Authors: Mickey Huff
Censored 2012 (66 page)
Which is to say, she promised another velvet glove on the military fist that so little of the world acknowledges because, again, the US isn’t dropping bombs in Congo, and US soldiers aren’t dying. Our Rwandan and Ugandan proxy armies control much of the region and serve in our interest instead. It has been documented that they are guilty of mass weaponized rape.
Clinton did not quote the 2001 UN Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on bilateral donors, the US and its allies:
The main bilateral donors to Rwanda and Uganda have been the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Denmark, Germany and the United States of America in various sectors. The analysis of their cooperation shows that sectors benefiting from this assistance are related to poverty, education and governance. Priority sectors have been water and sanitation, health and governance, including institutional reforms, justice and human rights, especially for Rwanda. In some cases, direct aid to the budget is provided. The balance of payments of Rwanda shows that budget support has steadily increased, from $26.1 million in 1997 to $51.5 in 1999. While such support is legitimate, the problem is that expenditures and services which were supposed to be provided and covered by the Governments of Rwanda and Uganda and which are covered by the bilateral aid constitute savings in the national budget.
Were these savings used to finance this war?
(Author’s emphasis.)
The New York Times
also reported that Secretary of State Clinton addressed “root causes”:
Mrs. Clinton also addressed some of the conflict’s root causes, including Congo’s illicit mineral trade. In the words of Congo’s foreign minister, who also met with Mrs. Clinton on Tuesday, the country, with its rich trove of diamonds, gold, copper, tin, coltan and other minerals, is a “geological scandal.”
But Congo’s mines are often the unlawful prize of armed groups, and Mrs. Clinton said the world needed to take more steps to regulate the mineral trade to make sure the profits do not end up “in the hands of those who fuel the violence.”
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She did not mention that US weapons manufactures depend on Congolese minerals—most of all those in the Katanga Copper Belt running from Southeastern Congo into Northern Zambia—or that it has been US policy to control the region, specifically the Katanga Copper Belt, since 1982.
Nor did Clinton remark on this passage from the UN Mapping Report, leaked on August 26, 2010, and released on October 1, 2010 (one year after the report from the
New York Times
), regarding our longstanding military “partners,” Uganda and Rwanda, under the command of Rwandan officer James Kaberebe:
329. On 4 August 1998, hundreds of Rwandan troops and a small number of Ugandan troops placed under the orders of James Kabarebe arrived by plane at the military base in Kitona, in Moanda, having travelled from Goma. Some ex-FAZ soldiers stationed at the Kitona base for several months rallied to join them. During the days that followed, the Rwandan-Ugandan-Congolese military coalition was reinforced by several thousand men and embarked on its conquest of the Bas-Congo via the road between Moanda, Boma and Matadi. Some elements in the FAC, which included numerous children associated with armed groups and forces (“child soldiers”) (known as “Kadogo” in Swahili) tried to resist, particularly in Boma and Mbanza Ngungu, but were swiftly overwhelmed; many died during the fighting.
330. Throughout their advance on Kinshasa, the Rwandan-Ugandan-Congolese coalition, referred to in the remainder of the report using the acronym ANC/APR/UPDF, killed numerous civilians and committed a large number of rapes and acts of pillaging.
39
Clinton also failed to remark on AFRICOM Commander William “Kip” Ward’s arrival in Kigali in January for his final meeting with Rwandan Defense Minister James Kaberebe, the commander of the Rwandan-Ugandan-Congolese military rape-and-pillage conquest of Bas-Congo, described above. This farewell was reported in the Rwanda News Agency:
Gen Ward will meet Defense Minister Gen James Kabarebe, with whom they have worked closely since the American came to office in October 2008. The AFRICOM chief will also meet the Army boss Gen. Charles Kayonga.
AFRICOM has been helping train Rwandan soldiers—as part of a wider US government military support program for Rwanda. This week, the State Department announced it had awarded a multimillion dollar contract for training of Rwandan soldiers in peacekeeping operations.
Finally Clinton failed to address the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief’s (PEPFAR) mobile assistance units that deliver HIV/AIDS services to the Rwandan and Ugandan armies deployed in remote regions. These units enable Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers to remain deployed, despite HIV infection—and despite documentation that Ugandan and Rwandan soldiers are guilty of using mass rape as a weapon.
40
Documentation not only includes the UN Mapping Report, but other sources including
Gender Against Men
, a documentary film produced by the Refugee Law Project at Makerera University in Kampala, Uganda, which won the best documentary film award at the Kenyan Film Festival in 2009.
41
Samuel Olara, Ugandan exile, English citizen, attorney, and human rights activist, wrote about rape, including male on male rape, committed by the Ugandan Army, sometimes with the conscious
intent of spreading HIV, in “Winning Acholi Region,” in February 2011:
During the two decades of conflict, rape against women (and young girls) was used as a weapon of war by warring parties. It was also used to humiliate and dehumanize men in Acholiland. “Gunga Tek” for instance, as it became known, was a phrase that had never been used against men, in the entire history of the Acholi people, until the NRA [National Resistance Army, renamed the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Force in 1995] deployed a mobile battalion that became known as the notorious mobile “Gunga” (kneel for me) battalion. They operated in Gulu and Kitgum in the late 1980s. They raped men before their wives and other family members in broad-daylight and the only Acholi word they learned at the time was “gunga” which meant kneel down.
The Refugee Law Project at Kampala, Uganda’s Makarera University, recounted the same atrocities in its 2009 film
Gender Against Men
.
In August 2009, while Hillary Clinton was in eastern Congo, Ugandan American journalist Milton Allimadi published “Targeted Rapes to Spread HIV Started in Uganda.”
On October 7, 2010, six days after the release of the UN report on Congo atrocities, and a subsequent rash of newly urgent reporting on the issue of rape in eastern Congo, Allimadi republished with this introduction:
The New York Times
—and the US State Department—would like to wish away the inconvenient truth; that the proliferation of mass rapes as part of warfare in DR Congo originated with the invasion of Congo by US-allies Uganda and Rwanda. It’s also no coincidence that the
Times
’ sudden focus on the Congo rape crimes comes the same week that the UN issued a report exposing Paul Kagame’s role in Congo genocide. We will watch carefully to see if the
Times
revisits that story. While current coverage of the Congo rapes atrocities is welcome, the
Times
’ should not use it as strategic diversion and abandon coverage of the October 1, 2010 UN report which implicates Rwanda and Uganda in genocide.
42
In June 2011, the Congo rape story burst back into the news, with an
American Journal of Public Health
study, an extrapolation from five-year-old statistics, which concluded that forty-eight women are raped every hour in Congo. The study not only discounted the political context, but also reported only women victims, giving the Congo conflict a fundamentally feminist construction, which further deflected attention from the principle aggressors, Uganda and Rwanda, and their powerful “partner,” the US and its allies, and from the loss of more than six million lives in Congo since 1996.
Veteran
New York Times
journalist Howard French, in a Youtube interview on the crisisincongo channel, asked:
What is the greatest violation of human rights that exists? That’s my question to you. Is it a rape, which is an awful thing? A rape is a horrible thing, but is it the greatest violation of human rights? For me, the greatest violation of human rights is the loss of life. Millions of Congolese people have lost their life as a result of the crisis that we’ve been discussing and it has warranted almost no sustained and enterprising reporting from the media of the world.
43
The New York Times
, BBC,
Huffington Post
, and more international media reported the new
American Journal of Public Health
rape report, which was also applauded by the humanitarian hawks. Feminist antirape campaigner Eve Ensler was on
Democracy Now!
with eastern Congo antirape campaigner Christine Schuler Deschryver within the week talking about a women’s spring beginning in eastern Congo, although Ensler said that the study was flawed and the time for further studies of this crisis had passed, that it was time for action.
Both Ensler and Deschryver, like Lisa Shannon, founder of Run for Congo Women, have commonly blamed the rape crisis on the defeated Rwandan army that crossed Rwanda’s border into eastern Congo in 1994, not on the invading armies of Rwanda and Uganda. In this they both
share the viewpoint of Samantha Power and another prominent humanitarian hawk, former National Security Advisor and National Intelligence Community employee John Prendergast. At the end of his book
The Enough Moment: Fighting to End the World’s Worst Human Rights Crimes
, Prendergast offers a long list of humanitarian hawk nonprofits including Operation Broken Silence, Eastern Congo Initiative, and Jewish World Watch. He also includes Eve Ensler’s V-Day.
44
The October 2010 UN report implicating both Uganda and Rwanda in genocide—and sexual atrocities—had long since faded from the news when eastern Congo’s rape crisis seized headlines again.
Someone inevitably asks me this every time I’m invited onto a radio show to talk about these issues. What’s to be done about millions of innocent Africans dying and being dislocated in the scramble for African resources essential to weapons manufacture and other details of empire? My best answer: “Redefine national security as national health insurance.”
Project Censored Director and KPFA radio host Mickey Huff asked me what’s to be done about the disinfo, all the humanitarian abuse and excuse for militarization of Africa, on the
Project Censored Show
on August 10, 2011, and I didn’t have a ready answer. Having thought about it since, I can suggest, for one, that we talk to our local school boards about adding to America’s high school curriculum, a primer on strategic minerals and America’s global dependency for nearly everything, and make it as core to the curriculum as the US Constitution. Whatever they may ultimately think of it, kids should at the very least understand the natural resource requirements for sustaining the greatest military force the world has ever seen.
This isn’t top secret, classified information as it is readily available online; the primer doesn’t have to be written. People at the National Defense Stockpile even return calls, as I’m sure they would to any high school or college student writing a term paper.
As for the corporate networks, my best answer is “turn it off,” even if that means turning off the presidential debates. Isn’t a boycott of these debate charades, if not the presidential election itself, long overdue?
Listen, read, support, and create independent media. Defend Net
Neutrality. News of a new internet backbone, up the West Coast of Africa to Europe, was some of the most promising out of Africa last year.
Reach out through the social networks and your web browsers; you can meet and talk to African people without mediation except that of the internet itself now. There’s been a paradigm shift that we’re just beginning to understand. Africa is no longer that far away from any place with a Net connection.
If you’re a media maker, note that you can compete in Google search by writing unique news. You need an outlet that has earned a high Google page rank, which translates into web visibility, but that doesn’t mean you have to be on ABC, CNN, or Fox News. Unique news appears ahead of duplicated wire service copy, or otherwise generic news on the Web, because the Google Search algorithm perceives unique news. I regularly come in ahead of Fox News, the networks, and often ahead of Reuters, AP, AFP, and even the BBC in Google Search with my researched, contextualized news on Africa—because no one else is writing the same copy. That much at least, I know, can be done.
As I was concluding this, I received an e-mail from Thomas Mountain in Eritrea, about another unreported genocide, this time in Ogaden, also known as the Ogaden Oil Basin, about 200,000 square kilometers of Ethiopia, bordering Djibouti, Kenya, and Somalia, where ethnic Somali and Muslim rebels who think the Ogaden is Western Somalia, seem to be fighting the Ethiopian government and challenging the infamous Swedish Lundin group’s oil concession. It appears there is a media blockade and atrocities are alleged on both sides.
The outlines of this, again, sound familiar. I doubt the spectre of genocide would be raised if there weren’t oil on this land, but I also doubt we’re going to hear much about this one, at least for awhile—maybe never—because Ethiopia is a US ally, and that always puts a crimp on humanitarian concern. But I wrote down Thomas Mountain’s most accessible phone number and resolved to call him for KPFA and/or WBAI
AfrobeatRadio
. Breaking down the barriers of censorship on Africa continues.
