Modern Day White Mercenaries in the Congo
Libya 360 Internationalist News Agency
June 17, 2015
by Keith Harmon Snow
Excerpt from the article Western-Backed Terrorism in the Congo: Where is General Laurent Nkunda?
“People are killed every day, here and there,” says one Congolese human rights investigator in eastern Congo. “U.S. intelligence agents and the organizations they work with produce disinformation favorable to Rwanda and Uganda. These guys are on someone’s payroll and they have enough money to throw around to their own networks of informants in the Great Lakes region.”
The U.S. and its allies, primarily Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Germany, Holland and Israel, are all part of the networks of multinational interests plundering the natural resources of the Great Lakes countries. The corporations involved in eastern Congo are never mentioned, and no pictures are ever shown of their networks of exploitation that exist in parallel and coincidence with the violence.
The corporations operating in eastern Congo protected by the media and western intelligence apparatus, but soaked in Congolese blood, include Banro Gold, Casa Mining, Mwana Africa, Loncor, Anglo-Gold Ashanti, Kilo Gold, Moku Gold, Randgold and Alphamin Resources.
Israeli Dan Gertler — one of the Congo’s greatest current enemies — has bought up petroleum operations in the lakes regions on the Uganda-Congo frontier. Gertler’s political allies in power in Israel have been making deals with Rwanda. Another Israeli has been awarded oil-drilling rights in Virunga National Park just in the past two weeks after Canadian oil company SOCO International pulled out under public pressure.
Corporations like Alphamin promise to provide community development programs, with all kinds of publicity of their supposed largesse and generosity. Usually these are cheap exchanges, the equivalent of trinkets for land and minerals, the legacy of colonial occupation and theft.
On 10 June 2015, communities dispossessed of lands and livelihoods by Banro Gold in South Kivu began to confront Banro Gold for the substandard homes provided by Banro. “There is trouble in Luhwindja where Banro is exploiting,” reported one Congolese human rights investigator on 10 June 2015. “Banro did nothing to help the locals. The houses they [Banro] built are falling down because people had to abandon them. People are dying from pollution.”
The operations of the big mining companies present in eastern Congo are completely whitewashed by the western press and western mercenaries and intelligence front group organizations like the International Crises Group, International Rescue Committee, ENOUGH, Raise Hope For Congo, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and the Social Science Research Council.[63]
Enough staff and CFCI leaders deliver letter to Avaaz co-founder and Special Envoy Tom Perriello
The reappearance on the ground in Congo of these Rwandan warlords illuminates the apparatus of impunity involving western governments, non-government front organizations, the United Nations, multinational corporations, think tanks, western academia, the genocide industry, and the industries that profit through the creation of careers and markets for the euphemistically named AID, charity, humanitarian relief, conflict-resolution, and development industries. None of these latter industries would flourish without the market-based manufacture of suffering, despair, disease and deracination, or the market-based production of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees.
As it is with the western human rights corpus “that keeps intact the hierarchical relationships between European and non-European populations,” [64] so it is with all these other industries. Suffering is big business.
[62][endif] Private communication, 5 May 2015. [63][endif] http://www.ssrc.org/programs/drc-affinity-group/
[A participant at the 65th Annual Conference on World Affairs, Keith Harmon Snow is the 2009 Regent’s Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California Santa Barbara. Some of his reportage, writings, photography and human rights reports can be seen on the web sites: Conscious Being Alliance, All Things Pass & Keith Harmon Snow. keith harmon snow, USA: +1.413.626.3800, 84 Goshen Road, Williamsburg, MA 01096 USA.]
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Western-Backed Terrorism in the Congo: Where is General Laurent Nkunda?