[wvns] Congo: The Glamorous Genocide

THREE CHEERS FOR EVE ENSLER?

Propaganda, White Collar Crime and Sexual Atrocities in Eastern Congo
keith harmon snow
October 10, 2007
www.althingspass.com

"I have just returned from hell. I am trying for the life of me to
figure out how to communicate what I have seen and heard in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo. How do I convey these stories of
atrocities without your shutting down, quickly turning the page or
feeling too disturbed?"

Eve Ensler, Glamour Magazine, August 2007

On a visit to Eastern Congo in May 2007, Eve Ensler—the playwright and
producer of the Vagina Monologues—was witness to the profound human
suffering and unprecedented sexual violence. Ensler came to see what
those whose eyes are open cannot deny: the sexual violence and
predation in Central Africa is unacceptable, unfathomable, and
stoppable. And she has the courage and audacity to write and speak
about it.

Three cheers for Eve Ensler!!

Or not?

Through her global campaign to end violence against women, called
"V-Day," and with a nine-page feature article in Glamour magazine in
August, Ensler has launched a campaign calling for an end to rape and
sexual torture against women and girls in eastern Democratic Republic
of Congo.

"Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource, Power To The Women And Girls Of
The Democratic Republic Of Congo," Ensler's web site explains, "is
being initiated by the women of Eastern DRC, V-Day and UNICEF on
behalf of United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict.
The campaign calls for an end to the violence and to impunity for
those who commit these atrocities." [1]

Impunity for those who commit these atrocities?

Ensler's Glamour article is an apt documentary of human suffering and
courage. The doctors working to save and heal the survivors of sexual
brutality are heroes. The women and girls who have survived are
themselves portraits of courage and human dignity.

In her nine-page portrait of heroism and suffering, there is a single
half paragraph that ostensibly addresses the roots of the problem.
"The perpetrators include the Interahamwe," Ensler writes, "the Hutu
fighters who fled neighboring Rwanda in 1994 after committing genocide
there; the Congolese army; a loose assortment of armed civilians; even
U.N. peacekeepers." [2]

THE GLAMOUROUS GENOCIDE

Who is responsible for the brutality?

According to Glamour and Vanity Fair, it is always those rag-tag
Rwandan genocidaires who fled justice in Rwanda, or those ruthless
Congolese soldiers from the heart of darkness, and the loose
assortments of obviously "loose" civilians, and even the U.N.
peacekeepers who, in the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo
(MONUC), are men from India, Uruguay, Nepal, Pakistan… and in Darfur,
Sudan, it is those damned Janjaweed—Arabs on horseback, you know, the
usual dark-skinned subjects.

And there is no mention whatsoever of the deeper realities and
responsibilities of white people. Where is the discussion of the
backers behind this warfare? Who sells the weaponry? Who produces it?
Who photographs the UNICEF poster children and peddles the images of
suffering in the Western press for billion dollar profit-driven
campaigns that do not in the end uplift the people who they claim to
care about?

Why are there gala UNICEF "fundraising" benefits—the Annual Snowflake
Ball—in New York hotels with white-tie U.S. Presidents as honorary
ambassadors and state department officials from the National Security
Council—and $10,000 tickets—held to celebrate people who refuse to
address the genocide in Ethiopia or northern Uganda or the U.S.-backed
coup d'etat that occurred in Rwanda in 1994? [3]

How does it happen that a notorious "dictator" and "cannibal" like
Uganda's legendary dictator Idi Amin could live out his life in
splendor in Saudi Arabia? Far more people have suffered terrorism
under President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, than under Idi Amin, yet
Museveni remains the West's golden boy in the old Pearl of Africa. In
the early years the iron fist of terror was wielded by Paul Kagame,
now President of Rwanda, who was then Museveni's director of Military
Intelligence. How does it happen that Taban Amin, Idi Amin's eldest
son, is today in charge of the Uganda's dreaded Internal Security
Organization, the private terror instrument of President Yoweri Museveni?

What we know to be true is that Eve Ensler was lucky to get this
article in Glamour at all. The magazine is a travesty of violence
against women—cosmetics, luxury aids, "health" and "beauty" products,
liposuction, breast implants and sexually seductive advertising
peddling the "perfect" female body and great American culture of
sexual violence—yet Glamour offers a platform for Ensler's message
about sexual brutality of unprecedented human proportions. What's the
trade-off?

Glamour's publishers do not care about the suffering of black people.
It is pure Western white supremacist propaganda serving to underscore
the accepted narratives of Central Africa and assist in the
consolidation of power over the region.

What Eve Ensler and Glamour have not addressed are the warlords behind
the warlords, the corporations and white collar crime which is
never—or selectively, now and then expeditiously, if ever—reported on
the pages of Glamour, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, or the other
promoters of popular propaganda brought to us by the Conde Naste
corporate empire.

Behind the warfare always blamed on Africans, behind the warlords'
deadly battles, are other warlords and corporations from Western
countries. The reason people—U.S. and Canadian citizens—are unaware of
the issues involved is because of publications like Glamour and the
corporations that control them. Ensler's article begins to look like
an advertisement for UNICEF and the so-called "humanitarian" AID
industry, which is itself part of the problem, because it remains
silent about corporate plunder, "humanitarian" organizations
partnering with the corporate exploiters, shared directors hips with
mining, defense, petroleum and other multinational interests. UNICEF
and "not-for-profit" organizations like it are in the business of
perpetuating their own survival, the vanguard of transnational capital.

Asked what to do, Ensler points to UNICEF: "Right now, [the best thing
to do is] to give to the V-Day UNICEF campaign at vday.org/congo."

In the end Ensler's article—like the few racialized articles about
rape in Rwanda, Congo and Darfur that have appeared in Ms. Magazine
[4] —is a compelling portrait that serves a narrow political agenda of
which Ensler appears not to be conscious. Such articles—appearing in
gendered white spaces of privilege like Glamour or Ms. or
Cosmopolitan—blame the very (African) victims of an international
system of oppression that revolves around permanent warfare
economies—U.S., Canada, Britain, Belgium, Israel, France, Canada,
Australia—and they serve to promote the interests of these by never
challenging the perpetrators of chaos and terrorism that are directly
aligned with the predominant military-intelligence establishment. When
reporting on rape in Central Africa, articles in Conde Naste group
publications—as with almost all publications—have never challenged the
governments of either Rwanda or Uganda, soldiers of which have
committed massive sexual atrocities, crimes against humanity and other
war crimes. [5]

Indeed, it turns out that Eve Ensler is collaborating with certain
interests whose involvement in Eastern DRC has never come under
scrutiny. In a September 17, 2007 interview with Ms. Magazine
journalist Michele Kort, broadcast by PBS, Ensler was joined in a
dialog about sexual violence in Eastern Congo by Christine Schuler
Deschryver, described by PBS as "from Bukavu in the Congo, who is an
activist against the sexual violence." [6]

Who is Christine Schuler Deschryver?

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF RAPE REPORTING

Jumping on the bandwagon, on October 8, 2007, Democracy Now! ran an
interview between Amy Goodman and Christine Schuler Deschryver about
sexual violence in Congo.[7] Deschryver claimed that studies were done
that show that sixty percent of the sexual violence in Eastern Congo
is committed by "these people who did the genocide in Rwanda, by
Hutu's who made the genocide in their country."

Christine Schuler Deschryver describes the process where militias
enter a village, kill all the men, and sexually assault and brutalize
the women.[8]

This is "femicide" says Deschryver, a charge repeated by Eve Ensler
and echoed by Amy Goodman. "People can help me first of all being an
Ambassador and talking about the problem going on in Congo because
it's a silent war. They are killing, they are raping babies… It's like
Darfur: Darfur started four years ago. But Congo started almost eleven
years ago and nobody's talking about this femicide, this holocaust.
It's a femicide because they are just destroying the female species…"

Femicide? Congolese women sexually traumatized, Congolese men killed?
It is a process of depopulation and ethnic cleansing.

Speaking from the Democracy Now! studios in New York City, Christine
Schuler Deschryver describes a war involving African countries outside
Congo, but she does not name Western interests involved.

Christine Schuler Deschryver describes her personal sacrifice to help
the victims of Congo's wars. She states that she works in
"administration, in her office…" Until 2002, at least, Christine
Schuler Deschryver was known for gorilla conservation, not human
rights, in Congo.

Christine Schuler Deschryver is married to Carlos Schuler, a Swiss
German working for decades in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in South
Kivu. Carlos Schuler and Christine Schuler Deschryver both work for
GTZ— Deutsche Gesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit—a "German
technological cooperation agency." Carlos negotiates with warlords for
"conservation." Because of his gorilla conservation interests, Schuler
has been described as "Dian Fossey's successor." Schuler has
maintained very private relations with all military forces in the
region, and there are questions about mineral plunder and military
collaboration and GTZ's role in structural violence and warfare in Congo.

GTZ is a German government institution with a corporate structure. The
GTZ Supervisory Board has representatives of four Federal [German]
Ministries: the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and
Development (BMZ), Federal Foreign Office, Federal Ministry of
Finance, and Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour. Since 1998 the
Supervisory Board Chairman has been State Secretary Erich Stather from
the BMZ.

GTZ's involvement in Eastern Congo is notable, given the German links
to the Lueshe mine in North Kivu, and the German embassy's role in
exploitation, depopulation and genocide in Congo. One top GTZ
executive appears to be linked to German corporate interests seeking
to control the Lueshe mine, now controlled by their U.S./German
competitors (see below). The German government has been understandably
mute about plunder in Congo, and the presentation of Christine Schuler
Deschryver's—a GTZ agent in Bukavu—as a champion of human rights is a
perfect example of the twisted "charity" and "philanthropy" dumped on
the Congolese people.

Like the rest of Congo, Kahuzi-Biega is rich in minerals coveted by
corporations and governments that include German multinationals like
Bayer—subsidiary H.C. Starck—involved in coltan in Congo.

But the interests of Carlos Schuler and Christine Deschryver run much
deeper than "gorilla conservation" and "human rights" activism in
Eastern Congo. The Deschryver family is one of the elite families in
Belgium. Christine's father, Adrian Deschryver, was one of the first
"rangers" of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park.[9] The Deschryver family
worked with the Mobutu dictatorship. The great patriarch was August
Deschryver, Belgium's Minister to the Congo at transition, in 1960, a
likely candidate involved in undermining and destroying the Patrice
Lumumba government, and assassinating the man, in the twilight of
Congo's Independence.

The Kahuzi-Biega National Park began as a Zoological and Forest
Reserve gazetted in 1937 after over-hunting threatened to wipe Congo's
big game off the map. Adrien Deschryver helped found the Kahuzi-Biega
Park in 1970.[10] One of the first actions was to forcibly displace
the huge pygmy population from the park. The pygmies were consulted
only to find locations of elephants and gorillas, and then they were
removed: they were lured, tricked, forcibly driven out, and some died
refusing to leave. This is exactly what is happening in other parts of
Congo today, involving USAID, GTZ, and big "conservation" and
"humanitarian" interests like CARE International.[11] Five pygmy
groupements—groups of villages spread over large geographical
areas—were destroyed. GTZ and UNESCO, the United Nations Scientific
and Cultural Organization, got involved in the 1980s, after UNESCO
designated Kahuzi-Biega a "World Heritage Site"—clearly another
mechanism designed by Western interests to establish cultural and
geographic control over people and landscapes. When the GTZ sought to
implement "community development" they did not consult with the
pygmies to determine their true needs, or wants. The result was armed
violence and death. There was no compensation, and the pygmies—forced
out of their universe of knowing, the forest—were left homeless and
destitute in a world they did not understand. In 2000 era discussions
involving some "440 stakeholders" under the new mantra of
participatory involvement, there were only two people of pygmy origin,
but these were lauded as representation of all the pygmy peoples.

As one Congolese consultant wrote, "Over the two-month period of
research into the situation of the Bambuti Pygmies and the protected
areas in North and South Kivu—the Kahuzi-Biega National Park—none of
the indigenous Bambuti, Barwa, Batwa and Babuluko [people] displayed
any enthusiasm for or awareness of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park
conservation project. This project has left them worse off than before
it was introduced and implemented. The Pygmies have been expelled and
driven out with neither indemnity nor other compensation. They have
been cast aside. They belong nowhere." [12]

This is genocide.

Genocide is the congregation of femicide and homocide, the destruction
of an entire people, and that is what is happening to people in
Central Africa, regardless of their ethnicity.

The human rights of the pygmies in Eastern Congo are the most violated
of the most violated on earth, thanks to the Belgian family
Deschryver, UNESCO and the GTZ.

The Amy Goodman report ends with a plea by Christine Schuler
Deschryver for funds to put a roof on a house for survivors of sexual
violence. How to help? Give to UNICEF, she says, or to Eve Ensler's
international organization "V-Day".

The Democracy Now! report about rape in Congo followed in rather
interesting coincidence with a New York Times feature. Goodman opens
her report noting that she interviewed Deschryver "last month"
[September] in New York. But the Democracy Now! report appeared on
October 8, 2007.

On October 7, 2007, in "Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War,"
Jeffrey Gettleman reported on rape in Congo for the New York Times.

If Amy Goodman was shocked and horrified about Christine Schuler
Deschryver's descriptions of the scale and nature of sexual violence
in Congo, why did she wait so long to run the interview? Why did the
Democracy Now! report follow one day after the New York Times feature?
Coincidence? Or is the Democracy Now! report just another expedient
piece of a coordinated propaganda strategy?

The Gettleman report was a travesty of deception in classic New York
Times form. "Eastern Congo is going through another one of its
convulsions of violence," Gettleman writes, "and this time it seems
that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before
seen here."

In fact, the situation in Central Africa has been one steady
"convulsion of violence" since, at least, the Rwandan Patriotic Front
invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. Zaire exploded in 1996, and
the killing and raping has never stopped. This author has consistently
and repeatedly reported on massive rape, sexual mutilation, and
slavery as weapons of war and depopulation in Central Africa since at
least 2001, and these were widely reported by others before that. Now,
barely a year after the "historic national elections" that brought
President Joseph Kabila to power in October 2006, The New York Times
is doing damage control.

"The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over," wrote
Gettleman. "Last year, this country of 66 million people held a
historic election that cost $500 million and was intended to end
Congo's various wars and rebellions and its tradition of epically bad
government."

Things don't just fall apart in Congo. "Epically bad government" and
"chaos" are typically manufactured to serve powerful interests—the
"shock doctrine" defined by Naomi Klein[13]—and are the result of
epically bad reporting and the impunity that is insured by Western
disinformation and propaganda campaigns. Hundreds of millions of
dollars pumped into the 2006 electoral process, and much was stolen.
But the elections exercise was not even a band-aid on the festering
war in Congo. To describe the ongoing warfare in Eastern DRC as the
most recent convulsion of violence is to feed the Western stereotype
of the hopeless African condition and run cover for multinational
plunder and depopulation, backing warlords, on and on.

Gettleman's choice of sources and experts is very interesting. One of
these, also referenced by Amy Goodman, is Sir John Holmes, a British
diplomat with a long history of support for predatory imperialism.

"The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world," said John
Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian
affairs, to the New York Times.

Holmes provides a tidy commentary about African savagery. What we
don't learn from the New York Times is that Holmes previously worked
for the British security firm Thomas De La Rue, one of the top
companies in the world that prints money, security documents (e.g.
passports) and postage stamps for 150 countries; currency instruments
are used to entrench and maintain structural violence. Thomas De La
Rue prints money for the Isle of Man, an offshore tax haven connected
to money laundering and mercenaries Tony Buckingham and Simon Mann,
and they have printed special currency notes for war-torn Sierra
Leone. More significantly perhaps, Holmes was the British Ambassador
in Lisbon, Portugal from 1999 to 2001, the period of war in Congo
where Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba, partnered with Uganda, a
close British ally, launched the Movement for the Liberation of Congo
(MLC) rebellion. Bemba has a villa in Portugal, and his criminal
syndicate involves his brother-in-law, blood diamonds and mercenary
partner Antony Teixeira, a Portuguese tycoon living in South Africa.
Bemba's troops committed massive rape and sexual violence in DRC, and
the Effacer Le Tableau campaign was a genocide campaign against
pygmies, but Bemba has never been held to account.[14] U.N. Under
Secretary General John Holmes is selectively used by the New York
Times to legitimize their propaganda, but Holmes himself should be
deposed about his role as an economic hit-man supporting plunder and
money laundering.

"The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity —
it's appalling," says John Holmes, in empty platitudes.

A PORNOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE

Jeffrey Gettleman goes on to attribute violence to "one of the newest
groups to emerge" called "the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked
fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los
Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies,
kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their
way." In fact, the Rastas have been operating in Eastern Congo for at
least three years, have previously committed atrocities, and are not a
"new group to emerge." Gettleman has to explain away the violence in
African terms, never the white multinational corporations, arms
dealers, criminal Western syndicates or "conservation" organizations
(they fund) occupying the soils of North or South Kivu provinces on
vast tracts of land.

These feature articles express some very white supremacist thinking
about rape in Congo. "Because there has been no justice," Eve Ensler
states, "because so few perpetrators have been held accountable for
the crimes that they're committing, it's becoming as Christine
[Schuler Deschryver] said to me when we were there, like a country
sport: rape."

So, according to this description, Congolese men are universally
castigated for "rape as sport," no matter that this is committed by
armed forces backed, armed, and licensed by the West to commit massive
sexual atrocities, or that Congolese men are killed outright when
militias enter villages. As shown below, the Congolese militias and
National Army serve a deeper, hidden, Western corporate agenda:
organized white-collar crime. They are paid in kind for services
provided to maintain and insure natural resource plunder and the
acquisition and control of vast tracts of Congolese territory.

Eve Ensler's privilege and white supremacy here is illuminated by her
feminist perspective, her feminist crusade, and it becomes acceptable
for Eve Ensler—and Ms., Glamour, PBS, The Washington Post, Newsweek,
etc.—to label all Congolese men as sexual predators. This, of course,
is the chorus of the Western media to begin with—Africans are sexually
licentious, they copulate like monkeys—only it transcends boundaries
and becomes an African condition. Isn't that why they [those savages]
are all HIV/AIDS positive?

Jeffrey Gentleman took it a step further with a direct quote by a
Congolese doctor that describes men in Congo as primates. "There used
to be a lot of gorillas in there," he said. "But now they've been
replaced by much more savage beasts." Such language would not be
tolerated by the New York Times to describe rape elsewhere. Rape as a
weapon of war is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, committed by US
soldiers, but the depiction of savagery would never be applied. But
here the propaganda system knowingly reduces the issue to sub-human
animal behavior by black savages.

WHERE IS ANDERSON COOPER?

There are extensive case studies analyzing and exploring the
systematization of sexual violence and the wounds it inflicts in
warfare in Eastern Congo.[15] Institutions like Columbia and
University of Denver have studied rape and war in eastern Congo for
years—funded by private foundations and the euphemistically named
United States Institute for Peace. The United Nations Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNIFEM and other UN agencies
have huge budgets dedicated to "humanitarian" reporting and research.

People know about sexual atrocities in Congo and they have known about
it at the highest levels for years.

It is well known that orders come from military officers. The orders
given call for mass rape and sexual violence. The chain of command
determines what soldiers do and don't do. There are hierarchies, and
soldiers include young boys and men conscripted into terror networks.
To disobey orders is certain death in these militias, and escape is a
deadly proposition. By castigating all Congolese men, or all soldiers,
the blame and responsibility are shifted away from officers and civil
authorities who run these criminal networks, and who give orders to
rape and plunder as policy. All of the rape stories in the recent
propaganda front characterize rape as wanton sexual chaos, rather than
weapons and instruments of warfare and social disintegration.

It is the standard message: African chaos, savagery, sexual
licentiousness, and primitive, sub-human brutalization. This is the
heart of darkness, after all, a place in the "middle of nowhere, a
primeval jungle landscape where it is every man for himself, every
woman for any man.

Eve Ensler further demonstrates the arrogance of whiteness and
ignorance of events by effectively stating that the United States has
said nothing about rape in Congo, because we are allies with Rwanda
and Uganda, who suffered genocide and saw the so-called genocidaires
flood into Congo, who graciously accepted them. In fact, the U.S.
overthrew the government of Rwanda in 1994, and the when Rwandan and
Ugandan forces shelled refugee camps in Eastern Congo (1996) they
followed this with a campaign of extermination where hundreds of
thousands of women and children were hunted, raped, and massacred.
This genocide has not been named. Howard French, New York Times bureau
chief in Nairobi in the 1990's, tried to name it, and he comes close
in his treatise on Western plunder—A Continent for the Taking—but his
efforts were too little. French moved on to become bureau chief in
China, leaving Africa behind, with no commitment to act on what he
learned. Everyone has tried to bury the truth with the skeletons. The
recent thrusts by the Clinton Foundation in Rwanda—dumping millions of
dollars into "humanitarian" programs—are a perfect example.

The U.S. factions—the Rwanda Patriotic Front and Uganda People's
Defense Forces that backed their invasion of Rwanda—committed massive
rapes in Rwanda as well. From 1990 to 1994 the Ugandan/RPF invaders in
Rwanda raped as policy, and Human Rights Watch covered it with their
reports of mass rape attributed, universally and solely, to the Hutu
genocidiares. This is the political economy of rape and genocide.

Eve Ensler and Christine Schuler Deschryver regurgitate the accepted
narratives and blame the victims of corporate and military plunder
aligned with Anglo-American-Israeli interests. To her credit, Eve
Ensler mentions SONY Playstation and cellphones as culprits, and she
suggests action should be taken against corporations, but she blames
the illegal mineral trade on the genocidal murderers from Rwanda, the
Interahamwe (just as all violence in Darfur is blamed on Janjaweed,
and all violence in Afghanistan is blamed on Taliban). But she states
that "we don't know who" is involved behind or beside these. This
cultural reductionism feeds the mainstream media discourses that
perpetuate oppressions and consolidate Western power.

Many of the criminals involved were named in the United Nations Panel
of Experts reports on illegal extraction of natural resources from
Congo. Countless others have been named by numerous independent
journalists, including this author, over, and over and over.

John Bredenkamp. Billy Rautenbach. George Forrest. Louis Michel. Paul
Kagame. Yoweri Museveni. Salim Saleh. James Kabarebe. Walter
Kansteiner. Maurice Tempelsman. Philippe de Moerloose. Dan Gertler.
Étienne Viscount Davignon. Ramnik Kotecha. Jean-Pierre Bemba.

Nothing is ever done. After the production of the United Nations Panel
of Experts reports on the plunder of Congo's natural resources,
nothing was done. Criminal syndicates lobbied to have their names
cleared and the United Nations bucked under. Emboldened by toothless
international legal instruments and spineless international leaders,
the corporations and their criminal syndicates stepped up their
operations. Plunder, depopulation, rape, sexual slavery—anything goes.

And the media provided its smokescreens: Anderson Cooper "360".

Eve Ensler has no idea what she is talking about and, on a certain
level, like all the rest of us, Eve Ensler is another Mazungu whitey
who has no business being in Central Africa at all, because she has no
idea what has happened, or is happening, or why. Her white skin and
feminist crusade act as a badge of credibility and insures her
privileged access to Western media corporations that benefit from
"chaos" and depopulation. When "peace" is discussed it revolves around
Western "charity" and "goodwill," yet more than 100 years of Western
involvement in Africa have culminated in permanent slaughter and
depopulation across the continent. The raw materials continue to leave.

Christine Schuler Deschryver represents another face of privilege.
When times got hard in 1996 she packed her suitcase and left with her
two children for Belgium. She flies to New York and is interviewed on
Democracy Now! Listeners in the U.S. believe she is a Congolese
native, but she is a Belgian expatriate whose family is a mainstay of
colonialism and neocolonialism in Congo. And the Congolese women are
never allowed to fly to New York or to tell the deeper story of
deracination in "the middle of nowhere," in Congo. What is the
Deschryver family relationship to Philippe De Moerloose or Louis
Michel or Étienne Viscount Davignon or the other principal
interlocutors in the Belgian money and power syndicates involved
behind the scenes in Congo today?

To get a sense of what Glamour does not report—what the New York
Times, Ms., Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, The Nation, BBC,
National Public Radio and CNN's Anderson Cooper "360" will not tell
us—take a look behind the scenes in eastern Congo and juxtapose the
unreported realities with the personal stories of trauma and recovery
told by Eve Ensler in Glamour magazine. While the mainstream corporate
media always reduces these stories to a few simple facts, and a
panoply of supposedly unfathomable black-on-black violence, there are
always some skeletons to be found lurking in the shadows of white society.

THERE'S GOLD IN THEM (BLOODY) HILLS

The North and South Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo
remain awash in blood. Over the past decade hundreds of thousands of
women have suffered sexual violence in these provinces as a weapon of
war meant to terrorize local populations and gain control of natural
resources. Sexual violence includes mutilations, rape and other forms
of torture.

Rwandan-backed General Laurent Nkunda has occupied eastern DRC for
several years, and was involved in atrocities, war crimes and crimes
against humanity in Congo during the first (1996-1997) and second
(1998-2004) Congo occupations by Uganda and Rwanda.

The United Nations Observers Mission in DRC (MONUC) makes possible the
occupation of Congo by General Laurent Nkunda today. Nkunda is backed
by the military regime of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda and by the
baby-faced Jean-Pierre Bemba, the rebel warlord from DRC's Equateur
province whose interests and ties in DRC go back to his dark alliance
with the dictator Joseph Mobutu and his Western backers.

The U.S. and European interests backing General Laurent Nkunda run
deeper than the blood in the fields and rivers of eastern Congo. The
German Embassy in the Democratic Republic of Congo is involved in
shady business deals, backing militias and plundering raw materials
from Congo, and behind them is U.S. involvement. This has partially
occurred through the military control of a mine called Lueshe, located
in a village called Lueshe, in North Kivu, some 170 kilometers
northwest of Goma. But it also involves coltan, cassiterite, diamonds
and gold, and the economic benefits that accrue to those who control
land and taxes.

One gold mining firm with vast landholdings in South Kivu province is
Canada's Banro Corporation. Banro has control of four major
properties, 27 exploration permits and 5730 square kilometers of gold
mining concessions.[16] Banro operates only in the Democratic Republic
of Congo: see the mining map here:
<http://www.banro.com/s/Properties.asp>.

When we talk about International Criminal Tribunals, who are the real
war criminals? What about Simon Village, Peter Cowley, Arnold Kondrat,
John Clarke, Bernard van Rooyen, Piers Cumberlege and Richard
Lachcik—the directors of Banro Corporation?[17] What is the definition
of "white collar" crime?

NIOBIUM & THE POLITICS OF SCARCITY

In North Kivu province the Lueshe mine provides a well-documented
example of the kinds of nefarious activities that all Western
governments are involved with in Congo, and in Africa more generally,
and these activities certainly apply to Banro and other
corporations—this is how the system works, and who works it. The
Lueshe Niobium mining scandal merely provides an excellent case study
where the thief has been caught red-handed with his hands in the
illegal minerals pot.

The Lueshe Niobium mine has been under the control of pro-Rwandan
forces for the past eight to ten years, first under the Congolese
Rally for Democracy (RCD) rebels allied with Rwanda and Uganda and
Jean-Pierre Bemba, and now under the "protection" of General Laurent
Nkunda. But Lueshe's history is deeply rooted in the controlling
interests of the German government and its U.S. and European partners.

The rare earth metal, niobium or "niob" for short, formerly also known
as Columbium, is found there, together with tantalum, in the mineral
Pyrochlore. Niobium became extremely important within the last twenty
years because of its enlarged range of application for aerospace and
defense purposes. Niobium is mainly used as an alloying addition in
the production of high quality steel used in the aircraft and space
industries, as well as in medicine. It is also widely used in basic
applications of machinery and construction and in quite large
quantities in the production of stainless steel. Niob, like tantalum
and columbium-tantalite or "coltan," is also coveted for the emerging
and secretive "nanotechnology" sector—also pivotal to state-of-the-art
and futuristic aerospace, defense, communications and biotechnology
applications.

There are three principal niobium deposits in the world, all
controlled by a company named Arraxa: one in Brazil, one in Canada and
the Lueshe mine in DRC. The owner of Arraxa is the U.S. based company
Metallurg Inc., N.Y. Mettalurg Inc. is itself a subsidiary of
Mettalurg Holdings of Wayne, Pennsylvania, and Mettalurg Holdings is
one of many companies in the investment portfolio of Safegaurd
International Investment Fund of (Philadelphia) Pennsylvania,
Frankfurt and Paris.[18]

In 1982 Metallurg signed a mining convention with the Republic of
Zaire, enabling them to exclusively extract all Pyrochlore at the
Lueshe niobium deposit for the next twenty years. A company named
SOMIKIVU (Societè Miniere du Kivu) was established. Metallurg &#769;s 100%
subsidiary, the German company GfE Nuremberg (Gesellschaft fuer
Elektrometallurgie GmbH), became a 70 % shareholder.

By 1990, SOMIKIVU stopped all production, which was never much at all,
because it was apparently insured by HERMES AG, backed by the German
Government, to prevent production from the Lueshe mine in order to
drive up and control the price of niobium mined and processed at the
other sites outside of Congo/Zaire. It was also important to prevent
any competitive venture from acquiring the mining rights and
subsequently from actually operating the Lueshe mine.

According to available documents, employees of the German Embassy have
personally benefiting from, and are involved in, the business of
GfE/Metallurg. This involvement has included complicity in extortion,
assault, murder, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This
involvement includes complicity in sexual atrocities committed by the
paid agents of white, Western corporations.

In 1999, after years of inactivity and lost incomes to the Congolese
state—a very minority partner manipulated into a position of
exploitation as usual—the Lueshe niobium mine was expropriated from
its owners by Congo's new president Laurent Kabila and turned over to
the firm E. Krall Investment Uganda (Edith Krall), under a Congolese
subsidiary company E. Krall Metal Congo. Nonetheless, with the
military backing of Rwanda, RCD rebels operated the mine from
1999-2005 with the help of German Embassy (Kinshasa) affiliate Karl
Heinz Albers, also a close business partner of the Rwandan Patriotic
Front Government of Paul Kagame. It is also alleged that mercenaries
have been involved in securing the mine.

The new owners of E. Krall Metal Congo reportedly tried to visit their
new mine in 2000, amidst some of the most serious and brutal fighting
in the entire war. The officials were arrested by RCD military who
immediately called Karl Heinz Albers, then a permanent resident in
Kigali, Rwanda. According to documents provided by Krall, Albers
explained that the RCD should not ask questions but "eliminate" the
Krall group—kill them on the spot. The RCD Goma secret service chief
apparently refused to execute this order and released the people of
the Krall group. This action helped the Krall delegation to escape to
Uganda but made the RCD secret service chief in Congo subject to
assassination attempts by killers from Kigali. The RCD chief only
saved his life by immediate emigration to Uganda, where he was
nonetheless also subject to several assassination attempts reportedly
ordered by Karl Heinz Albers.

Albers was reportedly selling coltan from the Krall concessions to the
German firm H.G. Starck. From August 2000 to October 2001 Somikivu
shipped some 669 tons of Pyrochlore concentrate to Rotterdam harbor in
Amsterdam. After October 2001 shipments went to A&M Minerals in
London, a company on the U.N. Panel of Experts blacklist who are
alleged to have purchased illegally some 2,246 tons of Pyrochlore
concentrate before 2004.

Dr. Johannes Wontka, German citizen and technical director of
SOMIKIVU, informed the members of Krall Métal that while Krall may
have the legal titles from Kinshasa to operate Lueshe, the SOMIKIVU
(Karl Heintz Albers) gang had the power to do so, therefore they
should in their own physical interest "disappear". Dr. Wontka
reportedly requested a Major of the RCD army to kill the chief of the
"Syndicate Global" the labor union leader of the workers in Lueshe who
were on strike due to months of non-payment of salaries. Dr. Wontka
reportedly requested that the RCD Major shoot the "whites" that would
come soon to Lueshe—the technical delegation of Krall Métal who were
on their way—and promised money for the job. By chance the RCD Major
was the brother-in-law of the trade union leader whom he was tasked to
shoot and therefore he neither shot him nor the "whites" he was meant
to kill, but reported the case to the police.

The general prosecutor of North Kivu eventually confiscated the
passport of Dr. Wontka, and Wontka, who tried to flee Congo with his
family, was arrested at the border and brought to Goma, DRC.

Then the German Embassy in Kinshasa cranked into gear.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AMBASSADORSHIPS

The German Ambassador to Kinshasa, Mrs. Doretta Loschelder, informed
the public by giving press statements that German investors will not
invest in Congo projects and that economic support by Germany will not
be transferred to Congo if the authorities in the Democratic Republic
of Congo are going to treat investors in the way authorities in Goma
were treating the SOMIKIVU agent Dr. Wontka. Under this pressure, Dr.
Wontka was released from prison and within 30 minutes fled Congo
against orders of the police and immigration officials.

Mrs. Johanna König, employed at the ministry of foreign affairs of
Germany until 2001, and serving at the German embassy in Kigali as
Ambassador of Germany in Kigali, was until February 2004 a member of
the board of KHA International AG, the holding parent company of the
Karl Heinz Albers companies. Konig apparently visited the Lueshe mine
with Rwandan military protection. The RCD were also operating the
Lueshe mine under forced labor conditions, at one time reportedly
involving prisoners from Rwanda accused of genocide by the Kagame regime.

The Krall complaints—well documented—have been brought to officials in
Holland, Germany, Switzerland, England and the U.S., all of which have
some financial interest or some link in the chain of exploitation. No
action has been taken anywhere, and officials of the German Embassy in
Kinshasa reportedly continue to benefit from the illegal exploitation
of the Lueshe mine. The multinational firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is
also invested in the companies exploiting Lueshe and profiting from
war, slavery and depopulation in Congo.

At this time, the Karl Heinz Albers may have transferred his "rights"
to Lueshe to one Julien Boilloit, a businessman in Kigali who has a
big office in Goma and operates behind militias in the Kivus. Julien
Boillot's partners reportedly include Mode Makabuza—a Congolese
businessman with multiple interests in Goma. The governor of North
Kivu has certainly been paid off.

The recent spate of "news" reports and broadcasts on sexual violence
in Eastern Congo are part of a coordinated campaign. It is interesting
that sexual violence became an issue when it did. Sexual violence is
off the charts, but the appearance, slant, framing and timing of
reportage suggests is being used to manipulate public sentiment to
serve the interests of certain powerful actors at the expense of
others. It is certainly a lever used against the Congolese government
of President Joseph Kabila, and it may be that it is coordinated in
response to Kabila's recent deals with China. After all, it has now
been reported by the BBC that the Kabila government is working with
the Hutu genocidaires, the FDLR—Forces for the Liberation of
Rwanda—the ultimate evildoers. It doesn't matter that the Paul Kagame
government's military and corporate machine has dealt with FDLR all
along, when it serves their interests. This is all very well-documented.

The public is unaware of these greater readings, and merely gobble up
the news reports as examples of an equitable and humane Western media
system that is attuned to tragedies, even if they were late to decry
and report them.

Rape was off the agenda at the International Criminal Tribunal on
Rwanda (ICTR) until Hillary Clinton showed up in Arusha, Tanzania—the
city that became the economic beneficiary of the lucrative ICTR
boondoggle—and pledged $600,000 to be paid after the first ICTR rape
conviction. And that's when they decided to pin rape on Georges
Rutaganda, the evil businessman portrayed as the devil in Hotel
Rwanda. It was Bill and Hillary's blood money, and another financial
incentive used to whitewash the Clinton's role in genocide and covert
operations in Central Africa.

Who should help the victims of sexual violence in Congo? Bayer AG.
GTZ. Nokia. Intel. Barrick Gold Corporation. Anglo-American Corp.
Banro. Moto Gold.

Add sexual violence to the list, sure, but Eve Ensler and the Western
media propaganda campaign for "an end to sexual violence in Congo"
must be placed in its proper context: white supremacy and the shock
doctrine of global corporate plunder. In this context rape and
depopulation are permanent conditions, the real killers get away with
murder, and there is endless, brutal revenge by the victors. For the
victims the suffering never ends.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] <http://www.vday.org/contents/drcongo>.

[2] Eve Ensler, "Women Left For Dead—and the Man Who's Saving Them,"
Glamour, August 2007.

[3] UNICEF's Snowflake Ball,
<http://www.unicefusa.org/site/c.duLRI8O0H/b.45578/k.EFDA/The_UNICEF_Snowflake__US_Fund_for_UNICEF.htm>.

[4] See Stephanie Nolan, "`Not Women Anymore…': The Congo's rape
survivors face pain, shame and AIDS," Ms. Magazine, Spring 2005; Femke
van Zeijl, "The Agony of Darfur: Again, rape surfaces as an
international war crime," Ms. Magazine, Winter 2006.

[5] keith harmon snow worked for UNICEF in Ethiopia in 2006. See
addendum pages in Livelihoods and Vulnerabilities Study, Gambella
Region Ethiopia, UNICEF Report, December 13, 2006,
<http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=13>.

[6] "A Conversation with Eve Ensler: Femicide in Congo," PBS,
<http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2007/lumo/special_ensler.html>.

[7] The Deschryver family name is of Belgian descent and multiple
spellings can be found for the same people: Adrien Deschryver, Adrien
De Schryver and Adrien de Schryver.

[8] "'They Are Destroying the Female Species in Congo:' Congolese
Human Rights Activist Christine Schuler Deschryver on Sexual Terrorism
and Africa's Forgotten War," Democracy Now!, October 8, 2007,
<http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/08/1340255>.

[9] UNESCO is today deeply connected to "conservation" in Eastern
Congo; from 1982-1985, at least, one Hubert Deschryver sat on the
executive board. See:
<http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0005/000518/051897E.pdf>.

[10] Kapupu Diwa Mutimanwa, The Bambuti-Batwa and the Kahuzi-Biega
National Park: the case of the Barhwa and Babuluko people, May 2001.

[11] See the series KING KONG: Scoping in on the Curious Activities of
the International Money Business in Central Africa, by keith harmon
snow and Georgianne Nienaber published in its entirety at
<http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=45>.

[12] Kapupu Diwa Mutimanwa, The Bambuti-Batwa and the Kahuzi-Biega
National Park: the case of the Barhwa and Babuluko people, May 2001.

[13] Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism," 2007.

[14] See: keith harmon snow, "A People's History of Congo's
Jean-Pierre Bemba," Toward Freedom, September 18, 2007,
<http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1123/1/>.

[15] See, for example, Sara Gieseke, Rape as a Tool of War in the
Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Graduate School of
International Studies, University of Denver, April 13, 2007.

[16] Banro Corporation, <http://www.banro.com/s/Properties.asp>.

[17] Banro Corporation, <http://www.banro.com/s/Directors.asp>.

[18] See: <http://www.metttalurg.com> &
<http://www.safeguardintl.com/portfolio.html>.

*********************************************************************

WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE

To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

Need some good karma? Appreciate the service?
Please consider donating to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@yahoo.com for instructions.

To leave this list, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/

<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/join

(Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:wvns-digest@yahoogroups.com
mailto:wvns-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:

http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/