KING KONG:
Scoping in on the Curious Activities of the
International Monkey Business
KONG: Part Five:
The Hanged Man
Georgianne
Nienaber
and
keith harmon snow
“Due to the current security problem
within the National Park, in spite of the ongoing civil war in Rwanda, it was
not possible to continue with other plans to develop, manage and organize the
national park. Fighting has been ongoing along the border to Rwanda and within
the conservation area. Unfortunately, a park ranger lost his leg…”
Klaus Jurgen Sucker
Mgahinga National Park Uganda, 1992[1]
They
say Klaus-Jurgen Sucker was beginning to look like the Silverback Gorillas he
so tenaciously protected in Mgahinga Gorilla National Park (MGNP). Friends
noted that an eerie change took place in his physical form. His hair was
turning a premature grey as he struggled to “out-Fossey Dian Fossey”—a
term used to describe a conservationist who betters his or her predecessors—and
find a way for humans and wildlife to co-exist both inside and outside of
Mgahinga National Park.
Mgahinga is a tiny wildlife park in southwestern Uganda and
adjoins the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is a
contiguous extension of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga National
Park and Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park. The 700 critically endangered
mountain gorillas roam freely across the international borders of this rugged
landscape, and the murdered American naturalist, Dian Fossey, is buried there.
In 1989, Klaus-Jurgen Sucker began working in the middle of
a metaphoric fault line that was about to erupt with undreamed of consequences.
Simmering like the volcanoes that gave birth to the Great African Rift Valley,
the region had been a cauldron of ethnic unrest, tribal animosities, colonial control
and multi-national meddling for centuries.
In 1990 the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA)—the military
wing of the exiled Rwandan Patriotic Front—launched an invasion of Rwanda
from the mountains of southwestern Uganda. Backed by Ugandan President Yoweri
Museveni and the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF), the RPA guerillas waged
a low-intensity war that would eventually overthrow the government of Rwanda
amidst the “100 days of genocide” in 1994. The United States, Britain, Belgium
and other outside military interests have not yet escaped the judgment of
history for their parts in the cataclysm of 1994.
When Klaus Sucker arrived in Uganda the country was in
shambles. The government of Yoweri Museveni—which has now survived for
twenty-two years as a one-party dictatorship——had fought a bloody
civil war and won significant control of the country in 1985. The government
was controlled by the National Resistance Movement/Army (NRM/A) and backed by
Western powers. Uganda needed foreign exchange, and gorilla tourism supported
by the Western “aid” enterprise offered an easy and lucrative source of cash.
Ugandan wildlife parks like Mgahinga, the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Kibale
National Park and the Queen Elizabeth National Park were targeted for “reconstruction”
and would soon be given the friendly facelift of public relations and
advertising. But the wildlife populations in all of Uganda’s wildlife parks
suffered massive declines as animals were slaughtered during the years of civil
war.
Two German conservation organizations jointly founded the
Mgahinga program, named the Gorilla Game Reserve Conservation Project, which
Klaus Sucker managed. One, the Bergorilla & Regenwald Direkthilfe (BRD), a
non-profit organized in 1982, still works to support the eastern gorilla
population, which includes the severely endangered mountain gorilla made famous
by Dian Fossey. The other, Deutcher Tierschutzbund, is a member of the larger European
Coalition to End Animal Experiments, an anti-vivisection organization.
Klaus-Jurgen Sucker died under mysterious circumstances. The
sacrifices he made to conservation in Uganda were almost forgotten—or
buried along with him. While Sucker was a leading agent of change at Mgahinga,
the USAID reports from this era never mention Sucker by name; they speak about
issues and risks only in terms of “needing to improve park management.”[2] The promotion of Sucker’s life, legacy
and work remains in the hands of the Bergorilla & Regenwald Direkthilfe
(BRD), his family, friends and loved ones.
“Klaus was a remarkable man; his dedication was something,
at times even frightening. It's a great loss that he's gone,” Ulrich Karlowski
wrote.[3]
ENVIRONMENTAL
MISSIONARIES
On June 20, 1994, Klaus-Jurgen Sucker was found strangled in
his house in Kisoro, Uganda. The official German and Ugandan governments’
reports want the world to believe this was a suicide—Sucker was found
hanging from a rope.
Klaus-Jurgen Sucker was 37 years old, and an unlikely
candidate for self-destruction. His sandwich was found sitting on a plate in
his kitchen, half-eaten, and his feet were touching the floor. He was engaged
to be married, and looking forward to it. He was the head of the Mgahinga
Gorilla National Park Project (MGNP) in Uganda, and while things weren’t as
smooth as he might have liked, his journal entries and other communications
made it clear he was looking forward to the future.[4]
Field reports from Mgahinga buried in the archives and data
banks of USAID and written in the early 1990’s are very similar to conservation
communiqués coming out of the Virunga National Park in Congo today. These
reports universally frame the blame for “conservation” problems around rogue
militias and rampant population explosion, generally castigating the local
people for their own suffering, while never addressing the structural violence
that insures this suffering and misery. Big “conservation” and “humanitarian”
organizations uphold this structural violence, but like the governments and
their “AID” machineries, these institutions are rarely challenged.
But Klaus Sucker’s reports from Mgahinga showed one ironic
and important difference from those of Congo today. Klaus-Jurgen Sucker was at
odds with the USAID-sponsored Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere
(CARE) —the international BINGO that had its own plans for the park. On
the surface, CARE offered Mgahinga a humanitarian operation with a humanitarian
agenda focused on emerging concerns for the environment. Behind the scenes,
CARE’s true mission was—now as then—another kind of monkey business
altogether.
“Sucker’s story is different,” wrote journalist Paul
Salopek, in his Pulitzer winning series, Africa’s Wildlife Running out of
Room, “because his most powerful opponents weren't the usual rogue’s
gallery of xenophobic politicians or greedy wildlife dealers, but competing
environmentalists who have launched what is, in effect, a sweeping, last-ditch
battle for the soul of wild Africa.”
But journalist Paul Salopek’s reference to
“environmentalists” competing in a “last ditch battle for the soul of wild
Africa” is a poignant example of the misleading and patronizing discourse that
currently holds sway over the minds of white Western readers—the members
of a population who, by virtue of our privileged economic and political status,
hold the greatest sway over the landscapes of Africa and the disenfranchised
people who live there.
What is “wild Africa” and how can (mostly) white
environmentalists “save” its soul? Sounds like the missionary enterprise that
accompanied colonial exploitation and slavery. The hubris of these ideas is
only exceeded by their actual implementation. Indeed, Congolese people equate
modern “conservation” interests exploiting their local landscapes to the
Christian missionaries and their evangelizing hidden agendas.
Today, Western conservation organizations with millions of
dollars in annual budgets are falling all over themselves to lay claim to what
may be the mountain gorillas’ last stand. Humanitarian organizations do the
same in the “humanitarian” business sector. These are industries. The
humanitarian or “misery” industry and the environmental “conservation”
industries are nothing more than multinational corporate enterprises waving
flags and brand names and logos, and the ultimate goal is to secure market
share through uniquely defined niche marketing strategies. The Western press
serves its function in photographing and thereby advertising the flags, the
logos, the white doctors and primatologists in the field—all to drum up
donor support from sympathetic hearts. It is a system of competition and
exploitation, and nothing less than predatory capitalism.
What is CARE/USAID’s involvement in the “wildlife
conservation” sector? Why are the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and
Jane Goodall Institute involved in population control in Africa?
THE CLIQUE OF
CONSERVATION HYENAS
At the very least, the BINGOs and DINGOs of our story
ignore the fate of the humans that share the same habitat with the flagship
species and “wild soul” of Africa they set out to “save.” Worse still, these
organizations exacerbate the suffering and denigrate the local people, their
communities, customs, knowledge, wisdom and sovereignty. The DINGOs build their
campaigns on racist discourses and policies that perpetuate slavery, misery and
massive loss of life, even as they claim to be working for the betterment of
humanity and the global mission to save the earth and its biodiversity.
As recently as March 2006, a meeting took place in
Washington DC to examine the BINGO’s tendency to promote
“conservation-as-indigenous-dispossession.”
According to the mythologies perpetrated by the
“conservation clique”—as one Congolese official correctly calls
it—it is tribalism and savagery that is to blame for every atrocity
committed against wildlife in Central Africa.
“For the ‘clique’ conservation is a flag which they work
behind,” one Congolese wildlife professional told us, in an interview conducted
in eastern Congo. The source—call him only “Ilungwa”—will not be
named herein, as he has already been threatened and fears for his life. He is an
expert in conservation in Central Africa, but he has been sidelined and
threatened by the clique and their powerful allies.
“If we consider conservation as a flag, it will never be
possible to change the values of the clique,” Ilungwa told us. “They are
interested in money, retirement, making a good career. The aim of the clique is
to survive. When the money comes to Congo they make sure the money is
well—shared amongst the clique. When someone—Dian Fossey Gorilla
Fund for example—gets CARPE funding they will organize a posh V.I.P.
dinner at a posh hotel. They will invite the Governor and military leaders and
heads of other projects. They tell them they have a big project, lots of money
for the next few years. They make promises—hospitals, schools, road
improvements—in the name of conservation. They are like hyenas: ‘we have
a kill, if we need to split up and work alone we will, but let’s try to work
together and share the kill.’ And the kill is the big money, and the clique has
its own rules and its own accountings. But there is no accountability, and that
is why Congolese people are dying and wildlife is disappearing.”
The discourses of the exploiting
organizations—conservation and humanitarian—vary according to the
reader or listener being targeted by the suave propaganda. The language and
syntax of fundraising campaigns exploit deeply held beliefs to “do good,” and
sustain and cycle the cash flow of contracts, grants, private donations and
other funding. For black people in rural Africa—both educated and uneducated—other
tactics and strategies are employed, with a completely different syntax and
language. But the effects are the same on all sides of the divide: millions of
people in Africa suffer, and they are blamed for their own suffering, and
denigrated for living at all.
“The strategies and methods used by the clique are used
beyond Africa, beyond borders, beyond what you can touch,” Ilungwa, the clique
insider, explained. “At the end of the system, the end result is to get the
money, and the money circulates and circulates. The discourses from the clique
are very different from what they do. And the clique is very powerful: if you challenge the funding and spending
and corruption—they will destroy you.”
Did the conservation clique in Central Africa destroy Klaus-Jurgen
Sucker?
FACING DOWN
KALASHNIKOVS
Klaus-Jurgen Sucker was no fool. He certainly realized that
the life of a high profile gorilla conservationist had inherent risks. Dian
Fossey had been murdered in 1985, a few years in time and a short distance in
kilometers away, on the other side of the mountain at her Karisoke research
station. Like Fossey, Sucker was unpopular with poachers, smugglers and others
who had vested interests in the park. Sucker, too, was threatened by armed
militia and ordered to surrender his research. His response was to invite the
invaders to shoot him with their fierce Kalashnikovs. They declined, and
instead they left Sucker’s fate to others.
In 1989, Klaus Sucker’s initial partners in the venture to
restore the dilapidated Mgahinga National Park were Thomas Butynski and Samson
Werikhe. Butynski would go on to be a senior conservation biologist with Zoo
Atlanta, which has a special relationship with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund
International (DFGF-I). Recall that Clare Richardson, current CEO of DFGF-I,
was once a fundraiser for Zoo Atlanta, and that Zoo Atlanta’s partners are
corporate entities hostile to true conservation objectives. (See Kong: Part
Four: The Map.) Butynski also went on to become director of Conservation
International’s Eastern African Biodiversity Hotspots Program and vice-chair of
the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Primate
Specialist’s Group, Africa Section. He is very much an insider in the
conservation clique that rules over Central Africa.
Curiously, documents received through a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
(USFWS)—in Kong: Part Four: the Map we outlined USFWS involvement
in Central Africa—have blacked out the dates that Thomas Butynski
was in Uganda working with Klaus Sucker; other details are also redacted.
In one document Butynski wrote: “I am a primatologist who
has been involved with primate field research and conservation since (REDACTED) mostly in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Equatorial
Guinea….” [6]
FOUR AND TWENTY
BLACKBIRDS
Samson Werikhe, the third partner who began working with
Klaus Sucker and Thomas Butynski at Mgahinga in 1989, made the news in colorful
fashion in January 2003, when the Ugandan news outlet New Vision
reported that Werikhe fled to the United States amid allegations of corruption
and embezzlement in the USAID-funded Wildlife Clubs of Uganda (WCU). New
Vision reported that the entire twelve member staff of WCU resigned after
the scandal broke.
“Werikhe took over the [WCU] clubs three years ago from
Violet Kajubiri, who had built a strong secretariat which benefited from donor
funds, including USAID,” reporter Gerald Tenywa wrote from Kampala for New
Vision.
“We had an impending audit before Werikhe left the country,” Mr. Douglas
Lugumya, the chairperson of the governing council, said.[7]
Samson Werikhe is now in the United States, and he is not
keeping a low profile. Werikhe’s biography for 2005 places him as a
“conservation intern” at the U.S. Air Force’s Beale Air Force Base. The
biographical reference appeared in an article Werikhe wrote for The Magpie,
a conservation bulletin published in the Sacramento, CA area.[8]
“All in all, [the] life of a wildlife biologist in Africa is
sometimes difficult to predict because he is faced with unique problems…funding
and issues of wildlife vs. man,” Werikhe wrote. This was an unbelievable
understatement, considering his past in Uganda, and one wonders if the fate of
Klaus Sucker ever crosses his mind.
Bearing in mind the proliferation of maps in this KONG epic,
and the other many defense and intelligence interests, it is noteworthy that
our Ugandan wildlife official-on-the lam took refuge at Beale Air Force Base.
According to readily available information posted on its website and elsewhere,
“Beale AFB is a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft base, located in the
Sacramento Valley, and home to the only stateside reconnaissance wing of the
USAF. Beale AFB recently flew the SR-71 Blackbird and still flies the nation's
fleet of U2 spy planes. Beale is also one of four U.S. locations for the Phased
Array Warning System, a unique radar system housed in a large pyramidal
building. Also called PAVE-PAWS, the system tracks airborne and space-borne
objects over the Pacific Ocean (a Cape Cod PAVE-PAWS looks out over the
Atlantic). The base covers 23,000 acres and employs around 4,000 people.”
Beale A.F.B. is deeply connected to aerospace and defense
giant Lockheed Martin, one of the partners of Zoo Atlanta and a financial
sponsor of CARE International, and the maker of the SR-71 Blackbird.
Samson Werikhe’s comments in The Magpie about
wildlife versus man, and his association as a “conservation intern” at Beale,
begs the question as to exactly how many Blackbirds are baked into this gorilla
conservation pie.
Werikhe is also closely tied to the United Nations World
Heritage Program, one of the many questionable institutions that have been
intensely lobbying for “gorilla protection” in the beleaguered Virunga National
Park in DRC, and yet another massive enterprise that does not show an equitable
concern for the innocent Congolese people caught in a decade of war and
corporate plunder.
“UNEP-WCMC has been identifying and compiling information on
the protected areas of the world to produce comprehensive global dataset and
maps,” according to its website. [9]
More global datasets and wildlife conservation mapping?
Maps, maps, the Empire and its predilection for maps…
Samson Werikhe is also on record as co-authoring a joint presentation
to UNEP-WCMC, in September 1997, on behalf of the Governments of Uganda,
Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This presentation was held in
South Africa and it discussed the impact of war on protected areas in these
three countries —in terms of wildlife and environment—and presented
a case study of the Virunga Volcano region. [10]
The presentation and report offer the standard propaganda
about war and high population densities—another example of powerful
external institutions delimiting Central Africa’s problems in terms of the
proliferation of its populations. These indigenous populations have little or
no say in the unfolding drama of the CARPE landscapes of the Mwami’s Tale (of
our series) and other massive programs premised on the access to, and control
of, the very land they live on.
The potential for addressing population “pressures”
jointly with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was
noted, and it was suggested that a dialogue should be established between
UNHCR, IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) and other
relevant parties.
In a departure from the usual cartographical angst about
overpopulation, the well-respected Annette Lanjouw of the International Gorilla
Conservation Project (IGCP), based in Nairobi, Kenya, attended the same
conference and suggested possibilities for the establishment of a peace park in
the Virunga Volcano region. Lanjouw noted the need for a strategy that
addresses both human needs and conservation of species. The constraints in
establishing such a park were outlined, including the security situation and
the extremely limited resources for the establishment and management of such
areas.[11]
PROJECT ELGON
FLIES HIGH
Samson Werikhe was also a principal player in the enigmatic
1996 “Project Elgon,” sponsored by the University of Aberdeen, U.K. Available
and somewhat sketchy descriptions of the project indicate it was designed to
“assess human activities…by examining the sustainability of current land use
practices, and attitudes towards sustainable land use practices, as well as
assessing the use of and attitudes towards family planning,” in Mount Elgon
National Park, Uganda.[12]
High-resolution satellite maps of Mt. Elgon, taken by the
NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) mentioned earlier in this series,
are available on the web in “cleaned up” versions. Readers can look for
themselves at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/2004/2004061717144.html
The buzzwords for the Mt. Elgon Project were all there:
“sustainability,” “land use,” “community development,” and “family
planning”—the euphemism for population control—“family planning.”
Project Elgon began in 1996, when a few hundred thousand
Rwandan refugees returned from eastern Congo to Rwanda across the border at
Gisenyi, a small town across from Goma, on the shores of Lake Kivu. At least
800,000 refugees were in the refugee camps in Goma alone. (This does not take
into account the numbers in Uganda or Tanzania.) The camps were shelled by the
Rwandan government in September of 1996 in violation of international
humanitarian law, and with complete support of the Pentagon, and the Rwandan
military attacks were amongst the opening forays in the Pentagon-backed war to
overthrow the government of Joseph Mobutu and reorganize the power structure in
Congo/Zaire.[13]
Hundreds of thousands of refugees—mostly women and
children—also fled west into Congo’s forest and were hunted down and
slaughtered by the RPF and UPDF forces; some were reportedly located with the
aid of remote sensing satellite technologies and the awareness and even support
of U.S. government officials.[14]
Sources in Congo are adamant that U.S. government and United Nations (World
Food Program) officials tolerated and even aided the massacres, which were
generally blamed on the Congolese “liberation” forces and the now assassinated
Laurent Desire Kabila that ostensibly led them.[15]
At the same time, the Pentagon had launched major covert
operations from Uganda, including Special Forces operations in western Uganda.
The Pentagon set up high-tech outposts—communications, command, control
and intelligence—in the Ruwenzori Mountains on the Uganda/Zaire border and
on Idjwe Island in Lake Kivu on the Rwandan/Zaire border. The Ugandan air base
at Entebbe served as the U.S. military’s premier base for weapons shipments
into Central Africa: C-130 transport airplanes reportedly landed around the
clock for months during the 1996-1997 invasion.
U.S. Special Ops also set up a covert military operation at
the Makerere University Biological Field Station in Kibale National Park, a
remote research compound shared with foreign wildlife conservation interests,
some thirty minutes by four-wheel drive from Fort Portal, Uganda, near Bwindi
and Mgahinga national parks. The Uganda Wildlife Authority and the Uganda
National Council of Science and Technology managed the research station; the
latter has been heavily funded by USAID.
An undated Memorandum of Agreement lists Thomas Butynski,
the former partner of Klaus-Jurgen Sucker, and Eastern Africa Biodiversity
Hotspots director for Conservation International, as one of thirty-three
signatory individuals committed to supporting the objectives of the Kibale
field station.[16] Permissions
to conduct the research came from Museveni himself—the Ugandan Office of
the President—and other Uganda agencies. [17]
Notably, in one research publication focused on work at
Kibale, the authors described the detrimental impact caused by the massive
infusion of USAID funds in the years just previous to the U.S. military
training at the station. “In the early 1990s the field station received some
large foreign aid grants, primarily from USAID. The amounts were more than
1500% of any annual budget previously required by the project. They induced
conflict over spending, very wasteful allocations to structures and items never
used, and created resentment among Ugandan participants.” [18]
“We saw these Special Ops coming and going,” said one
wildlife conservation professional working on a research project based at the
time inside the shared compound in Kibale. As usual, the source refuses to be
identified out of fear of retaliation and the ruination of his career. [19]
“Everyone knew it was the U.S. military but nobody asked
questions. They were obviously authorized by the Ugandan Government to be there
because they were training Ugandan soldiers to fight in Congo.” The source
reports that the project was funded by the Wildlife Conservation Society,
National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the National Council
for Science and Technology, Makerere University, Harvard, University of Florida
and the University of California at Irvine.”
“This was a very remote station in the jungle. We saw the
U.S. military at hotels in [nearby] Fort Portal, and we saw them in the jungle.
In was quiet in the beginning [1996] but during the invasion of Zaire/Congo,
military planes heading to Congo were flying low over us all the time. All
these colleges and universities from the U.S. use the research station and it’s
huge, and the military were there when we were there, when the shit was hitting
the fan in Zaire [Congo], in 1996 and 1997.”
The timing of the massive infusion of USAID funds for
“conservation” at Kibale raises questions about whether these funds were
intended to construct new facilities soon to be used by the U.S. military for
covert training and covert operations based out of a remote forest. We also
wonder how many of Uganda’s National Parks and “conservation” research
facilities serve as similar covert operation bases.
But back in 1992 the shit was hitting the fan
elsewhere—the battle being waged was for the control of tiny Rwanda. In
one of his last communications, Klaus-Jurgen Sucker would remark on the U.S.
military interest targeting Rwanda from Mgahinga, which straddled the border of
northwestern Rwanda.
The maps and the mapping agencies, the money, the wildlife,
the scientists, the humanitarians and family planners, and the crooks on the
run all converged on little Mgahinga Gorilla Park—and Klaus-Jurgen Sucker
faced them all alone. After Sucker’s death in 1994, the Mgahinga cast of
characters—taken straight from the Kong screenplay—were kept busy
mapping and, as we have shown, they all met again on Mount Elgon, in eastern
Uganda, in 1996.
Sucker’s big mistake was that he opposed big “conservation”
and big “humanitarian” interests. Like Dian Fossey, his hopes for a functioning
park which provided a haven for wildlife was perhaps a myopic vision. He had no
idea what or whom he was really challenging.
There are other critical associations between BINGOs and
DINGOs of today, the world of Klaus Sucker, and powerful U.S. interests, and
these go far beyond “conservation” interests involved in equatorial Africa. But
the story of Klaus-Jurgen Sucker illuminates the dangers inherent in opposing
agendas cloaked in the oxymoron of “conservation”. It seems that Sucker, like
Dian Fossey, paid the ultimate price for his dedication to conservation for its
own sake.
ANTI-CONSERVATION
AGENDAS
To understand the deeper relevance of the Klaus-Jurgen
Sucker’s story in today’s conservation arena it is necessary to take a little
detour back to the future. Some twelve years down the road from the death of
Sucker we can gain some insight into the “conservation” priorities and ethics
of the people Sucker was then dealing with.
In June of 2006 Sucker’s former partner, Thomas Butynski,
came under criticism for a letter of support, which he wrote on Conservation
International letterhead, of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Permit
Application (PRT-837068) that would allow the Yerkes National Primate Center in
the United State to engage in the “lethal taking” of wild Mangabeys (monkeys), over
a 5-year period, the from Ivory Coast.
An additional letter of support for the Yerkes application
came from Dr. Terry Maple, a Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I)
director and former CEO of Zoo Atlanta—and also Butynski’s former
employer after the Sucker episode. Dr. Terry Maple now runs the Palm Beach Zoo.
In his own words, he supported the killing of captive Mangabeys “with
enthusiasm,” and noted that his experiences in Africa dated to 1978.[20]
In fact, Dr. Maple also noted his DFGF-I association, although his letter was
not on DFGFI’s letterhead, but on the letterhead of Georgia Tech University.
Recall that Dr. Faust, The Mad Scientist of Kong: The Map,
was associate director of the Georgia Tech Center for GIS and one of the
principal DFGF-I research scientists for GIS projects. Dr. Faust was one of the
key architects of the GIS terrain surveys with the Rwandan government, DFGF-I,
and the National University of Rwanda (NUR)—the surveys where datasets
were turned over to the Rwandan military. Conservation International’s (CI)
letter on behalf of the Yerkes’ application was surprising to some animal
rights’ groups.
According to the International Primate Protection League,
“CI has over $192 million dollars in assets and could well afford to fund the
Ivory Coast project from its own treasury. It should not be endorsing a project
with a component that involves killing of captive Mangabeys in the United
States.” [21] In essence,
the deal was to trade a field research project on the Ivory Coast for monkey
lives in the Yerkes laboratory in the U.S.
“Yerkes stated that it would pay $30,000 per year to a
Mangabeys study project in the Tai Forest, Ivory Coast, West Africa, run by
Scott McGraw of Ohio State University. In return Yerkes asked to conduct
AIDS-related research on its Mangabey colony and even to kill “superannuated
[old] animals,” as well as monkeys who are “genetically over-represented”
(meaning having too many relatives).” [22]
In April 2006, The Georgia Consortium for Health and Agro
Security submitted a proposal to locate the National Bio and Agro Defense
Facility (NBAF) in Georgia. The proposal noted the “world class bioengineering
programs at the Georgia Institute of Technology,” and that the NBAF program
“reflects a growing appreciation of the need to study…related bioterror
pathogens through the lens of animal, as well as human medicine.” It also
mentioned “unique resources such as the Yerkes Primate facility.” [23]
Due to intense lobbying by animal rights’ groups, the Yerkes
application was rejected. The involvement of the DFGF-I and CI interests in the
Yerkes case makes clear the powerful interests these organizations are prone to
serve, including interests involved in biological warfare and animal
experimentation.
OUT-FOSSEYING
FOSSEY
Friends and family say Klaus Sucker had a life-long dream to
work with the endangered mountain gorillas and other threatened wildlife in the
Great Lakes region of Africa. When he started in 1989, the Mgahinga Forest
reserve was devastated and almost devoid of wildlife, much like the Parc des
Volcans of Rwanda was when Dian Fossey began her tenure there in 1967—and
much like the embattled Virunga National Park and others in the Democratic
Republic of Congo today.
Poaching, smuggling, pit-sawing[24],
cattle grazing and various forms of “illegal” encroachment were common. Mountain
gorillas and other rare animals like golden and blue monkeys, elephants, golden
cats, bushbucks, duikers, tree-hyraxes, and giant forest hogs had retreated to
the high regions of the Muhavura, Sabinyo and Gahinga volcanoes.[25]
Then, like today, there was a constant conflict between humans’ struggle to
survive and the threat to wildlife.
Sucker faced the same ethical conflicts that perplexed Dian
Fossey. The park thrived under his leadership, but he also resisted the rights
of the local people to hunt and gather within the park. Fossey initially had
the same mindset, but by the time of her murder in 1985 she had realized that
humans and wildlife must find ways to coexist.
In a heartbreaking midnight conversation with the murdered
gorillas, “Digit” and “Uncle Bert”, Fossey agonized over whether or not the
publicity she generated for the gorillas would lead to their demise.
“It was black as coal and I could only dimly see the
[gorilla grave] markers. I stood beside Digit a long time still not knowing
what to do, but Digit knew, and Uncle Bert and all the others.” [26]
The latest gorilla deaths then seen at Karisoke were due to
human worm infestations introduced by tourists and researchers, not from the
native population, and Fossey blamed herself for introducing the habituation
process whereby gorillas accepted human presence. The Mountain Gorilla project
had instructed that necropsy results of recent gorilla deaths not be shared
with Fossey, ostensibly due to the fallout which would descend upon the
fledgling tourism industry in Rwanda.
Accounts vary as to the relationship Sucker had with local
villagers. Like Fossey, the most vehement criticism Sucker faced came from big
conservation organizations that wanted access, tourism, and the dollars that
went with it.
While alive, Klaus Sucker was viciously disparaged by CARE
for allegedly violating the rights of indigenous people, especially the Batwa
Pygmies, who relied upon the park for hunting and gathering. However, it seems
the BINGOs may have been seeking to get rid of Sucker at all costs, and so were
prepared to use any argument that served their interest. Indeed, immediately
after Sucker’s death, the tune of the conservation organizations changed as
they pointed their satellites at the villagers “encroaching” on the gorilla
habitat, and then produced their fancy remote-sensing maps to prove it.
In his article exposing the double standards and vested
interests of the BINGOs and DINGOs like Conservation International, writer Mark
Dowie opens with a discussion of how the Batwa of Uganda were blamed for eating
silverbacks—an accusation the Batwa deny—while forcibly being
expelled from their communal forests. Dowie goes on to explore the role of the
BINGOs and DINGOs of conservation as “culture-wrecking” institutions.
“It's no secret that millions of native peoples around the
world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big
timber, and big agriculture,” Mark Dowie wrote in his story Conservation
Refugees. [27]
“But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler
cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking
institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not
only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like
Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World
Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Even the more
culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention,”
Notably, Jane Goodall is on the Advisory Board of the Orion
Society, the group that published Dowie’s article in Orion Magazine.
The Batwa people of Uganda have been severely marginalized,
their human rights universally violated. Even the USAID affiliated reports that
complained about Sucker flagged the urgent humanitarian crises faced by the
Batwa pygmies. Little has changed in their favor.
In his year 2000 Pulitzer series, Chicago Tribune
journalist Paul Salopek quoted Jaap Schoorl, “a Dutch environmental consultant
who worked in Uganda when the German [Sucker] was still booting villagers” out
of Mgahinga National Park. “But we have to face the reality that Africa's wild
places are shrinking islands surrounded by a growing sea of people. Unless we
do something drastic, we're lost,” Salopek quoted Schoorl to say.
But Paul Salopek misidentified Jaap Schoorl, just as he
failed to explore the deeper interests presented as “conservation” organizations
in his articles.
Ulrich Karlowski is the brother of Klaus Jurgen Sucker’s
fiancé, and one of the people who independently tried to investigate Sucker’s
death. According to Karlowski’s testimony in the Gorilla Journal, Jaap
Schoorl was on payroll with CARE as a “technical advisor” for CARE’s
Development through Conservation (DTC) program. Schoorl was advising on “park
management and law enforcement” in the neighboring Bwindi Impenetrable Forest
National Park, another reserve targeted to be a gorilla Mecca for tourists.
Salopek already used two CARE/DTC consultants as “experts” to support his
article, and perhaps that’s why Schoorl was identified merely as a Dutch
environmental consultant: two is a couple, and three was one too many CARE blackbirds
for Salopek’s “conservation” pie.
Schoorl’s job description can be independently verified in
the CARE project summary reports, prepared by the private U.S. consulting firm
Chemonics International.[28]
In November 1994—Sucker died in June—Schoorl
showed writers for the Gorilla Journal a map of the national park with
multiple-use zones and areas of increased poaching; they overlapped nearly
completely. [29] The
evidence clearly showed that the “multiple-use” programs implemented by the
CARE/DTC program were detrimentally affecting wildlife and deterring
conservation.
Jaap Schoorl’s cartographic career advanced rapidly, and by
1998 he was the Director of Operations for the World Wildlife Fund
(WWF)-Cameroon, giving the opening address at a “Conference Report on Capacity
Building in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for World Wide Fund for
Nature.”[30]
The Kribi conference feted the ArcView 3.01, desktop GIS
software from Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI), Redlands,
California, USA. Of course, ESRI is the secretive intelligence and defense
mapping agency allied with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Conservation
International in the Kong: Part Four: the Map segment of our series.
Klaus Sucker had been every bit as tenacious as Dian Fossey,
and he established regular patrols, stalked and harassed the poachers, pit saw
operators and smugglers. Like Fossey, Sucker confiscated cattle that grazed in
the protected areas, but stopped short of spray-painting them as she had. The
rangers, like Fossey’s, were well taken care of, and Sucker made sure they had
shelter. He organized conservation education programs for the people living on
the borders of the protected area. The conservation project that was initially
named the Gorilla Game Reserve Conservation Project (GGRCP) was thriving and
very successful, according to existing reports from the time.
There is also evidence that local public opinion was on
Sucker’s side. In July of 1994, the Ugandan New Vision published a
letter that accused the CARE-DTC project leaders “for a long time [being] on
the neck of this man. His death reportedly by hanging himself in a window
leaves a trail of suspicion.” [31]
Sucker was also commended for doing more on the ground than
“CARE-DTC can ever think of doing.” After Sucker’s death, the surrounding area
and Bwindi became “infested with poachers, gold miners, and pit-sawyers” due to
the “instability” created by CARE. Mining had now entered the picture.
Friends readily list Klaus Sucker’s many achievements. He
confiscated and destroyed 7000 animal traps and snares, stopped destruction of
the forest, ended smuggling and illegal grazing of cattle, recolonized plant
species, established environmentally-friendly gorilla tourism (although Fossey
thought there was no such thing), and created 1500 jobs that were “well paid by
local standards.” [32]
His friends and supporters have set up a website to document his achievements (www.klaus-juergen-sucker.de),
but are reluctant to speak with researchers, due to the terrible aftermath of
the story. Our last in-depth contact with Ulrich Karlowski, Sucker’s then soon
to be brother–in-law, was in 2005. He recently has indicated that there
is not much more he can add to what he has already offered—but perhaps we
can.
According to accounts written in the Gorilla Journal,
Ugandan authorities soon realized that they were sitting on what was probably
the “most successful conservation project in all of Africa.” As a consequence,
the Mgahinga forest was designated a national park and Klaus Sucker was
appointed chief warden. He had out-Fossied Dian Fossey and successfully turned
an unprotected area into one of the “best functioning national parks in
Africa.” Of course, Fossey’s experiences and research had paved the way for
this success. Eventually, the Mgahinga Gorilla National Park had the highest
density of rangers per square mile than all of Uganda’s national parks.
However, there are no interviews or reports from the villagers who were also a part
of this (his-) story.
According to Sucker, by June of 1992, the protected area was
enlarged and some 1305 farmers, who had been “illegally” using the recently
annexed “Zone 2” of the park, gave up their animal husbandry practices and left
the area. Supposedly, this was done on a voluntary basis after all concerned
had a democratic vote and some 273 affected families received financial
compensation.
Sucker’s report, published in the August 1993 Gorilla
Conservation News, documented a “compensation for the former encroachers”
which was “underway with USAID and CARE in Kampala (Uganda).”
Again there was a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) of the
same sort that was peddled to the Mwamis in the Tayna Reserve of Part Three of
our Kong series: The Mwami’s Tale.
“The encroached Zone 2 of MGNP was voluntarily left by the
illega1 settlers and land-users following a time-table, which was agreed up on
in the memorandum of understanding. Between June and December 1992 this process
went on in a peaceful and orderly manner. Violence was avoided from the
beginning under the control of the Ugandan National Park (UNP) and the project.
People shifting their homesteads from the National Park were supported by UNP
with poles and bamboo taken from Zone 2. People were allowed to harvest their
remaining crops until certain dates agreed in the memorandum of understanding.
Cattle grazing and the grazing of domestic animals were stopped by the catt1e
grazers according to the dates agreed,” Sucker reported.
This resettlement project became a model for similar
projects in other national parks. It looked as if it might be really possible
to enlarge the habitat of the mountain gorilla. For the first time in history,
there could be, and there was, a reversal in habitat loss through cooperation
and promises made and kept.
The animals thrived. The number of observed gorillas in the
Mgahinga forest increased from 25 to 45 and they stayed for longer periods and
more often. One group of gorillas spent an entire year in the forest, the first
time such an event had been observed in more than 40 years. Buffalos and
elephants returned and were seen in areas that had been abandoned by their
species.
There is no doubt that the Mgahinga project, with Sucker
running it, was a success for wildlife. This is not the case in the Democratic
Republic of Congo today, despite the massive influx of “conservation” dollars
into the region. As we pointed out previously, the northern white rhino of
Congo’s Garamba National Park is all but finished, but the news has yet to be
revealed for fear of upsetting donors and raising untidy questions. Wildlife
and environmental protection has failed miserably in the DRC, for all the CARPE
landscapes, National Reserves and National Parks. Judging by the constant flow
of press releases and gruesome photos of severed gorilla heads from
conservation organizations bemoaning the loss of gorilla after gorilla, and the
steady accumulation of gorilla orphans, nowhere is this failure more evident
than in the DRC’s Virunga National Park.
Again, there are no reports that we have found that document
how the villagers felt about the unfolding changes at Mgahinga. Were Sucker
alive and running the project at Mgahinga based on today’s exclusive Western
model of conservation, we might as quickly be criticizing Sucker for
marginalizing the local population and remaining silent about the green
political issues at stake in Uganda, just as we are doing with the BINGOs and
DINGOs involved in DRC. But the information is missing from Mgahinga and Sucker
is dead.
It may be that Sucker’s reports were optimistically biased
in favor of his own interests. More than 2000 people were displaced or evicted
from Mgahinga after the national park was declared in 1991, and the average
compensation paid was some $27 per person. Compensation was paid for physical
structures and permanent crops, but there was no compensation paid for losses
of land or land ownership; some people got nothing at all.[33]
By any standard, the legitimate landowners and long-term residents were
short-changed in the deal.
Mount Elgon is another story for which information is
available. The villagers there have a voice, and the evidence is damning to
modern conservation.
In 1993, three years before the genesis of Project Elgon,
and one year before the death of Sucker, the Ugandan government gazetted Mount
Elgon as a national park. Writing in the 2006 New Internationalist Magazine,
Timothy Byakola and Chris Lang said, “The people living within its boundaries
lost all their rights.”
According to Byakola and Lang, SGS (Societe Generale de
Surveillance) thinks the villagers never had any rights to begin with. “The
encroachers have never had legal rights to farm the land and the Ugandan
Wildlife Authority (UWA) is legally entitled to evict settlers from inside the
boundary.”
SGS is a company contracted to oversee a current carbon
offset project on Mt. Elgon, whereby guilty carbon users can pay a Dutch
organization, Forests Absorbing Carbon-dioxide Emissions (FACE) to have trees
planted to counterbalance their carbon emissions.
This “ruthless” eviction of villagers, without compensation,
is a story we have heard repeatedly, ad nauseum.
The testimony given by Byakola and Lang is very specific.
“In March 2002, UWA evicted more people from Mount Elgon,
many of whom had lived on the land for over 40 years. Park rangers destroyed
villagers' houses and cut down their crops. With nowhere to go, the evicted
people were forced to move to neighboring villages where they lived in caves
and mosques. The families living in the caves had to keep fires burning all
night to protect their children from the cold.” [34]
“UWA's park rangers receive paramilitary training,” New
Vision reported. The article quoted David Wikikona, a Member of Parliament
for the region. “The wildlife people who operate there are very militarized,
and have killed over 50 people. People feel that the Government favors animals
more than the people.”
New Internationalist Magazine quoted village elder
Cosia Masolo, who lived in a nearby village for over 50 years: “When the UWA
people came with their tree-planting activities, they stopped us from getting
important materials from the forest. We were stopped from going up to get
malewa (bamboo shoots), which is a very important traditional food here and is
a source of income.”
CARE PENETRATES
MGAHINGA
Things were looking unbelievably good in Mgahinga Park from
a strictly conservation for-its-own-sake point of view until 1993, when the
BINGO, CARE, materialized with planned projects for multiple-use of the
Mgahinga forest. Fossey faced the same opposition from the USAID sponsored
Mountain Gorilla Project in Rwanda in 1978. After the Earth summit in Rio de
Janeiro of 1993, “sustainable use” was the magic phrase that would guarantee
funding.
If CARE was going to get funding for “sustainable use” in
Mgahinga Park, the first order of business would be to allow honey collectors,
herb harvesters, bamboo cutters and other indigenous people access to the park.
Sucker was in vehement opposition to these plans. While it was a noble thought
to preserve traditional forest uses, the reality of increased population
pressure, i.e., more users, he reasoned, would be destructive to the
environment.
Klaus-Jurgen Sucker was not alone in his opposition to these
plans—international scientists and the Ugandan National Parks
organization backed him up. Mgahinga consists of 35 square kilometers, of which
two square kilometers were in the “degraded Zone 2.” The fear at the time was
that any disturbance would cause the gorillas and other animals to retreat back
into the mountains. CARE forged ahead with its sustainable use trials, which
resulted in the gorillas and other animals suffering the consequences, just as
Sucker had predicted. A group of mountain gorillas with a newborn left the area
and did not settle down for days, according to field reports Sucker left
behind.
Phillip Franks and Rob Wild were the CARE-DTC Project
leaders who swooped into Mgahinga Park with briefcases full of cash and utopian
visions of sustainable use. A conflict with Sucker was inevitable. Friends of
Sucker say that lobbying the CARE leaders was useless. They also charge that
attempts were made to bribe Sucker into silence and complicity, but that Sucker
refused the unholy pact.
Meanwhile DTC scheduled regular meetings with villagers to
convince them that the involvement of CARE would improve their surroundings and
standard of living. Agro-forestry was the first idea, but the farmers only
received some bamboo shoots that had been taken from the gorilla habitat.
Sucker’s friends and critics of CARE say that CARE was totally unwilling to
cooperate with the established conservation projects. By giving the villagers
bamboo shoots taken from the gorilla habitat, CARE indicated that it was trying
to take over the conservation project and become the sole organization working
in Mgahinga. Fossey fought the same battle with the Mountain Gorilla Project
that encroached on her turf.
CARE/DTC wanted Mgahinga and the millions of aid dollars
that would flow with it.
Eventually, the Ugandan national park system capitulated to
the forces behind CARE and ordered Jurgens’s transfer to another Ugandan park
on short notice in 1994; he was ordered to leave by August 1994. On June 16 he
returned from a trip to Kampala to his home in Kisoro. He had traveled to
Kampala to ascertain the reasons for his transfer, and while there he received
warnings that his life was in danger. His fiancé said that he was not able to
learn more about the reasons behind the threats. Friends say that Sucker felt
as if he was in danger in Kisoro and took every precaution to keep his
departure and whereabouts a secret, according to testimony in the Gorilla
Journal. Nobody, not even his neighbors, knew about his plans.
Sucker started to pack and made preparations for a
transition to the new park warden’s position. He was found dead on June 20,
with “a noose around his neck and his feet on the floor.” [35]
The other end of the bright red rope was attached to the window bars. The
remnants of his last lunch were on the table and packed boxes were everywhere.
Everything suggests that Klaus Jurgen Sucker was prepared for the transfer,
looking forward to his marriage, and eating his half-finished lunch.
Ugandan and German authorities were quick to speculate that
Sucker committed suicide out of the disappointment of his imminent transfer.
However, friends insisted that Sucker was eagerly looking forward to starting a
family and anxious to marry his girlfriend of nine years. His fiancé maintains
that they were shadowed in the weeks preceding his death—there was no
farewell letter, and he had another job lined up.
The authorities ultimately listed suicide as the cause of
death. However, friends and associates insist to this day that Klaus Jurgen
Sucker was murdered.
The autopsy was performed under German conditions, according
to Karlowski, and therefore did not take into account the unique situation of
the African environment. The official wording was ambiguous: “The situation in
which the deceased body was found and the pathological-anatomical evidence do
not exclude suicide by hanging.” [Emphasis
added.]
Hardly a “CSI-worthy analysis,” Karlowski says, invoking the
popular television program.
Fossey’s murder investigation—or lack
thereof—including the lost and found again evidence, and lost and found
again hair, dueling French and FBI lab reports, bloody flashlights, and another
mysteriously hanged man—possess striking similarities.
The reasons friends and associates do not buy the suicide analysis
include the obvious facts that Sucker was a dedicated conservationist who
clearly had many enemies. These ranged from poachers and smugglers to the
leaders of the developmental aid projects that wanted to establish sustainable
use projects in such a small national park. Like his predecessor, Dian Fossey,
Sucker’s first priority was the protection of the plants and animals that
inhabited the park—and he paid the price with his life, they say.
Dairy entries from a dead man provide interesting fodder for
a deeper analysis of the monkey hole, and a voice whispering from beyond the
grave. Sucker’s entries make stark reference to CARE-DTC personnel Rob Wild and
Philip Franks who arrived on the Mgahinga scene in 1993.
On March 16, 1994 Sucker wrote:
“The extension of my work permit is prevented by USAID
and Rob Wild.”
On March 28, Sucker described a meeting he had with Eric
Edroma, the then director of the Ugandan National Parks.
“He (Edroma) took me aside and confided that Rob Wild,
Rob Clausen (Director of CARE in Uganda) and somebody else had stormed into his
office and vehemently protested against the prolongation of my stay. Edroma
tried to straighten things out.”
Diary notes from April 17:
“Philip Franks told Edroma that he feels I am opposing everything
that comes from DTC. The work permit has still not come through.”
According to the written testimony of Ulrich Karlowski,
Edroma told Sucker that CARE and USAID were blackmailing him. USAID would pull
all of its funding they said, if Sucker did not leave Mgahinga. According to
Karlowski, three independent sources confirmed his testimony.
By May 1994, there were allegations of pilfered mail from
the post office and other machinations by all parties involved.
But it is the diary entry of May 18, 1994 that perhaps sheds
the most light into our monkey hole and explains exactly why USAID would be so
interested in little Mgahinga Park, its mobile gorillas and Batwa honey
gatherers.
“It is apparent that the US-American (sic) government is
placing great effort into trying to control the frontier areas into Rwanda. The
Mgahinga Project is located in one of these frontier areas which supposedly is
(sic) valued for its potential to control, aid, and stabilize the neighboring
country.”
In May of 1994, Rwanda was smack in the middle of the 100
days of carnage known as the Rwandan genocide.
Giving the eulogy at the 2006 memorial service of the
respected American ex-patriot and African philanthropist, Rosamond Carr, the
Reverend Ted Cleary vividly recalled the events of 1994: “In the spring of 1994
there was a tremendous holocaust which hit this country (Rwanda) in a most
unimaginable way. It fell into a terrible abyss and seared its mountains and
its valleys.” [36]
CARE had made many promises to the local population, but in
the year following the death of Sucker only one representative of CARE briefly
visited the park headquarters, according to Ulrich Karlowski (brother of
Sucker’s fiancé). Feeling abandoned by CARE, the villagers welcomed Bergorilla
& Regenwald Direkthilfe (BRD) representatives Karlowski and Karl-Heinz
Kohnen in November 1994. The villagers expressed disappointment and said they
were “deceived” by CARE/DTC.
In the aftermath, Philip Johnston, at that time director of
CARE USA, delivered an ultimatum to BRD that they must recant all allegations
against CARE and its employees in the death of Sucker. If BRD did not meet this
demand, CARE would demand immediate action from the German consulate. Wishing
to avoid an international incident, BRD suggested an inquiry and re-evaluation
involving CARE, USAID, Uganda National Parks (UNP) and persons from the
International Gorilla Conservation Program (IGCP). BRD backed the proposal by saying that if CARE’s staff had
nothing to hide, they would welcome the re-evaluation.
Ten days before Johnson’s threat, BRD received a letter from
Edroma, Director of Uganda National Parks, suspending all research work in
Mgahinga. This included all studies, not just those of BRD. All access to the
gorillas was denied.
In May 1995, after passions had cooled, BRD again went to
CARE to see if a compromise could be worked out which would benefit the
gorillas and conservation work in general. Philip Johnson said he welcomed the
overture, but never stood up to an offer he made for a meeting of all parties
involved, including CARE, UNP and BRD, according to Karlowski.[37]
Finally, by August 1995, Edroma called for bids for donor
support to the Mgahinga National Park. The organization with highest bid would
get the opportunity to manage the park. CARE was ostensibly backed by a 57
million dollar budget from USAID.[38]
Klaus Jurgen Sucker saw his work at Mgahinga as a success
that threatened powerful interests beyond his grasp.
“Although
this final report should be viewed with consideration to the fact that my
involvement in the MGNP (Mgahinga Gorilla National Park) was prematurely
terminated,” Sucker wrote to BRD
colleagues prior to his death, “the goals of the project, i.e. to
establish a functioning national park and to improve the protection of the
local flora and fauna, were successfully met. To install another person to
continue the project is unrealistic and of high risk, particularly in view of
the possible motives for my transfer. Unfortunately, the remaining time
available to me before my transfer on August 1, 1994, does not permit me to
travel to Germany right now to personally inform you of the current situation.
I will undertake everything in my power to personally get in touch with you as
soon as possible.”
These are Klaus-Jurgen Sucker's concluding lines in his final letter to the
German NGO Deutscher Tierschutzbund, dated June 15. The letter arrived after
his death.[39]
Phil Franks is still working with CARE.
A long time CARE executive, Philip Johnston was voted to
CARE’s Presidency in 1989. From October 1992 through March 1993, Dr. Johnston
served as Coordinator for Humanitarian Assistance for the United Nations in
Somalia (UNOSOM) at the request on the U.N. Secretary General. Stationed in
Mogadishu, he directed the integration of all “humanitarian” organizations with
the military in the wake of civil war and famine. Dr. Johnston was received at
the White House by President Bush and thanked for his accomplishments. Of
course, Somalia was a debacle where the “humanitarian” community—the
misery industry—was the principal agent in the deconstruction of Somalia
and the rise of war and suffering. It was all about private profits, and
CARE—like Save the Children and UNICEF—were all there for a piece
of the donor pie. Journalist Michael Maren exposed the realities in his book
the Road to Hell: the Ravishing Effects of International Aid and Foreign
Charity (The Free Press, 1997).
By June of 1994, Philip Johnson was the spokesman for CARE
in Rwanda, during the height of the atrocities there. Quoted by Knight/Ridder
News in a special to the Boston Globe, Johnston commented on the death
of local CARE workers—all of CARE’s foreign nationals were
evacuated—and predicted a famine in the region.
“Philip Johnston, director of CARE, the world's largest
private relief and development agency, said Friday that the confirmed death
toll among CARE employees caught in Rwandan civil strife had risen to five and
that the fate of many others and of their families, a number in the hundreds,
was unknown.”
“Meanwhile, Johnston said, a deepening drought in East Africa threatened as
many as 20 million people. In nine countries centered in the Horn of Africa
‘famine is only a few months away,’ he said.[40]
Johnston said nothing about the U.S. military involvement,
just as he supported the Pentagon’s true mission in Somalia.
Johnston continued as CARE President until 1996.
Putting the whole (his) story of conservation in the Great
Lakes Region of Central Africa under the monkey scope, CARE’s foray into Uganda
has remarkable similarities to the Conservation International/DFGF-I landscape
projects in DRC today.
CARE officials in Congo have not responded to our
communications about CARE projects in the USAID-funded CARPE landscapes that
stretch across Central Africa.
A CHALLENGE TO
CARE
Reporting for the Chicago Tribune, Paul Salopek’s
Pulitzer-prize winning reportage is full of de facto advertisements peddling the interests of the BINGOs
and DINGOs operating in central Africa. There were three CARE spokesmen, though
one was not identified as such, in one article alone. Salopek quotes WWF
experts as if they are purely involved in what we—the general American
public—have erroneously come to perceive as wildlife “conservation”
dedicated to “environmental” protection. As we have previously shown in this
series, and will show more, these BINGOs and DINGOs are involved in all kinds
of nefarious activities, even siding with logging companies—in both
Congo-Brazzaville and DRC—and petroleum companies—in
Gabon—against local people and indigenous resistance movements. Paul
Salopek never challenges the hidden agendas of the organizations whose
professional experts speak freely in his stories.
One WWF top-level official, a member of the WWF-USA National
Council, is Douglas C. Yearley, currently Chairman Emeritus of Phelps Dodge
Corporation—a mining giant involved in illegal mining in Congo’s Katanga
province. Douglas C. Yearley is also a director of Lockheed Martin, a corporate
partner of Zoo Atlanta and a military contractor connected to Beale A.F.B. Of
course, World Wildlife Fund is partnered with USAID and CARE in “conservation”
projects all over Central Africa. They are also throwing sand in the eyes of
the local people.
In “Africa’s Wildlife Runs out of Room,” Salopek quotes
Jackson Mutebi, a biologist also working for CARE’s Development through
Conservation Program, and the article presents the appearance of being
balanced, even critical of Western conservation agendas.
“The rich world wants places like Mgahinga preserved, and
they usually get their way, but it’s always at the expense of the local people
who live here,” Salopek quoted Mutebi to say. “When these places became parks
in the early 1990’s, thousands of villagers lost access to firewood, building
materials, food and medicinal plants overnight. They were so mad they were
ready to hunt gorillas out of revenge. Our job is to try and find ways to
compensate their losses.”
Salopek’s next paragraph presents CARE biologist Jackson
Mutebi (quoted above) doing just what he says needs to be done. “Dozens of
local workmen were putting the finishing touches on a gigantic water tank,”
Salopek wrote, noting Mutebi’s leadership. “The metal cistern, paid for by the
United Nations, eventually will supply 36,000 nearby villagers with tap water.
The water is being piped from a wetland inside the park. Prime gorilla
habitat.”
However, in the equations of power that exist today the net
losses to the environment and people in Uganda are huge. These equations of
power—structural factors dictating structural violence—are not
explored by Paul Salopek or the Chicago Tribune.
While CARE’s DTC project will pump water from a swamp in
“prime gorilla habitat” to some 36,000 villagers, the national water supply
annually suffers a massive loss of fresh water from Coca Cola bottling
operations in Uganda. A typical Coke plant will annually turn some 1,000,000
gallons of water—no matter how you look at it—into sludge.
Mining and petroleum operations in Uganda further devastate
water and soils, and big multinational agribusiness—some of the partners
and corporate sponsors of BINGOs like CARE and the IGCP partner Fauna and Flora
International—dump tons of pesticides into the environment. Genetically
modified crops are another blight on the commons of Uganda and these too come
with the partners of the BINGOs and DINGOs.
Coke is a major partner of CARE. “Coca-Cola and CARE have
been partners for decades as investors in a better world,” CARE’s corporate
alliance PR reads. “The Coca-Cola Company and CARE are working hand-in-hand to
create significant, effective and sustainable solutions to address global water
and sanitation concerns.”
This is greenwashing.
Any positive impact of CARE’s operations in Mgahinga is more
than offset by the detrimental and sustainable exploitation of Uganda by CARE’s corporate allies. These include
big pharmaceutical companies (Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Johnson &
Johnson, Pfizer); big agro-business (ConAgra, Cargill, McDonalds), big nuclear
(GE, Exelon), big transport (Boeing, Daimler-Chrysler, Delta, Ford, General
Motors), big chemical (3M, Abbott Labs), big timber (Weyerhaeuser, also a
member of the Congo Basin Forest Partnership), and big defense and intelligence
(Boeing, Ford, GE, Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Lockheed Martin).
President Museveni personally sampled the first Coca-Cola
products produced at the Coke bottling plant constructed in Uganda in the late
1990’s.
CARE is also partnered with ORACLE, the intelligence and
defense company involved in high-tech satellite mapping, the company we met in Kong:
Part Four: the Map.
But these “conservation” and “humanitarian” organizations’
ties to devastation and despair in Central Africa—as opposed to
development and prosperity—run deep and silent. U.S., U.K. and Israeli
interests are all over Uganda, and Uganda—like Kenya—serves as a
major base of military operations and support for U.S. military and economic
agendas in Somalia, Congo and Sudan. USAID is pivotal, and is now considered a
major affiliated partner in the new AFRICOM—the Pentagon’s Africa
Command.[41]
“AFRICOM aims to bring together intelligence, diplomatic,
health and aid experts. Staff will be drawn from all branches of the military,
as well as USAID and the departments of state, agriculture, treasury, and
commerce. These nonmilitary staff may be funded with money from their own
departments as well as the DOD.” [42]
USAID is a “soft” asset of the U.S. Department of Defense,
and USAID has been involved with the Pentagon’s so-called “counter-terrorism”
and other initiatives for years. According to one USAID document, “Combating
terrorism also requires closer coordination between the Department of Defense
(DOD) and USAID.” [43]
USAID is also aligned with the Partnership to Cut Hunger and
Poverty in Africa (PCHPA). PCHPA’s advisory committee members today include
Olivier Legrand of Conservation International, three USAID directors, and the
President of the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa from the U.S.
PCHPA co-chairmen from 2000 to at least 2004 included
President of Uganda Yoweri Museveni. Other members included Peter Seligman, CEO
of Conservation International and George Rupp, President of the BINGO
International Rescue Committee, and a member of the board of the Pulitzer Prize
committee for 2001, the year Paul Salopek won a Pulitzer for articles.
The Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa is
deeply tied to interests connected to the DINGOs of the “conservation” arena,
including the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Conservation International. Africa
Society sponsors include Archers Daniels Midland, Coca-Cola, Chevron-Texaco,
Exxon-Mobil, Daimler Chrylser, and Ford—many of the same corporate
partners of CARE.
Not only involved with CARE, the African Wildlife Foundation
is one of the BINGOs involved with USAID, CI, WWF, JGI and the DFGF-I. AWF
partners include the European Commission, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Forest
Service, and USAID. It is not surprising to find that one of the AWF’s premier
sponsors is Barrick Gold Corporation. It is also not surprising than one AWF
director, Walter Kansteiner, is deeply connected to gold and coltan mining in
eastern Congo today, and was a National Security director for William Jefferson
Clinton.
“CARE works with poor communities in more than 70 countries
around the world to find lasting solutions to poverty,” reads the CARE USA web
site. “We look at the big picture of poverty, and go beyond the symptoms to
confront underlying causes. With a broad range of programs based on
empowerment, equity and sustainability, CARE seeks to tap human potential and
leverage the power of individuals and communities to unleash a vast force for
progress.”
CARE USA is based in Atlanta, Georgia, the corporate base
for the Georgia Institute of Technology, Goodworks International, Georgia
Research Alliance, Zoo Atlanta, and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund
International—the mapmakers, monkey smugglers, and Mayor of our Kong
series who are exploiting central Africa.
CARE doesn’t care about people, or the environment, and they
didn’t set out to build local capacity or any kind of equitable “development”
in Mgahinga National Park, just as they are not doing in Congo. CARE and
DFGF-I and Chemonics set out to capture donor funding: they want to get at the
money, and grow their organizations, and cycle the money back to themselves,
and to do that they must have control of the land, the natural resource base,
and the gorillas—a saleable commodity.
Klaus Jurgen Sucker stood in the way of CARE’s control of
the landscape. With Sucker gone the proposals could be written, the promises
made, the funds captured. But the actual work didn’t need to proceed in the
field with any seriousness, just as “capacity building” in Congo is meaningless
as long as a clique of powerful white interests—with their requisite
black partners bribed and rewarded—controls and manipulates the system
from start to finish.
Accountability for these projects is unnecessary, because
this is Central Africa. The territory is inaccessible territory—the
promised roads never repaired. The leaders are corrupt—because they are
rewarded for corruption and are working for a corrupt clique. The Congolese and
Ugandan people can’t run their own show, they are uneducated—the promised
schools never built, the education stunted. Where schools do exist, they are
typically the most rudimentary and insulting examples of patronage, still they
are held up as evidence of our generous support. The “education” itself is the
most elementary: no books, no computers, no desks, no windows, and no paper:
nothing to insure that students will be able to take charge of their own future
and compete with foreign “experts” for the only paying jobs that might exist.
And it is impossible to learn when one is sick and hungry. Outsiders who question the state of
affairs maintained by the misery and conservation industries—and their
elite cliques—are either ignored altogether, or are quickly and
arrogantly challenged. “Who are you? What do you know about it anyways? You
have not been here. You don’t know what it is like. This is Africa.”
THE SILENCING OF
THE LAMBS
The ongoing war in northern Uganda involves massive rapes,
killing, tortures, and extrajudicial executions as a policy by the Ugandan
military. Some 1.3 million people have been displaced in the Gulu, Kitgum and
Pader districts of northern Uganda. There are over 73 camps with from 1000 to
50,000 people in them, all forcibly displaced by UPDF soldiers, with over
350,000 people out of some 400,000 people displaced from the Gulu district alone.[44]
Forced displacements occurred after UPDF bombed, and burned
Acholiland villages, and beat, killed, raped and threatened people into moving.
Some of the displacements occurred prior to 1993, but the most recent round of
forced displacements began in 1996 and peaked in the years 2002-2005.[45]
The entire “conservation” community, as in Congo, and
Rwanda, is silent. Paul Salopek said nothing about the Ugandan military
“adventures” in Rwanda, Congo, or Sudan, involvement in war and devastation,
but ultimately aimed at private profit and resource plunder. The Chicago
Tribune has not reported on the true causes for the conflict and suffering
in northern Uganda: almost no one has. Of course, they have not reported on the
big oil and gold investments in these areas either.
Indeed, this is Africa. Things fall apart.
Insight into the priorities of the “international community”
can be gained by examining the 2001 report Beyond Boundaries: Transboundary
Natural Resources Management for the Mountain Gorillas in the Virunga-Bwindi
Region, published by the Biodiversity Support Program, a consortium of the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature
Conservancy, and the World Resources Institute, that was funded by USAID. [46]
From 1998 to 2001, the BSP effort (1998-2001) brought together
the “conservation” authorities from three warring states: the Office of Rwanda
Parks and Tourism and National Parks, the Institute Congolais Pour a
Conservation de la Nature (I.C.C.N.) from Congo, and Uganda Wildlife Authority.
As the title of the report indicates, these experts addressed difficult issues
affecting the transboundary gorilla
habitats in the Great Lakes region—those nomadic gorilla groups and the
inconvenience of the international borders of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.
The report offers insights into the mechanics of
international wildlife protection applied to a war zone that has claimed
millions and millions of people’s lives.
“In all three countries the park staff also works closely
with military authorities, to ensure security in and around the parks for park
staff as well as visitors to the parks,” the authors reported. “In Rwanda and
DR Congo the military has provided training for park guards, and park
management has held special training sessions with military staff on the value of
conservation and the forest. Owing to the political climate, the park guards
patrol and monitor the park accompanied by military staff. Joint military-park
patrols are currently the norm in all three countries, and joint patrols
between countries also involve both park staff and military. The military also
provides protection for tourists, researchers and veterinarians entering the
park to conduct their normal activities.”
[47]
How do conservation organizations achieve what the United
Nations, the Security Council, the “international community,” and national
governments cannot achieve? How is “international cooperation” to protect
gorillas and gorilla habitat achieved in a landscape awash in human blood? Why
is the protection of wildlife a higher priority than the protection of the
millions of people who live in the Great Lakes region?
It is notable that conservation agents from National Parks
and their agencies are jointly patrolling parks with military staff, but it is
even more intriguing that the militaries of the three countries can maintain
“joint patrols between countries.”
Yet—even after the production of monumental United Nations Panel
of Experts reports qualifying the operations of these government militaries and
their elite trafficking networks in destabilizing the region and naming both
the regional and international agents and corporations involved—little
has been done to stem the illegal commerce in natural resources, illegal
weapons shipments, the money-laundering or extortion, or the massive slaughter
of innocent men, women and children.
Said differently, while the DFGF-I and CARE and USAID and
the International Gorilla Conservation Project secured the international and
in-country political will to protect some 700 mountain gorillas, and even
institutionalized the economic, political and military infrastructure to make
such massive protection initiatives possible, they have also willfully secured
the political will to allow, even facilitate, widespread and sustained looting,
torture, rape and massacres. These are institutionalized, as well, in their own
ways, as international and regional policies for land acquisition and
depopulation.
This is structural violence. This is what the Western mass
media is silent about. This is what the mythologies of the Western mass media
are all about, and what the conservation organizations and humanitarian
agencies are covering up or deflecting attention from.
The juxtaposition between the atrocities—massive war
crimes, crimes against humanity, acts of genocide—and the hustle and
bustle of international tourism, with military chaperones into the gorilla
areas is perhaps the most telling. Is it any wonder that Daryl Hannah and her
escorts encounter locals who “look angry, as though we are insulting them by driving
past, as foreigners do each day, on $1,000-a-day safaris to see the gorillas?” [48]
“Privately,” Paul Salopek wrote, in one of his central
Africa pieces, “some of the wildlife biologists involved [in Central Africa]
admit that a fierce game of public relations one-upmanship—rooted in
competition for donor funding—has marred the race to conserve Africa’s
last true wilderness.”
It was a massive understatement.
“There's a lot of talk that goes into thin air," said a
foreign park planner in Cameroon, Paul Salopek continued. “We don't cooperate,
we don't even talk to each other, and a lot of effort gets duplicated.”
Closing out his article on Mgahinga, where he disparaged
Klaus-Jurgen Sucker as a bulldog warden whose work paled in comparison to the
BINGOs who ruined him, Paul Salopek points readers a few miles to the east,
across the Congo border. Salopek’s trip in 2000 from Mgahinga to the Virunga’s
National Park in Congo—home to the other half of the world’s gorilla
populations—found a “spooky, derelict national park that [had] doubled as
a battlefield for nearly two years.”
That’s where we took the Road to the Tayna Conservation
Center in 2007. We set off to find out about the millions in USAID funds
disappearing in a landscape where the same has happened to millions of innocent
people. We wanted to check out the initiatives of the BINGOs and DINGOs, like
the population control programs of the Jane Goodall Institute and their USAID
and Conservation International partners.
~
*
NEXT:
KONG PART SIX:
“The Road to Tayna—Fear and Loathing in the CARPE
Landscapes of Central Africa”
[1] Klaus J. Sucker; “The Mgahinga Gorilla National Park,” article in Wildlife Clubs of Uganda 1992, pp.27-29 www.klaus-juergen-sucker.de
[2] Mid-term Evaluation of the CARE Development Through Conservation (DTC) Project; Grant Number 617-0124-G-00-91-01-00; http://rmportal.net/sitemap
[3] Communication between Ulrich Karlowski and Georgianne Nienaber, June 26, 2007.
[4] Testimony regarding Klaus Sucker’s reports and diary entries in this investigation is generally taken directly from the written remarks of Ulrich Karlowski, the brother of Klaus Jurgen Sucker’s fiancé.
[5] Indian Country Today; March 3, 2007
[6] Letter from Tom Butynski to United States Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service; December 13, 2005.
[13] See: Howard W. French, Africa: A Continent of the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa; and Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999.
[14] See: Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999; keith harmon snow and David Barouski, “Behind the Numbers: Suffering in Congo,” Z Magazine, July 2006; “Stolen Goods: Coltan and Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Dena Montague, SAIS Review, Vol. XXII, No. 1,Winter-Spring 2002.
[15] Private interviews, keith harmon snow, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2004-2007
[17] Colin Chapman, et al, “Thirty Years of Research in
Kibale National Park, Uganda, Reveals a Complex Picture for Conservation,” International
Journal of Primatology, Vol. 26, No. 3, June 2005; DOI:
10.1007/s10764-005-4365-z.
[18] Colin Chapman, et al, “Thirty Years of Research in Kibale National Park, Uganda, Reveals a Complex Picture for Conservation,” International Journal of Primatology, Vol. 26, No. 3, June 2005; DOI: 10.1007/s10764-005-4365-z.
[19] Interview, September 2006, keith harmon snow
[20] Letter from Terry L. Maple, PhD. To U.S. Department of the Interior, December 10, 2005
[22] Ibid
[24] Traditional sawing: a log is positioned over a pit with a man above (lifting) and one below (guiding).
[25] Gorilla Journal.
[26] Fossey Archives, McMaster University, Hamilton ON and Woman in the Mists, Farley Mowat p. 349.
[27] Mark Dowie, “Conservation Refugees,” Orion Magazine, November/December 2005.
[28] Evaluation of the Development Through Conservation (DTC) Project; Grant Number 617-0124-G-00-91-01-00; http://rmportal.net/sitemap
[29] http://www.berggorilla.org/english/gjournal/texte/10bwindi.html
[30] http://www.iicd.org/photos/iconnect/Stories/Story.import3958
[31] Letter from Sam Tumuhaise to New Vision, July 23, 1994
[32] Ulrich Karlowski. “For a Fistful of Dollars,” Gorilla Journal, 1996
[33] W.M. Adams and
Mark Infield, COMMUNITY CONSERVATION AT MGAHINGA GORILLA NATIONAL PARK,
UGANDA, (undated: 1999?).
[34] New Internationalist, July 1, 2006
[35] www.kilimajaro.com/gorilla/brd/klaus2.htm
[36] Video record of Rosamond Carr Memorial Service, November 2006.
[37] Ulrich Karlowski. “For a Fistful of Dollars,” Gorilla
Journal, 1996
[38] BRD Archives: www.kilimanjaro.com/gorilla/brd/1-1995.htm
[39] http://www.kilimanjaro.com/gorilla/brd/klaus.htm
[40] Randolph Ryan, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, June 4, 1994.
[41] Numerous USAID and U.S. State Department media advisories cite USAID’s support of AFRICOM and discussions with the Pentagon about support of AFRICOM.
[42] Stephanie Hanson, The Pentagon’s New Africa Command, Council on Foreign Relations, May 3, 2007, http://www.cfr.org/publication/13255/.
[43] Doug Menarchik, USAID and the War on Terrorism, USAID Summer Seminar Series, August 9, 2005:
[44] Karen Parker, Forced Displacement in Northern
Uganda, United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of
Human Rights, http://www.webcom.com/hrin/parker/sub01wsu.html.
[45] keith harmon snow, “Hidden War, Massive Suffering: Another White People’s War for Oil,” Global Research, May 26, 2007 http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=49.
[46] The BSP began in 1988 and reportedly closed down in 2001.
[47] Annette Lanjouw, et al, Beyond Boundaries: Transboundary Natural Resources Management for the Mountain Gorillas in the Virunga-Bwindi Region, Biodiversity Support Program, c/o World Wildlife Fund, Washington DC, 2001: P. 27.
[48] Richard Bangs, “Silverback Mountain: Where Gorilla Roam,” Richard Bangs Adventures: http://adventures.yahoo.com/b/adventures/adventures2988;_ylt=AmDtN9V6xjqmWv3YnomVQsTDW8sF;_ylu=X3oDMTBjamtzcG1mBHNlYwNoei1zdG9yeQ .