KING KONG:
Extra, Extra: STOP the Mainstream Press!
Gorillas “Executed” Stories front for Privatization
and Militarization of Congo Parks, Truth of Depopulation Ignored
July 30, 2007
keith harmon snow
and
Georgianne Nienaber
The story began the way they all do: DATELINE: Virungas National Park: “IN EASTERN CONGO OASIS,
BLOOD AMID THE GREENERY. In Africa's Oldest National Park, Gorillas Are Being
Killed and Their Guardians Are Endangered, Too.”
Published
July 22, 2007, it was yet “another gorilla murdered” story. This time it was
the Washington Post, and one more “news” feature that invents the desired
reality and runs cover for fortunes lost and found in Central Africa.
“They
heard the gunshots around 3 p.m., at least two pops that echoed across the
green mountains of this vast park tangled up in vines, fallen trees and years
of war. The park rangers knew immediately what it was… This time it was
Ribinga… the rangers found her hulking, lifeless body, her 2-month-old baby,
barely alive, was still clinging to her chest.” [1]
While
pulling on our heart strings for this one gorilla, the Washington Post
has manufactured yet another public relations piece for the Dian Fossey Gorilla
Fund, for Conservation International, for Wildlife Direct, and for all the
other self-perpetuating western institutions—for USAID and multinational
corporations—who are ripping off American and British taxpayers while
exploiting and devastating Central Africa.
MASS EXECUTIONS, RARE
GORILLAS SLAUGHTERED
From Africa to China, the
news headlines of Wednesday July 25—just three days after the front page Washington
Post feature—screamed out that three more female mountain gorillas
had been killed. Not just killed, executed. A fourth gorilla—a Silverback alpha
male—was discovered dead later. By July 29, Newsweek—the
Washington Post Corporation’s sister publication—had manufactured a major
article. Some world news outlets
declared “MASS GORILLA EXECUTION” suggesting that maybe hundreds of gorillas
were dead.
“Mass Gorilla ‘Execution’
Discovered in Congo,” announced the National Geographic News. “Three
female mountain
gorillas were found shot
dead this morning in the Democratic
Republic of Congo’s Virungas
National Park.” There is a certain moral indignation expected from the public
when someone is “executed”—it is the language that should be attached to
human beings, but here it is attached to gorillas.
Photos on CNN and at
least 100 web sites show the gorilla bodies displayed on stretchers, while
seemingly appalled conservationists look on.
Meanwhile, 113,000 people
have fled fighting between government forces, rebels and local militias since
February 2007 in the same region of DRC. Some human rights organizations count
250,000. On July 20, 2007, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called
for action to resolve the crisis in the DRC’s volatile eastern region, where
the United Nations on July 20 counted 700,000 people as internally displaced.
At least 1000 people a day
die in this region due to war, malnutrition, disease and lack of basic medical
care. Some of these deaths are executions by soldiers from varying militias and
armies. Congolese journalist Serge Maheshe was executed on the street in
Bukavu, South Kivu, on June 13, 2007, but there was no comparable outcry.[2]
OpEdNews.com was the only U.S. or European media outlet that published a
photo of the murdered journalist. There is little moral indignation for a
single dead Congolese person, and usually the Congolese victims are blamed for
their own suffering. It is the same for poor Ugandans and Rwandans across the
porous border.
“The
rare mountain gorilla had been shot execution-style—once in the back of
the head and a second time in the hand,” reported Nairobi correspondent
Stephanie McCrummen in the Washington Post
article of July 22. McCrummen told us that she visited the Park and “climbed
six hours” to “observe how the rangers do their work.” But McCrummen arrived
weeks after Rubinga the gorilla was killed, and she is telling an old story
previously told, and retold, by Richard Leakey’s new “conservation”
organization, Wildlife Direct.
Washington Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen
refuses to any questions about her relationship with Wildlife Direct. “I think
what is important is the rangers, above all, and the gorillas,” McCrummen
replied tersely, on July 24.
Is
that journalism?
Wildlife
Direct’s Emmanuel de Merode said via email that Wildlife Direct supplied
logistics to McCrummen, but “was not in a position to supply security.”
These “gorillas executed” stories are truly
sensational and heartbreaking to Western animal lovers. Four highly endangered
mountain gorillas killed the week of July 22 from perhaps less than 700
remaining in the world. But we find the motives and methods for the killings
unbelievable, and so do gorilla experts with years of field experience.
SLICK MACHINE GUNS
According
to McCrummen and the Washington Post, the “beleaguered” Congo
rangers—who have been blogging from the “wilderness” to feed Wildlife
Direct’s web site and help raise funds abroad—“have not been paid in a
decade.”
Why?
What has happened to the millions and millions of dollars and euros and pounds
and yen pumped into gorilla conservation by USAID, the European Union and other
bodies in the past seven years alone?
Correction:
Newsweek now says that Wildlife Direct has been paying the rangers.
Which is it?
Forget
about the onslaught of press releases from Wildlife Direct and Dian Fossey
Gorilla Fund, or the breathless articles from the Washington Post, National
Geographic News, and Newsweek all blaming local “militias” and
“charcoal gatherers,” and “Mai Mai” and “poison bananas” and “rebel leaders”
for the gorilla killings.
There is something else going
on here.
Our
February-March investigative visit to DRC revealed a different picture than the
one regurgitated by the Washington Post from press releases provided by
Wildlife Direct, the mercenary “conservation” organization supporting the “beleaguered”
“ranger force.” We were in the Virungas in February and photographed
well-stocked storerooms of food in the rangers’ encampments.
Post
reporter McCrummen laments about the rangers wielding “rusty machetes,” but the
truth is that there is a private “conservation” army in the Virungas, and they
are outfitted with new uniforms and automatic weapons, including Ak-47s and
what appear to be well-oiled .50 caliber machine guns on tripods.
Wildlife Direct’s Robert Muir
provided us a photo in January 2007, when his employer, the Frankfurt
Zoological Society, was touting the “success story” of the ranger program.
Obviously well-fed, well-clothed, and well-armed, with machine guns ready, and
fresh from training by British mercenaries and soldiers-of-fortune, Conrad
Thorpe and Robert Poppe (see Guns for Hire: Congo 2006; www.vonplanta.net), this mercenary army has
more than “rusty machetes” as reported by the Washington Post. It is a
flashback to the mainstream reporting on genocide in Rwanda: no guns, just a
bunch of machete wielding savages.
There have been at least ten
mountain gorillas killed since this Wildlife Direct publicity photo was taken:
indeed, the upsurge in gorilla killings is synonymous with Wildlife Direct’s
arrival on the scene. It is obviously a failed policy to have mercenary rangers
in Virunga Park. The current press releases plea for more money for suddenly
under-equipped rangers.
It seems likely that the
gorilla killings are elemental to the public relations strategy—a few
gorillas sacrificed for a walloping perception management coup against the
Western public.
PRIVATIZATION OF AFRICAN
PARKS
Wildlife Direct operates
under the mantle of the Africa Conservation Fund (ACF), a tax-exempt (501-c-3)
non-government organization registered with the US Internal Revenue
Service. Beyond Richard Leakey, a
survivor of an elephant attack whose family achieved fame unearthing
anthropological and paleontological specimens in East Africa, there are some very
prominent and notable people on the ACF board.
The late (2006) board member
of ACF, Paul Van Vlissingen, worked for years to privatize all of Africa’s
national parks for tourism. The BBC reported in 2003 that Van
Vlissingen’s company “planned to take over a string of national parks
throughout Africa,” through a private firm, African Parks Management and
Finance Company. At a press conference, Zambian Member of Parliament, Sakwiba
Sikota, called for an investigation, saying the scheme “borders on theft and
plunder of the resources of the people of Barotseland [Zambia/Angola] and
should be thrown out.”
ACF director Francois-Xavier
de Donnea is a Belgian Minister of State, having held Defense and International
Development portfolios. Belgium’s plundering of Congo began with 10 million
dead under Leopold’s Congo Free State, proceeded through decades of colonial
rule, and prospered greatly under the dictatorship of Col. Joseph Mobutu
(1965-1997). Belgian interests in DRC today are very powerful and hidden but
involved in diamonds, plantations, mining, timber and defense.
Most significant however is
the involvement of Walter H. Kansteiner III, an ACF board member since their
founding in 2004. Kansteiner has been a constant presence behind the scenes in
Central Africa’s wars since at least 1993. His background and experience are
not in conservation: Kansteiner was a major force for privatization in the
Clinton and Bush governments, and his work continues in this vein with think
tanks and policy institutes. He is tied to all kinds of deep intelligence and
national security people, and entities, and like many of them he was a top
level White House official in national security and intelligence in both Bush I
and II administrations, and in the Clinton Administration.
Walter Kansteiner III has
over 20 years’ experience in African and emerging market business issues and
has advised corporations on a wide range of mergers, acquisitions and
privatizations throughout Africa in virtually every business sector from forestry
and mining to aviation. Kansteiner advised the buy side on the $1.3 billion
privatization of Telkom South Africa, to date the largest privatization in
Africa.
Kansteiner was formerly
Executive Vice President of a commodity trading and manufacturing company
specializing in tropical commodities in the developing world: his family trades
in coltan, or columbium-tantalite, the precious ore used for Sony Playstations,
cell phones, laptop computers and myriad state-of-the-art
devices—developed under the exploding but secretive “nanotechnology”
developments of the defense and intelligence sector—behind the bloodshed
in eastern Congo.
The Democratic Republic of
Congo has the world’s purest and largest deposits of strategic minerals,
including gold, coltan, niobium, cobalt, heterogenite and columbite.
Heterogenite exports coming out of Congo are alone valued at between $260
million (at $20/lb.) and $408 million (at $30/lb.) per month.
The Great Lakes region is
also seeing an assault by oil and gas companies affiliated with mercenary
firms: this may be a partial impetus to “conserving” and “protecting” the Lake
Albert basin and the Virungas. Heritage Oil and Gas, Tullow Oil and Hartmann
Oil are exploiting oil reserves on both sides of the DRC border, while Lake
Kivu is being targeted for major natural gas (methane) production by Rwanda.
The region is one contiguous oil field—the Semliki basin—under the
Great Lakes and north through Darfur to the Red Sea.
Among other State Department
posts he held, Walter Kansteiner III was the Africa specialist on the Secretary
of State’s Policy Planning Staff under President Clinton, and he worked on the
Department of Defense Strategic Minerals Task Force. The Clinton Administration
was deeply involved in the conflicts in central Africa from 1993-2001.
Kansteiner is on the Board of
Directors of the Corporate
Council on Africa—the “who’s who” of corporate exploitation in
Africa piloted by Israeli American diamond magnate Maurice Tempelsman. He is a
director of the African
Development Foundation, Sierra Rutile Mining, and Moto Gold Mines.
Sierra Rutile has a long and sordid history of involvement with mercenaries and
mining in war torn Sierra Leone; Moto Gold Mines is now operating in the
killing fields of DRC’s blood-drenched Orientale Province just north of the
Virungas.
Kansteiner is also a director
of the African Wildlife Foundation, a big non-government organization partnered
with the big gorilla “conservation” organizations Conservation International,
World Wildlife Fund, Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, Jane Goodall Institute and Fauna
and Flora International.
Kansteiner’s connections, affiliations
and interests run much deeper than those outlined here (see below: SIDEBAR:
Walter Kansteiner III). He is a
founding Partner of the Scowcroft Group, whose principals are all top-level
former intelligence or White House insiders.
Kansteiner’s wife Francine
was or is a board member of the US-based WILD Foundation, whose directors
include James Dunlap, an Associate Partner at Scowcroft and Associates in
Washington, DC. Dunlap was formerly the principal US Department of State aide
to Assistant Secretary of State for Africa (Walter Kansteiner III), and he
worked in every African country. WILD director David Barron is founder and
President of the International Conservation Caucus Foundation, a policy
pressure and lobby group in Washington DC, working to “inform and educate
policy-makers on critical issues in international conservation and
environment.” Barron has led Congressional tours to Africa and played a central
role—with National Geographic Society “explorer-in-residence” and WILD
trustee J. Michael Fay—in “creating” national parks in Central Africa
through the Congo Basin Forest Partnership supported by General Colin Powell,
the DOD and US mining and logging firms. The centerpiece of the CBFT is the
USAID-funded Central Africa Regional Program for the
Environment—CARPE—supporting all the major conservation
organizations involved in Congo, from the Jane Goodall Institute to the World
Wildlife Fund. National parks “created” in Gabon are rapidly moving toward
privatization.
The massive ongoing propaganda
front peddling the recent gorilla “executions” has fast-forwarded the
privatization process, which today appears to be unfolding through increased
military surveillance, boundary protection, mercenary operations, and the use
and proliferation of surveillance devices and sensors—developed for
military and intelligence applications—for anti-poaching and periphery
defense. [3]
The Washington Post
covers for such interests, just as they have ignored the machinations behind
the scenes and put their own self-interested spin on the “Congo Rangers” and
“gorillas executed” stories coming out the Virungas National Park.
DIRECT
PATH TO WILDLIFE DIRECT
“Richard Leakey, the African
Conservationist credited with putting an end to the slaughter of elephants in Kenya
during the 1980s, has taken on the cause of Congo’s Mountain Gorillas,” reads a
press release from the Africa Conservation Fund, which backs Leakey’s Wildlife
Direct. “His programme, www.wildlifedirect.org, has been supporting the rangers
of this gorilla park through the provision of equipment, training and funds,
and was active in the campaign to save the gorilla sector during the park
invasions of 2004.”
“The Congo rangers have
continued their work without interruption throughout the war, and during that
time the gorillas have increased by over 14%,” reads the press release from
Wildlife Direct. “But this has come at a cost: 97 of Virunga’s rangers have
died protecting the park’s Wildlife against poachers since 1996.”
Some ninety-seven “rangers”
killed in 10 years? Some 1,000 ordinary people perish daily? Two gorillas
killed and eaten by starving people in January—when Wildlife Direct
arrived? Three gorilla females, and one Silverback male, shot and killed July
23, and three more gorillas missing? One gorilla shot and killed and another
missing in May 2007?
“Carnage” reports Wildlife
Direct—as the hippo population is slaughtered on Lake Edward in January.
One gorilla death “equates to a massacre.” Millions of dead people equates to
silence in the international community.
What is happening here? Are
desperate local people retaliating against a foreign invasion by wildlife
“conservation” interests? Or is there something else going on?
“In
recent months, the rangers’ work has included destroying poison bananas left by
poachers to lure the gorillas,” reported McCrummen in the Washington Post,
“they were scattered near Rubinga's family the day before she was shot.”
The
trail of bananas McCrummen regurgitated from press releases and the Wildlife
Direct web page are very telling. Bananas are exotic food sources for gorillas
and were introduced by humans.[1]
“In
the thick forests of central and west Africa, [gorilla] troops find plentiful
food for their vegetarian diet,” notes National Geographic. “They eat
roots, shoots, fruit, wild celery, and tree bark and pulp.” [4]
Roving
bands of militias do not carry perishable poisoned bananas on the off chance
that they will encounter a gorilla to lure. Militias are themselves hungry and
desperate. The unfortunate gorilla female “Rubinga” of the McCrummen story knew
her attacker. It is very telling that the male silverback did not make a stand.
The attacker was probably a trusted individual in the gorilla’s experience.
Dian Fossey, the murdered American naturalist credited with saving the species,
wrote extensively about gorilla group cohesion and how members will fight to
the death to protect their “family.”
This
group of gorillas is also under constant watch by the “elite” Congo Rangers
trained by Wildlife Direct, and this is touted on their websites, blogs, in the
international press—and it would be on bathroom walls if they had any
bathrooms there. While a premeditated killing by poachers or militias after
tracking these gorillas is possible, this new infant was already a media star
and probably not far from the watchful eyes of Wildlife Direct.
“Where
were the rangers who are supposed to be protecting them when this was
occurring?” said a gorilla expert, who—like all of our sources—will
not go public in fear of retaliation by conservation organizations or ostracism
from the incestuous primatology community. “You would think such expert
trackers would have noticed and/or heard disturbances before the killers were
able to murder the gorillas???? Something doesn't add and/or subtract here!”
Further,
if rangers found poisoned bananas “scattered near Rubinga’s family the day
before she was shot,” as McCrummen and Wildlife Direct have claimed, then why
didn’t they step up surveillance given the obvious and imminent threat? Where
were the rangers?
The
Newsweek feature, “Gorilla Warfare: Even after 10 years of war, rangers
are stunned by the mysterious killings of great apes in Africa's oldest park,”
appeared on line on MSNBC.com on July 29, 2007, with a dateline denoting its
imminent appearance in the August 6 print issue. The story describes rangers with “billowing green ponchos”
and “AK-47’s,” not the Post’s previous fiction of rusty machetes.
One of the rangers, Paulin
Ngobobo, 43, is photographed quite elegantly dressed, as if for a Vanity
Fair portrait. He is “a devout Christian” says Newsweek, clearly
grooming him for the next Conde Nast Traveller Environmental
Award—given in 2005 to Central African hero Pierre Kakule of Dian Fossey
Gorilla Fund fame in the Virungas—or the National Geographic
Society/Buffet Award created by “philanthropist” Howard Buffet and awarded in
2004 to Rwanda Country Director the Wildlife Conservation Society and a close
associate of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Rwanda. The Newsweek portrait
of debonair Congo ranger Paulin Ngobobo stands in sharp contradiction to the
starving rangers described by the Post’s Stephanie McCrummen a few days
earlier.
In
the corner of the on-line Newsweek feature—below the picture of a
dead silverback sprawled out on a stretcher—like KING KONG
himself—carried by a team of very well dressed
“conservationists”—is a little “READER’S VOTE” asking: “Would you be
willing to pay higher taxes in order to protect endangered species?”
Check:
( ) “yes” ( x ) “no” or ( ) “not
sure.”
GUNS
FOR HIRE: CONGO
It
seems the local populations resent the uninvited intrusion into their homes,
their communities and their lands. The Congolese take exception to white
“conservation” mercenaries from Wildlife Direct and the Dian Fossey Gorilla
Fund and the Frankfurt Zoological Society and the British Special Forces and
UNESCO—and they want them out of Virunga Park.
The local people want the
white mercenaries and their elite first-world agenda—with all the
dishonesty, corruption and vested interests behind it—gone. Period.
One glance at the
mercenaries’ promotional materials makes it clear why.
On their self-promotional web
site the white mercenaries and their elite Congolese “rangers” can be seen
terrorizing the local fishermen—whom they call “poachers”—forcing
them to “confess” their crimes and threatening them with death. The Von Planta
video “Guns for Hire: Congo 2006” at www.vonplanta.net
shows the poorest women in the world running for their lives from armed gangs
otherwise defined as “rangers” and their white Wildlife Direct “trainers.” The
white mercenaries are always portrayed as “selfless” and “compassionate” but
heroic white men dedicated to “saving” this part of the African “wilderness.”
In real life, mercenaries like these employed with security firms are known to
shoot poor Congolese for sport in the diamond mining areas controlled by large
foreign firms.[5] The Virunga
rangers are on videotape committing human rights violations against innocent
villagers who have a few wire snares in their meager huts—their only
means to feed their families.
The “Guns for Hire” video
also makes it clear that the white mercenaries believe that Congolese officials
are fanning the flames of the violence, encouraging local people to cultivate
inside the park, because park officials receive “payoffs”—albeit
pitifully meager—for each cultivated plot. Congolese government soldiers
are blamed with running a charcoal operation offering incentives for peasants
to make charcoal or collect wood inside the park. Poor Congolese communities
rely on charcoal as a staple energy source, and while they are the victims of
an unjust international system exploiting and forcing them off their lands,
they are blamed for wanting and needing heat and fuel to survive.
“The rangers also suspect
people associated with the country's $30 million charcoal industry,” wrote
McCrummen, “who depend on the park's trees and would rather Virunga be
unprotected.”
The Newsweek article
of July 29 cites Richard Leakey calling it a “a corrupt mafia of charcoal
merchants,” while simultaneously playing the tired refrain accusing Hutu
extremists responsible for Rwanda’s genocide.
The Newsweek article
(reaching 4.2 million people worldwide) is a propaganda fabrication serving as
both a fundraiser and cheerleader for Wildlife Direct—and its backers,
like Walter Kansteiner, and their corrupt mafias of “conservation” and
“humanitarian” interests.
The international logging
sector in Congo is another scandal never illuminated with similar zeal by the Washington
Post and Newsweek—who target Congolese charcoal as the
problem. The Portuguese Trindade brothers—Jose Albano Maia Trindade and João
Manuel Maia Trindade—are the owner-operators of four companies: SODIFOR,
SOFORMA, FARABOLA and Compagnie Forestière et de Transformation. Their concessions total 5,959,817 hectares in four
Congo provinces. Logging operations of other Western companies—the
American Blattner family, George Somja of Belgium, George Forrest, the German
Danzer Corporation (2,421,871 hectares), and others—comprise an
additional 26 million hectares, and the World Wildlife Fund rubber stamps their
operations. The profits and the expropriation of Congolese land for the
international logging sector swamp the $30 million a year charcoal industry run
by and for Congolese people. While there has been much fanfare in the
international media about “canceling” logging and “reexamining” mining
contracts—rewriting the mining and logging codes—little substantive
change has been made. The question of land belonging to the Congolese and their
access to it must be seen in the light of the logging industry in DRC—one
big Western corporate mafia.
At
one Blattner operation (SAFBOIS, Isangi, DRC), the WWF field station is located
within the deep forest compound of the company. The BBC publishes WWF
press releases verbatim, and WWF has actively undermined indigenous people’s
resistance in the face of the logging onslaught in Congo. Like the massive
rainforest rip-off underway, the Washington Post, New York Times,
Newsweek and BBC have reported none of this.
Similarly,
the framework of such stories shields the true reasons for poverty and
suffering of Congolese soldiers. International mining in Congo is a scandal
reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in profits monthly, and the problem of
non-payment of soldiers “salaries” lies with those who make this possible:
international business cartels, the World Bank, IMF, European Union and with
powerful individuals in Europe, North America, and Israel. Foreign interests
and their Congolese agents have expropriated local people’s livelihoods and
rights, and the Mai Mai militias are known for taking a nationalist stance
against foreign interests and for Congolese people.
However,
one Congolese conservation expert with the Congolese Institute for the
Conservation of Nature (ICCN) attributed all responsibility for the massive
failure of conservation and community development in Congo to institutionalized
corruption in Western “conservation” organizations and high-level ICCN
officials they have corrupted.
The
Congo rangers trained by Wildlife Direct are mostly outsiders with no ties to
the local communities around the park. In a place like Congo, this ethnic
influx is tantamount to a foreign invasion.
The
“Guns for Hire” video also makes a big production out of Wildlife Direct
mercenaries and their Congo Rangers dumping sacks of “ore” they purportedly
confiscated from Congolese miners and artisans operating inside the Virungas
National Park. This stands in sharp contrast to the massive corporate mining
operations of companies like Moto Gold, AngloAshanti, Banro and Mwana Africa,
and the alleged involvement of “conservation” officials in the coltan and
cassiterite mining in the areas in and around the Virungas, Maiko and Kahuzi
Biega National Parks. The inference is that white mercenaries and
“conservation” organizations are intolerant of mining: the entire video segment
appears staged. But staged or not staged once again we have elite white
mercenaries targeting the lives and industries of poor black people struggling
to survive by any means necessary, and never providing equitable options, but
instead lording over them with force and intimidation.
The
“Guns for Hire” video shows white British SAS forces giving smug interviews and
sharing lofty ideals, based in privilege and backed by the badge of their skin
color, and sneaking around in the bush—wearing flak jackets and carrying
automatic weapons—peaking through tall grasses and spying on peasant
fishermen in old rickety boats and skinny boys on rusty pedal bikes whose only
set of clothes are rags.
The
people of Congo are not stupid, and someone is sending a very clear signal: we
don’t like what you are doing, and we don’t want you here.
That is the sad, hard truth,
never mentioned in mainstream media like the Washington Post. Why?
SKELETONS IN THE (POST)
CLOSET
Consider this: Washington
Post director Barry Diller is a director of Conservation International and
the Coca Cola Company, one of the big partners of the aid organization CARE
International, and the defense company IAC/Interactive. Diller’s wife, Diane
von Furstenberg is also an IAC/Interactive director.
CARE is a USAID partner
involved in “conservation” and “humanitarian” projects in Congo, Uganda,
Somalia, Rwanda and Sudan. Through the Congo Basin Forest Partnership and
Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), USAID has funded
scores of millions of dollars in big conservation projects in the Great Lakes
region in the past decade.
Oracle Corporation, also an
intelligence and defense contractor, is another big partner of CARE. Oracle’s
CEO, Lawrence Ellison, is on the board of directors of Dian Fossey Gorilla
Fund-International. Three IAC/Interactive directors are directors of
Oracle Corporation. One is former Washington Post director and Newsweek
President Alan Spoon; another is General Norman Schwarzkopf, a director of
NBC/Universal, the makers of the film KING KONG. Another NBC/Universal director
is Henry Kissinger’s son David Kissinger.
Oracle was involved in Donald
Rumsfeld’s “Corporate Fellow Program,” where the US Department of Defense
planted military officers in business positions inside top multinational
corporations. Oracle “customers” include nineteen DOD entities like the
beyond-top-secret Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, National Security
Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and National Imagery and Mapping
Agency.
Conservation International
(CI) directors include Louis Cabot, whose firm Cabot International was cited by
the United Nations Panel of Experts for dealing in coltan coming out of Congo,
and Lewis Coleman, a director of US defense giant Northrup Grumman.
Turner Broadcasting and CNN
are major affiliates of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, in terms of
funding, partnerships, and preferential media coverage.
In a telling statement
reported in the Washington Post, bullet holes riddle the entrance signs
to Virunga Park. The locals are not happy with private militias limiting their
already minimal options for food and survival, or forcing them out of the only
shelter they have in eastern Congo. Most want only a few hectares to grow maize
for their starving children.
“We drove from Uganda to
Congo through the Virungas,” said Oscar Kashala, the renowned Congolese medical
scientist from Harvard who ran for president in Congo’s 2006 elections. “This
is a very celebrated park. Everything was green but there are no lions in
Virunga. No gazelles. People here have eaten everything. We didn't even hear
any birds singing. We were seeing half naked kids coming out of the bush. For
me—a doctor—to see malnutrition like that is very hard. The kids
all have wounds on their feet, and their bellies are swollen. They are all
sick.”
The gorillas have become
hostages in a propaganda war, and the people of Central Africa have become
irrelevant, non-people.
On the other side of the
fence—quite literally, the park boundary—the well-fed Congo Rangers
and their families rely upon a sympathetic Western public for donations to keep
themselves supplied and protected in former colonial encampments within the
Virunga Park. In fact, Wildlife Direct recently put out a plea for more funds.
The rangers were running out of food and an infusion of funding would certainly
help.
It’s a jungle out there, and
we will merely peep into the deep, dark money hole hidden by the heart of
darkness mythology.
Another Washington Post
director is Melinda Gates, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave at
least $10,000 to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund Europe—renamed The Gorilla
Organization after a legal attack from Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund-International
wrested control of the name of the murdered American naturalist Dian Fossey.
Washington Post director
Warren Buffet—worth $43 billion—is also a director of Coke, and his
son Howard Buffet is on the Advisory Council for the National Geographic
Society, whose press office is all over the “gorillas murdered” story. (Get
your National Geographic mountain gorilla IMAX DVD for just $12.95 at
their online store!) Buffet’s investment firm Berkshire Hathaway owns
substantial stock in the Washington Post. Gilbert M. Grosvenor, the
veritable grandfather and Board of Trustees member of the National Geographic Society
is also a trustee of Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I).
“This is a disaster,” National
Geographic News quotes Mr. Emmanuel de Merode, Nairobi director of Wildlife
Direct, to say. It is a massive understatement. Where are the editors for these
stories coming out of Congo? Whatever happened to VETTING a story? You
know—the process where a story is fact-checked and confirmed by numerous
sources?
PIGGY BANKS FOR PROFIT
“Joseph Aloma Major is a foot
soldier in the war to save the world’s critically endangered mountain
gorillas,” wrote Mike Pflanz, correspondent for The Christian Science
Monitor, in “Web Charity Helps Save Congo Gorillas,” on March 9, 2007.
“Before the money started
flowing from Colorado, directly donated online via a new charity website,
WildlifeDirect.org,” Pflanz wrote, Mr. Aloma could barely do his job.”
Turns out some 43 children at
Stratton Elementary School in Colorado Springs have emptied their piggy banks
and raised money for Wildlife Direct programs sporting elite white mercenary
soldiers and their “starving” African ranger protégés.
“Together, the 43 children in
the second-grade class give $244 a month to support a rarely paid and poorly
equipped Wildlife ranger half a world away in the Democratic Republic of
Congo,” Pflanz reported.
The Frankfurt Zoological
Society—a Wildlife Direct partner—acts as a conduit for the money
channeled from trusting children in American schools who believe that their
efforts will help save the rare gorillas—an investment in their own
future.
“In the first
72 hours after Wildlife Direct started working with gorillas in Congo in
January, the group received $38,000,” reported Pflanz.
Robert Muir, a
British conservationist working in Congo for the Frankfurt Zoological Society,
told Pflanz that all funds collected through the new program go straight to
Congo. “We buy the boots in the market and hand them over straight away. We buy
the food, the uniforms, the tents, and they're in the rangers' hands in a day
or two. Then Wildlife Direct pays us back later.”
The initial
kickstart of $38,000—raised in the first 72 hours—went to Congo in
January and by March, when the Pflanz article ran in the Christian Science
Monitor, they must have raised quite a pretty penny. And Wildlife Direct does
not take a percentage of donations, Pflanz reported; they are covered by donors
who separately fund their administrative and running costs.
Back
to the future, we find McCrummen and the Washington Post reporting on
July 22 that the Congo rangers “are desperately poor,” they “occupy run-down
posts” and “use old, rusty machetes.”
Where is all the money going?
How much do the white mercenaries with automatic weapons get paid? How much is
spent on petrol for the zebra-striped airplane operated by the Frankfurt
Zoological Society on its surveillance missions for Wildlife Direct?
“Congo Ranger Aloma Major had
not been paid for several months,” Pflanz went on, in the classic public
relations fundraising mold, and without questioning such platitudes. “His patrol
post had no fuel and no vehicle to put it in. And, until last month, he faced
the danger of attacks from rebels…”
The Wildlife Direct “Guns for
Hire” video shows piles of guns acquired for the beleaguered rangers. Where did
the guns come from? Who paid for the piles of guns? Stratton Elementary School
second graders like Kori Hernandez?
“And thanks to generous
donations from people like Stratton second-grader Kori Hernandez, who donated
her entire piggy bank (about $30), Congo rangers like Aloma are now getting the
money to make protection of the endangered gorillas possible again.”
And thanks to generous
taxpayers like Stratton second-grader Kori Hernandez’s mom and dad—who
responsibly paid their annual taxes, supporting the USAID coffers behind the conservation
scandal in Congo—the powerful beneficiaries of this rainforest rip-off
are swindling this American family on both ends.
And little Kori Hernandez
will grow up to find that one day in the not so distant future, her cherished
gorillas—along with millions of ordinary people in the Congo—came
to an abrupt and brutal finish. And little Kori Hernadez will always wonder who
lied.
***************************
SIDEBAR:
PLUNDERING AFRICA:
WALTER KANSTEINER &
FRIENDS
An understanding of the
decade of warfare and depopulation in Central Africa can be gained by examining
the positions of power, corporate directorships and new corporations and
alliances that have quietly emerged from the killing fields in the past several
years.
While the mass media, policy
institutes like the International Crises Group, human rights agencies like
Human Rights Watch, and “humanitarian” organizations like the International
Rescue Committee appear to offer some coverage of events in Central Africa,
they barely scratch the surface. More often, they offer only limited critiques
of events, interests or developments, without ever challenging any significant
deeper interests, or holding them to account.
One of the key agents behind
the machinery of change in Central Africa is Walter Kansteiner III.
In the 1980’s Kansteiner was
director of Economic Studies at the far-right Institute on Religion and
Democracy. The IRD called itself “centrist” but was deeply hostile to social
movements around the world, particularly in Africa, and it attacked mainstream
Christian religious institutions.
In his 1990 book Kansteiner
systematically attacked Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC),
characterizing the ANC as a group of violent revolutionaries engaged in an
“unjustified” and “Marxist” struggle against the government, without a mandate
from the South African people.
Kansteiner was a member of
the George H.W. Bush State Department’s policy planning staff from May 1989 to
June 1991, Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council,
1991-1993, and the Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Press
Secretary for Foreign Affairs from April 1992-1993.
Kansteiner also served in the
U.S. government as director of African Affairs on Clinton’s National Security Council
staff. He was President Clinton’s personal representative to the G8 Africa
Process.
Kansteiner was Assistant
Secretary of State for African Affairs under George W. Bush from June 2001 until November 2003, advising on
U.S. foreign policy in Africa.
Walter Kansteiner and
Maurice Tempelsman—and Corporate Council on Africa members from
Halliburton, Boeing, Cargill, Exxon-Mobil, Freeport McMoran and Oracle
Corporation—were the architects of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act
(AGOA), America’s NAFTA for Africa. The AGOA destroys local markets, erects
discriminatory trade barriers, undermines local economies to enrich elites and
impoverish the masses—a.k.a. in the language of doublespeak, the AGOA
promotes free trade.
The
Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund has an ongoing technology project through the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institute: Maurice Tempelsman on the board of trustees of
the Woods Hole Corporation.
Beyond Sierra Rutile’s forays
into bloody Sierra Leone we find that Sierra Rutile directors include Sam
Jonah, President and director of AngloGold-Ashanti, which has formal
partnerships with the infamous Bush-affiliated Barrick Gold, and also operates
in bloody Orientale Province. AngloGold-Ashanti has reportedly backed the
Rwandan allied Congolese Rally for Democracy in eastern Congo, and likely still
supports chaos in the region by backing Rwandan military interests. One
AngloAshanti director is Jerry John Rawlings, the U.S. military’s former
autocratic ruler of Ghana.
Sam Jonah serves on the
International Investment Advisory Councils of President Thabo Mbeki (South
Africa), President Kufuor (Ghana), and President Obasanjo (Nigeria). He is also
a member of the United Nations’ Secretary General’s Global Compact Advisory
Council, a likely reason why Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has merely issued
lukewarm communiqués expressing “concern” about 700,000 refugees in eastern
Congo, and never takes any hard action to help Congo’s people and expose the
interests exploiting them.
As a founding principal of
The Scowcroft Group, Kansteiner’s ties to the intelligence and defense sector
run still deeper. Brent Scowcroft is a former National Security Adviser to
George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) and Gerald Ford (1975-1977), and National Security
Council member under Henry Kissinger.
Kansteiner is also a Fellow
at the Forum for International Policy, a think-tank whose Chairman of the Board
of Trustees is Lawrence S. Eagleburger, a director of numerous
corporations—including Halliburton—and the former Deputy Secretary
of State (1989-1992) and then Secretary of State (1992-1993) under George H.W.
Bush. Other FIP notables are deep intelligence insiders, including John Deutch
and Brent Scowcroft, and Archers Daniels Midland director Dwayne Andreas.
Lawrence Eagleburger is also
president of Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm Kissinger Associates, which has
a “strategic alliance” with global PR firm APCO Worldwide.
Henry Kissinger is today on
the board of the International Rescue Committee, known to be a “humanitarian”
front for intelligence interests; the IRC is involved in Congo and in the
“grass-roots” Congo Global Action Campaign organized with the support of the International
Crises Group (ICG), a flak organization which also uses humanitarianism as a
front for deeper interests.
On the ICG board, for example, are some of the world’s
leading military strategists. ICG directors include former Supreme Allied
Commander General Wesley Clark; former National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski; and Thomas Pickering, formerly special assistant to Henry
Kissinger, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Clinton White
House, and now a Boeing Corporation executive.
The International Crises Group executive John
Prendergast’s role in manipulating world consciousness around war and genocide
must be situated not in the “humanitarian” front that the ICG gives him, but in
his role as National Security Council during the Clinton Administration, with
Walter Kansteiner III. The ICG is silent about the proliferation of dubious and
illegal mining by firms like Moto Gold Mines, and their “crises group” research
papers never identify any of the significant players behind the scenes in Congo
(or Darfur).
APCO Worldwide counts three
former Democratic and one Republican congressman as directors, and former
Senator Robert Dole as a senior counselor. Dole’s involvement in Central Africa
is well hidden but tied to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni through the
euphemistically named Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa, whose
direction involves directors Peter Seligman and Olivier Legrand of Conservation
International—deeply involved in gorilla “conservation” in Central
Africa. The PCHPA ties in another faith-based relief organization, Bread for
the World, and the two entities sport numerous Baptists, Methodists and other
Christian fundamentalist “missionary” organizations involved in Central Africa,
East Africa and Sudan. PCHPA director Peter McPherson is also a director of
Conservation International.
Money for Bob Dole’s
campaigns for years has come from National Public Radio sponsor and
agribusiness Archers Daniels Midland—supermarket to the world. Former
Senator Dole and his political foundations reportedly collected $178,000 in
contributions from Dwayne Andreas, members of Andreas’ family and A.D.M.
executives between 1981 and 1994. Andreas and A.D.M. also gave more than $2
million to the Democratic and Republican parties between 1991 and 2006.
Walter Kansteiner III is also
a Senior Associate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies
(CSIS), which today counts among its members Alexander Haig, Brent Scowcroft,
John Deutch, Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, and many other deep intelligence
and defense insiders.
Many of the same players
noted above are involved behind the scenes in Somalia, Chad, Ethiopia and
Sudan—the “Save Darfur” interests and lobby behind “genocide” in
Darfur—and profit from warfare and “humanitarian relief” while millions
and millions of Africa’s people suffer and die.
At this writing there are
700,000 Congolese people uprooted and forgotten in the Kivus region of DRC.
Across the border there are 1.2 million Acholi people suffering miserably in
death camps in Northern Uganda subject to terrorism as policy orchestrated by
Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.
One hundred fifty additional U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in
Uganda in March 2007, and Museveni has now instituted compulsory military
training in support of the DOD’s AFRICOM and the US/UPDF military campaigns in
Sudan (Darfur), Chad, Congo, Uganda, Ethiopia and Somalia. Petroleum operations
in western and northern Uganda are expanding: Bechtel subsidiary Nexant is one
of the companies building the pipeline across Uganda to the US military port in
Mombasa, Kenya. The genocide against the Acholi people in northern Uganda is in
media whiteout.
[1] Stephanie McCrummen, “IN EASTERN CONGO OASIS, BLOOD AMID THE GREENERY,” Washington Post, Jull 22, 2007.
[2] Georgianne Nienaber, “Congo soldiers arrested for Radio Okapi journalist's murder,” OpEdNews.com, June 15, 2007.
[3] See e.g.: http://www.wildlandsecurity.org/
[5] See keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond,” Z Magazine, June (part one) and July/August (part two), 2007.