just a watered-down civil union [PACS], and as committed to equality as the rest of Western Europe when it has as many female members of parliament as any of its neighboring countries. Of course the left should value secularism (when it respects the religious practice of minority populations, which is not the case currently in France) and equality, but not as particularly French ideals, as French identification with these principles has serves both apologists of French colonialism (”We brought them Enlightenment ideals”, etc.) and current anti-Muslim sentiment. An example of the latter can be found in Sarkozy’s program, which has this sentence in bold under the title dealing with immigration, “I want to be President of a France proud of its values and of its identity”: “I will be intransigent concerning the respect of our fundamental principles, in particular equality between men and women, secularism, and free choice [of religion].”¹⁴

This might sound perfectly reasonable — although one wonders what all this has to do with immigration — were it not an only slightly veiled reference to the extreme-right theory of the “Islamification” of France, in which French people of all religions are well on the way to being forced to adhere to a conservative interpretation of Islam. This sounds like a paranoid fantasy, and it certainly is one, but it was also the backbone of the campaign waged by the Mouvement Pour la France candidate Philippe de Villiers, who placed sixth in the first round, thus ahead of both the Communist Party and the Greens.

Leftists abroad who do not recognize the dangers posed by Sarkozy’s candidacy, the extreme fringe elements that he represents, the violence of his discourse, and the real damage that he has already achieved in France, are guilty of looking away while racist, anti-democratic ideology becomes legitimized and carried out on a national and European level. The international left could, on the other hand, play a very useful role: remind French voters, especially Bayrou supporters who may be seduced by Sarkozy’s liberalism, that a Sarkozy victory on May 6 will be a giant step to realizing at least one of LePen’s dreams: the total isolation of France from the world. All the better for Sarkozy, who will have his hands full with dismantling the social system and waging permanent war against the urban suburbs.

* See also a petition receiving strong international support asking French voters to reject Sarkozy in the May 6th Presidential Election

1. Libération, April 22, 2007
2. I would site a “pro-reform” apology for Sarkozy from the April 23 edition of the New Yorker, “Round One” by Jane Kramer, but it’s hard to say that a piece which seems to have been ghost-written by Paul Wolfowitz is coming from the left.
3. “A Coming Political Tsunami: The Elections in France,” Counterpunch, April 17, 2007
4. Ibid.
5. “Je vais te casser la gueule, connard!” Azouz Begag recounts Sarkozy’s abuse in his recent book “Un mouton dans la bagnoire” (”A sheep in the bathtub”, a reference to Sarkozy’s televised comments suggesting that Muslims slaughter sheep in their bathrooms) published by Fayard.
6. Views expressed in an interview with philosopher Michel Onfray for Philosophie Magazine
7. Sarkozy quoted in the Parisien, November 11, 2005: “Il faut agir plus tôt, détecter chez les plus jeunes les problèmes de violence. Dès la maternelle, dès le primaire, il faut mettre des équipes pour prendre en charge ces problèmes. Dès la maternelle ? Oui.” (”One has to take action earlier, to detect problems of violence among the very youngest [members of society]. From nursery school on, teams must be put in place to take care of these problems. From nursery school on? Yes”)
8. See the Reuters article of April 19, 2007 by Paul Taylor, European Affairs Editor, “EU hopes for Sarkozy but fears his nationalism”
9. Increases in violent crime have been largely reported in the French press; a thorough investigation of these statistics, as well as an account of attacks on civil liberties and the degradation of relations between the public and the police during Sarkozy’s term as Minister of the Interior, is given in the aforementioned Ruptures by Serge Portelli, expert on the French justice system.
10. The latter is an immigrant advocacy group. You can see the poster here
11. You can see it here, as one of the top-five posters of an anti-Sarko contest
12. “…de quel droit demandez-vous aux fils de se repentir des fautes que souvent leurs pères n’ont commises que dans l’imagination des professeurs de la repentance!“, cited in “Sarkozy flirts with those nostalgic for ‘French Algeria,’” l’Humanite, February 2007
13. In an interview on the station TF1 on April 27th, 2006
14. “Je serai intransigeant avec le respect de nos principes fondamentaux en particulier l’égalité entre la femme et l’homme, la laïcité, la liberté de conscience.” from the official program mailed to all French voters.