Their latest report on the conflict states that . For those who don't know, this war has been the bloodiest conflict since World War II, but an effective media blackout has shrouded this attrocity. Why do you think this is the case? Why isn't this "forgotten war" not being reported?

I believe it has to do with where the paper trail leads to- meaning where the munitions, supplies, and plundered resources are heading.

_¸»¬æ¤º²°¯¯°²º¤æ¬«SiG»¬æ¤º²°¯¯°²º¤æ¬«¸_



“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice. Remember, God is the best of Protectors and well acquainted with all that you do.”
-Qur’an 4:135

"Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."
--Jean Paul Marat, 18th Century French Visionary (and revolutionary), murdered in his bathtub by Royalist Charlotte Corday

__________________________

www.supportblackowned.org

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“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice. Remember, God is the best of Protectors and well acquainted with all that you do.”
-Qur’an 4:135

"Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."
--Jean Paul Marat, 18th Century French Visionary (and revolutionary), murdered in his bathtub by Royalist Charlotte Corday

__________________________

www.supportblackowned.org

IT is also in millions of cell phones, they can't destroy the Congo fast enough for it...

"Justice is Patient"

Cynthia McKinney's speech entitled Covert Action in Africa: A Smoking Gun in Washington, D.C.

Rayburn House Office Building
Friday, April 6, 2001
10:00am - 12:00 noon

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Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney

OPENING STATEMENT

I want to thank you all for coming today.

I especially want to thank our esteemed speakers for traveling, in some instances quite a long way, to be with us today.

Our speakers are courageous individuals who have gone to many of Africa's most dangerous and desperately poor locations, not for wealth or riches, but in order to merely discover the truth. They provide us with a remarkable insight into what has gone on in Africa and what continues to go on in Africa today.

Much of what you will hear today has not been widely reported in the public media. Powerful forces have fought to suppress these stories from entering the public domain.

Their investigations into the activities of Western governments and Western businessmen in postcolonial Africa provide clear evidence of the West's long-standing propensity for cruelty, avarice, and treachery. The misconduct of Western nations in Africa is not due to momentary lapses, individual defects, or errors of common human frailty. Instead, they form part of long-term malignant policy designed to access and plunder Africa's wealth at the expense of Africa's people. In short, the accounts you are about to hear provide an indictment of Western activities in Africa.

The West has, for decades, plundered Africa's wealth and permitted, and even, assisted in slaughtering Africa's people. The West has been able to do this while still shrewdly cultivating the myth that much of Africa's problems today are African made--we have all heard the usual Western defenses that Africa's problems are the fault of corrupt African administrations, centuries-old tribal hatreds, the fault of unsophisticated peoples. But we know that those statements are all a lie. We have always known it.

The accounts we are about to hear today assist us in understanding just why Africa is in the state it is in today. You will hear that at the heart of Africa's suffering is the West's, and most notably the United States', desire to access Africa's diamonds, oil, natural gas, and other precious resources.

You will hear that the West, and most notably the United States, has set in motion a policy of oppression, destabilization and tempered, not by moral principle, but by a ruthless desire to enrich itself on Africa's fabulous wealth. While falsely pretending to be the friends and allies of many African countries, so desperate for help and assistance, many western nations have in reality betrayed those countries' trust--and instead, have relentlessly pursued their own selfish military and economic policies. Western countries have incited rebellion against stable African governments by encouraging and even arming opposition parties and rebel groups to begin armed insurrection.

The Western nations have even actively participated in the assassination of duly elected and legitimate African Heads of State and replaced them with corrupted and malleable officials. Western nations have even encouraged and been complicit in the unlawful invasions by African nations into neighboring counties.

Something must be done to right these wrongs.

I invite you to listen and learn first-hand of the West's activities in Africa.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Prepared Statement of Wayne Madsen

WHAT A DIFFERENCE AN ELECTION MAKES: OR DOES IT?

Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist who has written for The Village Voice, The Progressive, CAQ, and the Intelligence Newsletter. He is the author of Genocide and Covert Activities in Africa 1993-1999 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1999), an expose of U.S. and French intelligence activities in Africa's recent civil wars and ethnic rebellions. He served as an on-air East Africa analyst for ABC News in the aftermath of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Mr. Madsen has appeared on 60 Minutes, World News Tonight, Nightline, 20/20, MS-NBC, and NBC Nightly News, among others. He has been frequently quoted by the Associated Press, foreign wire services, and many national and international newspapers.

Mr. Madsen is also the author of a motion picture screen play treatment about the nuclear submarine USS Scorpion. He is a former U.S. Naval Officer and worked for the National Security Agency and U.S. Naval Telecommunications Command.

---

I wish to discuss the record of American policy in Africa over most of the past decade, particularly that involving the central African Great Lakes region. It is a policy that has rested, in my opinion, on the twin pillars of unrestrained military aid and questionable trade. The military aid programs of the United States, largely planned and administered by the U.S. Special Operations Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), have been both overt and covert.

ACRI, ACSS, and the covert programs all involve the use of private military training firms and logistics support contractors that are immune to Freedom of Information Act requests. More troubling than these overt problems are those that involve covert assistance to the Rwandan and Ugandan militaries. Sources in the Great Lakes region consistently report the presence of a U.S.-built military base near Cyangugu, Rwanda, near the Congolese border. The base, reported to have been partly constructed by the U.S. firm Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, is said to be involved with training RPF forces and providing logistics support to their troops in the DRC.

The increasing reliance by the Department of Defense on so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) is of special concern. Many of these PMCs -- once labeled as "mercenaries" by previous administrations when they were used as foreign policy instruments by the colonial powers of France, Belgium, Portugal, and South Africa -- have close links with some of the largest mining and oil companies involved in Africa today. PMCs, because of their proprietary status, have a great deal of leeway to engage in covert activities far from the reach of congressional investigators. They can simply claim that their business in various nations is a protected trade secret and the law now seems to be on their side.

THE DESTABILIZATION OF AFRICA

America's policy toward Africa during the past decade, rather than seeking to stabilize situations where civil war and ethnic turmoil reign supreme, has seemingly promoted destabilization. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was fond of calling pro-U.S. military leaders in Africa who assumed power by force and then cloaked themselves in civilian attire, "beacons of hope."

In reality, these leaders, who include the current presidents of Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Angola, Eritrea, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo preside over countries where ethnic and civil turmoil permit unscrupulous international mining companies to take advantage of the strife to fill their own coffers with conflict diamonds, gold, copper, platinum, and other precious minerals including one that is a primary component of computer microchips.

Some of the companies involved in this new "scramble for Africa" have close links with PMCs and America's top political leadership. For example, America Minerals Fields, Inc., a company that was heavily involved in promoting the 1996 accession to power of the late Congolese President Laurent-Desire Kabila, was, at the time of its involvement in the Congo's civil war, headquartered in Hope, Arkansas. Its major stockholders included long-time associates of former President Clinton going back to his days as Governor of Arkansas. America Mineral Fields also reportedly enjoys a close relationship with Lazare Kaplan International, Inc., a major international diamond brokerage whose president remains a close confidant of past and current administrations on Africa matters.

One of the major goals of the Rwandan-backed Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie (RCD), a group fighting the Kabila government in Congo, is restoration of mining concessions for Barrick Gold, Inc. of Canada. In fact, the rebel RCD government's "mining minister" signed a separate mining deal with Barrick in early 1999. Among the members of Barrick's International Advisory Board are former President Bush and former President Clinton's close confidant Vernon Jordan.

Currently, Barrick and tens of other mining companies are stoking the flames of the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Each benefits by the de facto partition of the country into some four separate zones of political control. First the mineral exploiters from Rwanda and Uganda concentrated on pillaging gold and diamonds from the eastern Congo. Now, they have increasingly turned their attention to a valuable black sand called columbite-tantalite or "col-tan." Col-tan is a key material in computer chips and, therefore, is as considered a strategic mineral. It is my hope that the Bush administration will take pro-active measures to stem this conflict by applying increased pressure on Uganda and Rwanda to withdraw their troops from the country. However, the fact that President Bush has selected Walter Kansteiner to be Assistant Secretary of State for African, portends, in my opinion, more trouble for the Great Lakes region. A brief look at Mr. Kansteiner's curriculum vitae and statements calls into question his commitment to seeking a durable peace in the region. For example, he has envisaged the splitting up of the Great Lakes region into separate Tutsi and Hutu states through "relocation" efforts and has called the break-up of the DRC inevitable. I believe Kansteiner's previous work at the Department of Defense where he served on a Task Force on Strategic Minerals and one must certainly consider col-tan as falling into that category -- may influence his past and current thinking on the territorial integrity of the DRC. After all, 80 per cent of the world's known reserves of col-tan are found in the eastern DRC. It is potentially as important to the U.S. military as the Persian Gulf region.

The U.S. military and intelligence agencies, which have supported Uganda and Rwanda in their cross-border adventures in the DRC, have resisted peace initiatives and have failed to produce evidence of war crimes by the Ugandans and Rwandans and their allies in Congo. The CIA, NSA, and DIA should turn over to international investigators both signals intelligence and human intelligence evidence in their possession, as well as overhead imagery, including thermal imagery indicating the presence of mass graves and when they were dug. There must be a full accounting before the Congress by the staff of the U.S. Defense Attache's Office in Kigali who served there from early 1994 to the present time.

A LINGERING QUESTION ON ASSASSINATIONS

The present turmoil in central Africa largely stems from a fateful incident that occurred on April 6, 1994. That was the missile attack on the Rwandan presidential aircraft that resulted in the death of Rwanda's Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana, his colleague President Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, Habyarimana's chief advisers, and the French crew.

This aerial assassination resulted in a genocide coordinated by the successor militant Hutu Rwandan government that cost the lives of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. This was followed by a counter-genocide orchestrated by the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) government that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 mostly Hutu refugees in Rwanda and neighboring Zaire/Congo.

No one has even identified the assassins of the two presidents let alone sought to bring them to justice. There have been a number of national and international commissions that have looked into the causes for the Rwandan genocide. These have included investigations by the Belgian Senate, the French National Assembly, the United Nations, and the Organization of African Unity. None of these investigations have identified the perpetrators of the aerial assassination. In 1998, French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere launched an investigation of the aircraft attack. After interviewing witnesses in Switzerland, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Russia, Bruguiere apparently has enough evidence to issue an international arrest warrant for President Kagame. A former French Judge, Thierry Jean-Pierre, now a Member of the European Parliament, in an entirely separate and private investigation, came to the same conclusion that Kagame was behind the attack. The United States government must come to its senses, as it did with past intelligence assets like Sadaam Hussein, Alberto Fujimori, General Suharto, Ferdinand Marcos, and Manuel Noriega, and support a judicial accounting by Kagame. If it is proven that U.S. citizens were in any way involved in planning the assassination, they should also be brought to justice before the international war crimes tribunal.

Immediately after the attack on the presidential plane, much of the popular press in the United States brandished the theory that militant Hutus brought it down. I suggest that following some four years of research concentrating on the missile attack, there is no basis for this conclusion. In fact, I believe there is concrete evidence to show that the plane was shot down by operatives of the RPF. At the time, the RPF was supported by the United States and its major ally in the region, Uganda. Prior to the attack, the RPF leader, the current Rwandan strongman General Paul Kagame, received military training at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Many of Kagame's subordinates received similar training, including instruction in the use of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) at the Barry Goldwater Air Force Range at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona. It was Soviet-designed SAMs that were used to shoot down the Rwandan president's airplane. By its own admission, the U.S. Defense Department provided official military training to the RPF beginning in January 1994, three months before the missile attack on the aircraft.

In testimony before the French inquiry commission, former French Minister for International Cooperation Bernard Debre insisted that the two SAM-16s used in the attack on the aircraft were procured from Ugandan military stocks and were "probably delivered by the Americans . . . from the Gulf War." He was supported by two former heads of the French foreign intelligence service (DGSE) Jacques Dewatre and Claude Silberzahn, as well as General Jean Heinrich, the former head of French military intelligence (DRM). Former moderate Hutu Defense Minister James Gasana, who served under Habyarimana from April 1992 to July 1993, stated before the French inquiry that his government declined to purchase SAMs because they realized the RPF had no planes and, therefore, procurement of such weapons would have been a waste of money.

The contention by French government officials that the RPF was responsible for the aerial attack is supported by three former RPF intelligence officers who disclosed details of the operation to UN investigators. The three informants were rated as Category 2 witnesses on a 4-point scale where 1 is highly credible and 2 is "true but untested." The RPF informants claim the plane was downed by an elite 10-member RPF team with the "assistance of a foreign government." Some of the team members are apparently now deceased. A confidential UN report on the plane attack was delivered to the head of the UN War Crimes Tribunal, Judge Louise Arbour of Canada, but was never made public. In fact, Arbour terminated the investigation when details of the RPF's involvement in the assassination became clear. The UN now denies such a report exists. Michael Hourigan, an Australian lawyer who first worked as an International War Crimes Tribunal investigator and then for the UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services, confirmed that the initial war crimes investigation team uncovered evidence of the RPF's involvement in the attack but their efforts were undercut by senior UN staff.

After the former RPF intelligence team revealed details of the attack, they were supported by yet another former RPF intelligence officer named Jean Pierre Mugabe. In a separate declaration, Mugabe contended that the assassination was directed by Kagame and RPF deputy commander-in-chief James Kabarebe. The RPF, according to Mugabe, campaigned extensively for the regional peace meeting in Dar es Salaam from which Habyarimana was returning when he was assassinated. Mugabe claimed the idea was to collect the top Hutu leadership on the plane in order to easily eliminate them in the attack.

Yet another defector from the RPF, Christophe Hakizabera, in a declaration to a UN investigation commission, states that the "foreign power" that helped the RPF shoot down the airplane was, in fact, Uganda. According to Hakizabera, the first and second assassination planning meetings were held in Uganda in the towns of Kabale and Mbarara, respectively. A third, in which Kagame was present, was held in March 1994 in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso.

As it did with the three other RPF defectors, the UN took no action as a result of this complaint. It appears, and this is supported by private conversations I have had with former UN officials, that some other party is calling the shots in the world body's investigation of human rights violations in Africa.

The involvement of Uganda in the assassination tends to support the contention of the former French government ministers that the SAMs were provided to Uganda by the United States from captured Iraqi arms caches during Desert Storm. My own research indicates that these missiles were delivered to Uganda via a CIA-run arms depot outside of Cairo, Egypt. After the transfer, Uganda kept some of the missiles and launchers for its own armed forces and delivered the remainder to the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) and the RPF.

Other evidence pointing to an RPF role in the attack includes COMINT (communications intelligence) picked up by military units and civilian radio operators in Rwanda. A Rwandan Armed Forces COMINT listening station picked up a transmission on an RPF frequency, which stated "the target is hit." This was reported to a Togolese member of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). A Belgian amateur radio operator reported that after the attack, he heard someone on a frequency used by a Belgian PMC in Kigali state, "We killed Le Grand (Habyarimana)." The Belgian operator also stated that all Rwandan Armed Forces messages following the attack indicated the Rwandan army was in complete disarray n something that would not have been the case had the Rwandan government perpetrated the attack on its own president. Another source of COMINT was a French signals intelligence unit sent to Kigali from the French military base in Bangui, Central African Republic. According to French Judge Jean-Pierre, copies of French intercepts of RPF communications indicate, beyond a doubt, the culpability of the RPF in the attack on the aircraft.

Some formerly classified US State Department cables, which I received following a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal that the U.S. foreign policy establishment was of two minds over the April 6 attack. The U.S. Embassy in Burundi kept a surprisingly open mind about its theories about the missile attack, even suggesting a Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) role in it. Other U.S. diplomatic posts, most notably that in Kigali, seemed to follow the script that the aircraft was downed by hard-line Hutus who wanted to implement a well-planned genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

A May 25, 1994 Secret message from the Department of State to all African diplomatic posts also reports that "the RPF has summarily executed Hutu militia alleged to have been involved in the massacres and the RPF has admitted to such killings." The same message states that "Rwandan government officials who controlled the airport" or "French military officials" recovered the downed presidential aircraft's black box after securing the airport and removing the body of the French pilot from Habyarimana's plane. However, according to officials I interviewed who were involved with UN air movements in the region, the black box was secretly transported to UN Headquarters in New York where it remains to this day.

Officially, the Rwandan government claims the black box went missing. According to the UN investigators, the black box was spirited away by UN officials from Kigali to New York via Nairobi. In addition, this shipment was known to US government officials. According to the UN sources, data from the black box is being withheld by the UN under pressure from our own government. The investigators also revealed that RPF forces controlled three major approaches to Kayibanda Airport on the evening of the attack and that European mercenaries, in the pay of the RPF and US intelligence, planned and launched the missile attack on the Mystere-Falcon. The CIA figured prominently in the UN investigation of the missile attack. According to the investigators, the search for the assassins ultimately led to a warehouse in Kanombe, near the airport. From this warehouse, during the afternoon of April 6, the missile launchers were assembled and readied for action by the mercenaries. As the UN investigation team was nearing its final conclusion and was prepared to turn up evidence indicating the warehouse had been leased by a Swiss company, said to be linked to U.S. intelligence, its mandate was swiftly terminated.

CONCLUSION

It is clear that the United States, contrary to comments made by its senior officials, including former President Clinton, played more of a role in the Rwandan tragedy than it readily admits. This involvement continued through the successive Rwandan and Ugandan-led invasions of neighboring Zaire/Congo. Speculation that Rwanda was behind the recent assassination of President Laurent Kabila in Congo (and rumors that the CIA was behind it) has done little to put the United States in a favorable light in the region. After all, the date of Kabila's assassination on January 16 this year -- was practically 40 years from the very day of the CIA-planned and executed assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.

The quick pace at which Kabila's son and successor Joseph Kabila visited the United States at the same time of Kagame's presence, and his subsequent meetings with Corporate Council for Africa officials and Maurice Tempelsman (the majordomo of U.S. Africa policy), calls into question what the United States knew about the assassination and when it knew about it.

Also, particularly troublesome is a conclusion the CIA is said to have reached in an assessment written in January 1994, a few months before the genocide. According to key officials I have interviewed during my research, that analysis came to the conclusion that in the event that President Habyarimana was assassinated, the minimum number of deaths resulting from the mayhem in Rwanda would be 500 (confined mostly to Kigali and environs) and the maximum 500,000. Regrettably, the CIA's higher figure was closer to reality.

Certain interests in the United States had reason to see Habyarimana and other pro-French leaders in central Africa out of the way. As recently written by Gilbert Ngijol, a former Assistant to the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the UN to Rwanda in 1994, the United States directly benefited economically from the loss of influence of French and Belgian mining interests in the central Africa and Great Lakes regions.

There is also reason to believe that a number of people with knowledge of Kagame's plot against the presidential aircraft have been assassinated. These possibly include Tanzania's former intelligence chief, Major General Imran Kombe, shot dead by policemen in northeastern Tanzania after he was mistaken for a notorious car thief. His wife maintains he was assassinated. Kombe had knowledge of not only the planned assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents but a plot against Kenya's President Moi and Zaire's President Mobutu, as well. There is a belief that Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bukavu, Emmanuel Kataliko, was assassinated last October in Rome by members of a Rwandan hit team acting on orders from Kagame. Other Tutsi and Hutu leaders who oppose Kagame's regime continue to flee Rwanda to the U.S. and France in fear of their lives. Rwanda's figurehead Hutu President Pasteur Bizimungu was forced to resign last year under pressure from the only power in Rwanda, his then-Vice President, Paul Kagame. Deus Kagiraneza, a former intelligence officer in Kagame's Military Intelligence Directorate (DMI), interim Prefect of the Ruhengeri province, and member of the Parliament, is now in exile in Belgium. He charges that Kagame's top government and military are responsible for torturing and executing their political opponents. Kagiraneza maintains that the RPF has pursued such policies since the time of the 1990 invasion of Rwanda from Uganda.

It is beyond time for the Congress to seriously examine the role of the United States in the genocide and civil wars of central Africa, as well as the role that PMCs currently play in other African trouble spots like Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Ethiopia, and Cabinda. Other nations, some with less than stellar records in Africa, France and Belgium for example, have had no problem examining their own roles in Africa's last decade of turmoil. At the very least, the United States, as the world's leading democracy, owes Africa at least the example of a critical self-inspection.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Prepared Statement of Keith Snow

Thank you Representative McKinney for organizing this very important forum.

I find it particularly remarkable that the diamond exports from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were some US$897 million in 1997. Now this is a "country" which was in a major war. And then in 1998, DRC ranked second in diamond production at 25.7 million carats. Again, a country in a brutal war where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people and in fact I think it is millions of people -- suffered the consequences through disease and despair and displacement and rape and hunger and robbery and often death.

Based on my research, this is a western syndicated proxy war, and like Sierra Leone, Angola and Sudan, it is war-as-cover for the rapid and unrestricted extraction of raw materials, and war as a means to totally disenfranchise the local people. Diamonds, gold, columbium tantalite, niobium, cobalt, manganese and petroleum, natural gas and timber and possibly uranium -- are a few of the major spoils being pillaged behind the scenes as war ravages DRC and some of these minerals are almost solely found in DRC, especially cobalt, niobium, columbium tantalite.

Barrick Gold provides a convenient example using war-as-cover. According to testimony I took in western Uganda in November, Barrick Gold is operating in the Kilo Moto mines near Bunia. These mines are reportedly protected by UPDF. An Israeli General was awarded another Kilo Moto concession and UPDF and RCD operate others. And there is massive ivory poaching again protection rackets going on. Barrick Advisory Board member George Bush and his CIA connections certainly play into these mining deals and lay the groundwork a.k.a. slaughter if necessary to get the product. That includes long-time links to people like CIA station operative in Zaire Lawrence Devlin for example, and his associations with the Templesmans. Look at the CIA operations in Lubumbashi and you will probably find connections to the repression and massacres of students at the University of Lubumbashi in the early 1990s.

George Bush apparently telephoned Mobutu just prior to the first US supported invasion of Congo August 1996 on behalf of Swedish Financier Adolph Lundin to negotiate a deal over the Kilo Moto fields. And the US Presidential Election outcome of 1996 was completely irrelevant to the invasion of Zaire and the replacement of Mobutu. Remember that Kagame was in Washington about August 1996 checking his battle plans with the Pentagon. Mobutu's days were numbered.

The US took all the right decisions to allow the Rwanda genocide to unfold. And Clinton's comment that "we didn't know what was going on at the time" couldn't have been a bigger lie. Do you suppose it was coincidental that a Rwanda delegate rotated on to the security council early in 1994 and then worked with US representatives to block all subsequent attempts to deal appropriately with the unfolding slaughter?

The Lundin Group appears also to be involved in south Katanga, where they are into the Tenke Fungarume copper/cobalt concessions. This is near where America Mineral Fields International and Anglo American are operating as well. And these are a few of the many mining companies.

All these US military programs like IMET and E-IMET, ACRI and JCET are designed to consolidate US hegemony. UPDF and RCD and SPLA have conscripted child soldiers. They use sophisticated weapons not only the machetes so widely advertised by the media propaganda front of 1994 which sowed indifference and apathy in the US public. Troops have been trained by US green berets and US military personnel have worked to coordinate SPLA and RPF/UPDF/RCD military campaigns. This is according to Ugandan dissidents and/or Congolese refugees fleeing Congo and/or ex-patriots on the ground. And there are plenty of people who support these statements.

Weapons are reportedly shipped in through Entebbe. Again, people testified to seeing "American blacks" -- quote Negroes unquote traveling in the area, both in Uganda and in Eastern DRC, but they are always very clandestine and they don't mingle or talk to people. One refugee cited the locations of jungle camps where western he said American military advisors were training RCD or RPF or UPDF guerrillas in counterinsurgency and heavy artillery operations. Again, this was in November.

Note that the whole Tutsi contre-genocide against Hutus is off the radar screen of people in the US and that's because the media has covered for the powerful interests and US agenda of consolidating power in the region by any means necessary. In fact, the RPF have actually "turned" Interahamwe to their service in doing the dirty work of eliminating any dissidents and insurgents and creating a situation defined by the media as incomprehensible tribal warfare.

It was reported to me that UPDF will disguise themselves as their enemies and attack villages to provide justification to return and sweep n a.k.a. brutalize or rape or pillage these villages. They have also reportedly used these tactics to substantiate their needs for international support weapons and funds and military expertise from US and UK backers, funds and equipment which was often diverted to the secret US SPLA war against Khartoum, for example.

But war doesn't seem to be essential to the plan. Multinational

corporations-- a very significant constellation of US companies and/or US citizens included, are everywhere stripping the resources, leaving pollution and disease and environmental disasters in their wakes. And you might probe into the whole classified nuclear waste transshipments programs.

Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Togo, Niger, Madagascar and Burkina Faso provide examples, being massively exploited, where military repression and structural adjustment and the concomitant destitution suffice to enable lucrative western control and exploitation. Zambia, Tanzania, Namibia, Botswana and Ghana are a few more examples where I have similarly witnessed profound human suffering amidst huge multinational profits and SAP. I mean, 120 years after the British invasion of western Zambia this is an area heavily burdened by refugee flows out of Angola and DRC and the concomitant insecurity of insurgent nomadic military forces -- the people have absolutely no possessions. The schools don't exist and even if they do there are no books and the kids are so destitute that they often can't attend in any case. You can't buy basic staples. I mean absolutely no food, no medicine, no drugs for malaria. Some 30% of people in Zambia don't even know that malaria is caused by mosquitoes. But you can buy Coca-Cola and Sprite and Fanta virtually everywhere, but there are usually no basic foodstuffs, no books, no medical supplies. You cannot imagine the suffering until you live it yourself.

And it is no coincidence that one of the directors of Coca Cola now I think that's a US company -- is also a Director of Elf, and ELFs corrupt practices have been mildly exposed but very, very mildly.

These wars are prosecuted by local warlords, military dictators and their elite intelligence and security networks, typically armed, funded and trained by western intelligence and/or ex-military and/or private security companies. And these networks are particularly ruthless. However, again, they are directly associated with in-country western military and intelligence advisors and their programs. That includes Israel, US, British, German and French. But IMF/WB and OPIC and ADB funds continue to flow, and they support selective interests and projects and infrastructure which helps their related industries further expropriate the resources and the people and the institutions.

Uganda provides a good example. Uganda is at war on three fronts and a significant percentage of the IMF/WB funding which has gone into Uganda has been diverted for military objectives. The banks which fund Uganda through the international monetary institutions are often associated with the multinationals involved in the plunder of raw materials. Uganda has supported the SPLA war in southern Sudan, and I took testimony from Uganda dissidents who insist that US military advisors have worked with the SPLA and UPDF against Khartoum.

In Cameroon, Benin, Burkina Faso, Gabon and Niger in 1997, I found abundant evidence of unrestricted raw materials extraction by interests associated with the United States. The people of the oil-producing areas of the Niger River Delta are suffering horrendous atrocities. Again, on the Niger border with Burkina -- famine, disease, despair, political repression for the most trifling reasons -- and right next door there is a Barrick Gold mining operation. And Sumitomo and the Keidanren (Zaibatsu) out of Japan are all involved. And people in these (African) countries know what is going on, but they can't tell their stories because most westerners are completely caught up in the mental illness of colonialism and imperialism, which disallows the simple truth to be seen. And those who tell their stories are often brutalized or disappeared.

In Zimbabwe, the issue of land and elections and Mugabe's intransigence aside, the lasting repercussions of the Mugabe "five brigade" genocide against the Ndebele people in Matebelelands North and South and the Midlands provinces are heartbreaking. Here was this scorched earth campaign from 1981 to 1987 where hundreds and hundreds of thousands perished, where food was used as a weapon and rape prevailed, and the United States diverted its eyes. And the media knew about it but the media diverted its eyes. And this is all very current stuff in Zimbabwe. The 1990s was more of the same in a more subtle form. And the Ndebele people have suffered untold injustice and terror.

Meanwhile, there was plenty of mining and tobacco farming going on in Zimbabwe and the weapons for Mugabe's dirty little secrets came from where? The IMF and WB funded Mugabe, no matter, throughout his tenure and right up into the late 1990s. Again, these are big banks like Chase Manhattan and First Boston and Citicorp and the Morgan Banks -- and their directors sit on some of the western media boards and they dictate relief operations at a certain level. And then of course there are all these supranational multinational corporations like Asea Brown Baveri (ABB) and Unilever and Royal Dutch Shell and Lonrho and Citibank and Bechtel. I mean, Bechtel gets away with raping the system in Boston the 10 or 12 billion dollar overruns in the Harbor Tunnel project never mind their tight CIA and US government interconnections, policy interventions of dictations, and the orchestration of coups, assassinations, disappearances and wars.

Lonrho of course is Buckingham Palace and I contend that very powerful US citizens are tied in through companies like Brown and Root and Halliburton to Lonrho and Lonrho interests. And please recall that Vice President Cheney is a former Halliburton executive. And Lonrho has a lock on British media. And it is no coincidence that Lonrho has the most elegant and modern skyscraper in downtown Nairobi.

And all this is hidden by the US media. Even the village idiot, if he opens his eyes, can see that the directors of the media corporations are the same directors of those corporations raping Africa. But too many people have a paycheck to worry about. And that includes humanitarian organizations and the United Nations and the OAU and the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.

Special torture centers and death squads and massive repression of the population are the rule in Togo, Cameroon, Kenya, Gabon, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, and were so in Zaire. And these people--Eyadema, Biya, Bongo, Obasanjo, Abacha, Babangida, Mobutu, Compaore, Rawlings, Banda, Kaunda, Moi, Habyarimana, Kagame, Museveni, Garang, Ratsiraka--they provide the environment for pillage, and they are duly rewarded, with power, with all the perks.

Charles Taylor was incarcerated in Charlestown, Massachusetts circa 1983 or 1984 and he is the only person, I believe, in the history of the Charlestown jail to have been broken out. Apparently the records no longer exist of his stay there. And now he is President in Liberia?

And then you have the whole misery industry, which profits from the wars and repression and population displacement which their affiliated institutions and their funding banks and materials-providing multinationals create. Again, you don't need a Ph.D. to figure out that thousands of highly paid western AID workers would be out of a job if there were peace in Sudan. And Toyota wouldn't sell all those shiny 4-WD SUVs. And who would buy the US made weapons? And all that business of feeding and clothing and interning the refugees would be lost by these multinationals who get huge tax write-offs and subsidies and whose products are purchased by USAID or other government agencies. And some of these relief organizations also have close ties to the corporate media executives.

So I see it as a policy of depopulation in Africa. Because what I am talking about is access. That's all. Access to the animals. Access to the game parks and trophy fishing. Access to the minerals. Access to the cheap and replenishable labor pool. Access to uninformed populations to dump inferior and toxic and outdated products on. Access for military adventurism and special forces training and psyops operations. Access to biological and pharmaceutical testing grounds. Access to markets. And while at times it seems contradictory, at times it is, but it's all completely unethical, entirely arrogant and racist. It is driven purely by greed. And the profound human suffering is totally unnecessary.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Prepared Statement of Janine Farrell Roberts

MAURICE TEMPELSMAN: THE CONVERGENCE OF POLICY AND PROFIT IN PRIVATE How US Foreign Policy over decades was influenced by the Diamond Cartel.

By author of Book "Blood Stained Diamonds," Janine Farrell Roberts The Secret Story Behind Blood Diamonds

May I first briefly introduce myself. I hold degrees in Sociology and Theology and have authored several books written about Australian Aborigines and their civil rights struggle, which were launched by their leaders. For many years I was funded by a coalition of US and European church to work on human rights frontiers internationally.

This work led me to De Beers - after it clashed with an Aboriginal community. The more I worked internationally the more I discovered about its human rights violations. I have now been researching and writing on De Beers and the diamond trade for twenty years during which time I have made several films - including: "The Diamond Empire", a feature length" Frontline" since suppressed by WGBH due to pressure from De Beers. The owners of Doubleday also commissioned a major work from me on diamonds - only to drop it at the very last moment as they wrote "rich and important people" did not want it to come out.

De Beers is nothing if not secretive In the course of my investigation, De Beers banned me from its South African diamond mines where I was the guest of the National Union of Mineworkers (but I was smuggled in). Here I witnessed in De Beers's mines horrific conditions with wages paid at one-third of the official union minimum and in very hazardous conditions. I also witnessed considerable natural resources being hidden from the SA Government. I went also to India and witnessed children as young as 8 cutting and polishing diamonds in workshops mostly supplied by De Beers through its favored merchants, working in what is defined as a form of slavery. The wages were slashed this year from 40c to 25c a diamond causing riots. Workers get one dollar a day for cutting romantic gems. India cuts 55% by value of the world's gem diamonds.

De Beers tried to stop my film in the Canadian NW Territories diamond fields - but the Sierra Club and the Unions made it happen. On 5th Avenue, merchants were phoned telling them not to speak to me "as I worked with Blacks in Australia to make life difficult for De Beers." I was also the keynote speaker at the first post apartheid conference of Southern African mineworkers where I was funded by the World Council of Churches.

I have been told that a major reason for some of my difficulties is the fear publishers have of a certain Maurice Tempelsman, the former companion of Jackie Onassis who in 1998 was reported to be developing a relationship with Secretary of State Albright. He is a leading international diamond merchant of unique power and influence - often he has helped shape US foreign policy in directions that favour De Beers. I have extensively researched his work. Much of this is in my forthcoming book "Blood Stained Diamonds."

I have been asked to talk about Tempelsman's role in the confluence of public policy and private profit that happens in private. He is an excellent example. I have time only to summarise my findings.

Why was he uniquely important in the De Beers? In the 1940s De Beers was indicted by the US Justice Department for price fixing under the Sherman Act. The US also believed De Beers had rationed the supply of tool diamonds to the US during the Second World War severely damaging the war effort. It was determined never to let this happen again, and legislation was thus passed to set up a national diamond stockpile. De Beers needed a way to ensure it was the source of this stockpile despite being indicted. It sought a middleman to do the deals with the US. Early in the 1950s Tempelsman met with the Oppenheimers who rule De Beers and became this middleman. He was uniquely supplied with millions of diamonds to sell the US as its strategic reserve. Most of these diamonds came from the Congo.

THE CONGO

When Lumumba, Congo's first elected leader, spoke of using the Congo's resources to benefit the Congo. De Beers feared it would lose access to the one-third of world's diamond supply in the Congo - as would also Tempelsman. Shortly after this, the CIA facilitated Lumumba's assassination. Evidence on this came before the Church Intelligence Commission. Immediately after Lumumba's death, the Acting Prime Minister of the Congo, Adoula announced support for a very major Tempelsman diamond deal, telegramming this to President Kennedy. The historian Richard Mahoney claimed that the Adoula regime was receiving funds from Tempelsman. A State Department memo headed "Congo Diamond Deal" stated "The State Department has concluded that it is in the political interest of the US to implement this proposal." (2 August 1961)

Immediately after Mobutu came to power, Tempelsman became an even bigger player in the Congo - recruiting his own staff from those CIA staffers that Mobutu most favored that put him in power. Mobutu also at this time gave Tempelsman, as a "Christmas Gift," rich mineral reserves. According to Tempelsman's staff we interviewed, they had a wonderful time helping to run the Congo. One of the first acts by Tempelsman was to facilitate the return of the Oppenheimers to the Congo - and to secure funding for Mobutu. He succeeded in persuading the White House to secretly buy a vast number of diamonds for the US strategic reserve - at a time when Administration officials were protesting that the reserve was over full. The reason for this deal given in secret US government memos was to support Mobutu and his partner Adoula. This Tempelsman plan made much profit for him and for De Beers.

A State Department Cable of 23 December 1964 warned about the need of secrecy over this Mobutu diamond and South African uranium deal because; "it could outrage the moderate Africans we are trying to calm down." It suggest South African Foreign Minister Muller would understand the need for secrecy since the US was "doing a job" in the Congo that South Africa could not do. This covert support for Mobutu gave the US a gross excess in the strategic diamond stockpile that was still being sold off in 1997.

In 1967 the State Department reported; "Tempelsman is playing an increasingly central role as GDRC (Congo's) technical advisor and mediator." But these deals and other deals done throughout the following decades with a corrupt Mobutu government left the Congolese people in absolute poverty.

GHANA

In the late 1950s democracy arrived in Africa with the election of President Nkrumah - who thought Black Africans should not have to sell diamonds to an apartheid company - so took Ghana's diamonds from the cartel. A short while later, the State Department wrote a furious letter to Maurice Tempelsman saying that his office, by using an unguarded phone line, had betrayed the identity of the plotters against Nkrumah and the identity of the CIA Head of Station. The plotters seemingly were communicating to the White House via Tempelsman's office. (Memorandum for the President from WW Rostow, 24 September 1961) Tempelsman clearly had advanced knowledge of this coup attempt. Shortly afterwards President Kennedy decided not to "downgrade" (his word) Tempelsman for this error.

SIERRA LEONE

Tempelsman worked out a new diamond contract for President Stevens - under which Tempelsman got 27% of the country's diamonds - setting up an independent cutting factory - and De Beers bought shares in it. However it was not set up to compete effectively.

I have gathered ample evidence that historically Sierra Leone has been grossly exploited by fraudulent De Beers' practices which I would be happy to give during question time.

ANGOLA

In recent years Tempelsman has been trying to use US money and support to set up Savimbi of UNITA in the diamond trade with both De Beers the US support. On the side, he has also been setting up his own diamond cutting factory - here as in his other African cutting plants on terms that are likely to stop Africa getting a fully commercial cutting industry... a De Beers aim.

Tempelsman in 1996 persuaded the Assistant Secretary of State George E. Moose to give him a letter suggesting that the US would finance Tempelsman's plans. On October 10th 1996 he met with Tony Lake the National Security Advisor and with Lake's deputy, Shawn McCormick - and gained their support for Tempelsman's plans. In May 1997 the US Ambassador for Angola, Steinbach met with Savimbi - to back the Tempelsman plan. This plan included UNITA keeping its diamond mines - and selling them via De Beers. Again US foreign policy was being shaped to benefit De Beers.

TEMPELSMAN'S INDEPENDENCE OF DE BEERS

Tempelsman frequently poses as an independent diamond merchant, even as a rival to De Beers. This has enabled him to do such things as to advise the President of Namibia on his negotiations with De Beers. But if he were truly such, he would lose his diamond supplies from De Beers as have other diamond merchants who tried to rival De Beers. He has never lost these supplies. He is rumoured in the trade as having one of the very largest of the diamond "sights" supplied by De Beers. It is easy for De Beers to pay him secretly. They simply put more and better stones into the box they send him. The US customs are unable to check if this has happened, as they do not the experts on staff.

CONCLUSION

Maurice Tempelsman served the De Beers diamond cartel by promoting foreign policy decisions that favoured its access to and control of African diamond fields. This lead to the US covertly supporting undemocratic and corrupt regimes in Africa to the great detriment of the African people.

Information on Blood Diamonds Suppressed?

Why did WGBH suppress its Frontline program "The Diamond Empire," refusing to sell it to many who asked for it. The owners of Doubleday were later scared off from publishing the "sensational, important and accomplished" (their words) human rights book "Glitter and Greed: The story of Blood Stained Diamonds." They wrote after putting promoting the book as due to come out in 3 months, saying that rich and powerful people were against it, and although we may win any legal battle, it is not worth the cost of such a fight.

__________________________

www.supportblackowned.org

always interested in things like this

thanks for posting it.


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"Terrorism is only the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war. They believe that the legitimate use of violence is not the sole prerogative of the state." ~Arundhati Roy

strivin for self-determination since 1978

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http://omidele.blogspot.com/
http://rahareiki.tumblr.com/
http://seatofbliss.blogspot.com/

cash rules everything around me.

haaalf the story has never been told.

when it collapses around them, and they pretend to wonder why.

try listening to the congos heart of congos album while reading this article.

god is great.

ok!

******************************

______________________________
"...I'm telling ya these walls are
funny. First you hate 'em, then
you get used to 'em. Enough,
time passes, you get so you
depend on 'em. That's
"institutionalized."

Red, The Shawshank Redemption.







_________________
Inaug'ral Member of the OkaySports Hall of Fame.

"Slaves got options...cowards aint got shit." --PS
"Once upon a time, little need existed for making the distinction between a nigga and a black—at least not in this country, the place where niggas were invented" -- Donnell A

----------------------------

www.summerproleague.com/photo
_gallery.htm


''Ang hindi marunong lumingon
sa pinanggalingan, hindi
makakarating sa
pinaroroonan.'' Those who
cannot see where they came
from will never get to where
they are

by Edward Jay Epstein Friday February 14, 2003 at 05:46 PM
edepstein@worldnet.att.net

An important part of the pipeline goes from London to diamond-cutting factories in Tel Aviv to New York; but in Israel, diamond dealers were stockpiling supplies of diamonds rather than processing and passing them through the pipeline to New York. Since the early 1970s, when diamond prices were rapidly increasing and Israeli currency was depreciating by more than 50 percent a year, it had been more profitable for Israeli dealers to keep the diamonds they received from London than to cut and sell them.

Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

An unruly market may undo the work of a giant cartel and of an inspired, decades-long ad campaign


by Edward Jay Epstein


THE diamond invention -- the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem -- is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value -- and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known as "The Syndicate." In Europe, it was called the "C.S.O." -- initials referring to the Central Selling Organization, which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company. And in black Africa, it disguised its South African origins under subsidiaries with names like Diamond Development Corporation and Mining Services, Inc. At its height -- for most of this century -- it not only either directly owned or controlled all the diamond mines in southern Africa but also owned diamond trading companies in England, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland.

De Beers proved to be the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce. While other commodities, such as gold, silver, copper, rubber, and grains, fluctuated wildly in response to economic conditions, diamonds have continued, with few exceptions, to advance upward in price every year since the Depression. Indeed, the cartel seemed so superbly in control of prices -- and unassailable -- that, in the late 1970s, even speculators began buying diamonds as a guard against the vagaries of inflation and recession. The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever -- "forever" in the sense that they should never be resold.

In September of 1938, Harry Oppenheimer, son of the founder of De Beers and then twenty-nine, traveled from Johannesburg to New York City, to meet with Gerold M. Lauck, the president of N. W. Ayer, a leading advertising agency in the United States. Lauck and N. W. Ayer had been recommended to Oppenheimer by the Morgan Bank, which had helped his father consolidate the De Beers financial empire. His bankers were concerned about the price of diamonds, which had declined worldwide.

In Europe, where diamond prices had collapsed during the Depression, there seemed little possibility of restoring public confidence in diamonds. In Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain, the notion of giving a diamond ring to commemorate an engagement had never taken hold. In England and France, diamonds were still presumed to be jewels for aristocrats rather than the masses. Furthermore, Europe was on the verge of war, and there seemed little possibility of expanding diamond sales. This left the United States as the only real market for De Beers's diamonds. In fact, in 1938 some three quarters of all the cartel's diamonds were sold for engagement rings in the United States. Most of these stones, however, were smaller and of poorer quality than those bought in Europe, and had an average price of $80 apiece. Oppenheimer and the bankers believed that an advertising campaign could persuade Americans to buy more expensive diamonds.

Oppenheimer suggested to Lauck that his agency prepare a plan for creating a new image for diamonds among Americans. He assured Lauck that De Beers had not called on any other American advertising agency with this proposal, and that if the plan met with his father's approval, N. W. Ayer would be the exclusive agents for the placement of newspaper and radio advertisements in the United States. Oppenheimer agreed to underwrite the costs of the research necessary for developing the campaign. Lauck instantly accepted the offer.

In their subsequent investigation of the American diamond market, the staff of N. W. Ayer found that since the end of World War I, in 1919, the total amount of diamonds sold in America, measured in carats, had declined by 50 percent; at the same time, the quality of the diamonds, measured in dollar value, had declined by nearly 100 percent. An Ayer memo concluded that the depressed state of the market for diamonds was "the result of the economy, changes in social attitudes and the promotion of competitive luxuries."

Although it could do little about the state of the economy, N. W. Ayer suggested that through a well-orchestrated advertising and public-relations campaign it could have a significant impact on the "social attitudes of the public at large and thereby channel American spending toward larger and more expensive diamonds instead of "competitive luxuries." Specifically, the Ayer study stressed the need to strengthen the association in the public's mind of diamonds with romance. Since "young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings" it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship.

Since the Ayer plan to romanticize diamonds required subtly altering the public's picture of the way a man courts -- and wins -- a woman, the advertising agency strongly suggested exploiting the relatively new medium of motion pictures. Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love.

In addition, the agency suggested offering stories and society photographs to selected magazines and newspapers which would reinforce the link between diamonds and romance. Stories would stress the size of diamonds that celebrities presented to their loved ones, and photographs would conspicuously show the glittering stone on the hand of a well-known woman. Fashion designers would talk on radio programs about the "trend towards diamonds" that Ayer planned to start. The Ayer plan also envisioned using the British royal family to help foster the romantic allure of diamonds. An Ayer memo said, "Since Great Britain has such an important interest in the diamond industry, the royal couple could be of tremendous assistance to this British industry by wearing diamonds rather than other jewels." Queen Elizabeth later went on a well-publicized trip to several South African diamond mines, and she accepted a diamond from Oppenheimer.

In addition to putting these plans into action, N. W. Ayer placed a series of lush four-color advertisements in magazines that were presumed to mold elite opinion, featuring reproductions of famous paintings by such artists as Picasso, Derain, Dali, and Dufy. The advertisements were intended to convey the idea that diamonds, like paintings, were unique works of art.

BY 1941, The advertising agency reported to its client that it had already achieved impressive results in its campaign. The sale of diamonds had increased by 55 percent in the United States since 1938, reversing the previous downward trend in retail sales. N. W. Ayer noted also that its campaign had required "the conception of a new form of advertising which has been widely imitated ever since. There was no direct sale to be made. There was no brand name to be impressed on the public mind. There was simply an idea -- the eternal emotional value surrounding the diamond." It further claimed that "a new type of art was devised ... and a new color, diamond blue, was created and used in these campaigns.... "

In its 1947 strategy plan, the advertising agency strongly emphasized a psychological approach. "We are dealing with a problem in mass psychology. We seek to ... strengthen the tradition of the diamond engagement ring -- to make it a psychological necessity capable of competing successfully at the retail level with utility goods and services...." It defined as its target audience "some 70 million people 15 years and over whose opinion we hope to influence in support of our objectives." N. W. Ayer outlined a subtle program that included arranging for lecturers to visit high schools across the country. "All of these lectures revolve around the diamond engagement ring, and are reaching thousands of girls in their assemblies, classes and informal meetings in our leading educational institutions," the agency explained in a memorandum to De Beers. The agency had organized, in 1946, a weekly service called "Hollywood Personalities," which provided 125 leading newspapers with descriptions of the diamonds worn by movie stars. And it continued its efforts to encourage news coverage of celebrities displaying diamond rings as symbols of romantic involvement.In 1947, the agency commissioned a series of portraits of "engaged socialites." The idea was to create prestigious "role models" for the poorer middle-class wage-earners. The advertising agency explained, in its 1948 strategy paper, "We spread the word of diamonds worn by stars of screen and stage, by wives and daughters of political leaders, by any woman who can make the grocer's wife and the mechanic's sweetheart say 'I wish I had what she has.'"

De Beers needed a slogan for diamonds that expressed both the theme of romance and legitimacy. An N. W. Ayer copywriter came up with the caption "A Diamond Is Forever," which was scrawled on the bottom of a picture of two young lovers on a honeymoon. Even though diamonds can in fact be shattered, chipped, discolored, or incinerated to ash, the concept of eternity perfectly captured the magical qualities that the advertising agency wanted to attribute to diamonds. Within a year, "A Diamond Is Forever" became the official motto of De Beers.

In 1951, N. W. Ayer found some resistance to its million-dollar publicity blitz. It noted in its annual strategy review:

The millions of brides and brides-to-be are subjected to at least two important pressures that work against the diamond engagement ring. Among the more prosperous, there is the sophisticated urge to be different as a means of being smart.... the lower-income groups would like to show more for the money than they can find in the diamond they can afford....

To remedy these problems, the advertising agency argued, "It is essential that these pressures be met by the constant publicity to show that only the diamond is everywhere accepted and recognized as the symbol of betrothal."

N. W. Ayer was always searching for new ways to influence American public opinion. Not only did it organize a service to "release to the women's pages the engagement ring" but it set about exploiting the relatively new medium of television by arranging for actresses and other celebrities to wear diamonds when they appeared before the camera. It also established a "Diamond Information Center" that placed a stamp of quasi-authority on the flood of "historical" data and "news" it released. "We work hard to keep ourselves known throughout the publishing world as the source of information on diamonds," N. W. Ayer commented in a memorandum to De Beers, and added: "Because we have done it successfully, we have opportunities to help with articles originated by others."

N. W. Ayer proposed to apply to the diamond market Thorstein Veblen's idea, stated in The Theory of the Leisure Class, that Americns were motivated in their purchases not by utility but by "conspicuous consumption." "The substantial diamond gift can be made a more widely sought symbol of personal and family success -- an expression of socio-economic achievement," N. W. Ayer said in a report. To exploit this desire for conspicuous display, the agency specifically recommended, "Promote the diamond as one material object which can reflect, in a very personal way, a man's ... success in life." Since this campaign would be addressed to upwardly mobile men, the advertisements ideally "should have the aroma of tweed, old leather and polished wood which is characteristic of a good club."

Toward the end of the 1950s, N. W. Ayer reported to De Beers that twenty years of advertisements and publicity had had a pronounced effect on the American psyche. "Since 1939 an entirely new generation of young people has grown to marriageable age," it said. "To this new generation a diamond ring is considered a necessity to engagements by virtually everyone." The message had been so successfully impressed on the minds of this generation that those who could not afford to buy a diamond at the time of their marriage would "defer the purchase" rather than forgo it.

THE campaign to internationalize the diamond invention began in earnest in the mid-1960s. The prime targets were Japan, Germany, zand Brazil. Since N. W. Ayer was primarily an American advertising agency, De Beers brought in the J. Walter Thompson agency, which had especially strong advertising subsidiaries in the target countries, to place most of its international advertising. Within ten years, De Beers succeeded beyond even its most optimistic expectations, creating a billion-dollar-a-year diamond market in Japan, where matrimonial custom had survived feudal revolutions, world wars, industrialization, and even the American occupation.

Until the mid-1960s, Japanese parents arranged marriages for their children through trusted intermediaries. The ceremony was consummated, according to Shinto law, by the bride and groom drinking rice wine from the same wooden bowl. There was no tradition of romance, courtship, seduction, or prenuptial love in Japan; and none that required the gift of a diamond engagement ring. Even the fact that millions of American soldiers had been assigned to military duty in Japan for a decade had not created any substantial Japanese interest in giving diamonds as a token of love.

J. Walter Thompson began its campaign by suggesting that diamonds were a visible sign of modern Western values. It created a series of color advertisements in Japanese magazines showing beautiful women displaying their diamond rings. All the women had Western facial features and wore European clothes. Moreover, the women in most of the advertisements were involved in some activity -- such as bicycling, camping, yachting, ocean swimming, or mountain climbing -- that defied Japanese traditions. In the background, there usually stood a Japanese man, also attired in fashionable European clothes. In addition, almost all of the automobiles, sporting equipment, and other artifacts in the picture were conspicuous foreign imports. The message was clear: diamonds represent a sharp break with the Oriental past and a sign of entry into modern life.

The campaign was remarkably successful. Until1959, the importation of diamonds had not even been permitted by the postwar Japanese government. When the campaign began, in 1967, not quite 5 percent of engaged Japanese women received a diamond engagement ring. By 1972, the proportion had risen to 27 percent. By 1978, half of all Japanese women who were married wore a diamond; by 1981, some 60 percent of Japanese brides wore diamonds. In a mere fourteen years, the 1,500-year Japanese tradition had been radically revised. Diamonds became a staple of the Japanese marriage. Japan became the second largest market, after the United States, for the sale of diamond engagement rings.

In America, which remained the most important market for most of De Beer's diamonds, N. W. Ayer recognized the need to create a new demaind for diamonds among long-married couples. "Candies come, flowers come, furs come," but such ephemeral gifts fail to satisfy a woman's psychological craving for "a renewal of the romance," N. W. Ayer said in a report. An advertising campaign could instill the idea that the gift of a second diamond, in the later years of marriage, would be accepted as a sign of "ever-growing love." In 1962, N. W. Ayer asked for authorization to "begin the long-term process of setting the diamond aside as the only appropriate gift for those later-in-life occasions where sentiment is to be expressed." De Beers immediately approved the campaign.

THE diamond market had to be further restructured in the mid-1960s to accomodate a surfeit of minute diamonds, which De Beers undertook to market for the Soviets. They had discovered diamond mines in Siberia, after intensive exploration, in the late 1950s: De Beers and its allies no longer controlled the diamond supply, and realized that open competition with the Soviets would inevitably lead, as Harry Oppenheimer gingerly put it, to "price fluctuations,"which would weaken the carefully cultivated confidence of the public in the value of diamonds. Oppenheimer, assuming that neither party could afford risking the destruction of the diamond invention, offered the Soviets a straightforward deal -- "a single channel" for controlling the world supply of diamonds. In accepting this arrangement, the Soviets became partners in the cartel, and co-protectors of the diamond invention.

Almost all of the Soviet diamonds were under half a carat in their uncut form, and there was no ready retail outlet for millions of such tiny diamonds. When it made its secret deal with the Soviet Union, De Beers had expected production from the Siberian mines to decrease gradually. Instead, production accelerated at an incredible pace, and De Beers was forced to reconsider its sales strategy. De Beers ordered N. W. Ayer to reverse one of its themes: women were no longer to be led to equate the status and emotional commitment to an engagement with the sheer size of the diamond. A "strategy for small diamond sales" was outlined, stressing the "importance of quality, color and cut" over size. Pictures of "one quarter carat" rings would replace pictures of "up to 2 carat" rings. Moreover, the advertising agency began in its international campaign to "illustrate gems as small as one-tenth of a carat and give them the same emotional importance as larger stones." The news releases also made clear that women should think of diamonds, regardless of size, as objects of perfection: a small diamond could be as perfect as a large diamond.

DeBeers devised the "eternity ring," made up of as many as twenty-five tiny Soviet diamonds, which could be sold to an entirely new market of older married women. The advertising campaign was based on the theme of recaptured love. Again, sentiments were born out of necessity: older American women received a ring of miniature diamonds because of the needs of a South African corporation to accommodate the Soviet Union.

The new campaign met with considerable success. The average size of diamonds sold fell from one carat in 1939 to .28 of a carat in 1976, which coincided almost exactly with the average size of the Siberian diamonds De Beers was distributing. However, as American consumers became accustomed to the idea of buying smaller diamonds, they began to perceive larger diamonds as ostentatious. By the mid-1970s, the advertising campaign for smaller diamonds was beginning to seem too successful. In its 1978 strategy report, N. W. Ayer said, "a supply problem has developed ... that has had a significant effect on diamond pricing" -- a problem caused by the long-term campaign to stimulate the sale of small diamonds. "Owing to successful pricing, distribution and advertising policies over the last 16 years, demand for small diamonds now appears to have significantly exceeded supply even though supply, in absolute terms, has been increasing steadily." Whereas there was not a sufficient supply of small diamonds to meet the demands of consumers, N. W. Ayer reported that "large stone sales (1 carat and up) ... have maintained the sluggish pace of the last three years." Because of this, the memorandum continued, "large stones are being .. discounted by as much as 20%."

The shortage of small diamonds proved temporary. As Soviet diamonds continued to flow into London at an ever-increasing rate, De Beers's strategists came to the conclusion that this production could not be entirely absorbed by "eternity rings" or other new concepts in jewelry, and began looking for markets for miniature diamonds outside the United States. Even though De Beers had met with enormous success in creating an instant diamond "tradition" in Japan, it was unable to create a similar tradition in Brazil, Germany, Austria, or Italy. By paying the high cost involved in absorbing this flood of Soviet diamonds each year, De Beers prevented -- at least temporarily -- the Soviet Union from taking any precipitous actions that might cause diamonds to start glutting the market. N. W. Ayer argued that "small stone jewelry advertising" could not be totally abandoned: "Serious trade relationship problems would ensue if, after15 years of stressing 'affordable' small stone jewelry, we were to drop all of these programs."

Instead, the agency suggested a change in emphasis in presenting diamonds to the American public. In the advertisements to appear in 1978, it planned to substitute photographs of one-carat-and-over stones for photographs of smaller diamonds, and to resume both an "informative advertising campaign" and an "emotive program" that would serve to "reorient consumer tastes and price perspectives towards acceptance of solitaire jewelry rather than multi-stone pieces." Other "strategic refinements" it recommended were designed to restore the status of the large diamond. "In fact, this will be the exact opposite of the small stone informative program that ran from 1965 to 1970 that popularized the 'beauty in miniature' concept...." With an advertising budget of some $9.69 million, N. W. Ayer appeared confident that it could bring about this "reorientation."

N. W. Ayer learned from an opinion poll it commissioned from the firm of Daniel Yankelovich, Inc. that the gift of a diamond contained an important element of surprise. "Approximately half of all diamond jewelry that the men have given and the women have received were given with zero participation or knowledge on the part of the woman recipient," the study pointed out. N. W Ayer analyzed this "surprise factor":

Women are in unanimous agreement that they want to be surprised with gifts.... They want, of course, to be surprised for the thrill of it. However, a deeper, more important reason lies behind this desire.... "freedom from guilt." Some of the women pointed out that if their husbands enlisted their help in purchasing a gift (like diamond jewelry), their practical nature would come to the fore and they would be compelled to object to the purchase.

Women were not totally surprised by diamond gifts: some 84 percent of the men in the study "knew somehow" that the women wanted diamond jewelry. The study suggested a two-step "gift-process continuum": first, "the man 'learns' diamonds are o.k." fom the woman; then, "at some later point in time, he makes the diamond purchase decision" to surprise the woman.

Through a series of "projective" psychological questions, meant "to draw out a respondent's innermost feelings about diamond jewelry," the study attempted to examine further the semi-passive role played by women in receiving diamonds. The male-female roles seemed to resemble closely the sex relations in a Victorian novel. "Man plays the dominant, active role in the gift process. Woman's role is more subtle, more oblique, more enigmatic...." The woman seemed to believe there was something improper about receiving a diamond gift. Women spoke in interviews about large diamonds as "flashy, gaudy, overdone" and otherwise inappropriate. Yet the study found that "Buried in the negative attitudes ... lies what is probably the primary driving force for acquiring them. Diamonds are a traditional and conspicuous signal of achievement, status and success." It noted, for example, "A woman can easily feel that diamonds are 'vulgar' and still be highly enthusiastic about receiving diamond jewelry." The element of surprise, even if it is feigned, plays the same role of accommodating dissonance in accepting a diamond gift as it does in prime sexual seductions: it permits the woman to pretend that she has not actively participated in the decision. She thus retains both her innocence -- and the diamond.

For advertising diamonds in the late 1970s, the implications of this research were clear. To induce men to buy diamonds for women, advertising should focus on the emotional impact of the "surprise" gift transaction. In the final analysis, a man was moved to part with earnings not by the value, aesthetics, or tradition of diamonds but by the expectation that a "gift of love" would enhance his standing in the eyes of a woman. On the other hand, a woman accepted the gift as a tangible symbol of her status and achievements.

By 1979, N. W. Ayer had helped De Beers expand its sales of diamonds in the United States to more than $2.1 billion, at the wholesale level, compared with a mere $23 million in 1939. In forty years, the value of its sales had increased nearly a hundredfold. The expenditure on advertisements, which began at a level of only $200,000 a year and gradually increased to $10 million, seemed a brilliant investment.

EXCEPT for those few stones that have been destroyed, every diamond that has been found and cut into a jewel still exists today and is literally in the public's hands. Some hundred million women wear diamonds, while millions of others keep them in safe-deposit boxes or strongboxes as family heirlooms. It is conservatively estimated that the public holds more than 500 million carats of gem diamonds, which is more than fifty times the number of gem diamonds produced by the diamond cartel in any given year. Since the quantity of diamonds needed for engagement rings and other jewelry each year is satisfied by the production from the world's mines, this half-billion-carat supply of diamonds must be prevented from ever being put on the market. The moment a significant portion of the public begins selling diamonds from this inventory, the price of diamonds cannot be sustained. For the diamond invention to survive, the public must be inhibited from ever parting with its diamonds.

In developing a strategy for De Beers in 1953, N. W. Ayer said: "In our opinion old diamonds are in 'safe hands' only when widely dispersed and held by individuals as cherished possessions valued far above their market price." As far as De Beers and N. W. Ayer were concerned, "safe hands" belonged to those women psychologically conditioned never to sell their diamonds. This conditioning could not be attained solely by placing advertisements in magazines. The diamond-holding public, which includes people who inherit diamonds, had to remain convinced that diamonds retained their monetary value. If it saw price fluctuations in the diamond market and attempted to dispose of diamonds to take advantage of changing prices, the retail market would become chaotic. It was therefore essential that De Beers maintain at least the illusion of price stability.

In the 1971 De Beers annual report, Harry Oppenheimer explained the unique situation of diamonds in the following terms: "A degree of control is necessary for the well-being of the industry, not because production is excessive or demand is falling, but simply because wide fluctuations in price, which have, rightly or wrongly, been accepted as normal in the case of most raw materials, would be destructive of public confidence in the case of a pure luxury such as gem diamonds, of which large stocks are held in the form of jewelry by the general public." During the periods when production from the mines temporarily exceeds the consumption of diamonds -- the balance is determined mainly by the number of impending marriages in the United States and Japan -- the cartel can preserve the illusion of price stability by either cutting back the distribution of diamonds at its London "sights," where, ten times a year, it allots the world's supply of diamonds to about 300 hand-chosen dealers, called "sight-holders," or by itself buying back diamonds at the wholesale level. The underlying assumption is that as long as the general public never sees the price of diamonds fall, it will not become nervous and begin selling its diamonds. If this huge inventory should ever reach the market, even De Beers and all the Oppenheimer resources could not prevent the price of diamonds from plummeting.

Selling individual diamonds at a profit, even those held over long periods of time, can be surprisingly difficult. For example, in 1970, the London-based consumer magazine Money Which? decided to test diamonds as a decade long investment. It bought two gem-quality diamonds, weighing approximately one-half carat apiece, from one of London's most reputable diamond dealers, for £400 (then worth about a thousand dollars). For nearly nine years, it kept these two diamonds sealed in an envelope in its vault. During this same period, Great Britain experienced inflation that ran as high as 25 percent a year. For the diamonds to have kept pace with inflation, they would have had to increase in value at least 300 percent, making them worth some £400 pounds by 1978. But when the magazine's editor, Dave Watts,tried to sell the diamonds in 1978, he found that neither jewelry stores nor wholesale dealers in London's Hatton Garden district would pay anywhere near that price for the diamonds. Most of the stores refused to pay any cash for them; the highest bid Watts received was £500, which amounted to a profit of only £100 in over eight years, or less than 3 percent at a compound rate of interest. If the bid were calculated in 1970 pounds, it would amount to only £167. Dave Watts summed up the magazine's experiment by saying, "As an 8-year investment the diamonds that we bought have proved to be very poor." The problem was that the buyer, not the seller, determined the price.

The magazine conducted another experiment to determine the extent to which larger diamonds appreciate in value over a one-year period. In 1970, it bought a 1.42 carat diamond for £745. In 1971, the highest offer it received for the same gem was £568. Rather than sell it at such an enormous loss, Watts decided to extend the experiment until 1974, when he again made the round of the jewelers in Hatton Garden to have it appraised. During this tour of the diamond district, Watts found that the diamond had mysteriously shrunk in weight to 1.04 carats. One of the jewelers had apparently switched diamonds during the appraisal. In that same year, Watts, undaunted, bought another diamond, this one 1.4 carats, from a reputable London dealer. He paid £2,595. A week later, he decided to sell it. The maximum offer he received was £1,000.

In 1976, the Dutch Consumer Association also tried to test the price appreciation of diamonds by buying a perfect diamond of over one carat in Amsterdam, holding it for eight months, and then offering it for sale to the twenty leading dealers in Amsterdam. Nineteen refused to buy it, and the twentieth dealer offered only a fraction of the purchase price.

Selling diamonds can also be an extraordinarily frustrating experience for private individuals. In 1978, for example, a wealthy woman in New York City decided to sell back a diamond ring she had bought from Tiffany two years earlier for $100,000 and use the proceeds toward a necklace of matched pearls that she fancied. She had read about the "diamond boom" in news magazines and hoped that she might make a profit on the diamond. Instead, the sales executive explained, with what she said seemed to be a touch of embarrassment, that Tiffany had "a strict policy against repurchasing diamonds." He assured her, however, that the diamond was extremely valuable, and suggested another Fifth Avenue jewelry store. The woman went from one leading jeweler to another, attempting to sell her diamond. One store offered to swap it for another jewel, and two other jewelers offered to accept the diamond "on consignment" and pay her a percentage of what they sold it for, but none of the half-dozen jewelers she visited offered her cash for her $100,000 diamond. She finally gave up and kept the diamond.

Retail jewelers, especially the prestigious Fifth Avenue stores, prefer not to buy back diamonds from customers, because the offer they would make would most likely be considered ridiculously low. The "keystone," or markup, on a diamond and its setting may range from 100 to 200 percent, depending on the policy of the store; if it bought diamonds back from customers, it would have to buy them back at wholesale prices. Most jewelers would prefer not to make a customer an offer that might be deemed insulting and also might undercut the widely held notion that diamonds go up in value. Moreover, since retailers generally receive their diamonds from wholesalers on consignment, and need not pay for them until they are sold, they would not readily risk their own cash to buy diamonds from customers. Rather than offer customers a fraction of what they paid for diamonds, retail jewelers almost invariably recommend to their clients firms that specialize in buying diamonds "retail."

The firm perhaps most frequently recommended by New York jewelry shops is Empire Diamonds Corporation, which is situated on the sixty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building, in midtown Manhattan. Empire's reception room, which resembles a doctor's office, is usually crowded with elderly women who sit nervously in plastic chairs waiting for their names to be called. One by one, they are ushered into a small examining room, where an appraiser scrutinizes their diamonds and makes them a cash offer. "We usually can't pay more than a maximum of 90 percent of the current wholesale price," says Jack Brod, president of Empire Diamonds. "In most cases we have to pay less, since the setting has to be discarded, and we have to leave a margin for error in our evaluation -- especially if the diamond is mounted in a setting." Empire removes the diamonds from their settings, which are sold as scrap, and resells them to wholesalers. Because of the steep markup on diamonds, individuals who buy retail and in effect sell wholesale often suffer enormous losses. For example, Brod estimates that a half-carat diamond ring, which might cost $2,000 at a retail jewelry store, could be sold for only $600 at Empire.

The appraisers at Empire Diamonds examine thousands of diamonds a month but rarely turn up a diamond of extraordinary quality. Almost all the diamonds they find are slightly flawed, off-color, commercial-grade diamonds. The chief appraiser says, "When most of these diamonds were purchased, American women were concerned with the size of the diamond, not its intrinsic quality." He points out that the setting frequently conceals flaws, and adds, "The sort of flawless, investment-grade diamond one reads about is almost never found in jewelry."

Many of the elderly women who bring their jewelry to Empire Diamonds and other buying services have been victims of burglaries or muggings and fear further attempts. Thieves, however, have an even more difficult time selling diamonds than their victims. When suspicious-looking characters turn up at Empire Diamonds, they are asked to wait in the reception room, and the police are called in. In January of 1980, for example, a disheveled youth came into Empire with a bag full of jewelry that he called "family heirlooms." When Brod pointed out that a few pieces were imitations, the youth casually tossed them into the wastepaper basket. Brod buzzed for the police.

When thieves bring diamonds to underworld "fences," they usually get only a pittance for them. In 1979, for example, New York City police recovere stolen diamonds with an insured value of $50,000 which had been sold to a 'fence' for only $200. According to the assistant district attorney who handled the case, the fence was unable to dispose of the diamonds on 47th Street, and he was eventually turned in by one of the diamond dealers he contacted.

While those who attempt to sell diamonds often experience disappointment at the low price they are offered, stories in gossip columns suggest that diamonds are resold at enormous profits. This is because the column items are not about the typical diamond ring that a woman desperately attempts to peddle to small stores and diamond buying services like Empire but about truly extraordinary diamonds that movie stars sell, or claim to sell, in a publicity-charged atmosphere. The legend created around the so-called "Elizabeth Taylor" diamond is a case in point. This pear-shaped diamond, which weighed 69.42 carats after it had been cut and polished, was the fifty-sixth largest diamond in the world and one of the few large-cut diamonds in private hands. Except that it was a diamond, it had little in common with the millions of small stones that are mass-marketed each year in engagement rings and other jewelry.

A serious threat to the Stability of the diamond invention came in the late 1970s from the sale of "investment" diamonds to speculators in the United States. A large number of fraudulent investment firms, most of them in Arizona, began telephoning prospective clients drawn from various lists of professionals and investors who had recently sold stock. "Boiler-room operators," many of them former radio and television announcers, persuaded strangers to buy mail-order diamonds as investments that were supposedly much safer than stocks or bonds. Many of the newly created firms also held "diamond-investment seminars" in expensive resort hotels, where they presented impressive graphs and data. Typically assisted by a few well-rehearsed shills in the audience, the seminar leaders sold sealed packets of diamonds to the audience. The leaders often played on the fear of elderly investors that their relatives might try to seize their cash assets and commit them to nursing homes. They suggested that the investors could stymie such attempts by putting their money into diamonds and hiding them.

The sealed packets distributed at these seminars and through the mail included certificates guaranteeing the quality of the diamonds -- as long as the packets remained sealed. Customers who broke the seal often learned from independent appraisers that their diamonds were of a quality inferior to that stated. Many were worthless. Complaints proliferated so fast that, in 1978, the attorney general of New York created a "diamond task force" to investigate the hundreds of allegations of fraud.

Some of the entrepreneurs were relative newcomers to the diamond business. Rayburne Martin, who went from De Beers Diamond Investments, Ltd. (no relation to the De Beers cartel) to Tel-Aviv Diamond Investments, Ltd. -- both in Scottsdale, Arizona -- had a record of embezzlement and securities law violations in Arkansas, and was a fugitive from justice during most of his tenure in the diamond trade. Harold S. McClintock, also known as Harold Sager, had been convicted of stock fraud in Chicago and involved in a silver-bullion-selling caper in 1974 before he helped organize DeBeers Diamond Investments, Ltd. Don Jay Shure, who arranged to set up another DeBeers Diamond Investments, Ltd., in Irvine, California, had also formerly been convicted of fraud. Bernhard Dohrmann, the "marketing director" of the International Diamond Corporation, had served time in jail for security fraud in 1976. Donald Nixon, the nephew of former President Richard M. Nixon, and fugitive financier Robert L. Vesco were, according to the New York State attorney general, participating in the late 1970s in a high-pressure telephone campaign to sell "overvalued or worthless diamonds" by employing "a battery of silken-voiced radio and television announcers." Among the diamond salesmen were also a wide array of former commodity and stock brokers who specialized in attempting to sell sealed diamonds to pension funds and retirement plans.

In London, the real De Beers, unable to stifle all the bogus entrepreneurs using its name, decided to explore the potential market for investment gems. It announced in March of 1978 a highly unusual sort of "diamond fellowship" for selected retail jewelers. Each jeweler who participated would pay a $2,000 fellowship fee. In return, he would receive a set of certificates for investment-grade diamonds, contractual forms for "buy-back" guarantees, promotional material, and training in how to sell these unmounted diamonds to an entirely new category of customers. The selected retailers would then sell loose stones rather than fine jewels, with certificates guaranteeing their value at $4,000 to $6,000.

De Beers's modest move into the investment-diamond business caused a tremor of concern in the trade. De Beers had always strongly opposed retailers selling "investment" diamonds, on the grounds that because customers had no sentimental attachment to such diamonds, they would eventually attempt to resell them and cause sharp price fluctuations.

If De Beers had changed its policy toward investment diamonds, it was not because it wanted to encourage the speculative fever that was sweeping America and Europe. De Beers had "little choice but to get involved," as one De Beers executive explained. Many established diamond dealers had rushed into the investment field to sell diamonds to financial institutions, pension plans, and private investors. It soon became apparent in the Diamond Exchange in New York that selling unmounted diamonds to investors was far more profitable than selling them to jewelry shops. By early 1980, David Birnbaum, a leading dealer in New York, estimated that nearly a third of all diamond sales in the United States were, in terms of dollar value, of these unmounted investment diamonds. "Only five years earlier, investment diamonds were only an insignificant part of the business," he said. Even if De Beers did not approve of this new market in diamonds, it could hardly ignore a third of the American diamond trade.

To make a profit, investors must at some time find buyers who are willing to pay more for their diamonds than they did. Here, however, investors face the same problem as those attempting to sell their jewelry: there is no unified market in which to sell diamonds. Although dealers will quote the prices at which they are willing to sell investment-grade diamonds, they seldom give a set price at which they are willing to buy diamonds of the same grade. In 1977, for example, Jewelers' Circular Keystone polled a large number of retail dealers and found a difference of over 100 percent in offers for the same quality of investment-grade diamonds. Moreover, even though most investors buy their diamonds at or near retail price, they are forced to sell at wholesale prices. As Forbes magazine pointed out, in 1977, "Average investors, unfortunately, have little access to the wholesale market. Ask a jeweler to buy back a stone, and he'll often begin by quoting a price 30% or more below wholesale." Since the difference between wholesale and retail is usually at least 100 percent in investment diamonds, any gain from the appreciation of the diamonds will probably be lost in selling them.

"There's going to come a day when all those doctors, lawyers, and other fools who bought diamonds over the phone take them out of their strongboxes, or wherever, and try to sell them," one dealer predicted last year. Another gave a gloomy picture of what would happen if this accumulation of diamonds were suddenly sold by speculators. "Investment diamonds are bought for $30,000 a carat, not because any woman wants to wear them on her finger but because the investor believes they will be worth $50,000 a carat. He may borrow heavily to leverage his investment. When the price begins to decline, everyone will try to sell their diamonds at once. In the end, of course, there will be no buyers for diamonds at $30,000 a carat or even $15,000. At this point, there will be a stampede to sell investment diamonds, and the newspapers will begin writing stories about the great diamond crash. Investment diamonds constitute, of course, only a small fraction of the diamonds held by the public, but when women begin reading about a diamond crash, they will take their diamonds to retail jewelers to be appraised and find out that they are worth less than they paid for them. At that point, people will realize that diamonds are not forever, and jewelers will be flooded with customers trying to sell, not buy, diamonds. That will be the end of the diamond business."

BUT a panic on the part of investors is not the only event that could end the diamond business. De Beers is at this writing losing control of several sources of diamonds that might flood the market at any time, deflating forever the price of diamonds.

In the winter of 1978, diamond dealers in New York City were becoming increasingly concerned about the possibility of a serious rupture, or even collapse, of the "pipeline" through which De Beers's diamonds flow from the cutting centers in Europe to the main retail markets in America and Japan. This pipeline, a crucial component of the diamond invention, is made up of a network of brokers, diamond cutters, bankers, distributors, jewelry manufacturers, wholesalers, and diamond buyers for retail establishments. Most of the people in this pipeline are Jewish, and virtually all are closely interconnected, through family ties or long-standing business relationships.

An important part of the pipeline goes from London to diamond-cutting factories in Tel Aviv to New York; but in Israel, diamond dealers were stockpiling supplies of diamonds rather than processing and passing them through the pipeline to New York. Since the early 1970s, when diamond prices were rapidly increasing and Israeli currency was depreciating by more than 50 percent a year, it had been more profitable for Israeli dealers to keep the diamonds they received from London than to cut and sell them. As more and more diamonds were taken out of circulation in Tel Aviv, an acute shortage began in New York, driving prices up.

In early 1977, Sir Philip Oppenheimer dispatched his son Anthony to Tel Aviv, accompanied by other De Beers executives, to announce that De Beers intended to cut the Israeli quota of diamonds by at least 20 percent during the coming year. This warning had the opposite effect of what he intended. Rather than paring down production to conform to this quota, Israeli manufacturers and dealers began building up their own stockpiles of diamonds, paying a premium of 100 percent or more for the unopened boxes of diamonds that De Beers shipped to Belgian and American dealers. (By selling their diamonds to the Israelis, the De Beers clients could instantly double their money without taking any risks.) Israeli buyers also moved into Africa and began buying directly from smugglers. The Intercontinental Hotel in Liberia, then the center for the sale of smuggled goods, became a sort of extension of the Israeli bourse. After the Israeli dealers purchased the diamonds, either from De Beers clients or from smugglers, they received 80 percent of the amount they had paid in the form of a loan from Israeli banks. Because of government pressure to help the diamond industry, the banks charged only 6 percent interest on these loans, well below the rate of inflation in Israel. By 1978, the banks had extended $850 million in credit to diamond dealers, an amount equal to some 5 percent of the entire gross national product of Israel. The only collateral the banks had for these loans was uncut diamonds.

De Beers estimated that the Israeli stockpile was more than 6 million carats in 1977, and growing at a rate of almost half a million carats a month. At that rate, it would be only a matter of months before the Israeli stockpile would exceed the cartel's in London. If Israel controlled such an enormous quantity of diamonds, the cartel could no longer fix the price of diamonds with impunity. At any time, the Israelis could be forced to pour these diamonds onto the world market. The cartel decided that it had no alternative but to force liquidation of the Israeli stockpile.

If De Beers wanted to bring the diamond speculation under control, it would have to clamp down on the banks, which were financing diamond purchases with artificially low interest rates. De Beers announced that it was adopting a new strategy of imposing "surcharges" on diamonds. Since these "surcharges," which might be as much as 40 percent of the value of the diamonds, were effectively a temporary price increase, they could pose a risk to banks extending credit to diamond dealers. For example, with a 40 percent surcharge, a diamond dealer would have to pay $1,400 rather than $1,000 for a small lot of diamonds; however, if the surcharge was withdrawn, the diamonds would be worth only a thousand dollars. The Israeli banks could not afford to advance 80 percent of a purchase price that included the so-called surcharge; they therefore required additional collateral from dealers and speculators. Further, they began, under pressure from De Beers, to raise interest rates on outstanding loans.

Within a matter of weeks in the summer of 1978, interest rates on loans to purchase diamonds went up 50 percent. Moreover, instead of lending money based on what Israeli dealers paid for diamonds, the banks began basing their loans on the official De Beers price for diamonds. If a dealer paid more than the De Beers price for diamonds -- and most Israeli dealers were paying at least double the price -- he would have to finance the increment with his own funds.

To tighten the squeeze on Israel, De Beers abruptly cut off shipments of diamonds to forty of its clients who had been selling large portions of their consignments to Israeli dealers. As Israeli dealers found it increasingly difficult either to buy or finance diamonds, they were forced to sell diamonds from the stockpiles they had accumulated. Israeli diamonds poured onto the market, and prices at the wholesale level began to fall. This decline led the Israeli banks to put further pressure on dealers to liquidate their stocks to repay their loans. Hundreds of Israeli dealers, unable to meet their commitments, went bankrupt as prices continued to plunge. The banks inherited the diamonds.

Last spring, executives of the Diamond Trading Company made an emergency trip to Tel Aviv. They had been informed that three Israeli banks were holding $1.5 billion worth of diamonds in their vaults -- an amount equal to nearly the annual production of all the diamond mines in the world -- and were threatening to dump the hoard of diamonds onto an already depressed market. When the banks had investigated the possibilities of reselling the diamonds in Europe or the United States, they found little interest. The world diamond market was already choked with uncut and unsold diamonds. The only alternative to dumping their diamonds on the market was reselling them to De Beers itself.

De Beers, however, is in no position to absorb such a huge cache of diamonds. During the recession of the mid-970s, it had to use a large portion of its cash reserve to buy diamonds from Russia and from newly independent countries in Africa, in order to preserve the cartel arrangement. As it added diamonds to its stockpile, De Beers depleted its cash reserves. Furthermore, in 1980, De Beers found it necessary to buy back diamonds on the wholesale markets in Antwerp to prevent a complete collapse in diamond prices. When the Israeli banks approached De Beers about the possibility of buying back the diamonds, De Beers, possibly for the first time since the depression of the 1930s, found itself severely strapped for cash. It could, of course, borrow the $1.5 billion necessary to bail out the Israeli banks, but this would strain the financial structure of the entire Oppenheimer empire.

Sir Philip Oppenheimer, Monty Charles, Michael Grantham, and other top executives from De Beers and its subsidiaries attempted to prevent the Israeli banks from dumping their hoard of diamonds. Despite their best efforts, however, the situation worsened. Last September, Israel's major banks quietly informed the Israeli government that they faced losses of disastrous proportions from defaulted accounts almost entirely collateralized with diamonds. Three of Israel's largest banks -- the Union Bank of Israel, the Israel Discount Bank, and Barclays Discount Bank -- had loans of some $660 million outstanding to diamond dealers, which constituted a significant portion of the bank debt in Israel. To be sure, not all of these loans were in jeopardy; but, according to bank estimates, defaults in diamond accounts rose to 20 percent of their loan portfolios. The crisis had to be resolved either by selling the diamonds that had been put up as collateral, which might precipitate a worldwide selling panic, or by some sort of outside assistance from the Israeli government or De Beers or both. The negotiations provided only stopgap assistance: De Beers would buy back a small proportion of the diamonds, and the Israeli government would not force the banks to conform to banking regulations that would result in the liquidation of the stockpile.

"Nobody took into account that diamonds, like any other commodity, can drop in value," Mark Mosevics, chairman of First International Bank of Israel, explained to The New York Times. According to industry estimates, the average one-carat flawless diamond had fallen in value by 50 percent since January of 1980. In March of 1980, for example, the benchmark value for such a diamond was $63,000; in September of 1981, it was only $23,000. This collapse of prices forced Israeli banks to sell diamonds from their stockpile at enormous discounts. One Israeli bank reportedly liquidated diamonds valued at $6 million for $4 million in cash in late 1981. It became clear to the diamond trade that a major stockpile of large diamonds was out of De Beers's control.

THE most serious threat to De Beers is yet another source of diamonds that it does not control -- a source so far untapped. Since Cecil Rhodes and the group of European bankers assembled the components of the diamond invention at the end of the nineteenth century, managers of the diamond cartel have shared a common nightmare -- that a giant new source of diamonds would be discovered outside their purview. Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, using all the colonial connections of the British Empire, succeeded in weaving the later discoveries of diamonds in Africa into the fabric of the cartel; Harry Oppenheimer managed to negotiate a secret agreement that effectively brought the Soviet Union into the cartel. However, these brilliant efforts did not end the nightmare. In the late 1970s, vast deposits of diamonds were discovered in the Argyle region of Western Australia, near the town of Kimberley (coincidentally named after Kimberley, South Africa). Test drillings last year indicated that these pipe mines could produce up to 50 million carats of diamonds a year -- more than the entire production of the De Beers cartel in 1981. Although only a small percentage of these diamonds are of gem quality, the total number produced would still be sufficient to change the world geography of diamonds. Either this 50 million carats would be brought under control or the diamond invention would be destroyed.

De Beers rapidly moved to get a stranglehold on the Australian diamonds. It began by acquiring a small, indirect interest in Conzinc Riotinto of Australia, Ltd. (CRA), the company that controlled most of the mining rights. In 1980, it offered a secret deal to CRA through which it would market the total output of Australian production. This agreement might have ended the Australian threat if Northern Mining Corporation, a minority partner in the venture, had accepted the deal. Instead, Northern Mining leaked the terms of the deal to a leading Australian newspaper, which reported that De Beers planned to pay the Australian consortium 80 percent less than the existing market price for the diamonds. This led to a furor in Australia. The opposition Labour Party charged not only that De Beers was seeking to cheat Australians out of the true value of the diamonds but that the deal with De Beers would support the policy of apartheid in South Africa. It demanded that the government impose export controls on the diamonds rather than allow them to be controlled by a South African corporation. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, faced with a storm of public protest, said that he saw no advantage in "arrangements in which Australian diamond discoveries only serve to strengthen a South African monopoly." He left the final decision on marketing, however, to the Western Australia state government and the mining companies, which may or may not decide to make an arrangement with De Beers.

De Beers also faces a crumbling empire in Zaire. Sir Ernest Oppenheimer had concluded, more than fifty years ago, that control over the diamond mines in Zaire (then called the Belgian Congo) was the key to the cartel's control of world production. De Beers, together with its Belgian partners, had instituted mining and sorting procedures that would maximize the production of industrial (rather than gem) diamonds. Since there was no other ready customer for the enormous quantities of industrial diamonds the Zairian mines produced, De Beers remained their only outlet. In June of last year, however, President Mobuto abruptly announced that his country's exclusive contract with a De Beers subsidiary would not be renewed. Mobuto was reportedly influenced by offers he received for Zaire's diamond production from both Indian and American manufacturers. According to one New York diamond dealer, "Mobuto simply wants a more lucrative deal." Whatever his motives, the sudden withdrawal of Zaire from the cartel further undercuts the stability of the diamond market. With increasing pressure for the independence of Namibia, and a less friendly government in neighboring Botswana, De Beers's days of control in black Africa seem numbered.

Even in the midst of this crisis, De Beers's executives in London have been maneuvering to save the diamond invention by buying up loose diamonds. The inventory of diamonds in De Beers's vault has swollen to a value of over a billion dollars -- twice the value of the 1979 inventory. To rekindle the demand for diamonds, De Beers recently launched a new multimillion-dollar advertising campaign (including $400,000 for television advertisements during the British royal wedding in July), yet it can be expected to buy only a few years of time for the cartel. By the mid-1980s, the avalanche of Australian diamonds will be pouring onto the market. Unless the resourceful managers of De Beers can find a way to gain control of the various sources of diamonds that will soon crowd the market, these sources may bring about the final collapse of world diamond prices. If they do, the diamond invention will disintegrate and be remembered only as a historical curiosity, as brilliant in its way as the glittering little stones it once made so valuable.

__________________________

www.supportblackowned.org

there has to be a link to something Israeli with every Zewari post...

"This isnt an argument, you are just contradicting everything Im saying"

"No Im not"
******************
"Dont open your mind too much or your brain will fall out"

******************************

Its 2005, where's my hoverboard and jetpack?

_¸»¬æ¤º²°¯¯°²º¤æ¬«SiG»¬æ¤º²°¯¯°²º¤æ¬«¸_



“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice. Remember, God is the best of Protectors and well acquainted with all that you do.”
-Qur’an 4:135

"Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."
--Jean Paul Marat, 18th Century French Visionary (and revolutionary), murdered in his bathtub by Royalist Charlotte Corday

__________________________

www.supportblackowned.org

with israel, the diamond trade/history is fucked up. and always has been.

and jews have been instrumental in that trade.

so, either willingly or thru naivete, they have been party to the destruction it's caused.

no denying that.

~~~~
"Terrorism is only the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war. They believe that the legitimate use of violence is not the sole prerogative of the state." ~Arundhati Roy

strivin for self-determination since 1978

~~~~
http://omidele.blogspot.com/
http://rahareiki.tumblr.com/
http://seatofbliss.blogspot.com/

that wasnt my point. My point was, that if Zewari was posting about anything, there would be a link to how Israel was involved in it. Which sounds to me a little like a global jewish conspiracy a la the protocols....

Anyway, look into why Jews became involved in the Jewel trade, as well as banking the reasons are pretty clear....

"This isnt an argument, you are just contradicting everything Im saying"

"No Im not"
******************
"Dont open your mind too much or your brain will fall out"

******************************

Its 2005, where's my hoverboard and jetpack?

... about any and every negative depiction of Israel whether its true or not, so you exaggerate the presence of any criticism. your ego is at the root of your knee-jerk reaction typified by your first post, and the above post is just a sad attempt at trying to rationalize a dumbass comment and make it seem slightly less idiotic than it actually is.


_¸»¬æ¤º²°¯¯°²º¤æ¬«SiG»¬æ¤º²°¯¯°²º¤æ¬«¸_



“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice. Remember, God is the best of Protectors and well acquainted with all that you do.”
-Qur’an 4:135

"Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."
--Jean Paul Marat, 18th Century French Visionary (and revolutionary), murdered in his bathtub by Royalist Charlotte Corday

__________________________

www.supportblackowned.org

As well as agreeing with much criticism about Israel, I have myself criticised Israel , and condemned Jewish roles in the diamond trade.

My point is and was simple, any post you make will be a link to something negative about Israel.

Mention that many Palestinians are terrorists who are aiming to kill innocent people, and who gets hypersensitive?

I tend to be sensitive to your posts, because I feel that your agenda is not entirely anti-zionist. I feel that a lot of it may just be anti-jewish, with a veneer of anti-zionism to make it more acceptable. Otherwise, why the Jewish global conspiracy theories? the posting of Henry Ford articles and the Protocols of the Elders of the Tribe of Zion because they are "interesting"?
I believe that when you posted the Protocols, you even asked people to look at the similarities with what is happening in the world now, and the conspiracy that those authors put forward all those years ago.

"This isnt an argument, you are just contradicting everything Im saying"

"No Im not"
******************
"Dont open your mind too much or your brain will fall out"

******************************

Its 2005, where's my hoverboard and jetpack?

>As well as agreeing with much criticism about Israel, I have
>myself criticised Israel , and condemned Jewish roles in the
>diamond trade.

when did that happen? i mean, its kinda hard to believe this would come from a person who previously in perpetuating the war in central Africa, in militarily and economically supporting apartheid s. africa, in eugenics experiments, in being founded on terrorism, etc...

>My point is and was simple, any post you make will be a link
>to something negative about Israel.

yeah. right. that's not a point, you dumb piece of shit. and you can't even substantiate that. there are many issues that i posted on, and it just happens to be the only ones that get any activity are ones that piss zionist appologists like yourself off.

>Mention that many Palestinians are terrorists who are aiming
>to kill innocent people, and who gets hypersensitive?

only because of the grossly bigotted nature of that statement that's typical of an asshole like yourself. anyone who has an iota of respect for justice and principles would get offended. i have no particular allegiance or 'soft spot' to the Palestinian people, and would react the same way if you said a similarly idiotic statement about anyone else. the reason you don't see this reaction from me often is cause i don't interact much with idiots like yourself on these boards or in real life. you've had many moments were you were keen on interchangeably using the word "Palestinian" for terrorist, only to appologize after it being pointed out. I'm not dumb enough to categorically label jews anything, as I know the difference between a Jew and a zionist.

>I tend to be sensitive to your posts, because I feel that
>your agenda is not entirely anti-zionist. I feel that a lot
>of it may just be anti-jewish, with a veneer of anti-zionism
>to make it more acceptable.

again, shut the fuck up with that bullshit. i've always had the soundness of mind to distinguish between zionists and the Israeli state with jews in general, and i've corrected many people who interchangeably used the word 'jew' for the other two because of my opposition to unwarranted categorization. if anything, it is you who clearly demonstrates supressed hatred for entire demographics (muslims, Palestinians, etc...)

>Otherwise, why the Jewish global
>conspiracy theories? the posting of Henry Ford articles and
>the Protocols of the Elders of the Tribe of Zion because
>they are "interesting"?

here you go misleadingly reconstructing shit to fit into your own unsubstantiated micro-conspiracy theory. everything i've posted with respect to Israeli influence in geopolitics was established and logically sound, so i didn't merely post "theories". if you can prove them to be wrong, then do so. otherwise, misrepresenting my position and making vague references to discredit them only makes you look like a total idiot.

when did i ever post the protocols? and when did i say the protocols were "interesting", you stupid motherfucker? the only time i used the word "interesting" was when talking about henry ford's articles. the reason i said they were interesting (FOR THE 103rd TIME) is because of the direct quotes from established jewish sources. THAT WAS IT. how hard is that for you to understand? I even asked you to point out what exactly you found offensive, at which point you basically left the discussion in your irrational fit of emotional over-reaction. and you should be mature enough to realize that your reaction was most likely rooted in your frustration at being wrong on every issue you posed in that thread.

>I believe that when you posted the Protocols, you even asked
>people to look at the similarities with what is happening in
>the world now, and the conspiracy that those authors put
>forward all those years ago.

no, you retarded motherfucker. i said that's what the author's point appeared to be. the author of that particular article that mentioned the protocols wasn't even taking a position on its authenticity. he was simply stating that the barbaric and fascist acts of the israeli state make sense when viewed in context of the protocols. its akin to the way many people refered to the willie lynch letters in describing the socio-economic state of african americans. although the willie lynch letters are not authentic, the content of the letters prove to be applicable.

its interesting how you ignore the main point of that article by the way you keep mentioning the protocols of zion. i didn't post that article because it mentioned the protocols, i posted it because it mentioned how an anti-sharon, anti-zionist electronic sign placed in a spanish town was taken through the influence of prominent zionists worldwide. this sort of suppression of legitimate objection to a criminal such as sharon is akin to the maneuvers of functionally fascist states.

F.Y.I. if you felt offended by how i addressed you, its because i have no respect for you. so don't bother mentioning it as if you're interested in a fruitful discussion. its obvious you aren't by the way you keep recycling the same bullshit.

_¸»¬æ¤º²°¯¯°²º¤æ¬«SiG»¬æ¤º²°¯¯°²º¤æ¬«¸_



“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice. Remember, God is the best of Protectors and well acquainted with all that you do.”
-Qur’an 4:135

"Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."
--Jean Paul Marat, 18th Century French Visionary (and revolutionary), murdered in his bathtub by Royalist Charlotte Corday

__________________________

www.supportblackowned.org

Are you on your period?

By the way, just because you dont get zionist and jew confused does not mean that you arent using your anti-zionism as thinly veiled anti-jewish sentiment...

"This isnt an argument, you are just contradicting everything Im saying"

"No Im not"
******************
"Dont open your mind too much or your brain will fall out"

******************************

Its 2005, where's my hoverboard and jetpack?

>and you seriously consider yourself to be a liberal??

Nope, I dont follow one set ideology.

>>By the way, just because you dont get zionist and jew
>>confused does not mean that you arent using your
>>anti-zionism as thinly veiled anti-jewish sentiment...
>
>no, it really doesn't.

I know you didnt mean to, but you admitted it right there...

i have stated nothing with regards to
>my views on judaism as a philosophy.

How about Jews as people?

"This isnt an argument, you are just contradicting everything Im saying"

"No Im not"
******************
"Dont open your mind too much or your brain will fall out"

******************************

Its 2005, where's my hoverboard and jetpack?

Lawsuit claims corruption in Congo diamonds for arms deal
A former Anti-Terrorism Unit officer alleges senior Israeli military, business, and political figures were involved.
Yitzhak Danon 18 Feb 04 14:52


Yossi Kamisa, a former officer in the Israel Police Border Guard Anti-Terrorism Unit and advisor to the Ministry of National Infrastructures director general, has filed a NIS 2.55 million lawsuit with the Tel Aviv District Court against diamond merchant Dan Gertler, SIBAT - Foreign Defense Assistance and Defense Export Organization, and SIBAT director-general Gen. (Ret.) Yosi Ben-Hanan.
The lawsuit alleges that Gertler asked a former president of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) for a diamond mining franchise. The president replied that he would grant the franchise, on condition that Gertler would arrange a meeting with security personalities who would train the Congolese Army and provide military advice.

Kamisa claims that in July 2000, Avigdor Lieberman summoned him to a meeting at the Jerusalem offices of his company Nativ El Hamizrach. At the meeting, Lieberman told Kamisa that he was a partner in several future deals in the Congo, and wanted to share in the deals' security aspects.

Lieberman sought concealment

Kamisa claims that Lieberman and he had a prior acquaintance from the establishment of the Yisrael Beiteinu party. He said Lieberman referred him to Gertler, whom Lieberman called the acknowledged partner in the deals, since Lieberman wanted to conceal his involvement in them.

Gertler proposed that Kamisa set up an army in the Congo, in exchange for 80% of the proceeds, subject to signing the diamond mining franchise. Gertler also proposed to Kamisa an exclusive security contract for Congo's diamonds, provided the franchise deal went ahead.

Kamisa said he wanted a formal contract with Gertler, but was told that the diamond industry did not normally make contracts and that everything was settled by a handshake. Gertler added that since Lieberman was in the picture, Kamisa has no cause for concern. Kamisa said he updated Lieberman about the meeting.

Kamisa accepted Gertler's offer and the two men flew to the Congo in July 2000 to meet personalities in the regime. They met the president and army chief-of-staff, and Kamisa promised to try to obtain the necessary permits from the Israeli defense establishment.

A billion-dollar franchise

The lawsuit claims that the Congolese president accepted Kamisa's offer to establish the Congolese army. Kamisa said he made his assistance conditional on Gertler obtaining a diamond mining franchise in the Congo. The same day, an agreement was signed granting Gertler a diamond mining franchise worth $800 million-1 billion.

Kamisa alleges in the lawsuit that he was present during Gertler's trips when he bribed Congolese government officials and Angola Army generals who commanded Angola Army troops protecting the Congo capital Kinshasa, and who were associates of the Congo president.

Kamisa alleges that the Israel Ministry of Defense did not allow him to arrange meetings between the Congo Army deputy chief-of-staff and Israeli defense industries, but only with civilian industries.

The lawsuit claims that four months before Kamisa joined Gertler, Gertler tried to bring the Congo Army deputy chief-of-staff to Israel illegally, describing him as an earthworks contractor. The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs discovered the deception, and notified Gertler that it was considering filing a complaint against him with the Israel Police.

David Appel is involved

Kamisa says Gertler told him that he subsequently asked Lieberman to arrange matters, and that Lieberman contacted then Ministry of Foreign Affairs director general Eitan Bentsur, with the result that no complaint was filed.

Kamisa said he was informed that Gertler had met David Appel and the Congo Army deputy chief-of-staff. The lawsuit claims that Gertler told Kamisa that Appel was also a partner in the project, and that Kamisa must keep this fact confidential.

The lawsuit claims that a week later, Gertler summoned Kamisa to cancel their agreement. Gertler claimed the reason was media reports about the so-called "diamonds for an army deal" in the Congo.

In October 2000, Kamisa signed a receipt settling the account with Gertler for NIS 1.4 million, in exchange for foregoing any claims or demands relating to security for diamond mining in the Congo.

Kamisa said he pursued his efforts to obtain permission to set up and train the Congo Army. Ben-Hanan suggested that he contact a colleague Maj.-Gern. (res.) Meir Dagan (now head of the Mossad), but Kamisa rejected the offer.

Kamisa said in January 2001, SIBAT rejected his application to set up and train the Congo Army on the grounds that it violated Israel's defense export policy.

"Policy has changed"

Kamisa claims that at the same time SIBAT rejected his application, Meir Dagan and Maj.-Gen. (res.) Avigdor Ben-Gal (Yanoush) submitted a similar application to train the Congo Army in Israel and in the Congo, in cooperation with Gertler.

The lawsuit claims that shortly after Kamisa's application was rejected, a delegation of senior Congo Army officers arrived in Israel and visited the same defense industries that were blocked to Kamisa.

SIBAT illegally approved the visit, without obtaining the consent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The visit was cut short after Kamisa contacted Ministry of Foreign Affairs head of the bureau for coordination and director of the director general's bureau Danny Carmon, and the Congolese officers, including the air force commander and head of the presidential guard were flown back home.

The lawsuit claims that when Ben-Hanan was asked about the discrimination, he told Kamisa that the change in Congolese regime in January 2001 led to a change in Israel's defense export policy toward the country.

Kamisa claims that in 2001, Gertler tried to block Kamisa's activities in the Congo, and collaborated with Ben-Gal and Dagan instead, thereby grossly and fundamentally violated his agreement with Kamisa.

Kamisa claims that heavy pressure was exerted on him, threatening his job as an advisor to the Ministry of National Infrastructures director general. In September 2002, Kamisa notified Gertler's attorney that he had set up a meeting with Israel Police chief of investigations Commander Moshe Mizrahi in order to file a complaint against the parties involved in the affair.

In response, Kamisa was immediately notified that he was fired from the Ministry of National Infrastructures at the order of director general Yair Maayan. Maayan was appointed to the post by Lieberman when he served as Minister of National Infrastructures. Maayan is considered a political associate of Lieberman. The firing was canceled when Kamisa appealed to the National Labor Court.

Kamisa is suing Gertler for NIS 1.2 million, and SIBAT and Ben-Hanan for NIS 1.3 million.

No statements of defense have been filed yet.

__________________________

www.supportblackowned.org

and i still didn't learn anything i didn't already know.

now explain to me what the Great-Secret-Jew-Lobby-That-Rules-The-World-And-Opresses-Everyone has to do with all that.

______________________________


*TWINNING*

http://bongodoesnollywood.blogspot.com/

http://www.combandrazor.blogspot.com/

nothing but those damn jews...they're behind everything

www.rapgodfathers.com/forum Referrer ---> okayplayer21

you need to acknowledge that the reason this conflict is ignored is NOT because of public apathy. if you don't accept this premise, then there's no point in building the case for why the media blackout exists. i seriously doubt you read the McKinney speech. it is impossible to see how someone could think the media blackout is a result of public apathy after reading it.

i mean, do you realize how ASININE of proposition that apathy as the central reason for the media blackout is??

1. if you believe that, then you are making the subtle assumption that the media is actually responsive to the public. reality is that the media actually shapes the public's opinion

2. a media blackout is characterized by INTENTIONAL AVOIDANCE, not public responsiveness. if all the media was concerned about was public opinion, then there wouldn't be such a comprehensive black out on this subject, because someone somewhere would have tried to float this story... and it is unthinkable to assume that the general public would have no interest in the bloodiest war since WWII, but since most people don't know the first thing about this conflict, they remain apathetic. the public's apathy is the RESULT of the media black out, not the other way around


_¸»¬æ¤º²°¯¯°²º¤æ¬«SiG»¬æ¤º²°¯¯°²º¤æ¬«¸_



“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice. Remember, God is the best of Protectors and well acquainted with all that you do.”
-Qur’an 4:135

"Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."
--Jean Paul Marat, 18th Century French Visionary (and revolutionary), murdered in his bathtub by Royalist Charlotte Corday

__________________________

www.supportblackowned.org

I still think apathy is the first reason why come to my mind.

The first doesn't mean the ONLY.

(and i wonder who's interests the media were protecting in South Sudan... for 20 years... but that's not the point)

ok let's build from here.

there's a worldwide black out.

the french, the americans, the brits have interests there.

and it's the Great Jewish Lobby fault ?

dude.

______________________________

*TWINNING*

______________________________


*TWINNING*

http://bongodoesnollywood.blogspot.com/

http://www.combandrazor.blogspot.com/

.

__________________________

www.supportblackowned.org

______________________________

*TWINNING*

______________________________


*TWINNING*

http://bongodoesnollywood.blogspot.com/

http://www.combandrazor.blogspot.com/

******************************
http://profiles.myspace.com/users/1281849
******************************
"me as a black man will not
stand here and allow you to
talk dumb shit about white
women that simply is not true"
SouthPhillyMan

"If I see things unseen by
those who have eyes, why
should my wisest speech not
be silence?"
-Ayi Kwei Armah

Well, for me exile means
separation from people I love.
I didn't, and don't
miss the U.S., per se. But
black culture, black life in
the U.S., that African
American flavor, I
definitely miss. The
language, the movements, the
style, I get nostalgic about
that.
-Assata Shakur

"Riots eruptin around and still we party on..."

Sorry, I couldnt resist.

"This isnt an argument, you are just contradicting everything Im saying"

"No Im not"
******************
"Dont open your mind too much or your brain will fall out"

******************************

Its 2005, where's my hoverboard and jetpack?

because big media knows black people dont like to know about their own killing people eachother in other countries... if they ran a story on how awful it is over there certain black leaders would call the media racist.

you honestly believe THAT is the reason?

__________________________

www.supportblackowned.org

How can you let politics rot your brain to this level?

***************************************
"Science" and Religion are the two most dangerous weapons of ideology. See holocaust.

Why do "scientists" constantly produce statistics based on "race", a social construct?

*blinks in disbelief*

wow, what a ridiculous conspiracy theory. Yes we live in a world of a secretly black-run media - ROFL!

------------------------------------------------------------

Check my man Lao at www.myspace.com/lazzriel

The only way I can see someone thinking a comment like this makes a speck of sense is if they wish to make people of African descent take the place of jews in conspiracy theory mythology as the great evil controllers of the world.

describing allthe factions and their (western) backers.

because there is a bigger picture.

______________________________

*TWINNING*

______________________________


*TWINNING*

http://bongodoesnollywood.blogspot.com/

http://www.combandrazor.blogspot.com/

******************************
www.okayplayer.com/guidelines
----------------------
http://www.myspace.com/egyptianknight
******************************
Inaug'ral Member of the OkaySports Hall of Fame.

<---- It'll cure what ails ya...

_____________________________
BREAKBEAT PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS: MARLEY RIDDIM E.P

COMING SOON....

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/7/breakbeatproductions.htm

Africans/Blacks are always under attack from external and internal forces.

by political interest groups or combating factions (hutu allied and tutsi allied groups)?

«SiG»
“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice."
-Qur’an 4:135

I believe the whole instability in Central Africa since the 90's is due to a battle of influence between France and the USA.
Angola, Congo, Zaire, Rwanda, CAR... all of them.

now in DRC... If i'm not wrong, there is like 4 main rebel factions. And there are like 5 or 6 nneighbourg countries involved.

And the groups alliances might be awfully complicated. Since we know some factions won't hesitate to switch and stuff.

We should still try.

by factions.

______________________________

*TWINNING*

No doubt -Rwanda is all about a "geo-political" Grand Strategy in the Great Lake Region.

Bottom Line:The Congo contains HUGE amounts of RESOURSES required in/prerequisites for Communications AND Military..

85% of the WORLDs supply of COBAL, for example.

Paul Kagame was TRAINED and EDUCATED at Fort Leavenworth.
He spent 10 years leading up to his "rebel" invasion of Rwanda in Uganda...the largest U.S.A. Military buildup in the Great Lakes Region.

And it was HE who shot down the Rwanda One Jet carrying the Prez's of BOTH Burundi AND Rwanda in spring '94.






nuff said.

Peace+Luv=Canada

source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4370843.stm

Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo say they have arrested several senior members of militia groups active in the north-eastern Ituri region.

Among those seized was Thomas Lubanga of the main Hema militia group, the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), according to sources in Kinshasa.

Hema and Lendu militias are vying for control of the mineral-rich province, the country's most volatile.

More than 50,000 people have died in the conflict, which began in 1999.

Since the killing of nine Bangladeshi UN peacekeepers last month, both the United Nations and the Congolese government have stepped up efforts to regain control of Ituri.

'Arbitrary' arrest

The militia leaders were arrested on Saturday, but no official announcement was made at the time.

The news was leaked by UN officials after they visited them in prison on Monday.

A government spokesman later confirmed the arrests, Reuters news agency reported, saying that Mr Lubanga - the leader of some 4,000 Hema fighters - was wanted for atrocities in Ituri but was not thought to be involved in the peacekeepers' deaths.



DR Congo's wild east

Floribert Ndjabu, a leader of the rival Lendu-dominated Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI), was captured earlier in the month following the UN killings.

UPC Secretary-General John Tinanzabu told the agency Mr Lubanga's arrest was arbitrary, as he had been based in Kinshasa for more than a year and had registered the group as a political party.

The UN have repeatedly accused the militia leaders, who have been staying in hotel rooms in Kinshasa, of sending orders to their troops in Ituri from the capital.

Ituri warlords, who have been competeting for the control of the mineral rich province, have failed to disarm under the terms of a peace deal which ended DR Congo's five-year war.

The UN has given the 15,000 militia still active in the region until the end of the month to lay down their arms.

According to the BBC's Arnaud Zajtman in Kinshasa, the UN's threat of force seems to be bearing fruit with 4,000 member of the FAPC, another militia group, registering to a disarmament programme.

UN peacekeepers say they have disarmed 550 militiamen, with the others expected to follow suit before the end of the month.

«SiG»
“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice."
-Qur’an 4:135

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4403841.stm

The United Nations military in the Democratic Republic of Congo have carried out an attack on militiamen who refused to surrender their weapons.

A UN battalion backed by helicopters targeted two rebel camps south-west of the main town of Bunia in Ituri region.

"Shots were exchanged... , a number of militiamen fled with the arrival of the UN forces," the UN mission in the DR Congo (Monuc), said in a statement.

It gave no details on any arrests or weapons seized.

Col Hussein Mahmoud, the deputy force commander, said earlier the operation would send a message to other militias that the UN would destroy all their camps.

It was intended to show "we mean business", Col Mahmoud said.

The UN vowed to take a tough line against Ituri's warring ethnic militia after a disarmament deadline expired, with fewer than half of 15,000 fighters giving up their weapons.

Child soldiers

Col Mahmoud has accused the militias - from the Lendu tribe - of committing an appalling catalogue of murder and rape.

Vicious ethnic warfare, fuelled by ready access to weapons, has cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilians in the province.

UN envoys had twice urged the militiamen to join the disarmament process - agreed to by the main militia groups in Ituri last September - but they refused.

Half the fighters in the eastern Ituri region are under 18 years old and some are as young as eight, UN officials say.

They have been caught up in ethnic violence that has left many civilians dead and many more homeless.

Some leaders have been rewarded with high-ranking posts in the new integrated Congolese army, the BBC's Ishbel Matheson in Ituri says.

But other powerful warlords have dragged their feet over the weapons surrender, our correspondent says.

«SiG»
“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice."
-Qur’an 4:135

not just for the incredible info, but also becuase of the way zewari got in insanejake's ass.

www.hiphopmusic.com

"What I don't like is Negro elders finally taking a stand for cultural ethics by way of Caucasian vomit. What this now shows young people is that white guilt is still more powerful than black unity." - Star

...until this war comes to an end. we shouldn't let corporate media tell us what's important. we should base it on the merits of the situation, and this is one hella-important topic


«SiG»
“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice."
-Qur’an 4:135

All I saw was the same old bullshit.

Time to get a new cheerleading outfit?

"This isnt an argument, you are just contradicting everything Im saying"

"No Im not"
******************
"Dont open your mind too much or your brain will fall out"

******************************

Its 2005, where's my hoverboard and jetpack?

Thank you so much zewari for posting this up.

I couldn't read past the 2nd article, its so heartwrenching...I must print these off.

"Do to others what you would others have done unto you." - The Lord Jesus Christ

SB Video: http://www.youtube.com/soulbrothavideo
SB tweet:www.twitter.com/soulb

i appreciate your interest in this subject

«SiG»
“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice."
-Qur’an 4:135

-he was trained in the US Army Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth, Kansas... and is a CIA "asset". the RPF was supported by not only Uganda, but also Britain, the US, Belgium, the UN and the World Bank. such an interesting association.

-during a 1997 UN investigation, three Tutsi informants said they were part of an elite strike team that assassinated the Hutu president in 1994 "with the assistance of a foreign government" under the overall command of Paul Kagame. that foreign government is the United States of America

-Roméo Dallaire, the UN general who was in charge of the meager UN forces in Rwanda during the genocide that somehow managed to save the lives of over 20,000 Tutsis, wrote the following excerpt in his book 'Shaking Hands with the Devil':

"Let there be no doubt: the Rwandan genocide was the ultimate responsibility of those Rwandans who planned, ordered, supervised and eventually conducted it. ... But the deaths of Rwandans can also be laid at the door of the military genius Paul Kagame, who did not speed up his campaign when the scale of the genocide became clear and even talked candidly with me at several points about the price his fellow Tutsis might have to pay for the cause.... The failings of the UN and Belgium were not in the same league. (p.515)"

Kagame's actions remind me of another passage I read... one written by an Orthodox Jewish rabbi named Mordechai Gifter:

http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/rabbi_quotes/gifter.cfm
We know the truth. The truth is that Zionism is a curse, and that's the way it is. Zionism is murder! And that's what it really is, because it is true! Who threw the Jews into the ocean when they wanted to travel to Eretz Yisroel in 1941? Who sank the boat (called the 'Patria') with about 1000 Jews on it? Who? The Nazis? Zionists did it! Yes, the Zionists! What is that? Is it not murder? Murderers!! Because of Zionism, one is allowed to kill Jews? Didn't these murderers say that the Jews of Europe are the "sacrifices" which we have to bring to have a Jewish "state" in Eretz Yisroel (G-d forbid)? Didn't they say this? Don't they have printed black and white statements which everybody can read? Didn't this man with the name, "Yitzchok Greenbaum" say in Warsaw that all religious Jews should be thrown into the ocean? And all this because of Zionism! And he wasn't ashamed of these words! I ask you: Is this right? Is this being nice? Is this grace? This is MURDER! Without any excuse, it is murder! G-d comes and punishes us, and He says to us that if we brought up in our midst such and Esau - one who is against Torah, against religion, against everything a Jew is - then we suggest a hint to the world, and it calls us Racists, Murderers, Terrorists! We are called murderers, who kill women and children. The Gentiles say this and it makes an impression on us, and we scream. How terrible! How can they speak this way about the Jewish people?

But it's interesting. They don't say that Jews are murderers. Only Zionists are murderers. This is an awesome thing. That repeats itself thousands of times and it doesn't stop. Some make protests. They write articles in the newspapers. They go to Washington to explain to the President of the United States what Zionism means - and that G-d forbid it's not this way - but we know the truth: Zionism says and Zionism actually does with its own hands the killing of Jews for an "Ideal"! Is it right that one Jew should kill another for an "ideal"? What right do they have to do this - to sink them in the ocean? Did you ever hear such stories as those that Jews forget and don't want to know? Yet this is what is being spoken from the mouths of the evil ones. They go and tell these stories to the U.N., for the whole world. But, in reality, this is being spoken to us from Heaven. G-d speaks to us, and wants to awaken us, and speaks to us through their mouths. A new language has begun: Therefore, a Jew has to decide why others speak to us in this way. It is only because we are being called into account in Heaven.

«SiG»
“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice."
-Qur’an 4:135

...aside from the theological arguments, i don't know enough about to get into, (although i would say it sounds dangerously close to the fundamentalism that is demonised in muslims) don't you think that its only pertinent that the only reason you have an Israli state commiting crimes of war is because the U.S. supplies them with all the arms they need?

...guess what, you can't swing in scotland either.

..sorry i got the wrong end of the stick and missed you were talking about Rwanda.

...guess what, you can't swing in scotland either.

«SiG»
“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice."
-Qur’an 4:135

Really?

"This isnt an argument, you are just contradicting everything Im saying"

"No Im not"
******************
"Dont open your mind too much or your brain will fall out"

******************************

Its 2005, where's my hoverboard and jetpack?

...well it's not the only reason, what that because America wants to make it's money to sell the arms you don't have to have the conflicts in the first place? You do have to ask questions about the Judeo-Christian influence on American foreign policy, especially in the light of the last three or four years. As for the Palestine/Israel situation, does anybody else find it hypocritical that the Holocaust is bandyed about as moral justification for the formation of a Jewish homeland when it requires the violent oppression of the Palestinians to exist?

...guess what, you can't swing in scotland either.

and Israel gets its weapons from many different places.

«SiG»
“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice."
-Qur’an 4:135

they do bad things because bad things are done to them....

"This isnt an argument, you are just contradicting everything Im saying"

"No Im not"
******************
"Dont open your mind too much or your brain will fall out"

******************************

Its 2005, where's my hoverboard and jetpack?

http://www.inshuti.org/ruyenzi.htm
MAJOR GENERAL PAUL KAGAME BEHIND THE SHOOTING DOWN OF LATE HABYARIMANA’S PLANE: AN EYE WITNESS TESTIMONY

1. I have been keenly following talks on allegations of crimes committed by Paul Kagame, leader of Rwanda, and his attempts, against all odds, to deny them. I deem it necessary to inform Rwandans and the international community at large of the crimes I witnessed in the hope that he would stop deceiving people. It took quite a long time before I decided to make public this statement because I was in Uganda, where Kagame has a lot of covert agents who would have eliminated me. I know him very well because I worked with him in the Rwandese Patriotic Army since its creation. More so, I served in his escort for nearly 10 years, until I fled the country.
My background

2. My name is Aloys Ruyenzi, I was born on 1st March 1971 in Mbarara, Uganda of Rwandan refugee parents. I grew up in Uganda and I joined the National Resistance Army of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in 1987. I had a six-month course in Basic Military Training, after which I attended a six-month course in military intelligence. After the training, I was posted in the 23rd battalion based in northern Uganda, as intelligence staff. A year later, I was called back to Kampala and posted at the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), where Kagame was a senior officer. While in DMI, I was selected for another course called “the Intelligence and Self-Defence”. When I fled the country, I was working in the Republican Guard, an RPA (Rwanda Patriotic Army) special unit that provides elements for the Presidential Protection Unit. I was Second Lieutenant and my army number was OP1460.

I joined RPA since its creation

3. When the Rwandan Patriotic Front attacked Rwanda on 1st October 1990, I was among the fighters. First I was with the 4th battalion operating in the Akagera National Park, until we were pushed back to Uganda and started guerrilla warfare. I then joined the then LIMA Combined Mobile Force, from where I eventually joined the High Command Unit. This is equivalent to army headquarters in a regular army. However unlike the latter the unit's main duty was to escort Major Kagame, then RPA boss. I first was in the missile unit, before being appointed in the escort of Kagame.
4. When I joined the escort, I resumed my duties as intelligence officer. I would be most of the time close to Kagame as a member of the close bodyguards’ team. In this capacity, I hardly missed any detail of what he would say or instruct to be done. Hence, my testimony is not a piece of hearsays, but a testimony of an eyewitness.
5. After the take over of government by RPF, I once again attended courses in military intelligence and Protection of VIPs. I took up duties as a presidential bodyguard. When the invasion of Zaire started, I was sent there as one of the confidants of Kagame to follow and give detailed account of any military operation that took place. This was in a bid to make sure that he did not miss any detail by sending his own escorts. The crimes that I witnessed there are so much that I cannot detail them here. I was there on special assignment as member of the Republican Guards unit. I will do it in a different paper once I have time. What I can simply say for the time being is that a lot of crimes that were committed by the RPA were ordered by Kagame.
6. People were killed on a very large scale on orders of Kagame and officers who did not carry out orders to kill were either relieved of their duties or disappeared. Kagame does not tolerate anybody disobeying his orders. Similarly, during the time the RPA was fighting the so-called “infiltrators” in northern Rwanda in Ruhengeri and Gisenyi, many unarmed Hutu civilians were killed in what looked like a true ethnic cleansing. I opposed those atrocities, until I was labelled as an enemy collaborator.

Reasons for fleeing the country I love so much and I fought for

7. As I said earlier, I joined and served RPA since its creation. When I joined it, I sincerely believed that I was struggling to end injustice towards our brothers, our parents and our motherland, and eventually to return home. In any case, this is what we were told. I never envisaged that our return would lead to killings and expulsion of the population we found inside the country. To my dismay, I realised that our leader and current President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame had a hidden agenda. To make matters worse, he would not tolerate any dissenting voice and opposing his orders could even lead to disappearance.
8. I had the misfortune of working in his escort, where the climate is abominable. There is a permanent climate of terror and mistrust, as everybody spies on everybody else. I was intelligence officer, but I knew very well that I was myself being spied on.
9. The intelligence officers do not carry out ordinary military intelligence work they are paid for. They are a squad of criminals that was set up by Kagame for his own ends. Its sole mission is killings opponents and other unwanted elements, so as to consolidate his murderous regime. It is therefore very difficult to work with him, more so as intelligence officer without adhering to his criminal policies. My aim now is that before I am eliminated I want make public a list of assassinations ordered personally by Kagame. The list is indeed very long.
10. I defected because I was realising that we were becoming a gang of killers. I could not stomach that situation which was contrary to what we fought for, that it is fighting for restoring a rule of law.
11. But it took time before I could flee for fear of being arrested and killed as a deserter. I feared being killed by the butt of a used hoe agafuni. The latter is the acronym given to the part of a hoe that RPA used to smash heads of people condemned to death. It is very sad that I kept on working deliberately with a man whose criminal records are so horrendous.
12. The opposition to atrocities planned and ordered by Kagame landed me in trouble as this was considered as tantamount to treason. In fact I was being suspected of possible treasonable acts. I was eventually trailed and attempts were made over my life. I was by now labelled as one of the so-called “negative forces”. This was a label given to Interahamwe militia living in Zaire. I was even accused of having released Interahamwe in Nkamira-Gisenyi and put under arrest. This was mere fabrication. Not only there is no Interahamwe prison there, but also I never released anybody with evidence that he was involved in killings. There is no way I could show mercy to such people. I will emphasize here that I do not refer to those innocent Hutus who were labelled Interahamwe because simply by virtue of being Hutus.
13. By the time I worked with the Gendarmerie, people who were detained there were suspected of common law crimes mostly related to land and cattle disputes. I was unfairly arrested on 8th June 1999. Those who arrested me eventually got ashamed and I was released and allowed to resume my duties in the escort of Kagame.

My escape from many traps

14. After allegations of conniving with the enemy were levelled against me simply because I did not support killings innocent people, attempts were made to get rid of me in ambushes. The first time I survived an ambush was in Gisenyi on my way to Kabaya thanks to a friend who had warned me. It was on 13th April 1999.
15. I did also escape narrowly a second attempt on my life, but my escort perished. One was called James Kabera, a private soldier, the other one was Hodari, a Mugogwe (a local ethnic Tutsi group of Gisenyi). It was on 15th May 2001. I was again going to Gisenyi on special assignment. I was ambushed in the mountains of Buranga in Ruhengeri. This time around, I had not been warned at all, as I could not imagine that I could be ambushed while on such a mission. I did not understand why I had been selected for the mission but even if I had known, I could not refuse the order. A vehicle trailed me right from Kigali and kept on indicating my position. The Toyota Land cruiser vehicle that I was in was sprayed with bullets and two of my escort were killed on the spot. I don’t know how I survived.
16. The last attempt on my life was on 18th November 2001. This had been assigned to two groups to ensure that I don’t escape anymore. One of the people involved felt bad and told me to flee, as he did not have any quarrel with me. The same day I fled to Uganda.
17. I was first kept under tight surveillance, under CMI (Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence) custody purportedly for my own security. When they gathered enough information and confirmed that I was a genuine asylum seeker, I was allowed to go out and look for shelter. I realised that I could not remain in Uganda, as Rwandan intelligence services there are even more active that Ugandan own services. Many Rwandan asylum seekers were picked there and sneaked back to Rwanda where they were tortured and killed. This is why I decided to go far from Rwanda in my quest for asylum. I am now in a place where I can denounce the atrocities committed by General Paul Kagame and his henchmen. I insisted on giving all these details in order to explain the difficulties faced by an RPA soldier who does not support what Kagame wants. I am hoping that slowly by slowly, the tendency of considering all Tutsi officers as killers will vanish in the minds of many people.

General Kagame did a lot of atrocities, he must answer for them

A. Kagame’s record.

18. General Kagame is of quite a very bad character. He is extremely nervous, so much so that at time he can crash everything on his way and ransack a whole house. He does not tolerate any dissenting voice, what he says is gospel truth. I worked with him for a long time. He does not tolerate any advice and is trigger-happy. Once one of his close allies simply tells him that you are suspected of disloyalty, this is enough to warrant your death.
19. Kagame can spend a whole month without smiling. He can spend sleepless night abusing people and roughing them up. He does not spare anybody, he beats people at random. Anybody summoned at his home starts shaking excepts henchmen like Major general James Kabarebe. Other officers up to the rank of colonel like Ndugutse could be beaten to our disgust. He is a bloodthirsty person. When I worked with him, he would go very early in the morning to visit detention places of DMI to sometime supervise killing. I recall once in Muhura when we were fighting to capture Kigali, he personally went on a 12.7mm AAC (anti air craft) mounted on a jeep of his escort and sprayed bullets on a peaceful market crowd of peasants gathered on a market place. It was in 1994. He then ordered his soldiers to use all available weapons and shell the market. It is very saddening to see a leader getting involved in massacring people in a market, while sarcastically laughing. The few times you will ever see him smiling is mainly when he is killing or seeing people killed.

20. General Paul Kagame supervises the smallest detail of everything going on in the army. He even follows conversations between soldiers on military patrols on their walkie-talkie radios.

21. Every morning, he summons his signal officer and reads through all operations and routine army messages, to make sure that he does not miss anything. He uses to short circuit his military commanding officers by giving direct orders to field commanders without passing through the chain of command. Here I simply want to stress that there is nothing he can pretend to ignore. Nothing can take place within RPA without his knowledge. Apart from very isolated incidents carried out by petty criminals, all atrocities committed by the army in operational areas are sanctioned by him. The officers detained for so-called operational blunders are in actual facts detained because they did not kill the way he wants. They are not in remand for killing civilians, but for not concealing their bodies. For him that is a crime. The one who manages to kill the maximum and clear all the evidence will surely be promoted.
22. Major general Paul Kagame manages Rwandan army as his own militiamen. The whole army has become a wide intelligence network. When there are officially 5 intelligence officers, you can rest assured that there are another 20 under cover. There is no clear chain of command in the intelligence network, everybody spies on everybody else and reports to Major General Paul Kagame in person. Kagame is a very rough and security cautious person. He has got a network of criminals who are by this virtue untouchable. They are ready to carry out any dirty mission that Kagame assigns them. Those people are so deadly that nobody dares flee the country because they may be tracked anywhere and be killed. Kagame does not fear anybody. He does not care even about his health. He sleeps at 2.30 am and wakes up at 4.00 am. He does what he wants, when he wants. He is very stubborn and arrogant. He does not hesitate to call his entourage stupid people because he thinks that he is the cleverest man. He does not trust anybody and is very unpredictable.

B. Some of the crimes he committed or ordered

23. Major general Paul Kagame personally ordered the shooting down of President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane.
24. I got astonished when I heard him denying it. I equally got surprised by Rwandan Radio and some international media manoeuvre to absolve him of that act. I heard even civilian people like Minister Charles Muligande, trying to explain how militarily it was impossible.

25. Let me make it crystal clear, I attended the last meeting where the plan was hatched. I was there physically and I even know the names of those who carried out the shooting. I was working with them in the High Command unit. It is Lt Frank Nziza and cpl Eric Hakizimana.

26. It is not hearsays; I was present when the meeting took place. That was on 31st March 1994 from 2.30pm to 3.30pm.The Chairman of the meeting was Major general Paul Kagame, and the following officers were present: Col Kayumba Nyamwasa, Col Théoneste Lizinde, Lt Col James Kabarebe, Major Jacob Tumwine, Captain Charles Karamba. I heard P. Kagame asking Col. Lizinde to report about his investigations and I have seen Col Lizinde giving to Paul Kagame a map of the selected place for the plane shooting etc. I don’t want to jeopardise the investigation, because I would be playing around with criminals who would take the opportunity to prepare their defence. But I simply want to say that I am ready to give evidence in court, should my testimony be needed. I would then say the whole truth, if I were still alive.

C. Major general Paul Kagame gave orders to kill civilians.

27. He ordered at numerous occasions to kill as many civilians as possible. This took place in many areas in Byumba, Ruhengeri and elsewhere, and long before the Tutsi genocide. I say so because some people think that RPA killed in reprisal after the genocide. Even during the genocide, I saw and heard on several occasions major general Paul Kagame giving orders to kill civilians, especially in Mutara, Byumba and Kibungo. He would enjoy it like a football fan watching a football game and cheering his team. At time, he even used his escort or selected DMI operatives to kill civilians.

28. Before the plan to get rid of Juvénal Habyarimana was hatched, meeting had been going on to prepare the final assault on Kigali. This had been the ultimate goal whatever the outcome of the negotiations. At that time, I was acting I.O for then Lt Silas Udahemuka (currently strong man in Kigali), who had got involved in an accident. In this capacity, I could attend all the meetings of the High Command. In one of the meetings, major general Paul Kagame ordered that civilians be lured into attending a public rally under the pretext of emergency food supply or security meetings, in order to round them up and eliminate them. And this happened the way it had been planned. The reality is that mass killings of people took place under his orders. Furthermore, he had a special hatred against religious people. Whenever the latter would be spotted and rounded up, local commanders would always ask major General Kagame what to do. Invariably, he ordered for their killings. I am even aware of the talks he had with Lieutenant colonel Fred Ibingira before the bishops were killed in Kabgayi. Similar incidents happened in Rwesero. The execution squad took the priests to Karushya and killed them.

D. The sparking off of the Tutsi genocide. I was in charge of collecting and analysing intelligence from our sources inside Rwanda.

29. All the reports were unanimously stating that Tutsi would be wiped out if the war resumed. Any pretext would be enough to kick off the killings. Major general Paul Kagame did not care at all about those threats. Recently, when one of former RPA officers who deserted and fled the country said that RPA was to blame for the killing of Tutsi, Rwandan foreign affairs minister, Charles Muligande attempted against all odds to refute it. Why does he so pathetically tell lies? It will suffice to recall that Kagame himself used to say that Tutsi living inside Rwanda were opportunists and reactionary elements that had refused to flee. Their death was none of his concerns. In fact, all the forces that were used to kill innocent civilians in liberated areas would have been used to rescue Tutsi. This did not happen. God willing, I will, jointly with other colleagues, compile a comprehensive report about ethnic cleansing that was ordered by Kagame. At times, he did it personally. I saw him personally instructing for the digging of mass graves for people who had been massacred in Byumba, Muhura and Murambi. Later, he ordered their removal and to be taken to crematory centres in Gabiro, Nasho, Masaka, Nyungwe, Kami, Gitarama military barracks and Mukamira. At times, people would be packed alive into lorries and be taken directly to the above place to be executed on the spot.
30. Apart from the war of 1990-1994, he launched two bloody wars in Zaire and is still disturbing that country.
31. Major general Paul Kagame also instructed his officers and men led by then Col Kayumba Nyamwasa to massacre civilians in Ruhengeri and Gisenyi. I saw personally heavy artillery pieces and helicopter gunship shelling villages under the excuse of fighting insurgency. At time, no single infiltrators would have set foot there, or they may have been there but left long before the counterattack. People would be summarily executed after long suffering by torture.

32. He did not spare his own tribes mates Tutsi. Bagogwe and Banyamulenge of Zaire were killed to safeguard his own selfish interests. It is not easy to find the right wording, but what he did is indescribable. He killed so many Congolese of Rwandan origin, Hutu and Tutsi alike. This will also be detailed later. We were Inkotanyi-members of RPA, we know all the elements who were misguided into getting involved in crimes. People should be assured that soon or later, all crimes that took place on the Rwandan soil will be accounted for. It will serve as a lesson for many, for one may conceal a crime, but the crime does not conceal itself.

33. I take this opportunity to call upon all Rwandan fighting the general Kagame’s regime, to avoid getting involved in any activities that would lead to shedding the blood of innocent people. Kagame concealed his crimes for nearly 10 years, but time has come to expose him. All criminals will end up being taken to court to answer for their deeds. Why do they take the risk of being arrested one day and spend the rest of their lives in prison?
E. The refusal to rescue Tutsi in 1994

34. I cannot forget the pain that general Kagame inflicted to Rwandan of Tutsi ethnic group, his own tribe mates. Some were even killed on his orders. Others were deliberately left at the mercy of Interahamwe. He made sure that nobody comes to their rescue. Up-to-date, he is still pursuing his policy by repeating in Congo what he did in Rwanda. Why is he busy creating hatred between Banyamulenge minority and the rest of the Congolese population? Is it for the interest of Tutsis? Even in Rwanda, he does not spare anything to exacerbate tension between ethnic groups, by his policy of forced reconciliation. What he does will inevitably lead to a new wave of ethnic conflict and Tutsi will again be the main victims. I hereby condemn it publicly, I urge him to stop forthwith killing us, causing us to be killed and using us as political springboard. I urge him to leave our country and the region in peace. As I promised, with the help of courageous colleagues who managed to flee his death squads, we shall compile a comprehensive report of all atrocities General Paul Kagame was involved in. I deliberately refrained from talking about politics. I leave it to others more competent to denounce his dictatorship.

35. I know very well that people will ask themselves why a Tutsi who came from Uganda for that matter can leak such secrets, as people think that all former Ugandan refugees are all in good books with the regime of general Kagame.
36. For me, I am not leaking secrets, I am denouncing crimes. There are many people who are longing to do so, but who cannot because they don't have the opportunity. For to say such thing inside Rwanda or anywhere in Africa would put somebody’s life in great danger. I spoke out because I have a chance of being in a country where I feel safe. I don’t rule out reprisals against my family left in Rwanda, but I am doing it anyway to avoid more suffering for all Rwandans. My prayer is that the international community at long last takes the opportunity to put an end to its support to general Kagame’s regime, which is decimating people under the pretext of protecting Tutsi. Everything is done for his own interest.



Norway, 05/07/2004

2nd Lt Aloys RUYENZI

(Signed)

Contact :aruyenzi2000@yahoo.com

«SiG»
“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice."
-Qur’an 4:135

http://www.rwandaforum.org/Ruzibiza_English.htm

PRESS RELEASE

Following the news of the existence of an investigation on the crash landing of the plane that transported President Juvénal Habyarimana and his counterpart of Burundi, with nine other people originating from three different countries: Rwanda, Burundi and France. International newspapers, radios and televisions were pressed to disseminate this information. This plane belonged to the regime’s civil aviation and flew over a demilitarized zone; some of the journalists knew how to locate me, and they contacted me to ask whether I could confirm that the allegations of the newspapers really emanated from the quoted sources, sources of which I am part. I affirmed that it was true.



However, considering the distortion of the information through the channels of its diffusion, I prefer to deliver this information personally, instead of letting people forward events such as they were not lived. Concerning the investigations in progress, I am not an agent of a legal institution. I was questioned with others on what we knew, and we answered. If I dare to only give this testimony, it is that my comrades fear to be assassinated by Kagame if they were expressed on this subject. It would not be the first time he does that.

Myself, I prefer to break the silence, to bear witness on the responsibility of the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPF/RPA) in the genocide of Tutsis, the massacre of the Hutus during the war that it had to carry out and to which I took share. I want that the Rwandan and international opinion understand what occurred to Rwanda. Because until now, only the version of the facts and their interpretation made with the liking of the interests of the RPF were made public.



At a moment when we prepare to commemorate the genocide, which carried our most expensive beings, it is time that the truth is known. It has been ten years that Kagame proclaimed himself as the saver of Tutsis. Whereas it is him who made possible their extermination, and who even prevented us from assisting them, whereas we had the means to do it.



In appendix of this press release, you will find a detailed testimony on what happened on the territory occupied by the RPF. My intention is to release the Rwandans who have been held as hostage of the lie that “a man” stopped the genocide, by telling them the truth, which would make possible the reconciliation between all the Rwandans.



Thank you.



Abdul Ruzibiza

Se

Sunday 14-03-2004





TESTIMONY AIMING TO DEMONSTRATE HOW THE RWANDAN GOVERNMENT AND THE RPF ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ERRORS, WHICH MADE POSSIBLE THE GENOCIDE. DID THE RPF COME TO HELP THE TUTSI, AS IT HAS BEEN OFTEN REPETED TO US?



After the publication of the report of the investigation into the crash landing of the civil aircraft that transported eleven people of which civil and military eminent personalities from Rwanda, Burundi and France, among them two Presidents, Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, the newspapers which one is unaware of how they reached the detailed report of the investigation have largely made the echo these last days. For what relates to me, I will provide my testimony on the operation of the RPF and its armed branch RPA because I belonged to these two organizations before taking the direction of the exile. I take this initiative with the idea that the information conveyed by the media was deformed for the profit of the latter by allotting me words, which I did not pronounce, what served the purpose of those who had advantage to continue to deny the truth on what occurred.



LET ME BEGIN WITH DECLINING MY IDENTITE:



My name is RUZIBIZA, baptized Vénuste a few days after my birth. Since the beginning of my commitment to the service of (RPF) Family, they nicknamed me ABDUL as my code name. I kept it to my entry in the army in 1990. The reasons of that it is that at the time of the entry to the army, the members of the Family forwarded to us the ones with the others until our arrival in the zone controlled by the RPF Inkotanyi. The list of these code names preceded us. If at the request of your name, you answered by an unknown name, you were killed using an old hoe. You were taken for one infiltrated in the system of the RPF. By afterwards, when I decided to convert me with Protestantism, I chose the name of Josué. For all these names, I never denied that they belonged to me. With the army, every year that I passed there, I bore the name of RUZIBIZA Abdul. I fled the Country in the night from the 3 to February 4, 2001. I had the rank of second lieutenant, with my number of OP 1920.



I was born in Gitagata, Kanzenze commune in Bugesera. I am of the tutsi ethnic group, resulting from the clan of Abanyiginya, in the family of Abahindiro. My mother is also of the ethnic group of the tutsi of the clan of Abatsobe. I am of tutsi origin on the two sides of my parents, and I am orphan of father and mother. My two parents and my six brothers and sisters were killed, victims of the genocide of 1994. I was eyewitness of the events of which I tell you unfolding; I say it in my membership of the army and the Family of the RPF, as one of the soldiers of the RPA which fought for the control of their zone of combat, I also say it like pertaining to the ethno group tutsi. I would like especially that those who will have the occasion to read my writings can know the truth about certain events of great importance, that marked the long walk started by the RPF, but which, arriving at the point where the country had to be released, made the fatal error, which generated the tragedy of the genocide.







THERE ARE PRINCIPLES IN WHICH I BELIEVE AND WHICH NOTHING

COULD QUESTION:



1. I am convinced that it was necessary to engage the war against the Habyarimana regime because it denied certain basic rights to the majority of its fellow-citizens including mainly the Tutsi. I however believe that other ways, which are not the recourse to the war, should have been tested before taking the weapons. However, no other country was laid out to provide us weapons, because the NRA was the only national army of a country able to help us. Personal relations between Rwandan and nationals within the Ugandan army, often enameled contempt with regard to Rwandan in a country for which they had fought, are one of the principal causes which pushed the Rwandan ones to want to leave the Ugandan territory, without counting on patience that could require long negotiations, which could go up to five years.



2. I am convinced that there was premeditation of the genocide of Tutsi, planned by the high leaders of the Country and the levels in charge of safety. It was carried out by the Hutu population, except for some Tutsi, who by being transformed into Hutu took part in it. I am convinced that this genocide would never have been possible without the elements which started it, because even if the Hutu had been taken of madness, it was not possible that they awake the morning and sharpen their machetes to cut out Tutsi until a million people. I am also convinced that the RPF by its armed branch the RPA killed with premeditation, on order and the attentive glance of its Chief Paul Kagame. Moreover, I am convinced that the genocide was the result of the problems raised by the war started in 1990, especially by the behavior of the RPA in the areas, which it had conquered. I will explain this later.



3. I am convinced and I affirm that the RPA massacred people of all ethnic groups, with the objective to sow anarchy to facilitate its seizure of power, with price even if the price were the extermination of a whole people.



4. I do not believe at all that the RPF and its army, myself including, ever stopped the genocide. Rather, I am convinced that we drove out the army of the FAR, Interahamwe, Impuzamugambi of the CDR and affiliated youth, thus after having broken the forces which supported the Government, we seized the power. I will explain that too.



5. I am convinced and I affirm that the exhumed bodies of the common graves are not only those of Tutsi, because I know common graves where Inkotanyi threw mixes bodies with the people they killed, they were exhumed together by qualifying them all of Tutsi.



6. I am convinced that if the RPF had wanted it, the genocide should not have taken place. I am convinced that so even if the Government and Interahamwe had planned

to exterminate Tutsi within the framework of the genocide, the RPA had just acquired the power, which enabled him to reduce the damage by a million died to less than one hundred thousand.

This means that the RPF did not bring its assistance to the threatened people whereas it had the means of them. I will provide explanations of this.



7. I am convinced that after our seizure of power, which was accompanied by massacres of population, arbitrary acts of arrests and war of aggression against Zaire, it is impossible for the current regime to proceed to the installation of an impartial justice, because the magistrates directly or would be indirectly implied in these horrors under the threat and the pressure of Sir Kagame who dictates his will with all, in his current position of the head of the Country.



8. I believe from the bottom of my heart that the allegations on the responsibility of President Paul Kagame, who gave the order to shot down the plane of Habyarimana, are true. The testimonies, which were given about it, do not all emanate from me, I am not able of it, and I could not be personally everywhere that one tells. Testimonies emanate from several sources, exiled and even those who did not flee the country. Me I decided to speak with the radios and international televisions, because the means at my disposal allow it. Nobody is unaware of that any individual who not only would try to

speak about the inculpation of Kagame, but which quite simply would be allowed to express his only intention to charge him, would expose himself to being killed before he/she did not have time to say anything. International courts or other authorities that will receive competences to act legally will be able to decide if the fact of cutting down the plane took place, while having the evidence and the mandate which make it possible to designate Kagame as author of this crime or to determine that it is him who gave the order to make it happen. Let us satisfy ourselves by giving them time; those who deny these facts and those who affirm them will have the occasion to clash in front of the courts. Me I can speak until the limit of my knowledge, the others will take turns progressively.



9. I am convinced that the Rwandan people has just spent 10 years under the cane of soldiers men from the bush, the Rwandan ones lost confidence in one another, nobody can express himself freely or point finger the responsibility for the RPF in the atrocities of the baptized war of liberation. If information on the unfolding of this war were made available to a greater number of people, much explanation on the origin of the tragedy would be found, and thus the reconciliation could be based on bases of the truth, which would emerge some.



10. I believe of the content of my heart that all those leaders of the country who spend their time with the radios and televisions to contradict the results of the survey by describing them as handling of the French State want to divert the attention of the population of the truth on the crimes that they themselves made. As for the President Kagame, who says that these are rumors, which are assembled of left on the right that mean nothing in his eyes. I see the things differently, and it will not be long for him to realize that he knowingly made worse errors that caused the loss of innumerable human lives.






THE CREATION OF THE RPF AND ITS ARMED FORCE BRANCH, THE RPA



I do not have time to reconsider the history, but the RPF is a collective of small associations of former Rwandan refugees in the various countries. I will insist on young people of the 15 years old and more, who studied in Burundi, in Tanzania, Zaire and in Uganda. They were seedbeds of recruitment of the army. The first had been made recruit by the NRA, the others joined at the beginning of the war.



The important is that young people had grown by nourishing the conviction that the elder ones who one called Inyenzi, had very badly behaved not to gain the victory for which they had fought for. The RPF initially settled in the heads of the young people in the hope

that all the problems will be solved by them, i.e. by the army, since they did not consider any other strategy than that to fight for their country. In short, people had prepared to resolve the problem by the military way and thought that all was going to depend on the reports of force. This is why, the head of the Army Paul Kagame, was much more powerful than the President of the RPF.

Since the beginning, I personally noted this error because the consequences continued to worsen the situation and even currently this established fact did not change. They are the soldiers, their hierarchy, and their services of information, which direct the country.



On the question relating to the reasons, which pushed the RPF to attack immediately after its foundation, without awaiting for the results of the negotiations which Rwanda carried out with Uganda on the problem of the Rwandan refugees, the RPF made a point of ruining them while having found the pretext of attacking.



President Museveni was shown to have recruited too many Rwandans in the Ugandan army because the Rwandan ones were numerous to occupy most of the senior officers positions. The examples of those who were indicated as Rwandans that they want it or not were numerous: Major Général Fred Lay Rwigyema, Major Général Mugisha Muntu, Colonel Mateeka, Lt Colonel Adam Wasswa, Major Cris Bayingana, Major Peter Bayingana, Major Samuel Kanyemera Alias Kaka, Major Paul Kagame, Major Ndungutse, Major Kale Kayihura of Bufumbira, and other subalterns of which captains and lieutenants, like Twahirwa Louis, Musitu, Karangwa Bombi, Gashumba, Cyiza,

Bagire, Ngoga, Muhire, Kaddafi, Nyamurangwa, Musana, Bigabiro. One cannot all enumerate them, and the majority of them were commanders of companies or more. What irritated more the Ugandans, it was that the Rwandan ones had seized the important places within the strategic positions: services of information and military finances, presidential guards and that of Rwigyema; the others directed the military operations. That irritated the nationals and caused tensions between the Ugandan and the Rwandan ones. Those who chose the date of October 1, 1990 to start the war did no find other solutions.



October 1990 many did not believe that the Rwandans were escaped prisoners of the Ugandan military camps, but really they deserted from the Ugandan army. But this does not want to say that President Museveni was not informed by his services of information. However while following the military procedure, the last one that discussed the information to be forwarded to the President Museveni was a Rwandan, as that to whom he entrusted his secrecies. Those who crossed the border the first and second days of the offensive formed a manpower a little higher than 3 000. Nobody wanted to be opposed at the desertion of such people, especially that one said oneself: "Leave quickly so that we can recover our stations".

Errors made:

Rwigyema was quickly killed by some of his soldiers; those who planned his assassination have abstained to take the direction of the army not to be discovered; one could immediately suspect them of having thus acted to seize the command of the army. He was killed whereas he was the only one with the knowing of how the war had been planned.

When Kagame was requested by the President Museveni to direct the RPA, the soldiers quickly showed it of "Pilato", and stated that they did not want him at their head. Major Peter Bayingana says to him: "You are physically and mentally inapt, how can you claim to direct men? That he was to turn over to whom had sent him, and that he was inapt and unable to direct people. That if that who had sent him wanted to express contempt towards the other leaders of the military operations, he had only to appoint a Ugandan soldier to the head of the RPA. To seize the throne of the command of the army, Paul Kagame returned escorted of more than 10 jeeps, accompanied of the Major general Salim Saleh and soldiers of PPU of the personal guard of Museveni, and it was the same day that Bayingana and Bunyenyezi were assassinated...

Since this day, Afande Kagame began the long voyage that continues so far; he has directed with an iron hand people of whom he knew that they did not like him at all.



This had harmful consequences, because the direction of the army was entrusted to somebody who did not have confidence in person, at such point that he was occupied personally of all the details; he divided the army into factions, transformed into agents of denouncement; introduced the reign terror and the least counterpart was sanctioned by the death penalty with the old hoe as if it were a question of killing out of the pigs.

Within the framework of the division of this army with a view to ensure its domination, he introduced the designation of people by cataloguing them in "positive 1", "positive 2" until the "positive 5". Positive the 1 was those coming from Uganda, those cover confidence everywhere where they were, 2 was implemented to those coming from Tanzania, 3 with those coming from Burundi, 4 with those coming from Zaîre, 5 with those coming from Rwanda. The latter, even if they were tutsi, were to wait at least two years to deserve the least confidence. It was the same thing to reach the headquarters of the army, because the command was monopolized by those coming from Uganda in the proportion of 95 %. The justifications given to this discrimination were that they were better with the military art, and that they were the only ones able to direct the engagements. There is nothing truth in all that, they were quite simply pretexts to impose the domination from the "positive 1".



Most annoying was that the least fault made by a French-speaking recruit was rigorously sanctioned. The capital punishment with the old hoe was inflicted or you were inserted blows of bayonet in the body until death follows from there.

To have made suspicion on one’s fault, tiredness when one could not advance any more, the attack dysentery following the bad hygienic conditions: here are defects for which "positive 1" would said: "Here are somebody who took taste with the easy life, it is a dog to be cut down, who can be of no utility ". When you were not able any more to walk because of the wounds, one gave the order to complete you immediately. These cruel acts of torture decreased following the round that Paul Kagame carried out in Burundi where members of the RPF family there prohibited him from continuing to kill their children with the old hoe as the pigs are killed. That if he did not want them to fight any more, he had only to let them set out again and resume their studies. After this warning, people started to breathe. On the other hand, those who could fight and who came from Uganda could commit the most odious crimes, they did not undergo tough punishment, but a sorrow of imprisonment of short duration, and took again their functions little afterwards.

Reconsidering a little bit the beginning of the war in October 1990, General Rwigyema in his tactic, had planned to attack by the Mutara region by the park of Akagera, localities that were very lightly populated. They were advantageous to people in spite of the difficulties encountered to find water and food. They were also more advantageous, in that they enabled him to save a sufficient time to be able to explain to the population the motivations of the war started by the RPF. By humility, Rwigyema took care not to be at the origin of the causes, which could involve the slaughter of innocent populations in combat, which one could avoid.



It is not what Kagame conceived, because Mutara did not abound in food, because there were no heights to be protected from the heavy weapons, that in the low lands one was exposed to all the shootings; that it was finally advantageous to pass on heights to reduce the number of dead and casualties. It should be noted that except for the volcanoes, all these hills were highly populated by Hutu bakiga, who one said that they were hostile to Inkotanyi that fought for the re-establishment of feudal monarchy.

In the area of the Volcanoes, the soldiers perished massively. Because of the hunger, cold, dysentery, each unity lost between 5 and 10 people during the first 5 months. For Kagame, that was of no importance, all that made understand that if one refused to obey his orders, he was going to make use of his gun to be obeyed by force. It was that speech that he did not cease repeating with the soldiers at the time of his visits to the unities.



LET ME SUBDIVIDE THE WAR IN VARIOUS STAGES



The First Stage: November 1990 until July 1991.



This stage corresponds to the tactic of dissemination of the guerrillas in all the directions to cause the dispersion of the governmental troops on all the borders of the country to direct the attacks on less strengthened faces. This strategic advantage was obtained by having recourse to a wild cruelty as I will describe it while referring to me with the geographical configuration of North.

Attacks in the localities of Muvumba, Kiyombe, Nkana, Rushaki, Kaniga-Gatuna and in the surroundings were launched with an exceptional violence: for example, to condense the populations in the same place and then use machine gun against them indistinctly, to collectively rape women and the girls and kill them afterwards under the pretext of preventing that they do not throw a bad fate to them during the combat, to drive out the populations and to despoil their goods, to continue in their displacements to make them die from hunger, to destroy their houses and to sell their sheets in Uganda, to shave the dwellings so that the owners do not have to think any more of going back there.



On the side of Cyumba, Butaro, Nkumba, Kinigi, Mukingo and in the surrounding areas, military operations were similar to those carried out in Mutara. The important thing in all that was that people understand that Kagame was the only man to plan the course of operation of combat, to indicate the targets to be reached, to ensure of it the follow-up in all its execution so that no other initiative can be carried out apart from his plan. The armed forces of the Habyarimana government had consolidated their defensive positions so that it was very difficult to cross them to enter to the deep country. I can quote some examples.



In Mutara, for the localities of Nyagatare, Rwempasha, Kangoma, Mabare, Mutojo,

Bushara, Kabuga, Nyabihara, Gikagati, Karama, ... each Inkotanyi soldier was conscious of the imminence of the danger. In the localities of the Center, Gatonde, Kaniga I, Kaniga 2, Mukono, Kivuye, everyone knew that one could not venture there.

In Ruhengeri, the positions best strengthened were in Nyamicucu, Butaro-Runaba, Rwabutama, Kinyababa, Muremure, Kagano, Bisate, and everywhere else as in Ruhengeri, Kinigi, ... What I want to show is that each attempt to attack these localities was violently pushed back, we were put in rout. We had to wash the shame of our failures by proceeding to reprisals on the local populations to make transport our casualties and our dead soldiers’ corpses and to make keep and transport the cattle and the goods plundered to them, then they had to make them dig the tombs in which they were going to be buried, times, one ordered them to kill one another until the last of them, who was in his turn killed by an RPA soldier. When the things occurred differently, the populations were connected arms to the legs, one will break their cranium with the old hoe, or one will insert into them blows of knives in the coasts until dead follows from there. Pretexts to kill them so atrociously did not miss, they were for example asking people to reveal the secrecies of the MRND, "how do the soldiers prepare to attack us? », justifications were of all this kind.



When all these macabre acts were finished, we folded up ourselves on our back basis in Uganda. The lie of the RPF since then started, the RPF never acknowledges its crimes. We often swore on our honor that we are not on the Ugandan territory. That continued thus until the release of the war of aggression against Zaire, nobody acknowledged that the RPA had crossed the Zairean border.



Second stage: from July 1991 in June 1992:



It is at this time that the RPA tried to occupy one of the portions of territory along the border with Uganda. And yet, where the occupation was possible, that point was reached only when all the population was exterminated, the survivors were to flee, and the authorities of the Habyarimana regime could only gather them in reduced spaces, where they received insufficient quantities of food, sheeting to build their small shelters.

If the researchers wanted to know the reasons, which made this genocide possible, they should start by studying this situation (1).



The RPF undertook the tactics to attack the enemy by circumventing it, we cut all the ways of provisioning to him behind him. This tactic was advantageous for RPF Inkotanyi which had insufficient equipment, it pushed the enemy to leave his defensive positions and to move away some. It was a tactic attacks defensive because it was not possible to resort to the traditional tactics. We were fewer, and much less equipped than the governmental forces. Here harmful consequences resulting from this situation:



1. To circumvent the enemy means that one avoided the line of face between the armies to penetrate in the zones inhabited by the civil population behind the positions of the governmental army. This population not relying on us, it denounced our presence near the governmental army, who could attack us after us to have located and have counted. Among this population, that which was suspected of having seen to us was to be killed, because we did not have the means of maintaining it with the secrecy and did not know how long it was necessary to remain on the spot. That wants to say that each time we had to circumvent the enemy, we had received the ORDER TO KILL ALL the POPULATION WITHOUT PITIE.



2. To venture far from the line of face and our positions meant that we had to survive, thanks to the food that we find on the spot. The population had to be killed to plunder its goods and to destroy the houses to seize the cattle: goats, hens, cows, we nourished ourselves. It happened that one has all that in abundance for then wasting it; each one of us cut down his own animal, and took the parties he wanted to then throw the remainder; for 20 soldiers for example 2 cows, 10 hens, 3 goats were killed for them. All of that, for anybody who knows the poverty of Rwandan, the Hutu who was never informed of the ideology of the RPF, that he only saw coming to kill his children, to rape his wife, to despoil his cattle and to plunder the goods for which he had spent all his forces on, to drive out from his house which one destroyed; that is who wants to understand how the genocide was possible could also start here (2).



3. Sign exhaustion, at a certain time it happened that the Advisers of Sector, Burgomasters, Armed forces required of the population under their control to raise dogs on the level of each establishment, so that by their sense of smell they bark before the arrival of Inkotanyi soldiers, and that the population has time to run away. These practices made perish a considerable number of citizens; the tactics of skirting of the governmental positions made it possible to avoid the centers of the population, and while believing to flee, fell into the claws from Inkotanyi which killed everyone, thanks to the darkness of the night, without letting some only one escape, under pretext which they were IBIPINGA (adverse) who preferred to die for the MRND. Even if I inserted this paragraph in this stage, each time Inkotanyi had carried out the skirting of the positions of the army, they started by exterminating the local population



To trap with mines, to draw on buses which transported travelers in the frontier areas are acts which were carried out on a daily basis, so much so that mines were trapped in potato fields, to cut the legs to the peasants and definitively to prevent them from returning to their fields. This was sad. Peasants, obliged to leave their grounds, had nothing to eat, or simply corn and beans lived having given up their banana plantation, without being able to return to harvest their manioc (cassava roots), their potatoes, or their vegetables. It had rather to be made so that the moved populations have occasions to return to them. The majority returned to recover clothing. And yet, the forces armed of the RPF had received the order to kill them without another form of lawsuit. What could generate the fact of making die people of hunger, by preventing them from collecting the fruits of their work, if it is not the genocide? Who wants to know why the genocide was possible should once again start by studying this case (3).



4. The camps of people moved by the war had been established in well-known localities, which I will quote:

Rukomo-Rwebare (Muvumba), this camp I saw it several times of my eyes, was destroyed by heavy weapons like the mortars of 120 mm, that of Rukara, and that of Mutagomwa were destroyed with the Lance Rockets Multiple (LRM) 107 mm, the Katiusha in Murangira unit, time with other like the Commander Kyakabale of the Ugandan army lent it to Inkotanyi the mortars 23 mm, 33 mm, 14.5 mm to destroy the camps full with displaced people. It happened that we are not able any more to have explanation on the thoughts of our chiefs. We were numerous to note that the sufferings caused to the population were sufficiently atrocious not to have to add of them others by the use of the heavy weapons. This camp like many others, following the example of that of Runaba, Nkumba, Muhambo were used by way to test like fields of drive for the shootings of anti-aircraft missiles. One drew from the missiles flamers over the camps, and those who were trained to fire the transportable missiles with the hand, found a ground of implementation. Often the missiles exploded in the center of the camp to kill the occupants (displaced people). These threats forced the displaced to move again, to go to seek refuge possible further. Some moved arrived at Nyacyonga, close to Kigali, after being dislodged more than 20 times in less than two years. It was impossible that families arrive in their entirety at Nyacyonga, some displaced who fled the camps destroyed with the heavy weapon buried there initially the members of their families killed: a child, a woman, a husband or a brother, before leaving. Here another explanation of the massive participation in the genocide (4).



Third stage: since the attack of Byumba at the beginning of June 1992 to April 6, 1994



The attack of Byumba was launched by way of test. The RPF wanted to know if it were able to occupy at the same time a greater extent of the territory, because with the development of the negotiations, it wanted to make a show of force so that its claims are granted to him by the pressure of its growing military power. I point out that all the times that there were negotiations; Kagame never said to its army that they could lead to something of good. He repeated unceasingly that the arrival in Kigali was not possible unless using the fire of the gun. These attacks of great scale led us until Rukomo, beyond Byumba in direction of Kigali. It was the same thing on the left and on the right: Mukarange, a party of Kinyami, Buyoga, Rushashi, one starts from Ngarama, Cyumba, Kivuye, ; in all these localities, people who had not had the possibility of fleeing these attacks were massacred. This point also constitutes an enigma, because the RPF made a serious error there. It also turned over to Uganda to encourage the populations to come to Rwanda to collect the abundant harvest left by the displaced, and to help them to occupy this vast territory, which RPF had just conquered for them. People answered the appeal massively to return to Rwanda. The news was spread quickly at displaced, what corroborated the propaganda of the government, which taught that Inkotanyi had come to kill, to despoil the properties of their former occupants, to restore feudal monarchy, to forward the Hutu to the tutsi domination and the known slavery of the old tutsi regime. Here is another way by which the hatred of the Hutu was poked until reaching the genocide (5).



During this stage, the RPF realized that it was able to conquer greater extents of the territory and to occupy them. So that it is possible, it was necessary to carry out a second test to increase their territory, but it was necessary to find convincing reasons for them.

Firstly, the negotiations and the mechanisms of implementation of cease-fire had been just signed. For the moment, the RPF or rather Kagame and its army planned that in spite of the result of the negotiations on agreements of peace, it was necessary to seek occasions to reopen the hostilities. It is here that it was conceived to create a special squadron, which was under the only orders of Kagame and his closest collaborators: Kayumba Nyamwasa, James Kabarebe and Charles Kayonga. This squadron changed name with the liking of the circumstances, but here the no exhaustive list of the names that it had to carry: NETWORK COMMANDO, or TECHNICIANS, or CDR COMMANDO.



These names adapted to the small groups, instead of the execution of the mission, or with the various objectives. Those, which were assigned to the supervision of the activities of party CDR were baptized CDR Commando. Those which supervised the activities of the men who split the firewood in the army of Habyarimana, boys of city in Kigali, servants of the high personalities in charge for the country, technicians were baptized, etc.



What is important to know is that this squadron was designed in a sophisticated way, so much so that even those who formed part of it did not know, except for those who were formed together or for those who came from the same unity. The creation of this special squadron had as an aim of:

A. To sow the disorder and anarchy inside the country to cause occasions to show the government to be responsible for the crimes of assassinations having to be used for the resumption of the hostilities;

B. To plant the mines through the country in a more organized way;

C. To establish cells of the RPF inside the country, to diffuse its ideology, to recruit accomplices, to poison drinking water consumed by displaced people, spy on the enemy inside his line of face;

D. To organize assassinations of the political personalities targeted by the RPF.

Meanwhile, there was the attack of February 8 1993 that was aimed to test the capacity to go on Kigali, to evaluate the work achieved by Network in the research of the reasons to reopen the hostilities, even if the negotiations were in hand.

Atrocities were made at this time, because where I was in certain communes of Ruhengeri, I remember that at "Base" in February, the soldiers who were there killed out of people of which they burned the corpses. Not having been able to be buried, these bodies broke up along the road and of the river "Base", until the moment when soldiers of the GOMN had suddenly passed. They were indignant at this state of decomposition of the bodies and of allowed to go to ask whether we did not have shame to live with corpses in a state of decomposition. We called the population to help to bury these corpses, but when the GOMN was withdrawn, these people were also killed.



It is at the same time that we began from the cruel acts of destruction of infrastructures like the electric pylons of Ntaruka, attacks of the dwelling houses of the authorities to the grenade; I remember that the houses of Rucagu and Colonel Gasake were thus destroyed, it was in Nyarutovu and Cyeru... Nobody can forget the made atrocities with Ruhengeri when Inkotanyi were found in impossibility of occupying the city. People know what occurred to Musanze, with the ITIRU and Karwasa, Kigombe and Kinigi, the inhabitants of this area will never forget what occurred in this locality. And nobody is unaware of the atrocities made by Inkotanyi in Ngarama, Buyoga and elsewhere.


BIRTH OF THE INTERAHAMWE, IMPUZAMUGAMBI-RTLM



Kagame had planned to put the negotiations in failure and to invade Kigali, while Habyarimana planned how to face what he called his enemies, which we really were. He created an armed militia, which received a military drive of the armed forces, communal police force, gendarmerie, and of the same services of the Presidency. This youth that will make the tragedy was omnipresent in all the country. And yet all were not of equal virulence in their eagerness to kill Tutsi. This point must be made available of the public, because it is an authentic fact. Any individual who lived in Rwanda during this period can attest it.



At the beginning of the attacks of Interahamwe with Bugesera, Kibirira, at Bagogwe, attackers arrived each time in the buses of the ONATRACOM coming from the camps of war displaced people of Ruhengeri or Byumba. These same people knew already the RPA persecutions and cruelty. Other youths Hutu from other region did not understand yet the inhuman behavior their comrades who killed people wildly as one kills out of the flies with a great fury. The majority of the attacks identified before the genocide were launched by these young people, whose cruelty is to be sought in two origins: Government and the RPF. That is why who wants to know how the genocide was possible can also think of these facts (6)



For the RPF, the MRND acted without the knowledge in accordance with the wish of the RPF, because when the MRND trained Interahamwe, the RPF found the occasion to plant mines and to reject the responsibility for it on the Government, and found there the justification to take again the hostilities, while the International Community blamed the Habyarimana regime. I do not deny that Interahamwe like the other extremists planted mines. For the RPF, it was also the occasion to train the commandos of Network, because, when the negotiations were going on, RPF took the opportunity to train more troops and to organize sessions of formation. During only 1993, the RPF trained its forces in the following fields:

- It trained two battalions of commandos and other small unities of less importance;

- It formed more than 400 soldiers intended to form part of the gendarmerie;

- It formed more than four groups of instructors. It planned that in the event of war, each unity has its own instructors to form the new recruits quickly;

- It trained all the officers command leadership;

- It sufficiently trained its soldiers with the urban guerrilla warfare, within each unity;

- It trained and trained the soldiers to make long steps, transporting all the individual equipment, each man with his cartridges and of the bombs allowing him to resist during several days while waiting for that the new provisioning arrives;

- It trained the soldiers in what it called the true history of Rwanda, which was not necessarily different, but which was exempted with the objective to insist on the fact that the best remedy for the problem arising lay in the inversion of Habyarimana and its regime and in the need for the seizure of power by the RPF.



The weight of this was very important because the soldiers never thought that peace could come from the agreements of Arusha. On this point, the RPF adopted the same attitude as that of the extremists of the CDR and the MRND and other Power, the difference being that the RPF taught it to its soldiers without making publicity of it while, on its side, the MRND was praised some with the radio and in the newspapers, the refrain being that the agreements of Arusha were paper rags, or that they were like a dog in decomposition.



During this stage of the war, the RPF/RPA managed to control the methods of intoxication of the public opinion enabling him to trap the Habyarimana régime, and all the errors it made were easily rejected on Habyarimana and its government.

We were in the stage where the agreements of peace had been just signed, but where two men, Habyarimana and Kagame, two enemy Generals who are at war, and who if they met somewhere in the country would not hesitate to draw one mortally over the other.



We were in the stage where the RPF obtained the certainty that, if it wanted, it would sow the disorder to seize the power, but also, where it was ready to yield to the international pressure to enter to the government. He as the extremists of Habyarimana did not want to intend to speak about this way of power sharing as a durable solution with the problems arising. This is why each one planned an alternative solution if they would have been constrained to cohabit with a view to cause the rupture of the agreements concluded between the two protagonists of the conflict.

Here is what was planned on both sides:

- Habyarimana created what he indicated as civil defense, which did not even dissimulate its intention to disseminate weapons within the population, in each cell and each sector of the country that will be used later on to sow disorders.

- He created armed militia to refuse the signed agreements, even those signed by him. They were ready to make anything with the simple signal.

- He imposed on Radio RTLM on Radio Rwanda and other small affiliated newspapers, the same leading line for saying that the agreements of Arusha were not of any utility for the Rwandans.

- He bought new military equipment that was added to the old ones, so that one disseminates them in all the country.

- He made draw up lists of all the people who had children or brothers within the RPF Inkotanyi, those which were suspected of propagating the ideology of the RPF, those who sought financings to him, Hutu who behaved as of Tutsi, I want to say those who supported the fight of the RPF, so that as soon as possible, all are massacred. Nobody knew the day when these massacres were to be carried out.

- This is different from what the RPF propagates which supports that it was established the list of all Tutsi so that they all are killed. It is a lie because if Tutsi were to be killed simultaneously, that supposes that each one of them was to be carried out by his neighbors, and these neighbors knew each other very well in order not to have to try hard to draw up the list of Tutsi, because even the little children grow up hearing people talking about them at the village.



Here, I would like to stress that even with the death of Habyarimana, and even if he had not been killed, the objective was to massacre all the people inventoried on well drawn up lists, and it is what occurred except for some fortunate, all the others whose one had planned death were massacred in the three days that followed the death of Habyarimana.



On the side of the Government, I affirm that Habyarimana in person or on pressure of his entourage wanted that these lists are elaborated, and he knew that at a convenient period, the people appearing would be carried out there. Another point that I do not want to forget, and which appears serious to me, it is that the human life which is usually sacred in Rwanda, had become like the water that runs, especially for Tutsi; I please say that finally Habyarimana and his extremists had sensitized the Hutu of the CDR and Interahamwe that to pour the blood of Tutsi was a banal act. They had been exerted there in Kibirira, in Bugesera, and at Bagogwe, to test that to pour the blood was possible, and that those who did it did not have to tremble. This was serious so much that, as I announced, the other Hutu of the villages and the sectors, and even those of the MRND, were not killers, they were astonished by the behavior and the projects of Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi; others fought them until generated disorders within the political parties. Nobody is unaware of how the youth of the MDR (Inkuba), PSD (Abakombozi) and PL (liberals) faced Interahamwe.

All that occurred until Habyarimana manage to divide them into Power and Amajyogi. In short, the extremists sensitized their youths to give death without being worried. Here another sign that made the genocide possible (8).



On the RPF/RPA side, many things were done that prepared the last day for Tutsi.

- For reasons of control of the Ugandan border, the RPF made enter as much as possible of ammunition to Rwanda, for a use of long duration. This was held at the end of September 1993, on three different localities, and for two reasons:

-To take again the hostilities in a decisive way to seize power, in the contrary case, to dissimulate to use them to sow the disorder after our entry in the Government with a view to seize power by the force... For that, who wants to understand Network, here there is a signal. Those who were selected, myself y included, have to dig very large pits, as where I was, the cavity measured 50 m X 30 m X 7 m. We deposited ammunition there and bombs of various gauges of 7,62 mm, 11.5 mm, 12.7 mm, 14.5 mm, 23 mm, 37 mm, 75 mm, 76 mm, 81 mm, 82 mm, 107 mm, 120 mm, 122 mm. Ugandan citizens transported all this armament. They were more than 1.000 and transported it a whole day.

We who had the load to ensure the guard of it, we were agreed that one among us could result in the death of all with the old hoe if this secrecy escaped. In this place, three among us were shot because they had been to buy cigarettes without the authorization of the commander. What was affirmed to us by Kabarebe and Kayumba Nyamwasa was that even if it were that we enter to the Government, that there was no question for us of remaining there. We were going to be installed very close of the hiding-places of our equipment on the border between Uganda and Rwanda, that one was going to supply us discreetly, until the moment when it will be possible to make a coup d'etat.

The other hiding-place was in Kirama in Mutara, Bungwe in Cyumba, and between Kaniga and Gatonde. Actually, nothing other was considered if it is not to be able to sow the disorders to seize the power. Very few people were implied in this affair, one counted them at the end of the fingers, it was Kagame himself, Kabarebe his second, Kayumba Nyamwasa, the Chief of the Information, Colonel Ngoga in North, Colonel Bagire in Mutara, Major Jacob called Rubondo who was responsible for military logistics and others who arrived in visit organized by the persons in charge for the military operations or those who were sent to us. The soldiers of the RPF who were selected for this kind of work were to deserve a very great confidence, and it is among them that one recruited those who went spy on the town of Kigali before the assassination of Habyarimana.



- Several soldiers were disseminated everywhere in the country, with mission of posing the mines, to establish the basic structures of the RPF, to train with the handling of weapons those who could shoulder to us during the war, to know the operation of each political party, to mix with youths of the political parties, and to follow closely those which the RPF decided D ' to eliminate.



- The RPF and its frameworks penetrated in the buffer zone, demilitarized zone, where it started to propagate its ideology. For me it was a good deed, only the error that was made was that whoever did not adhere immediately to this ideology was killed with blows of the old hoe. Generally all its family was carried out little time afterwards.

The RPF tested its tactic of intoxication of the public opinion by allotting to the MRND the crimes for which it was the author. For example the RPF assassinated people whom it had in aversion or not, to cause occasions to show the regime. By using the technicians of Network or his enlarged branch officers of the intelligence of the unities or bands of killers, or of young people to which it had taught how to manufacture small bombs, the selection of the targets to be cut down was done according to criteria's hereafter:

1° The Hutu who discharged his function suitably, who liked Habyarimana and his Government.

2° Any Hutu who made watch of a certain intellectual level (for example Mr. Gapyisi).

3° Any Hutu whose assassination could be easily allotted to the government.

4° Any Hutu who’s the survey had of the difficulties of locating (isolated).

5° Any senior officer if it were possible.

6° No Tutsi born in Rwanda could cause the confidence of the RPF, if its death could easily be allotted to Habyarimana, there was nothing to regret (it is necessary to sacrifice Tutsi of the interior).

7° Intellectual Tutsi who could not adhere spontaneously to the ideology of the RPF like Landoald Ndasingwa whom we missed several times.

8° Tutsi who in general resided in isolated places were assassinated collectively, and this kind of crimes was immediately charged to the MRND, by example the soldiers of the RPF did that in Kabatwa in Gisenyi, under the command of Gashayija Bagirigomwa, Moses Rubimbura of the service of information. These are not rumors, they occurred at the beginning 1994.

9° Even after the war, the RPF did not hesitate to sacrifice Tutsi to find the pretext of go to plunder minerals and lumber in Zaire:

- It sacrificed the Bagogwe at Mudende, that which in doubt can require the evidence of them; we will provide them to him

- It sacrificed the Banyamurenge at Biura and elsewhere, and that is not secrecy for anybody.



- The technicians of the Town of Kigali (Network) committed innumerable crimes.

As I said at the beginning, Network is a broad network made up of elements only known by those who select them. For the remainder, each one knew that with which it was affected. If it happened that you meet some share with another, which you suspect of being your Inkotanyi comrade, there was even no question of making him a wink, because he was achieving a mission different from your. We were trained to occupy us only of what concerned us, each one personally carrying out the received instructions. The criteria of selection were as follows:



1. To be tutsi of father and mother: the examination of this criterion was not to leave any doubt and was not accepted that after a deepened examination, the candidate was to then enjoy greatest confidence.

2. To refer physical or to look like a Hutu was an asset, because it was not necessary for them to be camouflaged, the others that posted the face of Tutsi, it was necessary for us to circulate with motorbikes. Each time one feared to be known, we put the helmet on our heads, and one endorsed the tools of the agronomists, this camouflage enabled you to go to carry out the task for which you had come.

3. To know Rwanda perfectly, especially the town of Kigali was advantageous because there the center of the majority of the activities was.

4. To be a Hutu, of public notoriety, in condition never of not having resided at Rwanda, and to have shown a great hostility towards the Hutu, by disavowing your ethnic membership, and without fear to pour your blood.

5. To be Hutu, born in Rwanda for missions determined very well and isolated from the others, one took care not to put to you in contact with other missions dispatched at Kigali.

Openly or without your knowledge, you were spun by more than five agents of the services of information of Inkotanyi.

- Personal work was different from that of the others; it happened that one crossed there during the execution of a mission without knowing, but certain secret instructions could enable you to be recognized mutually in the event of need. There were young people who ensured everywhere the services of taxi motorbikes in the country; they furrowed all the places of gatherings of the politicians, taximen, commanders of the military unities or dignitaries Hutu. Boys of street were sent in the streets of Cyimihurura, among the dockers of the markets, some were going to mix with Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi or Bakombozi. Others worked clandestinely, they worked during the night, and others still were engaged as pump assistants at the gasoline stations. Work was diversified so much that when it took again hostilities there, Kagame had all information, which he needed to undertake his last decisive battle.



Each one of those who were considered to be able to trained the others, received the order to recruit the greatest number of accomplices, and often the latter did not know that they had in front of them a Inkotanyi soldier, they had only the impression to have an interlocutor in sympathy with the RPF. We received also instructions to carry out special surveys into personalities, to provide the reports of them by specifying if their assassination could be useful to us, and if it were possible.



- When the negotiations arrived at the conclusion that the RPF Inkotanyi could enter in Kigali with its 600 soldiers, the trap of the RPF was closed again on a new catch. The selection of these soldiers was done with a highly intelligent calculation, because they were not soldiers only we were accustomed to seeing. Here how that occurred:

1. Each unity sent a man of great confidence, a soldier who had eaten the teeth of the heart (pitiless), excessively devoted, who almost did not need a superior, able to draw from complicated situations without being assisted, gunner of elite, an example of courage and easy trigger.

2. The selection went on the best commanders, the best in the services of information, and which had had a drive sufficient for the urban guerrilla warfare, in order to not see any obstacle to be seized Kigali. We had memorized that one dies the come day, that all the risks deserved to be taken, that courage was the mother of all the other values, that in no case, one did not have to give to the enemy the opportunity to gain the victory.

3. According to the usual structures of command of the army, the Sergeants and corporals had troops under their command on the level of the Section. It was not thus with the third battalion of Inkotanyi, the sergeants were mixed with the corporals under the command with a second lieutenant or a sergeant estimated to have competences of the officers. What I want to explain here is that it acted of an autonomous force, which did not need to receive instructions too much, where each soldier could obey his own orders and succeed.

4. In more of the lesson exempted on the situation of the town of Kigali, our soldiers took turns in the convoys of escorts that went to Kigali, so that the greatest number among us have the possibility of looking of their own eyes all the districts of the Town of Kigali and its suburbs.



- Concerning ordinary Network which was under the high command of Mulindi, the structure somewhat changed, after the arrival of the 600 soldiers with Kigali; us all were placed under the command of Lt-Colonel Kayonga. Front, urgent information forwarded by Karake Karenzi who represented the RPA in GOMN and at the MINUAR.

It is as from this moment that the things really changed in our heads, us had carried out all that Kigali had fallen between our hands, and that we were going to burst the belly of the Hutu of Habyarimana. That is here what was going to achieve the Apocalypse predicted by Colonel Bagosora, without knowing that the RPF had prepared one of them as well.



- Disorder within the governmental army, the absence of protection of the city in spite of the omnipresence of Interahamwe, soldiers and gendarmes gave us desire of us for seizing some. Everyone agreed for saying that it was easy to seize Kigali, but that the consequences would be difficult to manage. All those who worked on the ground near the population, near the political parties, at Interahamwe, to the politicians agreed for saying that the greatest number of Rwandan privileged the way of the agreements of Arusha, but that for the extremists, Arusha remained an illusion. For the two parties in the conflict, it did not remain any more that to consider plan A, who consisted in seeking how to take again the hostilities, because plan B, which was to intervene after the integration of the two armies in a national army, remained a secrecy suitable for each party. All the predictions affirmed that the hostilities were to begin again without fault, that they would be very violent and that they were going to enormously carry human lives among the civil population.



RPF INKOTANYI HAD JUST PUSHED THE HABYARIMANA REGIME AT THE DERIVE TO TAKE AGAIN THE HOSTILITIES.



It was necessary to specify the reasons of them like the hope to gain the victory quickly, i.e. to seek the shortest distance to go to the victory.

Let me be explained on these points:



- After having poked the tensions, and sown the disorders within the political parties, which were divided into factions, ones to support the RPF and the others to fight it, RPF had just operated a division between the forces of the Hutu and the armed forces.

Even if these last were not authorized to make policy, certain political opinions liked much more them than of the others. From the time the armed forces were also divided by these currents, which crossed the other Rwandans. Some think that these divisions were the work of all alone Habyarimana, it is not true, because his capacity of control was limited, I speak about those that fought him, even if they did not support the RPF. The RPF did not like them and it did not need to be liked by them, it required rather that they make errors being able to justify the resumption of the hostilities.



- After having assassinated the various politicians and having tried to assassinate others without success and having rejected the culpability on the MRND, although the MRND and the CDR assassinated themselves some of them, the Government was condemned by the opinion of the greatest number owing to the fact that it sowed the disorder to prevent the installation of the Government of National Union at basis enlarged in accordance with the agreements of Arusha.

The Government fell thus into the trap from the RPF, this last one keeping the high head.

Really, while reconsidering our activities, us other Inkotanyi in the territories under our control, and inhuman treatment that we inflict the innocent populations originating from the North of the Country, it was difficult to distinguish our behavior from that of

Impuzamugambi. Then extremists of Habyarimana, his closer collaborators who were often originating in the North of the Country did not find any reason not to admit the CDR in the Government, whereas the MRND which had created it and which made use of it, was going to take part in it. One cannot understand why the RPF and its armed branch the RPA were going to enter the Government being also criminals of blood like I explained it higher. For the RPF as for Habyarimana, the reasons called upon to refuse to form the government were only pretexts, which ordinary people could not understand. What is regrettable is, that in general, it is difficult to render comprehensible with people how the RPF assassinated people discreetly, to then charge the responsibility for it to the MRND and the Government, which did not find arguments to contradict these false charges.



The difference between the RPF and the Government laid in the fact that the assassinations perpetrated by the RPF was the fact of sufficiently trained professionals, it did them without media din, prevented that the independent observers come to check at the time when the Government assassinated with its Interahamwe after their having given drug and made of it publicity by the radio RTLM, by all the newspapers controlled by Habyarimana.


WHY DID THE CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE RPF REMAIN UNKNOWN?



The first trick of the RPF is to deny in block all the crimes, which it committed until the moment when it notes that its consents cannot no longer carry any damage to him. During

all the duration of the war, the RPF accepted the presence of the journalists on his territory only when it was sure that the latter were not hostile with its policy. The others were among those it had appointed as its corrupted journalist like Hussein Abdou Hassan of BBC. Everyone wondered whether he was an Inkotanyi or if he acted as a journalist of a radio worthy of respect like the BBC. When it let the journalists circulate on its territory, the RPF made them come according to its suitability, led where he wanted and said to them according to circumstances' that the zone to be visited was trapped mines, or that combat violent one were held there. Finally, one walked them only in localities prepared for a long time in advance. Often, one led them along the border instead of their showing the interior of the Country. They traversed long distances thus and slept after having been tired without to have to enter to Rwanda even on 1 km of depth. This trick benefited Inkotanyi, no journalist who has ever been able to arrive where they committed abominable crimes.



Another point where Inkotanyi were more crafty ones than the governmental forces, consisted in killing then to burn the corpses, to scatter of their ashes far from the place of the crime. It was not easy to locate the remainders of the bodies. However, we know each of these places. It was practically impossible to surprise Inkotanyi, because the entry in their zone was subordinated to an authorization, and that who ever received it you took him along where you he wanted.



THE RPF INKONTANYI INFLUENCED THE CRUELTY WITH WHICH THE INTERAHAMWE KILLED.



To die in any manner does not happen without fear, but I will speak about death as inflicted on the two sides by the protagonists. It is what I saw with my own eyes, that it is at Inkotanyi and in the extremists of the Government or their security services.



AT THE INKOTANYI, which opened the atrocities on the 4-10-1990 after the death of Rwigyema, which has occurred the 02/10/1990. I quote it because the army would never have accepted that it directed its effort to keep the civil population silent:

1. To attach the legs, arms on the back, to draw until the bursting from the chest, to put

the victim with knees, to strike him of an old hoe the head; he falls directly into the coma; you crash to pieces the two temples, and the head breaks like a piece of ground.

2. To attach people as I described above, to insert stabs in the coasts, to give bayonet and kick in the belly.

3. To attach somebody, to put a branch in the head until dead for lack of air follows from there.

4. To attach somebody, to pour oil in the two ears, he simultaneously to give slaps on the temples, the victim is taken of giddiness that makes him collapse.

5. To attach somebody with chains to the neck and to lay him down on the ground, to draw until total throttling.

6. To strongly attach somebody arms and legs, to suspend reversed on a beam drawn up horizontally until his blood squirts of the ears, mouth and nose, until dead follows from there.

7. When it was necessary to tap information with somebody before killing him, he was tortured to make him die in small fire: blows of knives on all the body, to burn the body with the juice of the plastic cans heated, to bore the sex with pins. To oblige the child to have sexual intercourse with her father or his mother, to oblige the brothers and sisters to have sexual intercourse before killing them, etc.

8. On several occasions, the victims required being able to be killed with the grenade or the cartridge, but they did not obtain satisfaction. Because the torturers took pleasure to contemplate their long anguish patiently. The only ones who from time to time could be killed with the cartridge were girls who had been violated by Inkotanyi, for to prevent that they do not thro

_____________________________
BREAKBEAT PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS: MARLEY RIDDIM E.P

COMING SOON....

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/7/breakbeatproductions.htm

Africans/Blacks are always under attack from external and internal forces.

«SiG»
“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice."
-Qur’an 4:135

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/Guardian/congo/0,12292,765616,00.html the Guardian's special report on the Congo]

Their latest report on the conflict states that the Rwandan army ammassed at the Congolese border. For those who don't know, this war has been the bloodiest conflict since World War II, but an effective media blackout has shrouded this attrocity. Why do you think this is the case? Why isn't this "forgotten war" not being reported?

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1361253,00.html|

I believe it has to do with where the paper trail leads to-
meaning where the munitions, supplies, and plundered resources
are heading.


_¸»¬æ¤º²°¯¯°²º¤æ¬«SiG»¬æ¤º²°¯¯°²º¤æ¬«¸_

www.absurdtheater.org

“Stand out firmly for Justice as witness before God, even against yourselves, against your kin and against your parents, against people who are rich or poor. Do not follow your inclinations or desires lest you deviate from Justice. Remember, God is the best of Protectors and well acquainted with all that you do.”
-Qur’an 4:135

>"Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now.
>Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's
>been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford
>to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries
>foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so
>much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much
>more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you
>on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth
>speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe
>them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes
>and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world
>under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as
>soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their
>gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile
>scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can
>with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."
>--Jean Paul Marat, 18th Century French Visionary (and
>revolutionary), murdered in his bathtub by Royalist Charlotte
>Corday
>
profiles.myspace.com/users/zewari

Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little."

-- From Toni Morrison's new book, "Love"

--------------------------
in the West, when you see a chick who is prostituting you start

... which makes some of the discourse seem pretty off. are they gonna fix the incompatibility or do we just gotta deal w/ it? i guess folks could hit that "quote" reply and see wussup

“Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999”

SUFFERING AND DESPAIR: HUMANITARIAN CRISIS IN THE CONGO

HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS OF THE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
MAY 17, 2001
Serial No. 107–16

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD111A.html
STATEMENT OF WAYNE MADSEN

Author: “Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999”, Investigative journalist

Mr. MADSEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am very appreciative of the Committee's interest and support, particularly Congresswoman McKinney's interest and support, in holding these hearings on the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I wish to discuss the record of American policy in the DRC over most of the past decade, particularly that involving the eastern Congo region. It is a policy that has rested, in my opinion, on the twin pillars of military aid and questionable trade.

The military aid programs of the United States, largely planned and administered by the U.S. Special Operations Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency, have been both overt and covert. Prior to the first Rwandan invasion of Zaire/DRC in 1996, a phalanx of U.S. intelligence operatives converged on Zaire. Their actions suggested a strong interest in Zaire's eastern defenses.

For example, the number two person at the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda, traveled from Kigali to eastern Zaire to initiate intelligence contacts with the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, the Kabila group.

Currently, sources in the Great Lakes region consistently report the presence of a U.S. built military base near Cyangugu, Rwanda, near the Congolese border. The base, reported to have been partly constructed by the U.S. firm Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, is said to be involved with training RPF forces and providing logistic support to their troops in the DRC.

By December, 1996, U.S. military forces were operating in Bukavu amid throngs of Hutus, less numerous Twa refugees, Mai Mai guerrillas, advancing Rwandan troops and AFDL–CZ rebels. A French military intelligence officer said he detected some 100 armed U.S. troops in the eastern Zaire conflict zone.

Moreover, the French intelligence service, DGSE, reported that Americans had knowledge of the extermination of Hutu refugees by Tutsis in both Rwanda and eastern Zaire and were doing nothing about it. More ominously, there was reason to believe that some U.S. forces, either Special Forces or mercenaries, may have actually participated in the extermination of some Hutu refugees.

The killings reportedly took place at a camp on the banks of the Oso River near Goma. Roman Catholic reports claim that the executed included a number of Hutu Catholic priests. At least for those who were executed, death was far quicker than it was for those who escaped deep into the jungle. There, many died from tropical diseases or were attacked and eaten by wild animals.

It was known that the planes that the U.S. military deployed in eastern Zaire included heavily armed and armored helicopter gunships typically used by the U.S. Special Forces. These were fitted with 105 mm cannons, rockets, machine guns, land mine ejectors and, more importantly, infrared sensors used in night operations. U.S. military commanders unabashedly stated the purpose of these armed gunships was to locate refugees to determine the best means of providing them with humanitarian assistance.

Towards the end of 1996, U.S. spy satellites were attempting to ascertain how many refugees escaped into the jungle by locating fires at night and canvas tarpaulins during the day. Strangely, every time an encampment was discovered by space based imagery, Rwanda and Zaire rebel forces attacked the sites.

This was the case in late February, 1997, when 160,000 mainly Hutu refugees were spotted and then attacked in a swampy area known as Tingi Tingi. There was never an adequate accounting by the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies of the scope of the intelligence provided to the RPF and the AFDL–CZ.

The increasing reliance by the Department of Defense on so-called private military contractors is also of special concern. Many of these PMCs, one labeled as mercenaries by previous Administrations when they were used as foreign policy instruments by the colonial powers of France, Belgium, Portugal and South Africa, have close links with some of the largest mining and oil companies involved in Africa today.

P.M.C.s, because of their proprietary status, have a great deal of leeway to engage in covert activities far from the reach of congressional investigators. They can simply claim their business in various nations is a protected trade secret, and the law now seems to be on their side.

America's policy toward Africa during the past decade, rather than seeking to stabilize situations where civil war and ethnic turmoil reign supreme, have seemingly promoted destabilization. Former Secretary of State Albright was fond of calling pro-U.S. military leaders in Africa who assumed power by force and then cloaked themselves in civilian attire ''beacons of hope.''

In reality, these leaders, who include the current presidents of Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Angola, Eritrea, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, preside over countries where ethnic and civil turmoil permit unscrupulous international mining companies to take advantage of the strife to fill their own coffers with conflict, diamonds, gold, copper, platinum and other special minerals, including one, columbite-tantalite, also known as coltan, which is a primary component of computer microchips and printed circuit boards.

It is my observation that America's early support for Laurent Kabila, which was aided by U.S. allies in Rwanda and Uganda, had less to do with getting rid of the Mobutu regime than it did in opening up Congo's vast mineral riches to North American based mining companies.

The CIA, NSA and DIA should turn over to international congressional investigators intelligence that was generated and they have in their possession, as well as overhead thermal imagery indicating the presence of mass graves and when they were dug.

In particular, the NSA maintained a communications intercept station at Fort Portal, Uganda, which intercepted military and government communications in Zaire during the first Rwandan invasion in that country. These intercepts may contain details of Rwanda and AFDL–CZ massacres of innocent Hutu refugees and other Congolese civilians during the 1996 invasion. There must be a full accounting before the Congress by the staff of the U.S. Defense Attache's Office in Kigali, Rwanda, and certain U.S. Embassy staff members in Kinshasa who have served from the early 1994 time frame to the present time.

It is beyond time for Congress and the Administration to seriously examine the role of the U.S. in the genocide and civil wars of central Africa, as well as the role that PMCs currently play in other African trouble spots. Other nations' somewhat less than stellar records in Africa—France and Belgium, for example—have had no problem examining their own roles in Africa's last decade of turmoil.

The British Foreign Office is in the process of publishing a green paper on regulation of mercenary activity. At the very least, the United States, as the world's leading democracy, owes Africa at least the example of a critical self-inspection.

I appreciate the concern shown by the Chair and Members of this Committee in holding the hearings.

Thank you.



PREPARED STATEMENT OF WAYNE MADSEN

Author: “Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999”, Investigative journalist

My name is Wayne Madsen. I am the author of Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999, a work that involved some three years worth of research and countless interviews in Rwanda, Uganda, France, the United Kingdom, United States, Belgium, Canada, and the Netherlands. I am an investigative journalist who specializes on intelligence and privacy issues. I am grateful to appear before the Committee today. I am also appreciative of the Committee’s interest in holding this hearing on the present situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

I wish to discuss the record of American policy in the DRC over most of the past decade, particularly involving the eastern Congo region. It is a policy that has rested, in my opinion, on the twin pillars of military aid and questionable trade. The military aid programs of the United States, largely planned and administered by the U.S. Special Operations Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), have been both overt and covert.

Prior to the first Rwandan invasion of Zaire/DRC in 1996, a phalanx of U.S. intelligence operatives converged on Zaire. Their actions suggested a strong interest in Zaire’s eastern defenses. The number-two person at the U.S. Embassy in Kigali traveled from Kigali to eastern Zaire to initiate intelligence contacts with the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL-CZ) rebels under the command of the late President Laurent Kabila. The Rwandan embassy official met with rebel leaders at least twelve times.

A former U.S. ambassador to Uganda – acting on behalf of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) -- gathered intelligence on the movement of Hutu refugees through eastern Zaire. The DIA’s second ranking Africa hand, who also served as the U.S. military attaché in Kigali, reconnoitered the Rwandan border towns of Cyangugu and Gisenyi, gathering intelligence on the cross border movements of anti-Mobutu Rwandan Tutsis from Rwanda.

The Defense Intelligence Agency’s African bureau chief established a close personal relationship with Bizima (alias Bizimana) Karaha, an ethnic Rwandan who would later become the Foreign Minister in the Laurent Kabila government. Moreover, the DIA’s Africa division had close ties with Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), an Alexandria, Virginia private military company (PMC), whose Vice President for Operations is a former Director of DIA.

The political officer of the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa, accompanied by a CIA operative, traveled with AFDL-CZ rebels through the eastern Zaire jungles for weeks after the 1996 Rwandan invasion of Zaire. In addition, it was reported that the Kinshasa embassy official and three U.S. intelligence agents regularly briefed Bill Richardson, Clinton’s special African envoy, during the rebels’ steady advance towards Kinshasa. The U.S. embassy official conceded that he was in Goma to do more than meet rebel leaders for lunch. Explaining his presence, he said “What I am here to do is to acknowledge them as a very significant military and political power on the scene, and, of course, to represent American interests.” In addition, MPRI was reportedly providing covert training assistance to Kagame’s troops in preparation for combat in Zaire. Some believe that MPRI had actually been involved in training the RPF from the time it took power in Rwanda.

THE BA-N’DAW REPORT

The covert programs involving the use of private military training firms and logistics support contractors that are immune to Freedom of Information Act requests is particularly troubling for researchers and journalists who have tried, over the past several years, to get at the root causes for the deaths and mayhem in the DRC and other countries in the region. These U.S. contractor support programs have reportedly involved covert assistance to the Rwandan and Ugandan militaries – the major backers of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la démocratie (RCD factions and – as reported by the UN’s “Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the DRC” -- are responsible for the systematic pillaging of Congo’s most valuable natural resources. The UN panel – chaired by Safiatou Ba-N’Daw of Cote d’Ivoire -- concluded “Top military commanders from various countries needed and continue to need this conflict for its lucrative nature and for temporarily solving some internal problems in those countries as well as allowing access to wealth.” There is more than ample evidence that the elements of the U.S. military and intelligence community may have – on varying occasions – aided and abetted this systematic pillaging by the Ugandan and Rwandan militaries. The UN Report named the United States, Germany, Belgium, and Kazakhstan as leading buyers of the illegally exploited resources from the DRC.

Sources in the Great Lakes region consistently report the presence of a U.S.-built military base near Cyangugu, Rwanda, near the Congolese border. The base, reported to have been partly constructed by the U.S. firm Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, is said to be involved with training RPF forces and providing logistics support to their troops in the DRC. Additionally, the presence in the region of black U.S. soldiers supporting the RPF and Ugandans has been something consistently reported since the first invasion of Zaire-Congo in 1996. On January 21, 1997, France claimed it actually recovered the remains of two American combatants killed near the Oso River in Kivu province during combat and returned them to American officials. The U.S. denied these claims.

COVERT AMERICAN SUPPORT FOR THE COMBATANTS

As U.S. troops and intelligence agents were pouring into Africa to help the RPF and AFDL-CZ forces in their 1996 campaign against Mobutu, Vincent Kern, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs, told the House International Operations and Human Rights Subcommittee on December 4, 1996 that U.S. military training for the RPF was being conducted under a program called Enhanced International Military Education and Training (E-IMET). Kathi Austin, a Human Rights Watch specialist on arms transfers in Africa, told the Subcommittee on May 5, 1998 that one senior U.S. embassy official in Kigali described the U.S. Special Forces training program for the RPF as “killers . . . training killers.”

In November 1996, U.S. spy satellites and a U.S. Navy P-3 Orion were attempting to ascertain how many Rwandan Hutu refugees were in eastern Zaire. The P-3 was one of four stationed at old Entebbe Airport on the shores of Lake Victoria. Oddly, while other planes flying over eastern Zaire attracted anti-aircraft fire from Kabila’s forces, the P-3s, which patrolled the skies above Goma and Sake, were left alone.

Relying on the overhead intelligence, U.S. military and aid officials confidently announced that 600,000 Hutu refugees returned home to Rwanda from Zaire. But that left an estimated 300,000 unaccounted for. Many Hutus seemed to be disappearing from camps around Bukavu.

By December 1996, U.S. military forces were also operating in Bukavu amid throngs of Hutus, less numerous Twa refugees, Mai Mai guerrillas, advancing Rwandan troops, and AFDL-CZ rebels. A French military intelligence officer said he detected some 100 armed U.S. troops in the eastern Zaire conflict zone.Moreover, the DGSE reported the Americans had knowledge of the extermination of Hutu refugees by Tutsis in both Rwanda and eastern Zaire and were doing nothing about it. More ominously, there was reason to believe that some U.S. forces, either Special Forces or mercenaries, may have actually participated in the extermination of Hutu refugees. The killings reportedly took place at a camp on the banks of the Oso River near Goma. Roman Catholic reports claim that the executed included a number of Hutu Catholic priests. At least for those who were executed, death was far quicker than it was for those who escaped deep into the jungle. There, many died from tropical diseases or were attacked and eaten by wild animals.

Jacques Isnard, the Paris based defense correspondent for Le Monde supported the contention of U.S. military knowledge of the Oso River massacre but went further. He quoted French intelligence sources that believed that between thirty and sixty American mercenary “advisers” participated with the RPF in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees around Goma. Although his number of Hutu dead was more conservative than the French estimates, the U.N.’s Chilean investigator, Roberto Garreton, reported the Kagame and Kabila forces had committed “crimes against humanity” in killing thousands of Hutu refugees.

It was known that the planes the U.S. military deployed in eastern Zaire included heavily armed and armored helicopter gunships typically used by the Special Forces. These were fitted with 105 mm cannons, rockets, machine guns, land mine ejectors, and, more importantly, infra red sensors used in night operations. U.S. military commanders unabashedly stated the purpose of these gunships was to locate refugees to determine the best means of providing them with humanitarian assistance.

According to the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles, a French DC-8 Sarigue electronic intelligence (ELINT) aircraft circled over eastern Zaire at the time of the Oso River massacre. The Sarigue’s mission was to intercept and fix the radio transmissions of Rwandan military units engaged in the military operations. This aircraft, in addition to French special ground units, witnessed U.S. military ethnic cleansing in Zaire’s Kivu Province.

In September 1997, the prestigious Jane’s Foreign Report reported that German intelligence sources were aware that the DIA trained young men and teens from Rwanda, Uganda, and eastern Zaire for periods of up to two years and longer for the RPF/AFDL-CZ campaign against Mobutu. The recruits were offered pay of between $450 and $1000 upon their successful capture of Kinshasa.

Toward the end of 1996, U.S. spy satellites were attempting to ascertain how many refugees escaped into the jungle by locating fires at night and canvas tarpaulins during the day. Strangely, every time an encampment was discovered by the space-based imagery, Rwandan and Zaire rebel forces attacked the sites. This was the case in late February 1997, when 160,000, mainly Hutu refugees, were spotted and then attacked in a swampy area known as Tingi Tingi. There was never an adequate accounting by the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies of the scope of intelligence provided to the RPF/AFDL-CZ.

An ominous report on the fate of refugees was made by Nicholas Stockton, the Emergencies Director of Oxfam U.K. & Ireland. He said that on November 20, 1996, he was shown U.S. aerial intelligence photographs which “confirmed, in considerable detail, the existence of 500,000 people distributed in three major and numerous minor agglomerations.” He said that three days later the U.S. military claimed it could only locate one significant mass of people, which they claimed were identified as former members of the Rwandan armed forces and the Interhamwe militia. Since they were the number one targets for the RPF forces, their identification and location by the Americans was undoubtedly passed to the Rwandan forces. They would have surely been executed. Moreover, some U.S. military and diplomatic personnel in central Africa said that any deaths among the Hutu refugees merely constituted “collateral damage.”

When the AFDL-CZ and their Rwandan allies reached Kinshasa in 1996, it was largely due to the help of the United States. One reason why Kabila’s men advanced into the city so quickly was the technical assistance provided by the DIA and other intelligence agencies. According to informed sources in Paris, U.S. Special Forces actually accompanied ADFL-CZ forces into Kinshasa. The Americans also reportedly provided Kabila’s rebels and Rwandan troops with high definition spy satellite photographs that permitted them to order their troops to plot courses into Kinshasa that avoided encounters with Mobutu’s forces. During the rebel advance toward Kinshasa, Bechtel provided Kabila, at no cost, high technology intelligence, including National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite data.

AMERICAN MILITARY SUPPORT FOR THE SECOND INVASION OF CONGO

By 1998, the Kabila regime had become an irritant to the United States, North American mining interests, and Kabila’s Ugandan and Rwandan patrons. As a result, Rwanda and Uganda launched a second invasion of the DRC to get rid of Kabila and replace him with someone more servile. The Pentagon was forced to admit on August 6, 1998 that a twenty man U.S. Army Rwanda Interagency Assessment Team (RIAT) was in the Rwanda at the time of the second RPF invasion of Congo. The camouflaged unit was deployed from the U.S. European Command in Germany. It was later revealed that the team in question was a JCET unit that was sent to Rwanda to help the Rwandans “defeat ex FAR (Rwandan Armed Forces) and Interhamwe” units. U.S. Special Forces JCET team began training Rwandan units on July 15, 1998. It was the second such training exercise held that year. The RIAT team was sent to Rwanda in the weeks just leading up to the outbreak of hostilities in Congo. The RIAT, specializing in counter insurgency operations, traveled to Gisenyi on the Congolese border just prior to the Rwandan invasion. One of the assessments of the team recommended that the United States establish a new and broader military relationship with Rwanda. National Security Council spokesman P. J. Crowley, said of the RIAT’s presence in Rwanda: “I think it’s a coincidence that they were there at the same time the fighting began.”

Soon, however, as other African nations came to the assistance of Laurent Kabila, the United States found itself in the position of providing military aid under both the E-IMET and the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) programs. U.S. Special Operations personnel were involved in training troops on both sides of the war in the DRC – Rwandans, Ugandans, and Burundians (supporting the RCD factions) and Zimbabweans and Namibians (supporting the central government in Kinshasa).

As with the first invasion, there were also a number of reports that the RPF and their RCD allies carried out a number of massacres throughout the DRC. The Vatican reported a sizable killing of civilians in August 1998 in Kasika, a small village in South Kivu that hosted a Catholic mission station. Over eight hundred people, including priests and nuns, were killed by Rwandan troops. The RCD response was to charge the Vatican with aiding Kabila. The Rwandans, choosing to put into practice what the DIA’s PSYOPS personnel had taught them about mounting perception management campaigns, shepherded the foreign press to carefully selected killing fields. The dead civilians were identified as exiled Burundian Hutu militiamen. Unfortunately, many in the international community, still suffering a type of collective guilt over the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, gave the Rwandan assertions more credence than was warranted.

The increasing reliance by the Department of Defense on so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) is of special concern. Many of these PMCs -- once labeled as “mercenaries” by previous administrations when they were used as foreign policy instruments by the colonial powers of France, Belgium, Portugal, and South Africa -- have close links with some of the largest mining and oil companies involved in Africa today. PMCs, because of their proprietary status, have a great deal of leeway to engage in covert activities far from the reach of congressional investigators. They can simply claim that their business in various nations is a protected trade secret and the law now seems to be on their side.

PROFITING FROM THE DESTABILIZATION OF CENTRAL AFRICA

America’s policy toward Africa during the past decade, rather than seeking to stabilize situations where civil war and ethnic turmoil reign supreme, has seemingly promoted destabilization. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was fond of calling pro-U.S. military leaders in Africa who assumed power by force and then cloaked themselves in civilian attire, “beacons of hope.”

In reality, these leaders, who include the current presidents of Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Angola, Eritrea, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo preside over countries where ethnic and civil turmoil permit unscrupulous international mining companies to take advantage of the strife to fill their own coffers with conflict diamonds, gold, copper, platinum, and other precious minerals – including one – columbite-tantalite or “coltan” -- which is a primary component of computer microchips and printed circuit boards.

Some of the companies involved in this new “scramble for Africa” have close links with PMCs and America’s top political leadership. For example, America Minerals Fields, Inc., a company that was heavily involved in promoting the 1996 accession to power of Kabila, was, at the time of its involvement in the Congo’s civil war, headquartered in Hope, Arkansas. Its major stockholders included long-time associates of former President Clinton going back to his days as Governor of Arkansas. America Mineral Fields also reportedly enjoys a close relationship with Lazare Kaplan International, Inc., a major international diamond brokerage whose president remains a close confidant of past and current administrations on Africa matters.

The United States has a long history of supporting all sides in the DRC’s civil wars in order to gain access to the country’s natural resources. The Ba-N’Daw Report presents a cogent example of how one U.S. firm was involved in the DRC’s grand thievery before the 1998 break between Laurent Kabila and his Rwandan and Ugandan backers. It links the Banque de commerce, du developpement et d'industrie (BCDI) of Kigali, Citibank in New York, the diamond business and armed rebellion. The report states: “In a letter signed by J.P. Moritz, general manager of Societe miniere de Bakwanga (MIBA), a Congolese diamond company, and Ngandu Kamenda, the general manager of MIBA ordered a payment of US$3.5 million to la Generale de commerce d'import/export du Congo (COMIEX), a company owned by late President Kabila and some of his close allies, such as Minister Victor Mpoyo, from an account in BCDI through a Citibank account. This amount of money was paid as a contribution from MIBA to the AFDL war effort.”

Also troubling are the ties that some mining companies in Africa have with military privateers. UN Special Rapporteur Enrique Ballesteros of Peru concluded in a his March 2001 report for the UN Commission on Human Rights, that mercenaries were inexorably linked to the illegal diamond and arms trade in Africa. He stated, “Mercenaries participate in both types of traffic, acting as pilots of aircraft and helicopters, training makeshift troops in the use of weapons and transferring freight from place to place. Ballesteros added, “Military security companies and air cargo companies registered in Nevada (the United States), in the Channel Islands and especially in South Africa and in Zimbabwe, are engaged in the transport of troops, arms, munitions, and diamonds.”

In 1998, America Minerals Fields purchased diamond concessions in the Cuango Valley along the Angolan-Congolese border from International Defense and Security (IDAS Belgium SA), a mercenary firm based in Curacao and headquartered in Belgium. According to an American Mineral Fields press release, “In May 1996, America Mineral Fields entered into an agreement with IDAS Resources N.V. (“IDAS”) and IDAS shareholders, under which the Company may acquire 75.5% of the common shares of IDAS. In turn, IDAS has entered into a 50-50 joint venture agreement with Endiama, the Angola state mining company. The joint venture asset is a 3,700 km mining lease in the Cuango Valley, Luremo and a 36,000 km2 prospecting lease called the Cuango International, which borders the mining lease to the north. The total area is approximately the size of Switzerland.”

America Mineral Fields directly benefited from America’s initial covert military and intelligence support for Kabila. It is my observation that America’s early support for Kabila, which was aided and abetted by U.S. allies Rwanda and Uganda, had less to do with getting rid of the Mobutu regime than it had to do with opening up Congo’s vast mineral riches to North American-based and influenced mining companies. Presently, some of America Mineral Fields’ principals now benefit from the destabilization of Sierra Leone and the availability of its cut-rate “blood diamonds” on the international market. Also, according to the findings of a commission headed up by Canadian United Nations Ambassador, Robert Fowler, Rwanda has violated the international embargo against Angola’s UNITA rebels in allowing the “to operate more or less freely” in selling conflict zone diamonds and making deals with weapons dealers in Kigali.

One of the major goals of the Rwandan-backed RCD-Goma faction, a group fighting the Kabila government in Congo, is restoration of mining concessions for Barrick Gold, Inc. of Canada. In fact, the rebel RCD government’s “mining minister” signed a separate mining deal with Barrick in early 1999. Among the members of Barrick’s International Advisory Board are former President Bush and former President Clinton’s close confidant Vernon Jordan.

Currently, Barrick and tens of other mining companies are helping to stoke the flames of the civil war in the DRC. Each benefits by the de facto partition of the country into some four separate zones of political control. First the mineral exploiters from Rwanda and Uganda concentrated on pillaging gold and diamonds from the eastern Congo. Now, they have increasingly turned their attention to col-tan.

It is my hope that the Bush administration will take pro-active measures to stem the conflict in the DRC by applying increased pressure on Uganda and Rwanda to withdraw their troops from the country. However, the fact that President Bush has selected Walter Kansteiner to be Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, portends, in my opinion, more trouble for the Great Lakes region. A brief look at Mr. Kansteiner’s curriculum vitae and statements calls into question his commitment to seeking a durable peace in the region.

In an October 15, 1996 paper written by Mr. Kansteiner for the Forum for International Policy on the then-eastern Zaire, he called for the division of territory in the Great Lakes region “between the primary ethnic groups, creating homogenous ethnic lands that would probably necessitate redrawing international boundaries and would require massive ‘voluntary’ relocation efforts.” Kansteiner foresaw creating separate Tutsi and Hutu states after such a drastic population shift. It should be recalled that the creation of a Tutsi state in eastern Congo was exactly what Rwanda, Uganda and their American military advisers had in mind when Rwanda invaded then-Zaire in 1996, the same year Kansteiner penned his plans for the region. Four years later, Kansteiner was still convinced that the future of the DRC was “balkanization” into separate states. In an August 23, 2000 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, Kansteiner stated that the “breakup of the Congo is more likely now than it has been in 20 or 30 years.” Of course, the de facto break up of Congo into various fiefdoms has been a boon for U.S. and other western mineral companies. And I believe Kansteiner’s previous work at the Department of Defense where he served on a Task Force on Strategic Minerals – and one must certainly consider col-tan as falling into that category -- may influence his past and current thinking on the territorial integrity of the DRC. After all, 80 per cent of the world’s known reserves of col-tan are found in the eastern DRC. It is potentially as important to the U.S. military as the Persian Gulf region.

However, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, which have supported Uganda and Rwanda in their cross-border adventures in the DRC, have resisted peace initiatives and have failed to produce evidence of war crimes by the Ugandans and Rwandans and their allies in Congo. The CIA, NSA, and DIA should turn over to international and congressional investigators intelligence-generated evidence in their possession, as well as overhead thermal imagery indicating the presence of mass graves and when they were dug. In particular, the NSA maintained a communications intercept station in Fort Portal, Uganda, which intercepted military and government communications in Zaire during the first Rwandan invasion. These intercepts may contain details of Rwandan and AFDL-CZ massacres of innocent Hutu refugees and other Congolese civilians during the 1996 invasion. There must be a full accounting before the Congress by the staff of the U.S. Defense Attache’s Office in Kigali and certain U.S. Embassy staff members in Kinshasa who served from early 1994 to the present time.

As for the number of war casualties in the DRC since the first invasion from Rwanda in 1996, I would estimate, from my own research, the total to be around 1.7 to 2 million – a horrendous number by any calculation. And I also believe that although disease and famine were contributing factors, the majority of these deaths were the result of actual war crimes committed by Rwandan, Ugandan, Burundian, AFDL-CZ, RCD, and military and paramilitary forces of other countries.

SUMMARY It is beyond time for the Congress to seriously examine the role of the United States in the genocide and civil wars of central Africa, as well as the role that PMCs currently play in other African trouble spots like Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Cabinda. Other nations, some with less than stellar records in Africa – France and Belgium, for example – have had no problem examining their own roles in Africa’s last decade of turmoil. The British Foreign Office is in the process of publishing a green paper on regulation of mercenary activity. At the very least, the United States, as the world’s leading democracy, owes Africa at least the example of a critical self-inspection.

I appreciate the concern shown by the Chair and members of this committee in holding these hearings.

Thank you.



Lewiston, NY and Lampeter, Wales, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. <www.mellenpress.com>

Colum Lynch, “U.S. agents were seen with rebels in Zaire: Active participation is alleged in military overthrow of Mobutu,” BOSTON GLOBE, 8 October 1997, A2.

Ibid.

Ibid.

David Rieff, “Realpolitik in Congo: should Zaire’s fate have been subordinate to the fate of

Rwandan refugees?” THE NATION, 7 July 1997.

Georges Berghezan, “Une guerre cosmopolite,” (“A cosmopolitan war,”), Marc Schmitz and Sophie Nolet, editors, Kabila prend le pouvoir (“Kabila Takes Power) (Paris: Editions GRIP, 1998), 97.

André Dumoulin, La France Militaire et l‘Afrique (The French Military and Africa) (Paris: Éditions GRIP, 1997), 87.

“Fighting with the rebels,” ASIA TIMES, 1 April 1997, 8; Jacques Isnard, “Des ‘conseillers’ américains ont aidé à renverser le régime de M. Mobutu” (“American advisers helped to oust the regime of Mr. Mobutu”), Le Monde, 28 August 1997; “Influence americaine” (“American influence”), La Lettre du Continent, 3 April 1997.



Dana Priest, “Pentagon Slow to Cooperate With Information Requests,” THE WASHINGTON POST, 31 December 1998, A34.

Christian Jennings, “U.S. plane seeks “missing” refugees in east Zaire,” Reuters North American Wire, 26 November 1996.

Lynch, op. cit.

Hubert Condurier, “Ce que les services secrets français savaient” (“What the French Secret Services Knew”), VALEURS ACTUELLES, 30 August 1997, 26 27.

“Priests Speak of Massacres, Destitution,” All Africa Press Service, AFRICA NEWS, 24 March 1997.

Lara Marlowe, “Rwandans got combat training from U.S. army, paper claims,” THE IRISH TIMES, 28 August 1997, 11.

Condurier, 27.

Ibid.

“Helping Africa to help America,” JANE’S FOREIGN REPORT, 4 September 1997.

Donald G. McNeil, Jr., “In Congo, Forbidding Terrain Hides a Calamity,” THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1 June 1997, 4.

Edward Mortimer, “The moral maze: The dilemmas of African conflict cannot be avoided by identifying one side as victims and the other as aggressors,” FINANCIAL TIMES, 12 February 1997, 24.

“Oil Wars in the Congo,” ASIA TIMES, op. cit; Frederic François, “A la recontre du Kivu libéré: carnet de route (janvier-février 97)” (“Recounting the liberation of Kivu: the roadmap (January February 1997),” Marc Schmitz and Sophie Nolet, op. cit., 57.

Robert Block, “U.S. Firms Seek Deals in Central Africa,” THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 14 October 1997.

Milan Vesely, “Carving up the Congo,” AFRICAN BUSINESS, October 1998, 12; <http://www.marekinc.com/NCNSpecialDRCWar080198.html>

Lynne Duke, “Africans Use Training in Unexpected Ways,” THE WASHINGTON POST, 14 July 1998, A10

“Washington urges peace as U.S. team goes to Rwanda,” Agence France Presse, 5 August 1998.

Colum Lynch, “Congo, Rwanda appear headed to full scale war,” THE BOSTON GLOBE, 6 August 1998, A1.



Richard Morais, “Friends in High Places,” FORBES, August 10, 1998, 50.

http://www.am-min.com/amf/96/news/jan14-98.html

“RWANDA: Government denies busting UNITA sanctions,” UN Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN), March 13, 2000.

“Former Okimo Boss Named Rebels’ ‘Minister’,” AFRICA ENERGY & MINING, No. 245, February 3, 1999.







Mr. TANCREDO. Thank you, Mr. Madsen, for your really quite extraordinary testimony. I am sure and I know it has peaked all of our interest, and there will be a number of questions I am sure directed specifically to you.

I am going to start off with the focus of my questions to Mr. Ali Baldo and to Father Bahala. First of all, human rights activists and others hailed the end of the Mobutu regime, never anticipating the human rights legacy that would be left by Laurent Kabila. Now there is similar enthusiasm about the selection of Joseph Kabila. However, earlier this week the African Association for the Defense of Human Rights declared that there had been little improvement so far.

Do you think, sir, that it is fair to make an assessment after only 100 days of the new Kabila Administration? How much time should pass before an evaluation can take place of this nature, and how should the United States and this international community proceed with the new leadership?

I would like you to address those if you could. Mr. Ali Baldo, you may go first.

For example, there has been a commitment and implementation of a decision to close down all unacknowledged detention places in Kinshasa and a change of all commanders of security agencies. There are several of them, and they are competing always without any accountability.

However, the worst problems of insecurity in rural areas and under government control areas is basically the lack of institutions and the lack of accountability. We do not see an effort to address these issues.

Therefore, despite the government's closure of unacknowledged or unofficial detention places, agencies like the National Intelligence Agency and the military's Department for Suppression of Anti-Political Activities continue to detain people, to arrest them. The issue is really to hold the security forces accountable, and this, to our knowledge, has not been done so far.

The government has promised to improve the political environment. It has failed to repeal or to amend the decree laws that limit or prohibit political activities. The decree law, which was signed by Laurent Kabila,the father, in 1999, does not——

Mr. TANCREDO. Say that again. They have failed to repeal——

Mr. BALDO. To repeal the law regulating political activities, which prohibits political activities and does not recognize pre-existing opposition political parties. If there is a seriousness about improving the political environment, we believe that the government of Joseph Kabila should really amend that decree law.

There is also a decree law about associations, which also does not recognize the existing associations like ASADU and all the other civil society groups in the Congo, which are very active, very vibrant, and the only bodies in the country that are really acting and sort of dedicated to the population.

That law has also to be amended to acknowledge the existence and recognize the existence of pre-existing associations, so institutionally the reform has yet to happen.

Thank you.

Mr. TANCREDO. Thank you.

Father Bahala, would you like to comment on that?

Father BAHALA. I would just like to add to what Mr. Sulaiman has just said. I went to Kinshasa when I went back into the field, and we feel there has been some improvement in the democratization in the country. Maybe he was not aware of it, but this morning President Kabila has signed a decree that liberalized the political parties in the country.

I participated in Kinshasa in meetings that were preparing a national conference on human rights, so we feel that there is improvement in the sense of a collaboration between the government and the civil society.

Something that I also would like to add is that as they keep talking that there is no progress in terms of human rights and democratization in the Congo, we look and say it is a common situation in the whole central African region, so one of the questions is when you look at the situation of Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, why are they asking something of the Congo and not asking from the other countries?

If you look, for instance, in Rwanda it has been 6 years since the genocide has taken place, but so far nobody has talked about elections or anything, you know, in the sense of democratization. All the people want is that it be a fair request of all the parties.

That is why in talking about the Lusaka Accords, for instance, they ask that the Congolese enter into a dialogue with the rebels. Now, the question is why are we not requesting, for instance, that Rwandans and Ugandans and Burundians also enter into a dialogue with their own rebels?

I would like to finish by asking this. How can we organize a dialogue between Congolese when more than half of the territory is under occupation? For instance, there are reports today that the troops that are being redeployed from the front are being redeployed in the occupied territories somewhere else, so how can you organize a dialogue in those conditions?

We know also today that Rwanda is taking prisoners out of prisons in Rwanda and sending them in the Congo to exploit minerals. Also, there are reports, and we see armed forces who are in the region, and they come in to kill people, burn parishes and create insecurities, so how can you return to a normal situation with that kind of thing going on?

Thank you.

Mr. TANCREDO. Thank you very much.

I have several other questions. I am going to, however, postpone them at least because I want to make sure that Ms. McKinney is able to fully exploit this opportunity, except for one thing.

I am just wondering to the Ambassador. Do we have any specific information about the proclamation that was signed today that was referred to by Father Bahala? Do we know anything about it?

You do not have to testify, but if we can obtain that information as soon as possible I would certainly appreciate it. Thank you.

Now I am going to turn it over to the Ranking Member, Ms. McKinney, for her questions.

Ms. MCKINNEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to have the opportunity, if it is needed, for further clarification after you have posed your second round of questions to go back and——

Mr. TANCREDO. Of course. Of course.

Ms. MCKINNEY. I would also like to state that I have significant volumes of information to submit for the record, and I would like to receive that information from Father Bahala as well for submission to the record.

Mr. TANCREDO. Without objection.

Ms. MCKINNEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The first question I have is about the recent statement of Colin Powell, and this is directed to anyone who would desire to respond.

Colin Powell said that he would visit Uganda. The question is, one, should he go? Two, who should he meet with if he goes? Three, what should his message be?

Mr. BALDO. Yes. I believe the Secretary of State should go to Uganda, and I believe that his message on the situation of the presence of Uganda in the Congo should be very clear and straightforward, simple talk, you know.

Uganda is present in the Congo as an occupation power. Uganda is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions. It is obliged to respect the provisions of protocol of the Geneva Convention 4 and in addition Protocol 1. It is not doing that.

Uganda, as we document in our publications, is involved in attacks against civilians. Uganda is recruiting Congolese children for its war effort against the government. We document that as well. Not only are these children being trained within the Congo, but some of them are brought for training across the border in Uganda proper.

Ugandan officials, and that is to say commanders of the Ugandan army, have been implicated in war crimes by overseeing the execution of non-combatants. We have located incidents that we have documented. What is the Ugandan army and government doing about holding these military commanders accountable for war crimes basically?

The message should really be a confrontation on the conduct of the Ugandan army and the areas under its occupation in the east. This message has not been addressed to the Ugandan government, and I think it is about time that people speak out about these issues.

Ms. MCKINNEY. Yes.

Mr. ROBERTS. I need to preface this with the fact that I am a scientist and not even slightly diplomatic in nature.

When I read in the paper that the U.S. Ambassador in Kigali is saying that the war in the east cannot be resolved until the Congolese solve the security problems and then I hear last year that our Ambassador in Kinshasa has said publicly that this war cannot end until the foreign armies are withdrawn, it implies to me in my ignorance that we do not have a policy for the region and for this conflict.

I am ecstatic at the notion that Colin Powell will go to any country involved in this conflict for nothing else that it dramatically increases the chance that he will develop a policy so that we can say the same thing on each side with great consistency and every voice of the U.S. Government.

If he goes, I will do somersaults for joy, and I hope he would meet with the highest level folks both militarily and politically that he can, and I hope that whatever his message is, it is a message that will be given to Kabila and to everyone involved in this conflict.

I did not say this in my testimony, but it is in my report. If you look at who has been killed in the 148 murders that we have documented, and when I say the word murder, two-thirds are gunshots. The next most common is attacking. The next most common is burning alive in their huts. That is what I meant by violent deaths in our report.

An equal number have been committed by the opponents of the RCD than the RCD it would appear. There are no good sides in this conflict, and that makes Colin Powell's job really hard. I am the first one to say that. The more time he spends there thinking about it, the better off we all are.

Thank you.

Ms. EDGERTON. Les may be the first one to say it, but let me follow up and state that Colin Powell, if he were to go to Uganda, would be welcomed greatly by I think all of us here on the panel and many in the humanitarian assistance community.

Last Friday, Colin Powell spoke to our board of directors at Refugees International and reassured us that the Administration is committed to conflict areas and to assisting with conflict resolution. However, he gave no specifics.

If he were to go to Uganda as Secretary of State, I think that high level, Museveni and on down, speaking about the exploitation of resources as is in the U.N. exploitation report that you referred to, child soldier recruitment that has been taking place across borders. Those are Congolese children that Sulaiman just referred to who are trained in Uganda and other areas of occupation that are occurring across the Ugandan border, as well as possibly reaffirming the humanitarian rights necessity of following humanitarian or human rights records in order to be a legitimate international player for Uganda.

Thank you.

Mr. MADSEN. Congresswoman McKinney, I just want to make a point that whatever Colin Powell does in Uganda, he certainly might not want to emulate what the previous Administration did there.

Ms. MCKINNEY. Yes.

Mr. MADSEN. I was in Kampala 2 weeks after President Clinton's trip to the country back in 1998. I was sitting with the leader of the opposition there, Mr. Lukemuzie, at the Sheraton Hotel in Kampala. Incidentally, we had a number of Museveni's secret police sitting around eavesdropping from other tables on our conversation, which I think is endemic of the situation in Uganda.

Mr. Lukemuzie told me. He said when President Clinton was in Uganda, he did not even want to spend 5 minutes meeting with the members of the opposition. You know, he went on to say, you know, I used to look to the United States, you know, the statue of liberty and all those things that I admired America for.

When your President was here, not only did he not want to meet with any of the members of the opposition; the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Susan Rice, basically lectured them and told them they ought to really get off of this democracy kick and start to learn how to accept Museveni's one party system of government.

It was very embarrassing, number one, to sit there and have to hear the leader of an opposition complain about the United States and the Clinton Administration's policy, so I would just urge Secretary of State Powell to make sure he can make amends for the last Administration and meet with the opposition in Uganda as well.

Ms. MCKINNEY. What is the military relationship between the United States, Uganda and Rwanda in terms of bases, relationships with leaders, and training relationships that would allow the United States to turn a blind eye to the kind of egregious behavior, actually criminal behavior, on the part of its allies?

That is for anyone.

Mr. MADSEN. Okay. I will step up to the plate on this one first, I guess.

The background to the U.S. relationship with the RPF government and Uganda goes back to 1990 before the original invasion of Rwanda by the RPF from Ugandan soil, and it has taken many different roles. It includes, as I mentioned in testimony, covert and overt assistance.

There is, of course, the overt assistance, the African Crisis Response Initiative, which Uganda seems to be in and out of that program depending on whether they are being suspended for human rights violations or failure to withdraw troops from the DRC, but, more importantly, it is included in what they call Joint Combined Education and Training Program, JCET, Enhanced International Military Education and Training.

President Kagame himself was attending the U.S. Army's staff college in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, at the time the invasion was launched in 1990. I have been told that Kagame has very close ties with the U.S. military, including the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many members of his upper echelons in his military and intelligence structure who, incidentally, I understand may be indicted here by the U.N. war crimes tribunal, were trained by U.S. personnel. That goes right through the military and the RPF intelligence structure.

With Uganda, there were reports of a number of U.S. intelligence and military bases. There is, of course, the base that is often reported in Cyangugu, Rwanda, but also other bases around the country.

Ms. MCKINNEY. Do we know about any military bases in Uganda?

Mr. MADSEN. Well, when I was visiting Uganda there was, of course, a lot of talk about an intelligence selection facility in Fort Portal, which was then closed and moved elsewhere, but it was apparently involved in picking up signals from then Zaire during the initial invasion from Rwanda, that country.

There has also been a number of reports that personnel from the U.S. Special Forces in Fort Bragg have been involved in training not only Ugandan military forces for SPLA guerrillas in the northern part of Uganda, and there have been reports of a military training base in Ginga in the eastern part of Uganda, so there are ample reports of U.S. military presence in both of those countries regardless of whether they are under suspension by ACRI at any given time.

That seems to be a revolving door with ACRI. When they decide to suspend, it is usually for a couple of weeks or a month, and then they are back in.

Ms. MCKINNEY. I remember in the mid 1970's Henry Kissinger's policy was to arm the UNITA and FLNA in Angola in the Angolan struggle for self-determination against the NPLA. Because of the fervor in the United States on the part of African-Americans, African-American men were recruited in a very insidious and cynical twist to go and fight in Angola on the wrong side.

Now, are African-Americans being particularly recruited to go into Uganda and Rwanda on behalf of the United States? Do you know anything about any of that?

Mr. MADSEN. I have talked to people who have been in eastern Congo and also in Uganda that claim to have talked to/been with African-Americans with the Special Forces. I think this also gets into an area of, you know, who is actually in the military and who may not be because I have also been told that some of the people with the American forces spoke fluent Swahili, so are they contractors? Are they U.S. military personnel? Just who are these folks?

I think this gets us to the roots of the problem with these covert activities. We do not know who is doing what. The covert nature of these activities, you know, leaves congressional investigators, reporters, other people out of the picture. It is hard to get the information on them, but I think definitely what has been going on since the early 1990's as far as the U.S. is concerned needs some sunshine because in this case that would be the best disinfectant to find out just what was going on, who knew what when and when did they know it.

Ms. MCKINNEY. In about 1995 or thereabouts at a briefing that I received from the State Department, I was told that the Congo was too big and that it was unwieldy and something really needed to be done about that. I was also told that I should not expect Laurent Kabila to last for any length of time. The prescience of the Clinton State Department in this regard is remarkable.

The question I have is about the delivery of humanitarian assistance into the eastern part of the Congo. I think it was Dr. Roberts who pointed out that Kinshasa is a long way from where the fighting or the problems in the east are taking place.

If we understand that there are some people who really want the permanent partition of the Democratic Republic of Congo, how do we address the humanitarian situation without furthering that partition that is against all the precepts of the organization of African unity and international law, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?

Mr. ROBERTS. First of all, I need to point out that we in the NGO community normally bend over backwards to remain neutral in conflicts like this.

Secondly, that there are certain things happening right now, such as children dying of measles at extraordinary rates that could be stopped by vaccinating those kids, and that should be done. It is quite independent of whether or not we are propping up or increasing the probability of longevity of a regime we do not like.

Vaccinating children, providing a few minimal things to keep people alive until the political process has sorted out I think does not necessarily interfere with your political efforts to have one unified Congo or whatever it is that the world community and the Congolese, more importantly, decide is their destiny.

I do not think there is any inconsistency with keeping children alive and pursuing some political objectives which you may have.

Ms. EDGERTON. Congresswoman?

Father BAHALA. I just want to add a small something about the integrity of the national territory of Congo.

We hear the U.S. supports the integrity of the territory, but the Congolese people when they look and they hear the type of statements that you refer to, we fear that there is a plan to sell our country, and I would like to go on record and say that is something that nobody in the Congo accepts. We do not accept that, and we refute that idea of partitioning our country.

I would like to say that if anybody thinks that they are going to continue that idea, then they are going to meet with the type of resistance that you have seen with militias springing up everywhere because the Congolese people refuse categorically that idea.

We also have the impression that the international community has something that may cause two readings of the situation in the world. For instance, when the same situation took place in Kuwait and in Kosovo, the whole international community mobilized itself to defend the international law in that matter, but now here in the Congo it is another story.

Now I would like to talk about humanitarian assistance. I can tell you something about that because I was there. I was a witness when the situation in Rwanda took place. The whole international community mobilized itself to feed the Rwandese refugees when they came and they crossed the border into our country. They mobilized millions of dollars to help out.

When the Hutu refugees were massacred, nobody said absolutely anything. Now today we are being held responsible for being genociders just because of what has happened there.

We also are wondering why is there not any type of help given to the Congolese people who are today living under the same kind of the brunt of what I would call the consequences of the conflict? They are living in misery basically.

Also, I would like to end by saying that, should there be any sort of humanitarian assistance, the civil society and the churches are very well structured in the region to take on such a task.

Ms. EDGERTON. Congresswoman, if I may? We in the humanitarian aid community, NGOs, when we meet with U.S. foreign policy officials are told that humanitarian access and humanitarian assistance are not necessarily linked at all to the political U.S. foreign policy process of whatever country aid is being delivered to.

I want to say today that that is probably something that works two ways. You can deliver benign humanitarian aid in a way that it is not at all a reflection of U.S. foreign policy, nor should it be brought to the negotiation table as some kind of chit to be traded away.

Thank you.

Mr. MADSEN. I just wanted to make one point about the breakup of the Congo. I mentioned the previous Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. I am afraid from what I have read, the next person to fill that post it just seems like neither the last Administration or this Administration can get that thing right.

Mr. Kansteiner, who has been nominated to assume that function, wrote a couple of things that are troubling. Back in 1996, he called for the division of the Congo and the Great Lakes region between primary ethnic groups creating homogeneous ethnic lands that would probably necessitate redrawing international boundaries and would require massive ''voluntary'' relocation efforts.

In another piece he wrote for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette last year he stated that, ''The breakup of the Congo is more likely now than it has been in 20 or 30 years.''

It is also troubling that Cansteiner once worked for the Department of Defense where he worked on the Task Force on Strategic Minerals. Obviously what was said today about the criticality of these natural resources to the problems, to have a person involved with U.S.-Africa policy who served on such a board is very troubling.

Ms. MCKINNEY. Thank you. I just got a note here that Cansteiner's confirmation is today at 4.

I have 2 minutes to go and cast a vote. I will run there. I will run right back. I apologize. Let us recess, and then we will take up with Dr. Roberts.

Thank you.



Mr. TANCREDO. I extend my apologies to the witnesses for the interruptions that we have had in this process. It is, unfortunately, the price you have to pay.

Also to assure you, do not be concerned if we are talking here and you are trying to provide testimony. It is not just for our elucidation. It is for the record, which is extremely important for all of us. Your comments will be taken into consideration, I assure you.

I want to continue with and follow up to a certain extent anyway on what I understand to be Ms. McKinney's line of questioning, and that is, first of all, again this would be to any one of the members of the panel.

Who should the parties to the peace process be, the foreign governments supporting the rebels or the rebel leaders themselves? Along with that, whom should the international community and U.S. pressure to talk to President Joseph Kabila and his officials?

Does anybody want to take a whack at that?

Ms. EDGERTON. I will start with the first one and then probably hand over to Father Bahala, who can speak more readily to this.

It is called an inter Congolese dialogue for a reason. It is a national dialogue. I think the occupying forces are very interested in being a part of the national dialogue. I think that is a mistake. The sooner the dialogue takes place, the more legitimacy the occupying forces who are occupying parts of Congo have in actually having a place at the table. I think it is a very dangerous policy to follow.

Mr. TANCREDO. Go ahead.

Mr. BALDO. The world has several layers. One layer is an international law. Occupation forces are present as occupying powers in Congo, and there is a need for negotiation between the Congolese government and with the occupying powers of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi to obtain their withdrawal and preservation of the total integrity of Congo.

There is also a civil war in Congo. At that level, there is a big question about the legitimacy of several of the rebel groups. We know that let us say the Congolese Rally for Democracy signed the peace agreement in Lusaka not as a movement, but as 50 individual members, founders of that movement. Therefore, if you look at the reality of the rebel movement there are several leaders claiming to represent that.

I knew of a faction, the Offcide Nationale, which is a one man rebel group headed by Rogen Bala. This is a covert operation for the exploitation of diamonds in the town of Bafasundi in northeastern Congo. This is his only legitimacy, and that is to protect the interests of Uganda.

The Congolese Rally for Democracy liberation movement headed by Wamba dia Wamba groups about six members, founding members, of the original Congolese Rally for Democracy, who are operating from exile from Garselam, Gaproni, Kampala, Brussels and who operate as a revolutionary movement that is distributed through faxes and e-mails and to demand that they be presented in discussions and associations.

They represent no one. They do not have any constituency on the ground. They do not have any military power or control over whatever. They only seem to have put their name on the Lusaka agreement.

There would be a lot of sorting out that needs to be done. I believe the fact has to be acknowledged that these are not groups backed by Rwanda and Uganda. These are political fronts for Uganda and Rwanda in the occupation of Congo.

Thank you.

Mr. TANCREDO. Do we not then risk along with, and whoever wants to continue answering the original question please feel free to do so. I just want to add do we not then risk legitimizing these

Activists: Peacekeepers knowingly gunned down civilians in Congo
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-04-12-congo-peacekeepers_x.htm

KINSHASA, Congo (AP) — Human rights activists charged Tuesday that U.N. peacekeepers knowingly gunned down civilians in a raid that targeted a marketplace, pinning down dozens of people down during the biggest gunbattle in the U.N.'s six-year mission in Congo.

The human rights group Justice Plus listed names of several alleged civilian victims from a March 1 raid in eastern Congo and said they "paid with their life, while the mandate of the United Nations was to protect them."

The United Nations said its troops fired only when they were attacked, and that women and children were among those who fired weapons.

The charges Tuesday came as U.N. peacekeepers announced they were staging an assault on a militia camp, targeting fighters in eastern Congo who have killed thousands in a years-old ethnic conflict.

But the militia fled the camp before the troops arrived, spokesman Mohammad Abdul-Wahab said by telephone from Bunia, capital of the violent Ituri province and some 25 miles from the targeted camp.

He said the 300 peacekeepers sent to attack the camp instead spent the day dismantling it.

Accused of years of ineffectiveness, peacekeepers now are aggressively seeking to disarm fighters after thousands defied an April 1 ultimatum to surrender weapons. Some 9,000 of an estimated 15,000 fighters gave up their weapons.

U.N forces have raided three militia camps in the past month and killed up to 75 fighters.

Justice Plus charged that peacekeepers intentionally chose a busy market day to stage a March 1 assault, ensuring civilians were caught in hours-long crossfire between heavily armed militia and several hundred peacekeepers, the Bunia-based rights group said.

The raid killed up to 60 fighters, the United Nations has said.

Justice Plus said "the testimonies collected on the spot mention at least 60 persons killed, including several civilians, and many were injured."

It also charged that the raid near Loga, 20 miles north of Bunia, was in retaliation for a militia attack a week earlier in which nine Bangladeshi peacekeepers were slaughtered and their bodies mutilated.

The United Nations said the raid was not planned in revenge.

Spokesman Kemal Saiki said they chose a market day because that is when militia leaders come out to extort from merchants. "This is the day these guys do their rackets," he said.

Saiki said helicopters made two warning passes over the market to give civilians ample time to flee. Even after they were attacked, he said, peacekeepers did not immediately start shooting.

The United Nations said last month the firefight began when peacekeepers looking to dismantle a Lendu militia camp approached the target and were fired upon.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/congo.htm


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*TWINNING*

the maps

and the military groups
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*TWINNING*

for those of ya'll reading some of these posts for the first time, please bare in mind that embedded URLs did not show up anymore after the message board was upgraded, so places where links were @ now appear as empty spaces... which makes some of the sentences in this thread look incomplete

http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs1186

Reflections from the Hot Zone: Congo
Posted by Kevin Sites
on Fri Oct 14,10:27 AM ET

There is Laughter Here, Too.

We are sitting in the backseat of the International Rescue Committee's white Land Cruiser. With every bump and rut in what passes for a road here I feel like the vehicle's entire rear wheel base is going to lodge irrevocably up my lower intestines.

I'm in a mood. Petulant even. And it's not just the ride. Shahrzad, the IRC's 22-year-old intern, freshly graduated from Princeton, has just told me for the fourteenth time that I cannot take a frontal photo -- even a very wide one -- of the women that I'm covering for a story on sexual violence.

I've been pushing the issue, but I'm not sure why.They've been victimized enough and I want to protect their privacy, dignity and, most importantly, their lives against possible repercussions from the armed groups who have raped and terrorized them.

But I know that stories, ultimately, are in people's faces. While I can't, and shouldn't, show them in this circumstance, I worry that it may be difficult for readers to invest in them when all they can see is the back of their heads or their hands. They become objects, concepts rather than people. I just want one photo that even from a distance allows their collective faces to show what they've suffered.

But here's the thing: when they are together like this, it isn't just about collective suffering -- there is laughter, too. Lots of it.

For one, they look at me and laugh. In these dirt-poor villages, when I hop out of the vehicle with my high-definition camera and backpack, bulging with video and computer peripherals, I might as well be dressed in a bunny suit and carrying an Easter basket. Or wearing a neoprene wetsuit, mask, fins and snorkel and walking backward. I'm not exactly passing for one of the locals.

I marvel at these strong women who have dressed in their best, most colorful clothes to meet us. Some carry large golf umbrellas to shield them and their babies from the intense sun.These same women, welcoming us with broad smiles and rolling tongue chants, are forced to hide in the banana groves at night in fear of men bearing torches and guns who search them out.

They look at me, I think, as a man from another planet, who could, with all of his ridiculous trappings, bring some relief. Even if it is just comic.

I find myself reeling a bit from the responsibility. I worry that once we all get back into the Land Cruiser that we'll have left them again with nothing except their fear. I want to stay and protect them; I fantasize about turning their predators into prey, but I'm armed with a camera not a gun. It seems to me a poor substitution at the moment.

It makes me feel both angry and impotent. Where are the FARDC (the Armed Forces of the
Democratic Republic of Congo) that are supposed to be protecting them?

"They are hungry, too," one woman tells me. "They don't get paid, so sometimes they are the ones doing the looting and the raping."

When I sit down to interview some of the women about their stories, I am humbled. They bear their pain heroically -- the physical and mental trauma and its aftermath, even the loving infants that were forced upon them in the most cruel and unloving ways.

When I listen to them I sometimes feel ashamed. The worse the story, the less emotion I show -- hardening myself against the waters of pain that threaten to destroy the levee I've built for my own protection.

I also worry that my reporting will become this deluge of tragedy for people who, like myself, unable or uncertain of what to do, let it wash over them. Some African journalists call it "poverty porn" -- stories or images of intense suffering that are designed soley for emotional impact, but that often have the effect of shutting people down rather than helping them step up.

How do we get beyond that? I'm not sure. I guess by truly empathizing, not just with their tears but their laughter as well.

When I was in another village a few days earlier, I was surrounded by 1,600 families waiting for relief supplies from the IRC. Their names would be called and they would receive a coupon for cooking pots, soap and some other essentials. Many of these people hadn't eaten in days, and they were certainly suffering.

But some, like one old man whose name was called, had no problem sharing the joy of the moment by performing a little impromptu dance for my camera, making this crowd of people laugh with abandon. Everything had been taken from them but their humanity.

As the day went on I began to get hungry and unsettled by my own needs. I knew at some point, later in the evening, back in town I would be able to eat.

Yet so many around me would go hungry again this evening -- probably hungry enough to make a meal out of the press credentials that hung around my neck if I so offered them.

Again, I wonder if it would be more useful holding something else -- a loaf of bread maybe, rather than this camera. I know in my heart that this is not just an exercise in navel-gazing. People read these stories and respond. So many have posted responses on the site saying their eyes have been opened to people and issues they never knew about.

Others, however, perhaps overwhelmed by what they read, say Africa should be written off, that it's beyond repair. My experiences so far say we should put it in perspective.

Imagine, for instance, a new nation that has just won its independence from a colonial power. It struggles with internal graft and corruption, civil war and economic turbulence. Nations that are more developed see it as a basket case. Yet 200-plus years later it emerges as a superpower. Yeah, America.

Most African nations have only had their independence for 10 to 40 years. They're struggling not just with the legacies of colonialism, but also the Cold War -- in which the U.S. and former Soviet Union propped up opposing proxies on the continent to protect and promote their strategic interests.

These countries face many challenges: endemic corruption, a rapidly expanding AIDS epidemic, simmering armed conflicts, the struggle for democracy. At moments these challenges can seem insurmountable. But there is also, as I've seen and heard in the most unexpected places, laughter.

And with that, hope.

Note to Hot Zone Readers:

When the earthquake struck northern Pakistan last Saturday our team had to make a tough decision: Do we stay in Africa or do we go? With scores dead and millions left homeless, it is undoubtedly a catastrophic disaster.

And because of its magnitude, it has attracted cameras and reporters from all over the world -- just as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina did in New Orleans.

The suffering and hardship of the people in the region is immense, but it is also being covered well. Our thinking was that, while we might be able to bring other dimensions to the coverage, ultimately the story is getting told.

We also wanted to be faithful to our mandate of conflict coverage. In the end, we decided it would be irresponsible to swap the reporting of one people's suffering for another's.

When we launched Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone we pledged not to chase headlines, but instead to go to the places and talk to the people who are in so many ways invisible to the rest of the world.

We still believe Africa is one of the most underreported places on the planet, and we want to continue our mission here for the next few weeks, while at the same time acknowledging the terrible events in Pakistan and encouraging our journalistic colleagues in their laudable efforts to tell that tragic story.

http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2005/congo.asp

May 6, 2005 - (Ms Magazine) The Congo’s rape survivors face pain, shame and AIDS by Stephanie Nolen

It took Thérèse Mwandeko a year to save the money. She knew she could walk the first 40 kilometers of her journey, but would need to pay for a lift for the last 20.

So she traded bananas and peanuts until she’d saved $1.50 in Congolese francs, then set out for Bukavu. She walked with balled-up fabric clenched between her thighs, to soak up blood that had been oozing from her vagina for two years, since she had been gang-raped by Rwandan militia soldiers who plundered her village in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Finally, she arrived at Panzi Hospital.

Here, Thérèse takes her place in line, along with 80 women, waiting for surgery to rebuild her vagina. Dr. Denis Mukwege, Panzi’s sole gynecologist and one of two doctors in the eastern Congo who can perform such reconstructive surgeries, can repair only five women a week. The air is thick with flies. It reeks from women with fistula: rips in the vaginal wall where rape tore out chunks of flesh separating the bladder and rectum from the vagina. Yet Thérèse, 47, is happier than she’s been in years.
“Until I came here, I had no hope I could be helped,” she says.

Across the DRC are tens of thousands of women like this: physically ravaged, emotionally terrorized, financially impoverished. Except for Thérèse and a few fortunate others, these women have no help of any kind: Eight years of war have left the country in ruins, and Congolese women have been victims of rape on a scale never seen before.

Every one of dozens of armed groups in this war has used rape as a weapon. Amnesty International (AI) researchers believe there has been more rape here than in any other conflict, but the actual scale is still unknown.

“They rape a woman, five or six of them at a time — but that is not enough. Then they shoot a gun into her vagina,” says Dr. Mukwege. “In all my years here, I never saw anything like it. … o see so many raped, that shocks me, but what shocks me more is the way they are raped.”

Each armed group has a trademark manner of violating, he explains. The Burundians rape men as well as women. The Mai Mai — local defense forces — rape with branches or bayonets, and mutilate their victims. The Rwandans, like those who attacked Thérèse, set groups of soldiers to rape one woman.

The ward where Thérèse waits for surgery is run by a social worker, Louise Nzigire. The women tell her they are “not women anymore.” They are often too physically damaged to farm, or bear children, and there is such stigma associated with rape in Congo — where female virginity is prized and the husband of a rape survivor is considered shamed — that rape survivors are routinely shunned by husbands, parents and communities.

Nzigire believes rape has been a cheap, simple weapon for all parties in the war, more easily obtainable than bullets or bombs: “This violence was designed to exterminate the population,” she says quietly.

The Congo war has claimed more lives than any conflict since the end of World War II, yet receives almost no attention outside central Africa. An estimated 4 million people have died here since 1996 — the vast majority not by firepower but starvation or preventable diseases, as people hid in the jungle to escape the fighting.

It began when Rwanda’s Tutsi government sent troops over the border to pursue Hutu militias responsible for the 1994 genocide, since many Hutu had escaped to the impenetrable Congolese bush. When the then-Zairian army offered little resistance, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame formed a hasty alliance with a Congolese rebel group attempting to overthrow dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Tutsi-run Burundi and neighboring Uganda saw a lucrative opportunity, and sent troops to help the putsch.

The rebels took Kinshasa in 1997, installing Laurent Kabila as president. But the next year, Rwandan and Ugandan troops turned on Kabila, so he called in Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe to back his army. All of Congo’s neighbors joined the war, which gave them a chance to indulge in a frenzy of looting diamonds and other minerals, in which Congo is abundant.

After a 2002 peace deal, a fragile, transitional government holds power, in a uniquely Congolese power-sharing: President Joseph Kabila (thrust into the job at age 29 after his father’s 2001 assassination) shares power with four of the major warlords whose militias have wrought havoc for the past years. This is peace enough to placate international donors, who’ve poured money in to prop up this flimsy government and to repair roads and phone lines in the capital — and reassure international mining companies, who are reopening up shop all over the country.

But beyond Kinshasa’s city limits, there is little sign the war has ended. In the east, where the worst hostilities were fought, a half-dozen armed groups still control territory, holding civilians hostage. Here there is no rebuilding, no phone service, no electrical grid, no roads. Hospitals, when they still stand, have been looted of everything from beds to bandages. No government employee — teachers, judges, nurses — has been paid in 14 years.

There is a United Nations peacekeeping mission charged with maintaining order, but it has 12,000 soldiers for an area the size of Western Europe (the U.N. mission to tiny Kosovo, by contrast, had 40,000 troops); furthermore, the troops lack the ability to move outside town centers, while the militias move freely in the forests.

The people who live out here have been rendered feral by the war. Their homes have been burned, their possessions pillaged, men shot, women and girls raped, boys abducted to serve as soldiers. Any survivors took refuge in the forest, living naked, eating grubs and roots. This season, for the first time in six years, people in most of the eastern provinces have returned to their fields and planted crops.

Shami Alubu, 21, came out of the jungle and back to the town of Kibombo last year, although she can’t go home. In early 2002, while working in her fields, she was snatched by Mai Mai militants, who dragged her into town, then kept her there for a full day, beating and raping her with guns and sticks. The whole time, she was within earshot of her 7-month-old son Florent, who was sobbing wildly.

When it was over, she limped back to her house — but at the sight of her, her husband ordered her away. “It was like he thought I wanted to go with the Mai Mai,” Shami says bitterly.

Shami’s town, Kibombo, changed hands a half-dozen times during the war: the Rwandan army, then the Mai Mai, then Rwandans again. Every time new troops seized Kibombo, they set out systematically to rape. When the soldiers lost the town to a new militia, they often dragged dozens of women with them as they fled, holding them as sexual slaves and cooks in their jungle retreats until the next time they raided the town.

Today, Shami is thin and hunched; she breathes with difficulty. “Maybe I have AIDS,” she murmurs.

An estimated 30 percent of the women raped in Congo ’s war are infected with HIV; as many as 60 percent of the combatants are believed to have the virus. Shami also suffers continual pain in her shredded vagina, but has had no medical help since the rape. There is a hospital in Kibombo, with six wards: Four are empty; two each contain three iron bed frames, stripped of any mats. The director, Jean-Yves Mukamba (the only doctor for this region of 25,000 square kilometers) knows he is surrounded by women suffering raging venereal infections, HIV, prolapsed uteruses, torn vaginas.

“I think it was a large majority of the women here who were raped, almost all of them. But I can’t help them with just my bare hands,” he says. When he decided, late last year, to consult with sexual-violence victims, more than 100 women turned up the first morning.

“I had nothing, not even antibiotics, to give them.” Not that antibiotics would have helped much: “Most cases were traumatization of the genitals: These women had been raped with a tree branch or the barrel of a gun, or a bayonet. When you see a woman who was forced by 10 men — the trauma…”

The doctor holds out his thin hands, as if to push the memory away.

Nor is it just Kibombo. “The women rely on a national health system that has been totally destroyed,” says Andrew Philip, coauthor of an AI report on the Congo : “They walk for days…then are charged for health care because none of the doctors or nurses is paid , and it’s beyond the means of most patients.”

A typical doctor’s visit costs about 70 cents. Although the government now collects substantial revenues on exports, particularly diamonds, it insists it cannot afford to pay nurses or doctors, or abolish consultation fees. Dr. Mukamba has not received so much as a Band-Aid from Kinshasa in two years.

Legal assistance is even rarer than medical help. There have been fewer than a dozen prosecutions of sexual assault in the eastern DRC. Many rape survivors know where their assailants are; in some cases, they see them every day. But large parts of the country lack judges, lawyers, police or detectives.

Staff that are present often answer to the militias, which still control large chunks of territory. No senior officer of any military (as well as the national armies of Rwanda , Uganda and Burundi , which committed thousands of rapes) has ever been held accountable for sexual violence committed by his staff.

There is yet another problem. “Most women won’t pursue this legally, because they are afraid it’s not over. They figure that when the militia is back in power, they will be targeted,” explains Emiliane Tuma Sibazuri, who heads a women’s group supporting rape survivors in the eastern town of Kasongo.

“They think, ‘If I give my name to try to get justice, then when they come back, I will be attacked, or my family.’ All we can do is try to help them forget.”

The grossly underfunded U.N. mission is in little position to assist. Last October, when the mission went to the Security Council to ask for additional soldiers and money, it won a laughably small increase. Then, weeks later, came the revelation that U.N. peacekeepers themselves are contributing to Congo’s frenzy of sexual assault.

The U.N. said that 150 allegations of sexual abuse were reported committed by peacekeepers (from Morocco, Nepal, Pakistan, South Africa, Tunisia and Uruguay) in Congo, and that there were likely hundreds more that would never be reported; commanders were allegedly resisting measures to curb such abuses. Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced there was “clear evidence that acts of gross misconduct have taken place.”

Furthermore, U.N. investigators found that peacekeepers and civilian workers were paying an average of US $2 for sex with women in populations they were assigned to protect, or bartering for sex with food, basic supplies or a fictitious promise of work in safe, well-guarded U.N. compounds.

A recent International Rescue Committee survey, conducted in all regions of the Congo , found that 31,000 people a month are still dying, almost all for preventable reasons. But as the delicate peace inches out across the country, more people emerge from the jungle, and more women like Thérèse Mwandeko are able to make their way to a hospital.

“We treat one, and send her home to the village,” says Dr. Mukwege, “and she returns with five more.”