Authors: Mickey Huff
Hence, for example, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), is most active in fifteen “focus countries” of geostrategic importance to the US: thirteen African countries and Haiti and Vietnam.
4
As Lasensky wrote:
The truth is that the vast majority of US aid goes to countries that are not poor, not free or both. This should not be cause for moral outrage. It simply reflects the cold fact that foreign aid—$18 billion in 2004, under the president’s budget—is still allocated primarily on the basis of American political and strategic needs and priorities, rather than pure humanitarianism. And this is how it should be.
Since most diplomats, elected officials, aid executives, and celebrities are far less frank than Lasensky, PEPFAR and most other US humanitarian aid mask “security” agendas, although, as
Foreign Policy in Focus
editor Emira Wood says, in the video “Resist Africom,” this is not new:
What we see is a repeat of the Cold War experience, with the US arming and equipping militaries, essentially putting forward a military fist, but covering it up with a velvet glove of humanitarianism and development.
5
In the US, the most censored or misreported news and the most massive disinformation campaigns about Africa serve to fit the velvet glove onto the military fist.
They include these “stories”—so called “stories” in that they have not been reported or so little that they are not widely understood—which are all intertwined in the African Great Lakes region, the Horn of Africa, and, most of all, in the long tortured Congolese border region with its eastern neighbors Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.
United Nations “peacekeepers,” formally dispatched by the UN Security Council, are often, in reality, combatants dispatched by the US.
On April 29, 2011,
Somalia Report
published the news that “the US government requested Rwanda to contribute peacekeeping forces to Somalia,” but not that “the UN, or the Security Council, requested Rwandan forces.” The Security Council gives the label “UN peacekeepers” to African forces recruited to fight Al Shabaab in Somalia, and will no doubt do the same for any Rwandans who will join them. Whatever the War on Terror rhetoric, their missions will be, above all, securing the Somali coastline, which much of the world’s maritime traffic, including oil, passes by.
6
During the first week of June 2011, an Associated Press story published on many outlets reported that a Somali American from Minnesota had repatriated and suicide bombed the UN peacekeeping mission in Somalia “because of abuses by Christians in Muslim countries.” The study failed to report the peacekeeping mission’s radical expansion of the war for control of Somalia’s capitol Mogadishu.
They also failed to report that another Somali American, Mohammed Abdullahi Mohammed, a resident of New York State for twenty years, had also repatriated, after being appointed Prime Minister of Somalia in October 2010, much to the surprise of his neighbors in Buffalo, New York, where he had been working for the New York State Department of Transportation at the time.
7
While at the State University of New York in Buffalo, Mohammed Abdullahi Mohammed had written a master’s thesis titled “US Strategic Interest in Somalia: From Cold War Era to War on Terror,”
8
which called on the US to extend financial, political, and military support—i.e., UN peacekeepers—to defend the Transitional Government in Mogadishu. It also warned that US Marines would have to be deployed to combat Islamic extremism if they failed.
Mohammed’s thesis is not altogether uncritical of the US and its past and present interests in Somalia. Nevertheless, it does raise questions of whose peace is to be kept, for what purpose, and by whose mandate.
The term “UN peacekeepers” implies global moral consensus, although UN peacekeepers are hired by the Security Council—which the US largely controls or ignores at will if it can’t.
When given the chance, I call them combatants, as does veteran Africa journalist and investigator Keith Harmon Snow, whose response to this summary was, “This is not about peacekeeping, so no peace is to be kept. It’s about empire.”
For daily news reporting, “UN troops” will do far better than “UN peacekeepers,” and, better yet, with a reminder that they’re dispatched by the UN Security Council, not the General Assembly.
As I was organizing this list of the most censored and/or misreported stories about Africa, I opened a dispatch from Thomas Mountain, sent to
AfrobeatRadio.net
, saying that a million Somali refugees were facing slow, UN-managed starvation in refugee camps.
Mountain, who identifies himself as “the only independent journalist working in the Horn of Africa,” wrote that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees had cut food aid to a third of what it had been, while “the UN,” meaning the Security Council, had, at the same time, increased funding for “thousands more Ugandan troops [peacekeepers], tanks, and helicopter gunships to fight the War on Terror.”
Thomas Mountain’s source on the ground was an aid worker who had just been to Dabaab, a Somali refugee camp in Kenya, and who was afraid to identify the aid agency he worked for:
I really hope and pray that someone is listening. I work for—and I have just returned from Dadaab, it is hell on earth, and this has been going on for 20 years. Today 320,000 are living in camps for 90,000. Geldof’s images that so shocked the world in the 80s are the daily lives of people there today. Children severely malnourished. New arrivals having to walk miles to register instead of the UNHCR providing registration in all the camps. The rationale being that if they have made their way from Mogadishu they can surely walk a few more miles for registration … people who have already begun the process of a slow death; mothers with 8 kids in tow. It is disgusting (the people saying this are obviously in an air conditioned room and have probably not walked anywhere in a few decades). I don’t know how this can be justified in a so-called modern society. Where is our humanity? Keep writing.”
9
I produced a few minutes of KPFA Radio’s Weekend newscast, including the voice of Thomas Mountain reporting this from Eritrea and that of Ugandan American journalist Milton Allimadi saying that the Ugandan “peacekeepers” were again acting as a police force for the US, then sent the audio archive and transcript to Toronto-based Global Research, which published it the next day with the headline “Somalia: A UN Managed Catastrophe, A Million Refugees Facing Starvation.” Hiiraan, a news and information website about Somalia, published it the day after that. We were briefly visible in Google News search for “Somalia” before being buried in news of Somalia’s War on Terror, but, several weeks later, we’d sustained visibility in searches for “Somalia” and “refugees” because far fewer outlets were reporting the refugee story.
10
I’m not an expert on Somalia, but the outlines of Thomas Mountain’s story were familiar:
1) Military operations armed and organized by external forces, most of all by the US, in accordance with their own geostrategic agendas, cause human catastrophe in Africa, creating populations of internal and/or external refugees.
2) Underresourced, ineffective, and/or corrupt catastrophe managers follow, not only from UN agencies, but from USAID and large government contractors and nonprofit corporations like CARE, Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children, and Feed the Children.
Michael Maren, a former international aid worker and Africa journalist, makes a damning argument in his 1997 book
The Road to Hell, the Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity
that “these organizations are a complete waste of money that serves absolutely no purpose but to keep Westerners employed.” However, so long as US and other foreign military operations continue to create huge, desperate, internal and external refugee populations, it seems heartless to argue that the catastrophe managers not at least follow along with aid, like that Thomas Mountain said the UN was failing to provide to Somalian refugees in June 2011.
A similar problem played out on the Gulf Coast, after Hurricane Katrina and flooding that resulted in 2005, as Blackwater Marines patrolled the streets in combat vehicles while refugees gathered to speak out about being abused by the Red Cross. It was still no time to refuse any food or other aid that might actually be delivered.
11
Far too often, however, aid isn’t delivered. Most of the six million or more people dead in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996 have died of pneumonia, starvation, malnutrition, disease, or exposure to the hardships of refugee camps or in the bush, after being driven from their villages and homes.
On July 28, 1994, within weeks of General Paul Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front’s seizure of power in Kigali, Rwanda, the
New York Times
helped the Pentagon slide a velvet glove onto its military fist, and told one of the tallest tales of all time, in this news report titled “US is Considering a Base in Rwanda for Relief Teams” by Eric Schmitt:
The United States is preparing to send troops to help establish a large base in Rwanda to bolster the relief effort in the devastated African nation, Administration officials said today.
Setting up a staging area in the capital, Kigali, would mark an important new phase, committing American troops in Rwanda for the first time. Military officials said 2,000 to 3,000 troops could be sent into Rwanda, in addition to the 4,000 that Washington has said would join relief efforts outside the country.
President Clinton’s senior foreign policy advisers discussed the plan at the White House today but delayed approval. One Administration official said the White House may not decide until Defense Secretary William J. Perry visits the region this weekend.
But other officials said the White House was inclined to go ahead if several conditions were met. Engineers must first assess the battle-scarred airfield in Kigali. Assuming it can be used, American officials need permission of the Government of the victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front, and want assurances that the front will guarantee the safety of a small but growing stream of returning refugees.
Relief effort indeed, though I do have to thank the
New York Times
for at least creating this record, and acknowledging that “the victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front” was in power at the end of the massacres that the world came to know as the Rwanda Genocide, meaning that they had won the Rwandan Civil War of 1990–1994.
Seventeen years later upwards of six million Congolese people and tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees had died either in the massacres or, after being driven from their homes during the First and Second Congo Wars, during the ongoing conflict. US ally Rwanda, with its neighboring US ally Uganda, had invaded and occupied eastern Congo and established an infrastructure for plundering its mineral wealth, much of which is essential to both military and consumer manufacture.
12
The US had also established itself as the dominant power in the region,
along with its Anglophone allies, displacing France. Before the Rwandan Civil War, which ended in the Rwanda Genocide and the ensuing Congo Wars, Rwanda and Congo had been French-speaking, Francophone countries. France had been the dominant power in the region.
13
Finally, Rwandan and Ugandan troops were defending US interests in Sudan, Somalia, Congo, and elsewhere on the African continent. Rwanda even sent expert police and prison wardens to Haiti in the aftermath of the 2009 earthquake there, and thousands of Ugandan troops have taken the place of US troops in Iraq.
14
Relief effort indeed. It’s very hard to believe that the Rwandan Patriotic Front colors are red, white, and blue, or that it celebrates Rwanda Liberation Day on July 4, by accident.
Despite the International Rescue Committee’s January 2008 report that over 5.4 million people had died in the Congo conflict since 1998 alone—not including those who died in the First Congo War, 1996–1997—and that 45,000 continue to die each month, the US and its allies on the UN Security Council continue to ignore seventeen years of investigations documenting the responsibility of the Ugandan and Rwandan regimes, most recently including the UN Mapping Exercise Report on Human Rights Abuse in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 1993–2003, released on October 1, 2010.
15
The Mapping Report wasn’t literally censored; no one managed to keep it from being published or released, but not because no one tried. Someone leaked it to
Le Monde
on August 26, 2010, inspiring headlines in major media around the world, including the BBC,
Guardian, Democracy Now!
, the
New York Times
, and even CNN, but not the other major television networks.
16
The governments of Angola, Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo all tried because the report included
evidence that all of their armies, and thus their presidents and military commanders, were responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Congo.
But the western powers on the Security Council, most of all the US, who have armed and trained the Ugandan and Rwandan armies, probably would have preferred not to see this report released either.
Why?
First, the report contains evidence that the Rwandan army, which was then made up of mostly ethnic Tutsi, committed ethnic massacres of Rwandan Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutus in Congo—crimes which an international criminal court might try as genocide, were a court convened, and the crime of genocide, if proven, weighs heaviest on the scales of international justice.
17