Welcome to Nazareth
By Jonathan Cook | AMEU | September 2012
Until a few years ago, the only road northwards from central Israel to Nazareth rose from the fertile fields of the Jezreel Valley to wend its way steeply up the craggy face of a hill in the Lower Galilee range, following what must have once been a goat-herders’ path.
The crawl upwards—often behind a tourist coach or a truck—provided plenty of time to admire a dramatic outcrop of rock known as Mount Precipice, the spot where, according to Christian tradition, the townsfolk of ancient Nazareth tried to hurl a young Jesus to his death after he proclaimed himself the son of God. Locals refer to the place in Arabic as “Jebel Kufze,” or “Jumping Hill,” alluding to what was possibly Jesus’ first miracle. He is said to have leapt to safety as he was pushed over the precipice.
For millenia, Jebel Kufze hid a secret. At its foot, close to where Jesus might have been dashed on the rocks had he not “jumped,” a cave was discovered by Franciscan monks in the 1960s. Excavations over the next decade identified human remains dating back possibly 100,000 years. At the time, so-called Kufze Man was our oldest ancestor ever unearthed.
But even Jebel Kufze, so rich in human and sacred significance, had no defense against the needs of a modern state, especially one whose officials have little or no sympathy with Christianity. Shortly after I moved to Nazareth in 2001, bulldozers and diggers moved in to tear out the lower southern flank of Mount Precipice, the deep scar eventually stopping just short of the Kufze Cave. A bridge on stilts was built up from the Jezreel Valley’s floor to what was left of the mount’s lower slope, and there engineers blasted a hole through the rock to create a tunnel.
The old “goat road” became a little-used scenic route to Nazareth. Meanwhile, the bridge and tunnel, which opened in 2008, needed a name. The list of candidates should have been long. It could have made reference to humankind’s forebears interred nearby; or to the miracle that averted the untimely death of a man in whose name a global religion was founded; or any of the subsequent Nazarenes who made a more limited mark on their city and the Galilee, such as Tawfik Ziyad, a mayor in the 1970s and 1980s whose “poetry of protest” still inspires Palestinians. But none were chosen.
Instead, government officials held discussions behind closed doors. The first we in Nazareth knew was when a sign appeared a short distance before the tunnel, naming the new route the “Rafael Eitan Bridge,” after a famous general. Nazarenes were not consulted for good reason; their vehement opposition was assured.
The tenuous justification for the road’s name was that Eitan had been born in the Jezreel Valley, in a kibbutz (farming cooperative) called Tel Adashim. But Eitan’s fame derived not from his connection to the Lower Galilee or Nazareth, today the largest Arab city in Israel and the effective capital of the 1.4 million Palestinians who have citizenship inside the state.
He made his name first as a hawkish military chief of staff and then as a politician who was always ready to voice his visceral hatred of Palestinians and Arabs. In the early 1980s, he established a far-right party, Tzomet—an ideological forerunner of current foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party—and enthusiastically advocated settlement building. He is best known for stating: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”
Outside observers have assumed that Eitan was offering a policy prescription for the occupied territories. However, Palestinians inside Israel, much better and longer acquainted with Zionist politics, understood this declaration to refer to Palestinians wherever they were found, including in the Galilee. On another occasion, Eitan outlined his party’s platform: “We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel. …Force is all they do, or ever will, understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”
There could have hardly been a more succinct exposition of the logic of a central plank of Zionist policy known as “Judaization.” Long before Israel began building settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, its strategic planners were devising similar methods to contain, fragment and control the dozens of Palestinian communities whose inhabitants had not been chased out of the new state in 1948. The goal was to turn these towns and villages into figurative “bottles” and transform their Palestinian inhabitants—a fifth of the population—into “drugged cockroaches,” who would docilely accept their inferior status in a self-proclaimed Jewish state.
Judaizing Nazareth
One of the very first targets for Judaization was Nazareth. The city, unlike most other Palestinian communities, had emerged relatively unscathed from the year-long bloodshed of the 1948 war. The newly declared state of Israel, still awaiting recognition from the United Nations, worried about a potential backlash from the international community, and especially the Vatican, if Nazareth were seriously attacked. So the city was left largely in peace as Israel’s armed forces swept northwards towards the Lebanese and Syrian borders.
By the end of the war, hundreds of Palestinian villages—the overwhelming majority—had been destroyed, and their inhabitants, some 750,000, expelled. Only 150,000 Palestinians remained. Palestine’s once-great cities inside the new borders, such as Jaffa, Haifa and Lod, were almost emptied, later to be misleadingly termed “mixed cities”: cities of Jewish immigrants that accommodated an adjoining ghetto of Palestinian casual laborers to build homes for the waves of new arrivals.
Nazareth found itself transformed twice-over by the war. A town of 13,000 more than doubled in size over the course of a few months as 15,000 refugees from nearby villages poured in seeking sanctuary from the Israeli army. And, with other cities vanquished inside the new state of Israel, Nazareth unexpectedly found itself the only urban Palestinian space to have survived.
Swollen with refugees and in a position to become the political and cultural capital of the Palestinians inside Israel, the city attracted the sustained attention of Israel’s military and political leadership.
Like all Israel’s Palestinian citizens in the aftermath of 1948, Nazarenes lived for two decades under military rule. To leave the city for work, or to attend a wedding or funeral, or simply to reach their fields, Nazarenes had to apply for a permit from a military governor—much as Palestinians in the West Bank today find their lives controlled by Israeli military rulers known as the Civil Administration. As in the occupied territories, such permits were issued at a high price, requiring Palestinians to inform and collaborate in return for the privilege of free movement.
In these circumstances, it was easy for the government in 1953 to confiscate 1,900 dunams (a dunam is a quarter of an acre) of Nazareth’s farmland to the west of the city, which Nazarenes relied on both for income and as a land reserve for future development and expansion.
Such expropriations would become a staple of life over the next three decades as more than 70 per cent of the land belonging to Palestinian communities in Israel was nationalized by the state for the benefit not of its citizens but of Jewry worldwide. Today the state owns 93 per cent of the land, with 2 per cent left under the control of Arab municipalities.
Officially, Nazareth’s land was taken for “public purposes”—in this case, building new government offices for the Galilee. But the city’s inhabitants could not be persuaded that the authorities needed such a vast area for a few buildings. When rumors spread that the government was secretly planning to build a suburb of Jewish homes there, Nazareth petitioned the High Court for the land to be returned.
The judges issued a ruling in 1955, accepting the government’s claim. The following year work began not only on a government complex but also on a residential area. Initially these homes were characterised simply as a “Jewish neighborhood” of Nazareth. The neighborhood grew so fast that by 1960 the government was able to redraw the boundaries and declare it a new city called Nazareth Ilit. “Ilit” denotes in Hebrew both a physical elevation (upper) and a moral superiority (better).
The need for Upper Nazareth—as well as two other “Judaization” cities nearby, Karmiel and Migdal Haemek—had been decided upon by David Ben Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, following his travels around northern Israel in the early 1950s. Afterwards, he was reported saying anxiously: “Whoever tours the Galilee gets the feeling it is not part of Israel.”
The United Nations had assigned the Galilee to the Arab state under the 1947 Partition Plan, and Ben Gurion was disturbed at the continuing solid majority of Palestinians there. More specifically, he worried that Israel’s conquest of the northern region might yet be reversed through an alliance of subversive elements within the local Palestinian population and the neighboring Arab states.
According to Geremy Forman, a British historian, the army’s planning director, Yuval Ne’eman, believed that the new Jewish city would send a message generally to Palestinians in the north. It would “emphasize and safeguard the Jewish character of the Galilee as a whole and … demonstrate state sovereignty to the Arab population more than any other settlement operation.”
The northern military governor, Mikhael Mikhael, admitted that Upper Nazareth also had a more specific goal. It was designed to “swallow up” Nazareth through the “growth of the Jewish population around a hard-core group” and thereby ensure the “transfer of the center of gravity of life from Nazareth” to Upper Nazareth.
In other words, the vision of Israel’s leaders was to turn Arab Nazareth into a ghetto suburb of Jewish Upper Nazareth, along the lines of the mixed cities. How to achieve this has exercised both military and civilian planners ever since.
The first task was to de-develop Nazareth. During the British Mandate, the city had been the administrative capital of the Galilee, but Israeli officials worked swiftly and systematically to weaken Nazareth in relation to its small, upstart neighbour. They began by transferring the government office complex and a district courthouse to Upper Nazareth.
The fortress-like court building also served a symbolic purpose: poised on a bluff directly above Nazareth, it was visible from everywhere in the city, giving the appearance of a watch-tower to spy on the Arab population below. The effect was more menacing at night, when it was illuminated. (The observation and monitoring of Palestinian populations is central to the idea of Zionist settlement, both in the West Bank and the Galilee, where homes are located on the tops of hills. Many such communities in the Galilee are known as “mitzpim,”or look-outs.)
Next, officials used planning as a weapon to suffocate the city of land and income. Sixty-four years after Israel’s establishment, Nazareth has a development area no different from the one in 1948: 14,000 dunams. With a population that has grown to 80,000 in the meantime, the city has been starved of land for housing, industry and recreation. Upper Nazareth, by contrast, has been expanding its municipal boundaries relentlessly, always at the expense of Nazareth or surrounding Arab villages.
Amira Hass, an Israeli reporter, recently explained the character of Israel’s control over the occupied West Bank: “We dominate the expanse … we develop master plans for Jews and construction prohibitions for Palestinians. Colonies [Jewish settlements] combined with discrimination have created those scattered stains on the map, known as the Palestinian enclaves (bantustans, in another language). … For the Palestinians there is separation, isolation, concentration and a stranglehold.”
Upper Nazareth was the template for these later settlements. Aerial maps show the Jewish city’s borders twisting and turning as they carve out areas for homes, industrial areas, nature reserves and green belt. A series of tentacles have been produced that have engulfed Nazareth and the surrounding Arab villages, restricting their expansion and development and severing each Arab community from the other.
Had Upper Nazareth not been built, planning and demographic logic would have required that Nazareth become the heart of a conurbation that would have incorporated half a dozen adjacent villages—Yafa, Reine, Kana, Mashhad, Ein Mahel and Iksal—comprising in total nearly 200,000 Palestinian citizens.
That would have transformed Nazareth into the true capital of Israel’s Palestinian minority, a center for their political, intellectual, business and cultural life. Instead, Nazareth became, as one neighbour told me shortly after my arrival, “the largest Arab village in Israel,” disconnected from all the other, smaller villages nearby.
Upper Nazareth, meanwhile, grew relentlessly. Today, it has a population of 42,000, and a huge municipal area of 48,000 dunams. Or, in other words, Upper Nazareth has just over half of Nazareth’s population but nearly four times more land.
The extra land has been put to good use. Upper Nazareth has an extensive industrial area that provides not only jobs but also raises substantial business rates for the city. Nazareth, by contrast, has two tiny industrial zones: a dozen private carpentry workshops in the Old City and a “garage area” of car repair workshops.
That said, Nazareth has a few privileges not afforded to any other Arab community in Israel, mostly due to its historic importance. As a result, a Palestinian middle class has emerged that flaunts its wealth—not least in its choice of luxury cars that coast around the city center—often concealing from visitors the terrible poverty to be found in its suburbs.
For starters, it has the only hospitals—three of them—in an Arab locale, all founded privately by international church-based medical charities before Israel’s creation. Medical specialists and lawyers have also set up their offices in Nazareth, serving the Galilee’s Palestinian population.
The city is home too to the only major Arab company in Israel, Nazarene Tours, which, paradoxically, has benefited from the very racism that was intended to keep Jewish and Arab citizens apart. The transport company prospered after 1948 only because Israel needed a separate bus service to link Arab communities in the Galilee. The state-owned transport company, Egged, could then safely ignore these towns and villages as it restricted itself to connecting Jewish communities.
Over the past two decades, as Israel’s economy partially globalized, Nazarene Tours has launched new divisions, including in international travel agency, hotelry and the development of transport technology. It has also won tenders against international rivals as Israel outsourced some of Egged’s routes.
A recent, though minor, success, achieved over opposition from the state, has occurred in higher education. Nazareth has been lobbying unsuccessfully for decades to host a university. That there is demand for a university teaching in Arabic rather than Hebrew is undisputed. Arab students are heavily under-represented in higher education, and shocking recent figures show that a third of those who are at university now travel to Jordan to study, a reflection of the many obstacles Israel puts in their way.
Although Nazareth still lacks a university, a first hesitant step was taken in 2009 when Israel’s Higher Education Council reluctantly recognized a more limited “Academic Institute” in the city, which awards degrees in chemistry and communications to a handful of students each year.
The institute is a pale imitation of the university so long dreamt of by Nazareth. Its recognition has been dependent on its promoting itself as a “coexistence institution”: much of the coursework is in Hebrew; nearly half the staff are Israeli Jews, as are many on its board of directors; and students are required to attend a compulsory “peace studies” course. All of this is presumably designed to counter any nationalist impulse that might be encouraged by studying in an Arab city.
The Higher Education Council agreed to recognise the institute only if it committed itself to not seek public funds. Israel has so far refused to reverse that decision, despite pressure from the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of the world’s wealthiest nations that Israel acceded to in 2010. Following an OECD meeting at which the issue was raised, Raed Mualem, the institute’s vice-president, said: “The participants … couldn’t understand how come six colleges in the area [the Galilee] get state support, while the only institute that doesn’t get state support is the one located in the largest Arab city.”
Nazareth is also soon to benefit from a new private hi-tech industrial park, the brainchild of Stef Wertheimer, a billionaire industrialist. Wertheimer, who has established half a dozen such parks previously in Jewish communities, has apparently heeded the OECD officials who have been railing against Israel’s long-standing exclusion of qualified Palestinian citizens from most of the economy. A poll in 2010 found that 83 per cent of Israeli businesses in the main professions admitted being opposed to hiring Arab graduates. That explains why 15,000 are unemployed or in low-skilled jobs.
Wertheimer, it seems, is hoping to make use of this large pool of untapped talent. Yossi Cohen, director of a hi-tech training program in Nazareth, told the Israeli media recently that, of 84,000 jobs in Israel’s hi-tech industries, only 500 had been filled by Arabs. In familiar vein, Wertheimer has framed the venture as a coexistence initiative, bringing Jews and Arabs together. But the billionaire has struggled to conceal his own prejudices. Justifying the coexistence philosophy behind his park, he said: “When people work together, they have no time for nonsense. They’re too tired at night to commit terrorist acts.”
Despite these welcome private initiatives, the government’s influence has been consistently, and cynically, malign. Israeli officials no longer speak of “Judaization”—the term sounds too racist. Now they talk of “developing the Negev and the Galilee,” the two regions with heavy Palestinian populations. There is even a Minister for Development of the Negev and Galilee.
But in case there is any misunderstanding about what the ministry means by “development,” one need only look at its priorities. A study published in March 2012 found that, of an annual budget of $45 million, not a single cent was earmarked for the Arab population. Instead, most of the funds are directed at a program initiated by the government in 2009 to attract 600,000 Jews to the two regions by 2020. They will be offered tax breaks and heavily discounted land, while businesses are given incentives to relocate.
Each municipality in Israel has three potential sources of income: a local tax on residents, business and commercial taxes, and a balancing grant from the central government. No community can rely solely on income from its residents, least of all Arab towns and villages where poverty rates are three times higher than in Jewish areas.
A study in 2009 by Ben Gurion University in Beersheva revealed that, measured as a percentage of income, families in Arab communities paid a local tax rate 50 per cent higher than families in Jewish communities. The reason was both that Arab families were much poorer and that their municipalities had little other income to rely on because they lacked land for industrial and commercial zones.
None of this is remotely by accident. Several large state institutions have been built inside Nazareth, for example, and yet the income from them, which amounts to many hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, ends up in the coffers of Upper Nazareth. How is that possible?
It works this way. A complex of buildings located just inside Nazareth’s municipal borders that includes the local Interior Ministry office and the district courthouse was simply transferred by the government to Upper Nazareth. Similarly, a now-defunct military base, covering 100 dunams, sits as a Jewish enclave in the middle of a residential area of Nazareth, after it was assigned to Upper Nazareth in the 1970s on “security grounds.” The base closed several years ago but the site also includes a hotel, whose revenues accrue to Upper Nazareth. Nazareth’s demands for the return of the land so that it can develop housing and a commercial center there have been repeatedly ignored.
This is a pattern reflected across the country, according to a survey in 2010 by a Nazareth research center, Dirasat. It found that Arab local authorities received a minuscule 0.2 per cent of the local taxes paid by government institutions. Almost everything went to Jewish communities instead.
Upper Nazareth, despite benefiting from its own large industrial zone, was also assigned in the early 1990s an additional substantial industrial park—some distance outside its municipal borders—on 7,500 dunams confiscated from the Arab villages of Mashhad and Kana.
The Tzipporit industrial zone includes some of the country’s most polluting industries, close to the villages’ homes. In 2010, after years of campaigning, the residents finally managed to get an aluminum plant there closed. One resident of Mashhad, where cancer rates are reported to have risen dramatically, observed: “We get all the pollution while Upper Nazareth gets all the financial benefits.”
Another survey has found that an average Jewish municipality receives nearly five times more in city taxes than an Arab municipality. Such a stark imbalance should be addressed by the central government’s balancing grant, which is supposed to ensure that the poorest local authorities can still provide essential services. But research also shows that, despite Arab municipalities being much poorer than Jewish ones—in fact, two-thirds are effectively bankrupt—they typically get only a third of the grant received by Jewish municipalities.
Pilgrims Make Hasty Progress
In 2009 Nazareth hosted possibly the world’s most famous pilgrim. During his tour of the Holy Land, Pope Benedict XVI decided he would stage his main mass on Mount Precipice, with the proceedings broadcast live to a global audience. The venue was an open-air amphitheater that had been intended for the visit in Easter 2000 of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, but was never completed.
The original plan had been to use the amphitheater not only for John Paul II but as the stage for famous rock bands to welcome in the millennium in the city of the Annunciation where—as Nazareth’s official slogan states—“it all began”: the Archangel Gabriel’s revelation to Mary that she was carrying the son of God launched 2,000 years of Christian history. Television deals, it was hoped, would ensure the world’s eyes were turned to Nazareth on the eve of the year 2000.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, riding a wave of international approbation surrounding the Oslo accords in the early 1990s, agreed to release massive funds to Nazareth for the first time in the country’s history. The “Nazareth 2000” project included money for the amphitheater; a makeover of the Old City, where several churches, including the Basilica of the Annunciation, are located; and the city’s upgrading to “Development Zone A,” priority status to encourage new investment, especially in hotels.
Nazareth’s tourism officials recall that this sudden about-turn in government policy was prompted mostly by a fear that sustained media coverage for the millennium and the Pope’s visit a few months later might highlight quite what a shambolic state the city was in.
People who have never visited Nazareth might assume that it ranks as one of the great tourism cities, and that it benefits from the revenues generated by so many visitors. They would be mistaken, however. Certainly, Nazareth attracts a large number of visitors each year, but very few of them spend any time or money in the city. The reason is that tourism to Nazareth, as well as the occupied Christian holy sites in East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, has been almost exclusively controlled by Israeli Jewish travel agents and tour operators for decades.
This control extends even to the tour guides themselves. The Israeli tourism ministry licenses all guides, and their permits can be revoked if they mention “political” issues. Which is why so many tourists and pilgrims leave the region without ever hearing the word “occupation” uttered.
A few years ago, the Israeli parliament tried to pass a law barring Palestinians from acting as tour guides in case they presented Israel in bad light. But in reality the law was entirely superfluous. Tour guides have been cowed into silence on “political” matters, fully aware that, should their comments be relayed back to the tour organizers, they will lose their jobs.
I have experienced this at first-hand on more than one occasion. For example, I remember joining a group of Danish students on their coach as they headed out of Nazareth to visit the destroyed Palestinian village of Saffuriya nearby, now a Jewish rural community renamed Tzippori. The Palestinian village’s thousands of inhabitants were forced out in 1948 as Israel used for the first time its fledgling air force to bomb Saffuriya’s homes. Today the ruins are covered by a forest planted by an international Zionist charity, the Jewish National Fund.
I asked the coach driver, an Israeli Jew, to take us through a neighbourhood of Nazareth known as Safafra, established in the 1950s by Saffuriyans who fled to Nazareth rather than Lebanon and Syria. Today it still looks much like a refugee camp. As I explained Safafra’s story over the microphone, the driver interrupted. “What’s your ID number?” he demanded angrily. Assuming I was a registered tour guide, he intended to get my permit revoked.
This suffocating grip on tourism to the Holy Land means that Nazareth has been almost entirely marginalized in the typical pilgrim’s schedule. Those arriving on an organized tour, as most do, are shepherded to Mizra, a Jewish community in the Jezreel Valley, where they have lunch in a canteen. Then they are dropped close to the Basilica in Nazareth and told to follow the guide directly to the church. From their often anxious expressions, it seems that they are warned not to talk to the natives. They then head back to the waiting coach and drive straight off to Tiberias. The vast majority stay in the city for less than an hour, and rarely buy even a bottle of water.
Why do almost all of them stay in Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, which unlike Nazareth suffers from uncomfortably high levels of humidity through much of the year? Because Israel awarded the Jewish city “Development Zone A” status back in the 1950s. Investors poured money into hotel-building, while Nazareth, which was denied such status, had to rely on a few established pilgrim hostels. Later in the 1970s, Upper Nazareth gained “Zone A” status. As a result, the Plaza, the first modern hotel serving tourists to Nazareth, was built not in the holy city but just inside Upper Nazareth.
Rabin, however, accepted that the neglect of Nazareth could not continue indefinitely. Work began on building the amphitheater; the Old City, which included Nazareth’s lively souq (market), was closed for renovations; and developers started to erect a handful of large hotels.
In the mid-1990s Nazarenes thought a corner was finally being turned in Jewish-Arab relations. That explains why in Ula Tabari’s “Private Investigation,” a documentary covering that period, some Nazarenes can be seen enthusiastically waving the Israeli flag—with the exclusionary Star of David symbol at its center—on what Israeli Jews call their Independence Day, and Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or the “catastrophe” of their dispossession in 1948.
The mood of optimism would soon sour, however. Rabin was assassinated in 1995, and elections a year later brought the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu to power. He immediately pulled the plug on the amphitheater, apparently concerned that Israel would be represented by a non-Jewish city for the millennium celebrations.
The renovations of the Old City continued, though on a reduced budget. All these years later, traders in the old market have not a good word to say about the project. Much of the Old City was turned into a no-go area for several years while the narrow alleys were paved, pipes were installed to stop the winter flooding that caused sewage to run down the streets, and shop fronts were torn out so that they could be replaced with standardized green shutters.
What old-world charm the market possessed was largely excised, but much of the ramshackle infrastructure of the Old City remained, including the eyesore of dozens of crisscrossing electricity and telephone cables strung across each alley.
But worst for the traders was the Old City’s extended closure. The market had attracted not only Nazarenes but shoppers from across the Galilee, including many Israeli Jews who came on the Sabbath, when Jewish communities shut down for the weekend. All were now redirected to a “temporary” market in Upper Nazareth, next to the ring road that marks the border between the two cities.
When the Old City reopened, its customers did not return. The temporary market continued to operate and Nazareth’s market never recovered. The municipality lost yet more of its already meagre income from the relocation of local businesses.
Christians vs. Muslims
Pope John Paul II’s impending visit had another negative consequence for Nazareth, one that is being felt to this day. As the city geared up for the celebrations, some inhabitants started to feel aggrieved.
It is often mistakenly assumed that Nazareth is a Christian-majority city; in fact, two-thirds of the population is Muslim. This is, in part, a legacy of the massive demographic dislocation of 1948, when refugees flooded into the city from nearby Arab villages. But Nazareth also has a long-standing Muslim community that has lived peacefully alongside Christian neighbors for hundreds of years.
The Nazareth 2000 project entirely ignored the city’s Muslims. The more that local Christians readied for their celebrations, and state funds were directed their way, the more it underscored to some Muslims the historic injustice that had been perpetrated against them by their state.
As already mentioned, Israel had been fearful of antagonizing world opinion by attacking Nazareth during the 1948 war. Afterwards, it left the churches and their extensive holdings in the city untouched. The Muslim community was treated very differently.
Before Israel’s creation, pious Muslims often bequeathed part of their property, land or wealth to an Islamic endowment called the Waqf. There it was used for the community’s benefit: to build and maintain mosques, schools, orphanages, cemeteries, community centers and so on. Although the Waqf was run locally, it had been nominally overseen by the Ottoman—and Islamic—rulers of the region for hundreds of years.
Assuming the Ottoman role, Israel assigned itself not only sovereignty over all the Waqf land and property but also the right to confiscate most of it for “public purposes”—meaning, as we have already seen, for the benefit of the Jewish community. Muslims were effectively left with little more than the mosques and cemeteries that were in use in 1948 in the towns and villages that survived the wave of destruction. Everything else was lost.
The wound of that assault on their rights is still to heal. And the Nazareth 2000 project felt to some like a blatant attempt to rub in yet more salt.
The response was not long coming. When in the mid-1990s the municipality demolished a disused school in front of the Basilica to create a tourist plaza, a small group of Muslims occupied the vacant lot and declared it Waqf land. They based their claim on the fact that a small tomb close by was dedicated to Shihab a-Din, a nephew of Salah a-Din, the nemesis of the Crusaders. They proposed building a huge mosque at the site, one that would overshadow the Basilica and serve as a symbolic challenge to the dominance of the Church and by extension local Christians.
Tempers quickly flared. Muslims pointed out that they were the majority but, unlike the Christians, lacked land in Nazareth to build holy places. The city’s leaders and the Christian community regarded the Shihab a-Din mosque, as it became known, as a thinly veiled effort to sabotage Nazareth 2000 and fuel sectarian divisions.
The Israeli government intervened by setting up two ministerial committees to investigate the rival claims. Strangely, the committees sided for the first time with the Muslim community and its claim to Waqf land. The government supported building the new mosque, although it required that the scale be reduced. In Easter 1999, clashes erupted between groups of Christians and Muslims.
The street fighting received plenty of coverage in the international media. A view shared by city leaders on both sides of the religious divide was that Israel was intentionally stirring the pot. One told me: “Israel has a vested interest in provoking a feud. That will suggest to the world that Christians and Muslims cannot live together and that only Israel can secure peace. If that message is accepted, then Israel bolsters its claim to being the guardian of the holy places, and most importantly those in Jerusalem. That’s what this is all about.”
I arrived in Nazareth a year after Pope John Paul II’s visit in spring 2000. Other events, which we shall turn to in a minute, had taken the edge off the Shihab a-Din dispute. A permanent contingent of Muslims had taken over the square, scattering prayer rugs across it. Christians had become largely resigned to the construction of a modest mosque at the site.
But, in a reversion to type, the Israeli government stalled on granting planning permission. The Muslim faithful who guarded the site became impatient and in early 2003 they started to build the mosque’s foundations without approval.
For several months nothing happened. But at sunrise one day in July, I was slowly roused from my sleep by an insistent drone that, in my half-dream state, I mistook at first for an annoying fly hovering close by. But gradually I became aware that the noise was in fact emanating from helicopters circling low overhead. I dressed and followed others out of the Old City and towards the Basilica.
There, I found hundreds of police, some heavily armed, stationed on the roads in every direction around the church. The city center was under siege. With no warning, bulldozers had moved into the square to demolish the beginnings of the mosque. It was an operation that lasted a few hours, though armed police cordoned off the area for days more.
Later, the Israeli media reported on the chain of events leading to the destruction. When the Pope learnt that the mosque’s foundations had been laid, he complained to the U.S. President, George W Bush, who in turn called Ariel Sharon to order the building razed.
The story did not end there, however. The square was fenced off with corrugated iron sheeting as the Housing Ministry worked to establish a public park inside. When its handiwork was unveiled in 2006, Nazarenes were astonished to see that at its center there was the metal skeleton of a small mosque, complete with a dome and painted in green – the colour of Islam.
Within days a group of Shihab a-Din activists congregated under the dome and placed prayer rugs on the floor. The police moved them off, but after a few weeks of cat-and-mouse an unofficial compromise was reached in which the group was allowed to use the square to stage the main sermon of the week, each Friday at noon.
The bitterness, however, grew for a core of activists. According to Nazareth officials, the Israeli security services, especially the notorious Shin Bet, which operates collaborators in both Israel and the occupied territories, had assiduously cultivated relations with the Shihab a-Din activists in the 1990s, when the mosque project had government backing. A degree of support seemed to continue. Muslims put up large provocative banners in the square, confronting tourists as they headed from their coaches to the Basilica. One warned: “And whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and in the Hereafter he will be one of the losers.”
Three years later the signs are still there, even though erecting them in a public place is illegal without approval from the police.
The banners first appeared a few weeks before the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI in May 2009. His predecessor, John Paul II, had captured many Nazarenes’ hearts with a slow procession down the main street in his Popemobile shaking hands with locals as he made his way to the Basilica. The city assumed Benedict would do likewise. Thousands of residents, Christians and Muslims alike, lined the same route to greet him after his mass on Mount Precipice.
But after hours of waiting, the police finally urged the crowds to go home. The Pope had earlier been smuggled into the church in a Mercedes with blacked-out windows. He had been advised by the Shin Bet that it would not be safe for him to meet the local people.
For Nazarenes, that moment encapsulated the extent of Israel’s control over their city. Under Israeli guidance, the Pope had avoided meeting them, just as they were shunned by the hundeds of thousands of pilgrims who visit the city each year; and he had preferred to entrust his safety to Israel rather than his own flock in Nazareth. It felt like the ultimate betrayal.
Almost inevitably, Israel’s meddling over the Shihab a-Din affair resulted in what security experts like to term “blowback”. In 2010, a small cell of Muslims connected to the mosque were accused of murdering a Jewish taxi driver and evidence emerged that some had sought training at an al-Qaeda camp in Somalia. In April 2012, the mosque’s sheikh, Nazem Abu Salim, was convicted of “incitement to terrorism” and support for a terrorist organisation.
The ‘Enemy’ Next Door
The tunnel that cut a swath through the foot of Mount Precipice was built for a reason—and it had nothing to do with improving journey times to Nazareth, either for the city’s inhabitants or for the tourists.
The plan for the tunnel road had emerged in the immediate aftermath of what became known as the October 2000 events, in which 12 Palestinian citizens and a laborer from Gaza were shot dead by Israeli police in the Galilee at the start of the second intifada. Hundreds more were seriously wounded.
In Nazareth, where three people were killed over the course of events, the police initiated the violence by opening fire with rubber bullets on demonstrators staging a peaceful march from the Salam mosque down the main street. They were protesting the killing the day before of Mohammad al-Durra, a 12-year-old boy whose death under a hail of Israeli bullets in Gaza had been repeatedly shown on Arabic satellite channels.
Youths erected barricades in the center of Nazareth and threw stones at police. The police responded with live fire, killing a young man and wounding dozens more. In other areas, Palestinian youth burned tires on roads in anger at the mounting death toll. After two days of clashes, Palestinians in the Galilee were stunned into submission by the ferocity of the police onslaught.
One evening several days later, Nazarenes in the eastern neighborhood—on the slope below Upper Nazareth – heard a call over the local mosque’s loudspeaker to defend the city against an attack by residents from the neighboring Jewish city.
A large crowd from Upper Nazareth, which included armed off-duty policemen, had crossed over the ring road and was making its way into Nazareth. A tense stand-off ensued, as on-duty police held the line between the two sides. One participant noted: “It was clear where the police’s sympathies lay. We were under attack and yet the police faced off with us and had their backs to the invaders from Upper Nazareth.”
After lengthy negotiations, the crowd from Nazareth agreed to leave first. As they headed downhill, they were sprayed with automatic fire; two Nazarenes were killed with shots to the back of their heads. The police shooters, it later emerged, were stationed on the tall court building that overlooks Nazareth.
I moved to Nazareth from my journalist’s job in London a short time afterwards to investigate these events and write a book about them, which I completed in 2005 under the title “Blood and Religion.” It was clear to me that there had been a shoot-to-kill policy, a finding that was partially confirmed by a judicial commission of inquiry. It concluded that institutionally the police regarded the country’s Palestinian minority as “an enemy.”
Despite the commission’s disturbing findings, Israeli Jews, including politicians and the police, were wedded to their racist conception of their Palestinian compatriots. Officials drew a paranoid conclusion from the October 2000 events: Jewish communities in the Galilee like Upper Nazareth must never be as vulnerable again to the “internal Palestinian enemy.”
The tunnel road, points out Mohammad Zeidan, head of the Human Rights Association in Nazareth, was built primarily to bypass Nazareth in so far as was possible given the hilly terrain. The new road offered a more secure connection between the Jewish city and the Jezreel Valley and the rest of Israel. A similar logic underpinned a plan, reported in July 2012, to build a road especially for Upper Nazareth so that its residents could avoid driving through neighboring Arab villages. The Jewish city’s mayor, Shimon Gapso, described the need for the road as an “existential issue,” ensuring the city could not be “besieged,” as had occurred, he said, during October 2000. Meanwhile, Rassem Ghamaisi, a geographer at nearby Haifa University, described the plan as the creation of “apartheid roads.” Understood in this light, Rafael Eitan’s name could not have been more appropriate for the tunnel road.
But if the goal was to turn Palestinians into “drugged cockroaches”, trapped inside their “bottles,” the Judaization campaign against Nazareth could not be judged wholly a success.
As we have seen, Upper Nazareth managed to contain the expansion and development of Nazareth and the Arab villages around it through a series of land grabs. And the government successfully redirected the area’s wealth away from Arab communities towards the Jewish city. But officials found it much harder to “transfer the center of gravity of life” to Upper Nazareth. Part of this failure can be attributed to a long-term development apparently unforseen by Israeli planners. As Arab communities were progressively choked by Upper Nazareth, many of their inhabitants drew the obvious conclusion: they should move to the Jewish city.
In most of Israel that would have been impossible. More than 700 rural communities, controlling 80 per cent of Israel’s territory, enforce a strict form of housing apartheid. They bar Palestinian citizens through admissions committees that are designed to weed out “undesirable” applicants. Efforts by Palestinian families to petition the courts to force such communities to accept them were effectively stymied by a new law in 2011 upholding the legality of the admissions committees.
But access to homes in Israeli cities is governed by the free market. In cities in the country’s center, such as Tel Aviv, Palestinian citizens simply cannot find someone willing to sell to them. Demand from Jewish buyers is high and the social opprobrium of selling to a non-Jew is even higher.
But Upper Nazareth is different. During its history, most of those who were settled there by the authorities were new immigrants—today, mostly from Russia and Ethiopia. After their arrival, they quickly realised that they had been cheated of the Zionist dream, dumped in the peripheries close to “primitive” Palestinians.
As soon as these immigrants learn Hebrew and accumulate enough savings, they sell their homes in Upper Nazareth and head for a better life in the center of the country. But, with no new major sources of immigration since the collapse of the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago, there are few Jews to sell to. Instead Palestinian families from Nazareth, desperate for a place to live, are prepared to pay over the odds. Many Jewish families have sold to Palestinians, reversing the Judaization process.
Although Israeli officials are tight-lipped about the extent of this phenomenon, it is known that by 2005 the government had begun classifying Upper Nazareth as a mixed city. According to most estimates, at least a fifth of Upper Nazareth’s population is now Palestinian.
The backlash has not been long in coming. In the 2009 local elections an independent, Shimon Gapso, was elected mayor. Gapso is known to be close to Avigdor Lieberman.
Gapso soon made headlines, banning Christmas trees from public buildings, pledging to block any attempt to build a mosque or Arab school in Upper Nazareth, lobbying for a national ban on mosque loudspeakers (a policy taken up by Netanyahu in 2011) and averring repeatedly that the city was for “Jews only.”
In 2011 his municipality was found in contempt of court for ignoring a decade-old ruling that required the city to replace road signs so that they included Arabic as well as Hebrew. The council was found to have failed to implement the decision even on the new signs it erected.
Gapso is riding a popular racist wave, which is only too clear to Palestinian families in the city.
My wife, who is from Nazareth, has a relative in Upper Nazareth. A few years ago I attended a birthday party for her young daughter one Saturday afternoon. The children started playing the usual games in the garden, but after a few minutes there was pounding at the door. Three policemen stood there, looking grave. We were told the music must be turned off immediately or they would stop the party—and make arrests if necessary. The music was not loud, and Upper Nazareth is considered one of Israel’s most secular Jewish cities, so we had not offended religious sensitivities. The neighbors simply did not want to hear Arabic music, and the police were fully prepared to enforce their prejudices.
I got a sense of the mood in Upper Nazareth at around that time when I went to interview a councillor, Zeev Hartman, who in the 1980s belonged to the Tzomet party of Rafael Eitan. He had made headlines in the local papers by promoting a scheme to pay Palestinians living in Upper Nazareth to leave not only the city but the country. He boasted to one reporter that he had helped an Arab man to move his young family to Germany so that he could study.
Hartman became much coyer about his scheme when he realized I was planning to write a piece for the foreign media.
But he does not hide his views from local audiences. In 2009 he and other councillors from Upper Nazareth recorded a video message for Israel’s Independence Day, stating their wish for the coming year. His was for “all the Arabs to disappear.”
His ideas appear to be gaining ground fast. In June 2012, it was revealed that the Yisrael Beiteinu party in Upper Nazareth had devised a scheme to buy the homes of Palestinians in the city and pay them $10,000 in exchange for a promise never to return. Gapso praised the initiative, but added that he could not officially support it for “legal reasons.”
Gapso, however, has his own plans for pushing Palestinian families out of Upper Nazareth.
Shortly after his election, it was reported that he had reached an agreement with the Housing Minister, Ariel Attias, a member of the religious fundamentalist Shas party. The government would build an entire new neighborhood in Upper Nazareth for the Haredim, the black-coated ultra-religious Jews, on land confiscated from several Arab villages in the 1970s.
The advantage for Gapso is that the Haredim have huge families, often with nine or 10 children. If all goes to plan, and the first tenders for the houses were published in June 2012, the 3,000 homes will nearly double the city’s Jewish population in a generation.
Gapso is also planning to establish a hesder yeshiva, a religious seminary that combines Bible study with military service, to attract ultra-nationalist families, including some of the settlers forced out of Gaza during the disengagement of 2005. He has won support from Dov Lior, rabbi to the extremist—and often violent— settlers in Kiryat Arba next to Hebron, in the West Bank.
In 2009 Gapso observed: “As a man of Greater Israel, I think it is more important to settle in the Galilee than in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], where natural growth is high and enough Jews already live. I urge the settlers there to come here.”
Gapso’s goal is not just about changing the demographic balance in Upper Nazareth through higher Jewish birth rates, but about making life so unbearable for its Palestinian residents that they will choose to leave. In Israel, the Haredim are known for their savage intolerance to those who do not strictly observe Judaism’s religious laws. In towns where the Haredim live alongside secular Jews, there are regular reports of assaults on “immodest women,”the stoning of cars driving on the Sabbath, and attacks on shops selling non-kosher items.
Mohammed Zeidan, of the Human Rights Association, says Gapso is so determined to rid his city of Palestinian families that he is prepared to risk clashes between the Haredim and the city’s secular Russian immigrants, his natural supporters. “Like all the other officials before him who made Judaization their holy grail, he is so blinded by his racism that, it seems, this end justifies any means.”
And there is no guarantee that, ultimately, such an upheaval will not engulf Nazareth too.
In the mixed city of Acre, where religious extremists and settlers began streaming in a decade ago, clashes erupted in 2008 over a Palestinian resident who drove through a Jewish neighbourhood on a holy day while playing music in his car. Jewish and Arab gangs fought on the streets for several days and Arab homes were torched.
A similar fate may be just around the corner for Nazareth and its Jewish twin. ■
EXPOSING U.S. AGENTS OF LOW-INTENSITY WARFARE IN AFRICA
The “Policy Wonks” Behind Covert Warfare & Humanitarian Fascism
This special report includes three unpublished video clips of interviewees from the Politics of Genocide documentary film project: Ugandan dignitary Remigius Kintu, former Rwandan prime minister Fautisn Twagiramungu, and Nobel peace prize nominee Juan Carrero Saralegui.
By Kieth Harmon Snow | Conscious Being Alliance | August 13, 2012
From the 1980s to today, an elite group of Western intelligence operatives have backed low-intensity guerrilla warfare in certain African ‘hotspots’. Mass atrocities in the Great Lakes and Sudan can be linked to Roger Winter, a pivotal U.S. operative whose ‘team’ was recently applauded for birthing the world’s newest nation, South Sudan. Behind the fairytale we find a long trail of blood and skeletons from Uganda to Sudan, Rwanda and Congo. While the mass media has covered their tracks, their misplaced moralism has simultaneously helped birth a new left-liberal ‘humanitarian’ fascism. In this falsification of consciousness, Western human rights crusaders and organizations, funded by governments, multinational corporations and private donors, cheer the killers and blame the victims—and pat themselves on the back for saving Africa from itself. Meanwhile, the “Arab Spring” has spread to (north) Sudan. Following the NATO-Israeli model of regime change being used in Central & North Africa, it won’t be long before the fall of Khartoum.
SPLA Tank in South Sudan: An old SPLA army tank sits in the bush in Pochalla, Jonglei State, south Sudan in 2004. Israel, the United States, Britain and Norway have been the main suppliers of the covert low-intensity war in Sudan, organized by gunrunners and policy ‘wonks’. Photo c. keith harmon snow, 2004.
It is, oh! such a happy fairy tale! It begins as all happy fairy tales do, in fantasy land. The fantasy is one of human rights princes and policy ‘wonks’ in shining armor and the new kingdom of peace and tranquility, democracy and human rights, that they have created. That is what the United States foreign policy establishment and the corporate mass media—and not a few so-called ‘human rights activists’—would have us believe about the genesis of the world’s newest nation, South Sudan.
“In the mid-1980s, a small band of policy wonks began convening for lunch in the back corner of a dimly lit Italian bistro in the U.S. capital,” wrote Rebecca Hamilton in the recent fairytale: “The Wonks Who Sold Washington on South Sudan.” Hamilton is a budding think-tank activist-advocate-agent whose whitewash of the low intensity war for Sudan (and some Western architects of it), distilled from her book Fighting for Darfur, was splashed all over the Western press on 11 July 2012. [1]
The photos accompanying Hamilton’s story show a happy fraternity of ‘wonks’—John Prendergast, Eric Reeves, Brian D’Silva, Ted Dagne and Roger Winter. What exactly is a ‘wonk’? Well, looking at the photo, these ‘wonks’ are obviously your usual down-jacket, beer- and coffee-slurping American citizens from white America, with a token black man thrown in to change the complexion of this Africa story. Their cups are white and clean, their cars are shiny and new, their convivial smiles are almost convincing. There is even a flag of the new country just sort of floating across Eric Reeves’ hip.
Because of Dr. Reeves’ ‘anti-genocide’ work in Sudan, Boston College professor Alan Wolfe has written that the Smith College English professor is “arrogant to the point of contempt.” (I have had a similar though much more personal experience of Dr. Reeves’ petulance.)
“John Prendergast (L-R), Eric Reeves, Brian D’Silva, Ted Dagne and Roger Miller [sic]—pose for a photograph in this undated image provided to Reuters by John Prendergast,” reads the original Reuters syndicated news caption for the posed image of the Council of Wonks. (U.S. intelligence & defense operative Roger Winter is misidentified as “Roger Miller”.)
The story and its photos project the image of casual, ordinary people who, we are led to believe, did heroic and superhuman things. What a bunch of happy-go-lucky wonks! Excuse me: policy wonks! And their bellies are presumably warmed by that fresh Starbucks ‘fair trade’ genocide coffee shipped straight from the killing fields of post-genocide [sic] Rwanda… where, coincidentally, Starbucks reportedly cut a profit of more than a few million dollars in 2011.
This is a tale of dark knights, of covert operators and spies aligned with the cult of intelligence in the United States. Operating in secrecy and denial within the U.S. intelligence and defense establishment, they have helped engineer more than two decades of low intensity warfare in Sudan (alone), replete with massive suffering and a death toll of between 1.5 and 3 million Sudanese casualties—using their own fluctuating statistics on mortality—and millions upon millions of casualties in the Great Lakes of Africa.
Behind the fantasy is a very real tale of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocides real and alleged, and mass atrocities covered up by these National Security agents with the aid of a not-so-ordinary English professor—their one-man Ministry of Disinformation—Dr. Eric Reeves.
“After ordering beers, they would get down to business: how to win independence for southern Sudan, a war-torn place most American politicians had never heard of.” Rebecca Hamilton thickened the plot, delving deeper into the intrigue and the extra-ordinariness of this happy Council of Wonks. “They called themselves the Council and gave each other clannish nicknames: the Emperor, the Deputy Emperor, the Spear Carrier. The unlikely fellowship included an Ethiopian refugee to America, an English-lit professor and a former Carter administration official who once sported a ponytail.”
How quaint! How absolutely Clark Kent! From the photo, I immediately recognized three of the five Council of Wonks members posed casually next to a car in some nondescript parking lot somewhere in America. There is John Prendergast, Eric Reeves, Brian D’Silva, Ted Dagne and… Roger Winter. (Not ‘Roger Miller’: the massive Reuters syndicate can’t even get the wonk’s name right.)
“The Council is little known in Washington or in Africa itself.” Rebecca Hamilton deepened the intrigue. “But its quiet cajoling over nearly three decades helped South Sudan win its independence one year ago this week. Across successive U.S. administrations, they smoothed the path of southern Sudanese rebels in Washington, influenced legislation in Congress, and used their positions to shape foreign policy in favor of Sudan’s southern rebels, often with scant regard for U.S. government protocol.”
Smoothed the path of the Sudanese rebels? That’s an understatement. That’s not all they did.
Faustin Twagiramungu, former Prime Minister under Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front government (1994-1995), speaks on U.S. intelligence operative Roger Winter:
Wonks? What is a wonk anyway? Sounds excessively benign. Even charming. Not being an English professor-cum-genocide-savior or a national security operative or a gun-running covert intelligence asset myself, I looked the word up in my American Heritage dictionary, but it doesn’t exist in my (apparently) antiquated copy. Seems the word ‘wonk’ is about as new as the country of South Sudan.
wonk/wäNGk/
|
|
Synonyms: bookworm, dink [slang], dork [slang], geek, grind, swot [British], weenie, nerd
“Look at the names mentioned by the story,” says Dr. Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, one of many former Rwandan government officials who continues to be harassed by the regime of president Paul Kagame in Rwanda and watched by U.S. Homeland Security. “All of them have a good cover. They move from one job to another easily. The story suggests they are somehow unrelated to the U.S. government even though their employer is the U.S. government.”
What does this Roger Winter know about the Rwandan rebel ‘Zero Network’ and alleged CIA involvement in shooting down the presidential plane on April 6, 1994—assassinating the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, their top aides and the French crew? Was Roger Winter involved in the October 23, 1993 assassination of Burundi’s Hutu president Melchior Ndadaye?
“It is also known that Roger Winter, an influential American politician, was present at Paul Kagame’s headquarters at Mulindi [Rwanda] a few days before the offensive launched in the night of April 6-7, 1994,” reported Bernard Lugan, a prominent French historian and the editor of the online journal L’Afrique Réelle.
“Whoever shot down the plane, the killing began within hours, as Kagame and his Tutsi army fought their way toward Kigali to stop the genocide they had helped provoke,” wrote U.S. scholar-diplomat Stephen Weissman in 2004. While selling the establishment mythology where Kagame ‘stopped the genocide’—which the RPF actually provoked and supported—Weissman also elaborates a very serious point. “Traveling with them, by his own account, was at least one American—the refugee’s [Paul Kagame’s] friend Roger Winter. Should Congress ever investigate America’s role in the Rwandan holocaust, Mr. Winter would be a star witness.” [2]
“Roger Winter was the chief logistics boss for [RPF] Tutsis until their victory in 1994,” said Ugandan dignitary Remigius Kintu, “and he was operating from 1717 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington D.C. This was the nerve center of the operations against Rwanda.”
Ugandan dignitary Remigius Kintu speaks on U.S. intelligence operative Roger Winter:
Storyteller Rebecca Hamilton set out to save Sudan from itself during her “Save Darfur” days at Harvard University, circa 2004, where she organized the campaign to divest Harvard from corporations doing business with Khartoum.
Since then, doors have opened for Rebecca Hamilton everywhere she goes—though she was once detained in Khartoum. Surprised to be suspect as a ‘journalist’, Hamilton later chronicled her six-hour ordeal in the Atlantic Monthly, where she positioned herself as an innocent journalist detained by the Government of Sudan’s “dreaded internal security agency”. With her cell phone on mute she texted her husband to “contact [my] employer in Washington”—but she didn’t tell us who that employer in Washington is.
A “special correspondent for the Washington Post in Sudan,” Rebecca Hamilton is also supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the New America Foundation. These institutions serve and advance the ever expanding Anglo-American Zionist Empire—multinational corporations and investment banks and currency speculators like Soros and the German Jewish firm Warburg Pincus. [3] These entities have deep ties to establishment news corporations and their use of qualifiers like ‘Pulitzer’—perceived to be synonymous with truth and integrity in investigative reporting—only serve to blind the ‘news’ consuming masses to these institutions’ hidden agendas. They are also deeply tied to powerful Christian and Jewish interests, and lobbies.
The New America Foundation is funded by all the big foundations (Ford, MacArthur, Pew, Bill & Melinda Gates, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Open Society) and the U.S. Department of State donates hundreds of thousands of dollars (in the $299,000 to $999,999 category) annually. Members of their ‘Leadership Council’ and ‘National Security Advisory Council’ include the prominent Council on Foreign Relations member Fareed Zakaria. An editor-at-large at Time, a Washington Post columnist and the host of CNN‘s foreign-affairs show, Zakaria is also director of The Aspen Institute. [4] Zakaria was a columnist for Newsweek and editor of Newsweek International from 2000 to 2010. On August 10, 2012, Zakaria was suspended from several media positions for plagiarism.
Back in 2008, the New American Foundation funded another major agitprop piece on Roger Winter by Eliza Griswold in the New York Times Magazine. Another sanitized story, a bit more honest though, “The Man for a New Sudan” makes it clear that Roger Winter effectively served as a military commander for the SPLM in Sudan. Like Rebecca Hamilton’s wonk fare, it is a story of a white knight in shining armor fighting his way to martyrdom, hand and foot, suffering and sandstorms, rag-tag rebels and roughshod rebellion, against the evil and superior Khartoum government. [5]
What western ‘news’ consumers fail to understand is that these left-liberal institutions hone and tune the ‘news’ that appears in venues across the political spectrum. ‘News’ stories like “The Wonks Who Sold Washington on South Sudan” are produced with the understanding that they will: [a] serve corporate interests; [b] advance themes of democracy and freedom; [c] shield western power brokers from criticism and scrutiny; [d] whitewash western war crimes; [e] demonize anyone perceived to be hostile to the western economic and financial systems; and [f] support economic, political and/or military warfare all over the world.
These hegemonic objectives are achieved by overt and covert means, including: conventional warfare; intelligence operations; low intensity warfare; psychological operations or Psy-Ops; assassinations; coup d’etats; subversion; ‘democracy promotion’; election-rigging; and other illegal tax-payer funded foreign interventions.
Clean-cut American ‘media’ personalities and ‘journalists’ like Rebecca Hamilton and Eliza Griswold and Nicholas Kristof are used to manufacture domestic consent—to inculcate ignorance, apathy, confusion, complacency and patriotism—in the English-language (U.S., Canadian, European, Australian) infotainment consuming masses. They are also used to make us more ethnocentric. This is primarily achieved through emotionally potent oversimplifications: facts don’t matter.
The propaganda techniques used by these mainstays of American Freedom [sic] are no more or less manipulative and sinister than those we associate with Russia or China or the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’ states (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen). Like the bloodied victims (whether foreign civilians or U.S. troops), tortures, massacres and other war crimes and crimes against humanity are whited-out from the pages and screens of Western ‘news’ venues, leaving us with sanitized fantasy tales reinforcing our own sense of truth and justice, and the inherent goodness we all want to believe in.
“The lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth,” says war correspondent John Pilger in his documentary film The War You Don’t See. Like the non-coverage of the ongoing western-backed terrorism in Burundi, Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia and Uganda, “The Wonks Who Sold Washington on South Sudan” is a propaganda piece covering up the war we didn’t see—and the war we don’t see—in Sudan. The strategy to fracture and divide Sudan is similar to the strategy at work in the Congo, and it echoes the RPF’s strategy of ‘fight and talk’ used to achieve regime change in Rwanda, 1990 to 1994.
In the low intensity wars waged against Sudan (1989-2006), Uganda (1980-1985), Rwanda (1990-1994) and Congo-Zaire (1996-1997), it was not enough to try to destroy the organized military forces of the legitimate governments in power; a movement or group responsive to U.S. interests had to be created, legitimated, and presented to the target (domestic) populations as viable alternatives to the governments to be overthrown or replaced. For such purposes the U.S. and its allies (primarily U.K. and Israel) sponsored the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the National Resistance Movement (NRM), Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and the Alliance for the Democratic Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL). [6] (Such terrorism has also occurred in northern Uganda—where Museveni’s soldiers targeted the Acholi people.)
SPLA soldiers and captured GoS Tank: SPLA soldiers stand near a Government of Sudan (GoS) tank they destroyed at “Kit bridge battle” in south Sudan in early November 1995. SPLA soldiers commanded by Gabriel Majok Nak (third left) on standby for deployment. Photo by Jimmy Adriko on December 8, 1995, courtesy of the New Vision newspaper Kampala, Uganda.
These propaganda stories and the institutions that manufacture them also whiteout all Israeli ties to the carnage. Israel routinely advised and trained the security forces of the Mobutu regime in Zaire and the Hissen Habre regime in Chad and they backed both Idi Amin and Museveni in their guerrilla wars. Israeli MOSSAD agent David Kimche worked alongside Roger Winter to aide the RPF victory in Rwanda. Israeli commanders were spotted on the battlefields of eastern Congo-Zaire and the Israeli firm Silver Shadow reportedly armed the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces in their alliance with the Congolese warlord Jean Pierre Bemba and his ruthless Movement for the Liberation of Congo. [7]
Israel backed the SPLM with defense and intelligence cooperation for decades. Israel backed the ‘rebels’ in Darfur, both the Sudan Liberation Army—an extension of the SPLM—and, more significantly, the so-called Justice and Equality Movement. Tanks and artillery equipment were off-loaded at the U.S. military port of Mombasa, Kenya, and driven across Kenya and South Sudan. [8]
Israel’s support for the new South Sudan is no longer covert. In April 2012, just before the full-scale SPLA offensive in the disputed Heglig border region, Israeli and South Sudanese newspapers reported that Israeli aircraft have been delivering military hardware and mercenaries (from other African countries) in South Sudan to fight against the Khartoum government. South Sudanese soon after shot down a Sudanese MiG-29 fighter jet: the SPLA claimed that Khartoum “didn’t know we have that capacity.” [9]
In December 2011, Salva Kiir, South Sudan’s new warlord president, chose Israel for one of his first official visits. In November 2011 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosted the leaders of Uganda and Kenya. During his December visit, Kiir held meetings with President Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. These are the same players backing the Dan Gertler companies behind the dictatorship of Hyppolite Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila) and the Western-backed plunder and depopulation in the Congo. [10]
On July 23, 2012, in return for decades of covert Israeli support for the SPLA’s low-intensity war, the SPLA regime running the new South Sudan signed over Sudan’s water rights and “infrastructure development” to Israel. The deals were sealed by Israeli government and agents for Israeli Military Industries (IMI)—an aerospace and defense contractor fully owned by the Israeli government, and a prime U.S. military supplier.
Israeli and South Sudan: Israeli Prime Minsiter Benjamin Netanyahu
with South Sudan President Salva Kiir in December 2011.
Meanwhile, the United States has routinely deployed covert forces in the Great Lakes, Chad, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Mali, Niger—all over the place. In October, 2011, president Barack Obama announced that the Pentagon was sending “100 armed advisers” to Uganda. An insult to the people’s intelligence, these are not “armed advisers”—they are U.S. Special Forces. But U.S. forces are all over the region, from Camp Hurso in Ethiopia and Camp Lemonnier in DJibouti to the new AFRICOM base in Kisangani, Congo. Evidence of the Special Forces is obliterated by most news agencies. If and when the presence of the U.S. military is revealed, it is casually noted, downplaying their presence, as if it were routine.
For example, the Pentagon’s special “conservationist” J. Michael Fay dropped a bombshell in disguise in the story “Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma” in the March 2007 print issue of National Geographic. Ostensibly about elephants in Zakouma National Park in Chad, the story is more imperialist anti-Islamic propaganda related to the Arab militias on horses, hailing out of Darfur, known as Janjaweed. “I saw a large helicopter to the southeast.” Fay builds the drama for the reader. “It made straight for our truck. We could run, but we couldn’t hide. It was a Russian-made Mi-17 with a missile launcher, the same type that had mistakenly fired the day before on a column of Chadian and American soldiers north of the park.” [10-a]
Looking at the map, north of the park could be Chad or Sudan. What is a column of American soldiers doing in Chad? Or is it Darfur? Well, obviously! They are saving elephants!
A few days later, Fay reports “[a] pair of French military Mirage fighter jets running sorties toward Sudan (more than a thousand rebels were retreating there) buzzed the Tinga, spooking a herd of elephants I was watching at the pool.” Oh, and, by the way, “Marc Wall, the U.S. Ambassador to Chad, just happened to be visiting the park.” [10-a]
The article reveals all without revealing anything. The presence of French fighter jets, American soldiers, the U.S. Ambassador—who is out for a “safari”—provide proof of highly organized military campaigns that are rendered invisible by the propaganda system.
“Nationhood has many midwives,” reads the long caption appearing with many of the Council of Wonks story photos. But if the Council of Wonks are the ‘midwives’ of South Sudan’s birthing process, their result has been a bloody abortion and a grotesquely deformed progeny whose ‘leaders’ are promoting ethnic hatred and selling the place off to the highest bidder.
Tirelessly and furiously pumping out disinformation,day in and day out, year in and year out, for several decades now, the happy cabal of Washington wonks has paved the public mind with hysterical accounts of Arab and Islamic terrorism and African tribalism. They have blinded U.S. taxpayers to the unholy truth that our tax dollars have been used to covertly fund, arm, supply and re-supply at least four massive guerrilla insurgencies that have shattered five sovereign countries, terrorized scores of millions of people, and drenched Sudan and the Great Lakes in blood and skeletons.
“Everybody is working to protect the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement [SPLM], but the truth is the SPLM is doing all of these terrible things every day,” says Luke Chuol, a South Sudanese human rights defender based in Canada. “These people from the U.S. and U.N., all they care about is to give the SPLA money and weapons.” [11]
When South Sudan became the world’s newest nation on 9 July 2011, the SPLA—the armed wing of the SPLM—became South Sudan’s national army. Mr. Chuol, a member of the South Sudan’s Nuer tribe, has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate crimes against humanity committed in South Sudan in May 2011 by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The Nuer community alleges that the specific and systematic attacks against the Nuer people constitute ethnic cleansing by the SPLA.
Roger Winter & John Garang: Judging the youth of Sudan People’s Liberation Army leader John Garang (L) and Roger Winter (R), this photo is probably circa 1985 (Winter would have been 42 years old). Garang was trained at Ft. Benning, GA, home to the notorious School of the Americas (from 1984).
Caption created by Reuters: John Garang (L) shakes hands with Roger Winter, now an honorary adviser to the South Sudan government and one of the Council’s original members, in this undated image taken in Sudan and provided to Reuters by Roger Winter. Nationhood has many midwives. South Sudan is primarily the creation of its own people. It was southern Sudanese leaders who fought for autonomy, and more than two million southern Sudanese who paid for that freedom with their lives. U.S. President George W. Bush, who set out to end Africa’s Longest-running civil war, also played a big role, as did modern-day abolitionists, religious groups, human rights organizations and members of the U.S. Congress. But the most persistent outside force in the creation of the world’s newest state was the Council, a tightly knit group never numbering more than seven people, which in the era before email, began gathering regularly at Otello, a restaurant near Washington’s DuPont Circle.”
In January 2011, the SPLA and governor Kuol Manyang Juuk of South Sudan’s Jonglei state diverted 1000 guns meant for graduating police and delivered them to Murle tribesmen so that the Murle could fight their rival the Lou Nuer community. SPLA Commander-in-Chief General Salva Kiir—the first president of the newly independent [sic] South Sudan—was reportedly aware of the diversion of weapons. Following the SPLA’s redistribution of weapons last July, massive ethnic violence in Jonglei state has created perhaps as many as 100,000 internally displaced people (IDPs), with ongoing clashes in the spring of 2012.
“The SPLA is looting everywhere,” says Mr. Chuol, accusing the SPLA of behaving like an army of occupation and terror. “They are taking everything for themselves, acting like they are heroes. They are torturing, raping, and killing people, and burning down villages.” [11]
The fairy tales about Roger Winter and Eric Reeves and the Council of Wonks have airbrushed such inconvenient truths from history. “South Sudan is primarily the creation of its own people,” continues the ever-repeated Reuters caption, drumming home the new-old Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton propaganda line about ‘Africa by and for Africans’. “It was southern Sudanese leaders who fought for autonomy, and more than two million southern Sudanese who paid for that freedom with their lives.”
“The reality,” says Mr. Chuol, whose family and friends have suffered from the recent violence, “is that the U.S. and U.N. are abandoning the people of South Sudan, because they only want to focus on the problems of the Bashir government in Khartoum.” [11] The divide and conquer politics of Empire would dictate that rebel factions be set at each other’s throats, enabling greater western penetration and control of the new South Sudan.
Of course, no propaganda piece would be complete withoutthe patriotic accolades for former U.S. President George W. Bush, who “set out to end Africa’s Longest-running civil war, [and] also played a big role,” Rebecca Hamilton tells us, “as did modern-day abolitionists, religious groups, human rights organizations and members of the U.S. Congress. But the most persistent outside force in the creation of the world’s newest state was the Council, a tightly knit group never numbering more than seven people, which in the era before email, began gathering regularly at Otello, a restaurant near Washington’s DuPont Circle.”
From the very first days of their insurrection, the SPLM has committed massive atrocities, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide. It was the same story with Museveni’s NRM guerrillas in Uganda, Kagame’s RPF guerrillas in Rwanda, and with the Ugandan and Rwandan ADFL guerrillas in Congo-Zaire.
Roger Winter was involved with each of these four major guerrilla campaigns. From the early 1970’s to the present day he has moved in and out of foreign countries under the cover of the United States Committee for Refugees (USCR) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other entities.
“Starting in the early 1980’s, the United States began to reorganize the military establishment to conduct low-intensity warfare campaigns. The Joint Chiefs of Staff formed special low-intensity conflict divisions within the Department of Defense and within each military service, and also reintroduced political and psychological warfare branches. The Pentagon even drafted a Psy-Ops ‘master plan’ at the behest of a presidential directive, and the National Security Council set up a top-level ‘board for low intensity conflict’.” [12]
Spain’s human rights icon Juan Carrero Saralegui on intelligence operative Roger Winter:
Getting beyond the infantile nonsense about “Emperor” and “Deputy Emperor” and “Spear Carrier,” the roles of our Council of Wonks in creating conflict, shipping weapons, covering massacres, and producing propaganda for these insurgencies are not completely clear. The military and intelligence hierarchies they operate within are equally nontransparent.
Rebecca Hamilton tells a happy story of the origins of the Council of Wonks. It begins in 1978, when Brian D’Silva studied at Iowa State University alongside “an intensely charismatic southern Sudanese man named John Garang, who had been dreaming of a democratic Sudan… After graduation, D’Silva went with Garang to Sudan to teach at the University of Khartoum.”
D’Silva was a Ford Foundation visiting professor at U-Khartoum, but Rebecca Hamilton drops the reference to Ford, a known conduit to the covert U.S. intelligence sector and foreign interventions. [13] D’Silva joined the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to work in Sudan in the 1980’s. D’Silva’s old schoolmate is John Garang, “a conscript in the Sudanese arm [who] led a mutiny of southern Sudanese soldiers,” Hamilton tells us. Enter the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLM), “which led the fight for southern autonomy.” [14]
In the early 1980’s, Sudan was run by the CIA’s man Jaafar Nimeiri, who was ousted in 1985, and USAID maintained tight ties with the CIA. From 1985 to 1989, the Reagan Administration maintained a strong allegiance to the unstable Islamic government prior to the ascension to power of Omar al-Bashir. USAID at the time was deeply involved in agriculture, especially interventions in plantations and gum arabic production. [15] Gum arabic is essential for soft drinks (Coke, Pepsi, Fanta) and beer, and for ice cream and other foods, and Sudan has a near monopoly. Gum arabic imports were exempt from president Clinton’s trade embargo of October 1997. Rep. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) sponsored the gum arabic loophole and Rep. Donald Payne (D-N.J.) backed it: N.J. is home to three major corporations importing gum arabic. USAID operations became more and more untenable from 1985, and were completely displaced in 1989 under the Islamic government of Omar al-Bashir. Such facts are unmentioned by Hamilton—heretical to a fairytale of U.S. policy wonks who “dreamed of democracy” in Sudan. Then as now, Brian D’Silva operated under the USAID cover.
Of course, Sudan is also about oil. While the Council of Wonks minister of propaganda Dr. Eric Reeves was screaming about genocide in Darfur, he was also denying that massive petroleum reserves were up for grabs in Darfur. [15-a]
In his Washington Post article titled “Regime Change in Sudan,” Dr. Eric Reeves called for the overthrow of the government of Sudan, by any means necessary, and noted that some “governing body” needed to be created to take its place. This is exactly what has happened in other “Arab Spring” countries—Libya, Egypt, Yemen—and was the modus operandi for the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. These are effectively coup d’etats.
“A proportionately representative interim governing council must be created externally but be ready to move quickly to take control when the NIF [National Islamic Front] is removed by whatever means are necessary,” Dr. Eric Reeves opined. [15-b]
Roger Winter appears on the wonk scene after a 1981 visit to Sudan “for a non-governmental outfit called the U.S. Committee for Refugees,” says Rebecca Hamilton. Like the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR) has a euphemistic name suggesting humanitarian motives, but both are deeply connected to the U.S. intelligence and defense community, and their work with ‘refugees’ is more about selectively monitoring populations on the move, gathering intelligence on political dissidents, identifying points of leverage or intervention in complex emergencies.
Roger Winter then meets Francis Deng, “a respected legal scholar” at a prominent U.S. think tank, and, Hamilton tells us, Deng “calls up a cousin in the rebel movement to ensure that on future visits, Winter would have access to all the so-called liberated areas—the parts of Sudan held by the rebels—where he could gather direct testimony on the impact of the war.”
Nonsense. Like all Alice in Wonderland fairytales, the rabbit hole goes much deeper than we are told here. The true facts remain hidden in classified documents, waiting for some enterprising muckracker—completely unlike Rebecca Hamilton or Nicholas Kristof—to excavate by FOIA from the bowels of the U.S. National Security apparatus.
“By the mid-1980s,” Rebecca Hamilton tells us, “these three future Council members–D’Silva, Deng and Winter–were working in the United States as proxies for John Garang, trying to open doors for the SPLM in Washington.” Enter John Prendergast, “a wayward college graduate in search of a cause” who had been traveling in the Horn of Africa.”
Caption by Reuters: Smith College Professor and South Sudan expert Eric Reeves is pictured at home in Northampton, Massachusetts June 29, 2012. Nationhood has many midwives. South Sudan is primarily the creation of its own people… blah, blah, blah.” REUTERS: Matthew Cavanaugh.
“By the early 1990s, the group’s work was starting to pay off.” Rebecca Hamilton distills the fairy tale down to platitudes. Ted Dagne “was seconded from the Congressional Research Service to the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, where he began to build allies for the southern Sudanese cause… By the mid-nineties, five men—Dagne, Deng, D’Silva, Prendergast and Winter—were meeting regularly at Otello’s.”
Another key player in the covert network, and Roger Winter’s protégé, was Susan Rice, William Jefferson Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State on African Affairs political hit-man [sic] on Sudan and the Great Lakes. According to Rebbecca Hamilton, John Prendergast “applied to work for Susan Rice”—sometime in the 1990’s—and “she hired him.”
The Prendergast history is intentionally vague. “At 33, he was former President Bill Clinton’s director of African Affairs at the National Security Council,” wrote a Philadelphia magazine. [16] It was 1996. The Clinton administration was sponsoring the invasion of Congo-Zaire, and famine was sweeping south Sudan—due in part to the SPLM using food as a weapon of war—but this is a clean and shiny profile of John Prendergast. Susan Rice hired Prendergast after his gig at the National Security Council, making him one of her special advisers at the U.S. Department of State.
“While you sing [John Prendergast’s] praises, the Congolese people who have been dying since 1996 have NO use for JP, though he might go by there and spread some crumbs around from the money he raises and lives by.” Dr. Yaa-Lengi Ngemi, Congolese author of Genocide in the Congo, sent a letter to the posh Philadelphia tabloid. “WHY? Let me put it this way for you to understand: It’s like raising money to feed someone in chains and who is being tortured everyday instead of denouncing and getting rid of the brutes torturing the man.” [17]
Prendergast later worked for the International Crises Group, another intelligence think tank and agitprop NGO fronting for factions close to the U.S. government—described by Rebecca Hamilton as “an independent research group”. Operating behind front groups like ENOUGH and Raise Hope for Congo, John Prendergast has been long involved in supporting and covering up the western defense and intelligence sector’s involvement in low-intensity conflicts in Africa. Like the so-called “non-government organizations” or “NGOs” named RESOLVE, Save Darfur, Raise Hope for Congo, STAND (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur), United to End Genocide, the Genocide Intervention Network and many more, these groups morph and reconfigure, always drawing massive funds from specious U.S. government front organizations like the Center for American Progress. Their brochures are fancy, full color productions, their organizing is funded, their messages are simple—as appealing as the Kony2012 video—watered-down-and-feel-good campaigns that displace the true grass roots movements for social justice in Africa.
Rebecca Hamilton also deleted the key fact that Susan Rice and John Prendergast worked together to create the Pentagon’s prized Africa Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI)—a euphemistically named entity created to project U.S. power in Africa—run by U.S. Army Special Forces Command (SOCOM).
“By the late 1990s, Washington was not just providing humanitarian assistance to the southern Sudanese,” Rebecca Hamilton’s agitprop reports. “It was also giving leadership missions and training, as well as $20 million of surplus military equipment to Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea, who all supported the southern rebels. Prendergast said the idea was to help states in the region to change the regime. ‘It was up to them, not us,’ he said in an interview…”
Operation Lifeline Sudan: An International Rescue Committee plane flying from the United Nations’ base for Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) in Lokichogio, Kenya, lands in south Sudan’s Jonglei State near Pochalla and is met by Anuak and Nuer refugees. The plane dropped a humanitarian mission to investigate attacks against Ethiopian Anuak and Nuer refugees in nearby Gambella state, Ethiopia, January 16-24, 2004.
Photo c. keith harmon snow, 2004.
Africa by and for Africans! Notice how Rebecca Hamilton distances the U.S. government from the already 15 plus years of covert low-intensity warfare facilitated—since the early 1980’s—by Roger Winter. The military equipment is also described as ‘surplus’—a ploy of plausible denial and disinformation that further downplays the covert support for a nasty and bloody low-intensity war in Sudan. Of course, there is no mention of Roger Winter’s role in the low-intensity wars in Africa’s Great Lakes countries.
“The Council’s Deputy Emperor, Eric Reeves, joined in 2001.” Rebecca Hamilton writes. “Reeves was a professor of English literature at Smith, a small college in Western Massachusetts. He had no background in Sudan. But after reading about the humanitarian conditions in the south and attending a lecture Winter gave at the college, Reeves became the Council’s most prolific writer. He published hundreds of opinion pieces and blogged detailed reports brimming with moral outrage against Khartoum.” [18]
Dr. Eric Reeves is perhaps America’s greatest emotional manipulator. Reading his texts, one is overwhelmed by superlatives and assaulted by inflammatory emotional language. “The brutal regime in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, has orchestrated genocidal counterinsurgency war in Darfur for five years, and now is poised for victory in its ghastly assault on the region’s African populations.” [19]
Add the delusions, the outright lies and invented facts provided from the field by the other members of the Council of Wonks, the arrogance and brow-beating of anyone who dissents against him, and the patriotism, and it is clear that Reeves demonstrates what Wilhelm Reich described as fascism. [20]
And then there is his petulant behavior. Reeves tolerates zero criticism or divergence from the party line. If he doesn’t want to hear what someone has to say, and his mind is closed to alternative perspectives, he quite literally throws a temper tantrum: even Rebecca Hamilton wrote how he stormed out of a Save Darfur meeting. [21]
Dr. Eric Reeves refuses to sit on any panels with anyone who deviates from his sacred script, and he can be downright nasty. For example, on July 6, 2006, at Dr. Reeves’ own Smith College, Reeves refused to participate in a panel on Darfur titled “Intervention, Regime Change and the Politics of Genocide” and he did not attend the event. The head of Smith’s African Studies, Dr. Eliot Fratkin, was one of the panel members, as was this journalist. (Dr. Fratkin applauded the panel, at its conclusion, but Fratkin changed his position overnight and distanced himself the following day.) [21-a]
At Smith College on December 9, 2010, when a journalist interrupted Reeves during the question and answer session following Reeves’ lecture on Darfur, Reeves went berserk: the journalist was assaulted by the event organizers, and Smith College security issued the journalist a “No Trespassing for Life” notice for three colleges: Smith College, Mt. Holyoke and Hampshire College.
The mass media spread Reeves’ Sudan propaganda far and wide, and whole social movements have been engineered—from Mia Farrow and George Clooney to the Darfur Action Group of the Northampton (MA)-based Congregation B’Nai Israel Church to the Holocaust Memorial Museum—to mobilize constituencies and misdirect public action. The political calculus at work is based in a left-liberal hawkishness that has lost its moral compass, and this misplaced moralism is a cultural phenomenon that serves the powerful forces of Empire.
This is what I call humanitarian fascism. The cover story is full of fictions, little lies and outright disinformation. While the resumés of most development and policy experts are typically findable on-line, the details of Prendergast, Dagne, D’Silva and Winter’s careers are not so easily discoverable.
For example, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, John Prendergast worked in southern Sudan for several so-called non-government organizations that, in fact, have very close ties to the foreign policy and intelligence establishment: Bread for the World and Human Rights Watch.
Access to south Sudan was facilitated through the so-called ‘humanitarian’ wing of the SPLM, the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association (SRRA). From Nairobi—a hub for U.S., British and Israeli defense and intelligence interests in East Africa and the Horn—western agents fly to Lokichogio, on the Kenya-Sudan border, where a United Nations base offered support for the billion dollar western misery-cum-missionary enterprise, Operation Lifeline Sudan.
Sudan in pictures: A racist, blurry, black, decontextualized New York Times Magazine photo that accompanied a Nicholas Kristof article.
Very euphemistically named, Bread for the World is a Christian faith-based organization close to the heart of the Christian Coalition. Past and current Bread for the World directors have included U.S. Rep. Donald Payne (D-N.J.)(d. 2012) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). Other directors include Clinton White House insiders Mike McCurry and—president Barack Obama’s current Secretary of Defense and former CIA director (2009-2011)—Leon Panetta.
“In 1995, Christian Solidarity International initiated a controversial program in Sudan called slave redemption,” wrote Rebecca Hamilton. “The Zurich-based human-rights organization began paying slave traders for the freedom of southerners captured in raids by government-backed militias from the north. Christian Solidarity took journalists and pastors from the black evangelical community along on their missions, and stories of modern-day slavery filtered into church congregations and the U.S. media.”
Many Jewish and Christian political organizations and think tanks have supported the long years of covert low-intensity warfare in Sudan. The religious propaganda produced by the policy wonks sold western minds to support a Jewish and Christian fundamentalist war against Islam that would otherwise never have existed. The slavery campaigns amounted to one massive fabrication after another, Psy-Ops used against western ‘news’ consumers and the Christian and Jewish masses. [22]
Intelligence operatives Ted Dange, John Prendergast and Roger Winter shuttled U.S. politicians to SPLM territory to see the misery for themselves—misery that the Council of Wonks’ Dr. Eric Reeves always attributed to a “genocidal counterinsurgency by the Government of Sudan.” Nicholas Kristof took the flag and ran with it in such massive disinformation pieces as “The Secret Genocide Archive.” [23] Nicholas Kristof was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize for his Sudan agitprop.
Roger Winter took Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) and another member of Congress (unnamed by Rebecca Hamilton) to meet SPLM commander John Garang on one of his visits to rebel-held areas of Sudan in 1989. Ted Dagne’s “network of southern Sudan allies in Congress solidified,” Rebecca Hamilton wrote. “He organized trips into SPLM-held areas for bipartisan delegations, including Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Frist and the late New Jersey Democratic Rep. Donald Payne.”
Donald Payne served on numerous top-level Congressional committees involved in African Affairs and he accompanied the Clinton’s on the victory tour in Africa in 1998, he was arrested for protesting in front of the Sudan Embassy in 2001, and supported the Genocide Intervention Network, one of the Prendergast-linked intelligence agitprop groups. Payne was tied to numerous other Christian-right charity organizations—like Servant’s Heart—working in Africa, and to the Africa Society, a pro-business intelligence and propaganda front group.
Bread for the World director and former senator Bob Dole (R-KA) worked for years to advance the interests of mid-western U.S. grain corporations, esp. Archers Daniels Midland. U.S. lobbyists for big agribusiness seeking vast landholdings in Sudan worked out of Dole’s office and frequently traveled to Sudan. Dole also used and manipulated the World Food Program as an imperial tool to both leverage foreign markets and protect domestic ones.
Famines, starvation, internally displaced people and refugee flows are these organizations’ stock in trade, and the war in south Sudan simultaneously took land out of agricultural production and created a market for U.S. corporations to dump surplus and sub-standard grains for a profit. Many of these organizations are today connected to Yoweri Museveni—former co-chair of the euphemistically named Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa (PCHPA)—and they operate in tandem with USAID, which is really just a Christian-based “soft policy” wing of the Pentagon that uses food as a weapon under the disguise of charity. Many of USAID’s programs are highly invisible.
Kigali, Rwanda, 4 July 2010: Paul Kagame decorates Roger Winter with special medals celebrating RPF victory; U.S. Rep. Donald Payne also received one of Kagame’s medals.
Donald Payne and Roger Winter were decorated by Rwandan president Paul Kagame at the July 4, 2012 celebration of the 16th Anniversary of the RPF’s victory in Rwanda. Donald Payne, then 76, received only the UMURINZI “Campaign Against Genocide Medal for being “among ‘very few’ people in the world who recognized the Tutsi Genocide as the governments, media and individuals continued to debate.” Roger Winter, then 67, received both Rwanda’s URUTI Liberation Medal and UMURINZI medal.
“Roger Winter is one of Kagame’s most ardent supporters, and one of the most biased, and least credible,” says Rene Lemarchand, long-time Central Africa expert and former USAID consultant (1992-1998). “It is not for nothing that Winter has been decorated by [Paul] Kagame for his past services as a praise-singer (griot) on behalf of his patron. He played a key role in 1992 in putting Kagame in touch with high-ranking bureaucrats in the U.S. State Department, and he kept in close touch with the RPF in subsequent years. I would trust him about as far as I can throw a piano. I believe you’re right in saying that Winter worked as a U.S. intelligence operative. That’s my gut feeling but I cannot prove it.” [24]
“The silence is fathomless and overwhelming and eventually there will be no more sounds from this region,” wrote Roger Rosenblatt in a July 1993 Vanity Fair feature article (later published as a book) that sold the U.S. policy line on Sudan in 1993. [25] The article is a sales pitch, a provocative pornography of misery and violence meant to tug on western heart strings and open purses for western charity NGOs. Whether by accident or intention, depopulation of indigenous lands is one of the objectives of Empire, enabling foreign interests to more easily steal and occupy the land.
“No side has a claim on morality in these wars.” Rosenblatt prepares the argument for our SPLA support, taking the side sanctioned by the popular insanity, and in sync with the National Security apparatus. This is, after all, a war for public opinion at home, as much as for Empire in Sudan.
“When [Government of Sudan] military convoys lose vehicles to rebel mines, they usually burn the closest village and murder its inhabitants.” Rosenblatt is unwilling to expose the SPLM tactics in low-intensity warfare, where the people are used as human shields. “Soldiers routinely rape women displaced from their homes by the fighting; the SPLA has also been accused of rape and kidnapping.” The GoS soldiers are guilty of rape, while SPLA soldiers are only accused. “Both the government and the SPLA have menaced relief operations and blown up trucks carrying food and medicine.” So there are, in fact, two warring factions in this war! “The government has amputated the limbs of prisoners of war; so has the SPLA.” [25]
“Yet nearly everyone [sic] agrees that the Bashir government has been the main persecutor in the wars.” Roger Rosenblatt’s script is still in use today! “Muslim fundamentalists armed and inspired by Iran, they are the theocratic cleansers of their country—a twist on the ethnic cleansers in Bosnia. They seek to “Islamize” the Sudan—as indeed Iran may seek to Islamize the entire Horn of Africa—by converting or killing off all the Christians and animists in the South. Their weapons are famine, political repression, the torture of dissidents, and outright slaughter.” [25]
Yet nearly everyone does not agree.
To conclude the upside-down and backwards charade, Rosenblatt proffered the thesis that “the U.S. government provided only intermittent humanitarian aid to the Sudan, either because it is loath to interfere with a sovereign government (this is how the political situation in Sudan differs from Somalia) or because there is no obvious geopolitical advantage in doing so in the post-Cold War environment.” [25]
No obvious geopolitical advantage! No geopolitical interests! No strategic interests! “The silence is fathomless and overwhelming,” indeed, and if “eventually there will be no more sounds from this region,” it will be due to the massive corporate depopulation land-grab [Lebensraum] by Wall Street bankers, industrial philanthropists and other white collar predators.
The example of Jarch Capital comes quickly to mind. Wall Street banker Philippe Heilberg’s Jarch Capital, an investment firm, acquired 400,000 hectares in South Sudan in the last few years. These landholdings the size of Vermont were acquired in a deal with SPLM warlord Gabriel Matip. Jarch Capital came under some mild scrutiny when it was learned that Jarch executives include a former Clinton era Pentagon agent named Gwenyth Todd, and Joseph Wilson. In 1997, just before Clinton destroyed Sudan’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory with cruise missiles, Joseph Wilson ran the National Security Council’s East Africa Desk. Working under him was none other than National Security Council agent John Prendergast, America’s humanitarian poster boy for Sudan and George Clooney’s sidekick. [26]
“Whatever the causes of the war, it is southern civilians who have paid most dearly for it, and continue to pay,” wrote Human Rights Watch in a November 1994 report. “In this second civil [sic] war, even the adults are hard pressed to survive where displacement, asset destruction, famine and disease are constantly recurring. Children, always the most disadvantaged in any war, have been additionally punished in Sudan by being separated from their families, where they might find a modicum of adult protection, supervision and concern. They remain at greater risk than adults.” [27]
John Prendergast was one of several key researchers for the HRW report, based on research at refugee camps in Kenya, Sudan and Uganda from January to June 1993, and interviews in conducted in London, Cairo, Nairobi and Washington DC. The report concluded that “the SPLA has engaged in recruitment of boy soldiers and in the separation of children from their families… Since 1987 the SPLA has maintained large camps of boys separate from their relatives and tribes in refugee camps in Ethiopia and in southern Sudan. From these camps the SPLA has drawn fresh recruits as needed, regardless of the age of the boys.”
Not only were the SPLA “lost Boys” camps used for military recruitment: they were also places of death. Conditions were abhorrent. While the Operation Lifeline Sudan was paying huge salaries to western ex-patriots, and while Christian NGOs were shipping bibles to remote locations suffering famine, boys were living in absolute misery in these camps. Scores of thousands of children have died due to the indirect causes of the U.S. covert war. Roger Winter and the low-intensity SPLM war created the so-called “Lost Boys of Sudan”—not the Khartoum government, as we are always led to believe.
SPLA child soldiers in south Sudan: photo courtesy of the New Vision newspaper, Kampala, Uganda.
The Council of Wonks are all well aware of the atrocities committed by the SPLM. Like Human Rights Watch, and sometimes working for them, sometimes not, John Prendergast wrote about the SPLM campaigns of terror in south Sudan. In his book, Frontline Diplomacy: Humanitarian Aid and Conflict in Africa, for example, Prendergast explores how the SPLM uses food as a weapon, how they shuttle refugees around for their strategic and tactical advantage, using people as human shields, attacking relief organizations and enforcing starvation to leverage foreign intervention. Over the years however, Prendergast went silent on SPLM abuses.
The government think tank U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP) funded Prendergast’s Frontline Diplomacy project, just as they funded Philip Gourevitch to travel back and forth to see his friend Paul Kagame and produce the ‘non-fiction’ propaganda book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda (Verso, 1999).
The USIP funded other Sudan and Rwanda propaganda, conferences and policy papers. Speaking at a USIP conference titled “Religion, Nationalism and Peace in Sudan” on September 16-17,1997, Roger Winter reportedly demanded full-scale backing from the U.S. government for a war “to bring down the Khartoum government” in Sudan, adding, “even though I know it will bring about a humanitarian catastrophe.” John Prendergast and Ted Dagne were on the same panel as Winter, and Council of Wonks member Francis Deng spoke on another panel.
Over the past few decades, the human rights agencies became more and more muted about crimes committed by the U.S., the U.K. or Israel—if mentioned at all—with resources and public relations increasingly concentrated on documenting the crimes of ‘enemies’ that are in the way of Empire. “The grand narrative of human rights contains a subtext which depicts an epochal contest pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviors, on the other,” writes Professor Makau Mutua. [28]
SPLM war crimes and crimes against humanity are documented in stark detail in the March 1990 Human Rights Watch/Africa Watch report Denying “The Honor of Living”: Sudan, a Human Rights Disaster. Between 1984 and 1989, the SPLM attacked southern Garrison towns, disappeared and tortured, and shot civilian airliners out of the sky. In 1986, the SPLM attacked Ugandan (mostly Acholi) refugees in southern Sudan—forced out of Uganda by Museveni’s NRM low-intensity war there—killing refugees and forcing at least 35,000 refugees back to insecurity in Uganda. In 1989 the SPLM attacked Ethiopian refugee camps on the Ethiopian border. Both instances were violations of international humanitarian law.
As Operation Lifeline Sudan grew in scope, so too did the scale and magnitude of the crimes committed by the SPLM—and the sophistication of the western intelligence apparatus at hiding them. The Council of Wonks and the ‘human rights’ establishment and the misery industry increasingly closed their eyes to SPLM atrocities, funded by western taxpayers, and increasingly honed and tuned the propaganda corps to demonize the Government of Sudan in keeping with the savior versus savage narrative at work behind the new humanitarian fascism.
Did the SPLM reform itself in the mid-1990s and post-2000 era? Starting in 1999, from his offices at Smith College, policy wonk Eric Reeves screamed louder and louder—ever more hysterical by the day—about the Government of Sudan’s bombing campaigns, the climbing death tolls, the genocide, and about our moral imperative to facilitate “regime change” in Khartoum by any means necessary. Meanwhile, John Prendergast became increasingly silent about SPLM terrorism in Sudan in direct proportion to his proximity to the U.S. government. The closer Prendergast got to the National Security apparatus—and the perks of power and private profit—the quieter he became.
Ditto with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and the western human rights corpus. The massive tome Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (1999), researched and written by Human Rights Watch agent Alison Des Forges, offers a scant 43 pages (out of 793 pages) on crimes committed by the “highly disciplined” RPF, and these crimes are often downgraded to allegations or unverified reports. Roger Winter is not once mentioned in the book. Alison Des Forges also worked as a consultant to USAID.
Similarly, the 343-page Human Rights Watch book Behind the Red Line: Political Repression in Sudan (1996) offers a mere 20 pages (out of 343 pages) attending to SPLM crimes, and these 20 pages also include further “Crimes by All Parties to the Conflict.”
As human rights and so-called humanitarian NGOs have evolved, they have become ever more focused on presenting western civilization as saviors and our proxy forces as victims, in a contest with savages. In the case of the governments (and people) we wish to overthrow, the ‘savages’ are the Arab Government of Sudan, the Hutu government of Rwanda, and so on, and so forth. It is all too easy for affluent westerners to adhere to this narrative.
It is “a project for the redemption of the redeemers,” writes Makau Mutua, “in which whites who are privileged globally as a people—who have historically visited untold suffering and savage atrocities against nonwhites—redeem themselves by ‘defending’ and ‘civilizing’ ‘lower,’ ‘unfortunate,’ and ‘inferior’ peoples.” [28]
An early SPLA photo: A photo of an SPLM bridge in south Sudan taken by Roger Winter in the 1980’s.
Hamilton reports that Smith College professor Eric Reeves began working with the policy wonks—and the implication is he began working on Sudan—in 2001 after Roger Winter spoke at Smith College. In fact, it was the other way around: Eric Reeves began screaming about “genocide in Sudan” in 1999. If his Sudan crusade was inspired by Roger Winter, he has changed his story.
“When the former executive director of the U.S. branch of Doctors Without Borders, Joelle Tanguy, told Reeves she thought Sudan needed a champion, she probably didn’t expect it to be an English prof from Northampton, Massachusetts.” John Prendergast wrote this while eulogizing Eric Reeves in his book Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond. [29] “Fighting cancer and frequently working from his hospital bed, he has waged an often lonely but always Herculean struggle to ensure that the American public is aware of what is happening to the people of Sudan…”
Reeves has stated he met Joelle Tanguy and adopted the Sudan cause “early in 1999”. On April 1, 1999, Smith College hosted a lecture by Roger Winter organized by Eric Reeves. “Winter ‘is a really distinguished presence in the world of humanitarian agencies,’ says Smith English professor Eric Reeve, an organizer of the event…” [30]
On October 30, 2000, Smith College hosted a special ceremony where Roger Winter and the U.S. Committee for Refugees honored Reeves with an award recognizing Reeves “for his widely published work calling attention to Sudan’s vast and ongoing humanitarian crisis.” [31]
Eric Reeves Disinformation Graphic: ‘They Bombed everything that Moved’:
a flagrant example of Dr. Eric Reeves’ highly incredible anti-Khartoum propaganda.
In Eric Reeves’ hysterical perspective, virtually all violence in Sudan is attributed to the “genocidal counterinsurgency by the [Khartoum] Government of Sudan.” Reeves’ disinformation—especially his inflation and fluctuation of mortality estimates in Darfur (2003-2010)—has been roundly debunked. [32] The charge of genocide in Darfur was equally specious—meaningless in the context used by Eric Reeves and Nicholas Kristof.
In 2006, the U.S. Government Accountability Office in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences convened twelve experts to review six sources of data on mortality in Darfur. The GAO study, reported to the U.S. Congress in November 2006, questioned the validity of three of the six ‘expert’ international sources providing estimates of mortality on Darfur, offering a “devastating critique of assumptions, source data and extrapolations behind the findings of the two most prolific high-end researchers associated with Save Darfur…” [32]
One of these high-enders was professor John Hagan, who authored the highly politicized “Atrocities Documentation Report” produced by an NGO called the Coalition for International Justice. The second high-end researcher was Dr. Eric Reeves. “Nine of the experts found Hagan’s source data ‘generally’ or ‘definitely’ unsound, while ten experts said the same of Reeves’ source data. Ten said Hagan’s assumptions were ‘somewhat’ or ‘very unreasonable,’ and eleven said so with regard to Reeves. Eleven said Hagan’s extrapolations were ‘somewhat’ or ‘very inappropriate,’ and all twelve said so in reference to Reeves.” [32]
Worse still, the escalation of Save Darfur hysteria occurred in 2006, even as the violence in Darfur had greatly receded. Reeves’ mortality estimates went up and down and up again, and he paid no attention to the GAO critique, but continued to scream about between 400,000 to 500,000 dead due to the “genocidal counterinsurgency” by the Government of Sudan. Given the cloudy assessments of the actual mortality—somewhere between the Government of Sudan’s estimate of 10,000 and other reasonable estimates of around 200,000—the hysterical behavior of Dr. Eric Reeves is shocking.
Of course, behind Reeves was the Council of Wonks. To his credit, Dr. Eric Reeves specifically acted as Minister of Disinformation for the Council’s anti-Sudan campaign: he had nothing to do with the low-intensity wars in Uganda, Rwanda or Congo. Or did he?
While the (extremely conservative) International Rescue Committee estimates of death tolls in the neighboring Congo were coming in at 3.9 million dead by 2004 and 5.4 million dead by 2007—some 45,000 Congolese dying every month—Reeves was inflating mortality statistics on Darfur, monopolizing attention, getting shriller and shriller by the day, focusing the global consciousness on Darfur. Like Mahmood Mamdani—whose analyses of Reeve’s manipulation of Darfur mortality stats was utilized above—Dr. Eric Reeves has protected Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame from scrutiny; the former by deflecting attention from the SPLM’s covert supply chain in Uganda, the latter by whitewashing the Rwandan Defenses Forces’ (formerly known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front) combat operations under the African Union flag in Darfur. By falsifying consciousness on Sudan, Dr. Eric Reeves was also falsifying consciousness about the Great Lakes.
Roger Winter and Ted Dagne and the other Council of Wonks members were Reeves’ primary sources of information, and Reeves accepted their data and perspective all too happily. His reports, appearing anywhere and everywhere in the U.S. media, reeked of hysteria and outright lies. Reeve’s understanding of a greater geopolitical context, such as the political fault lines of front line states (Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda) involved in Sudan’s war (or the international geopolitical importance of countries like Libya) was unnecessary for the mission of propagandizing the western public and providing cover for the covert low-intensity war prosecuted by the SPLA and backed by Washington.
New York Times Magazine caption: Winter meets a Darfur rebel [sic], Minni Minawi, in Juba, Sudan.
“To this day [Reeves] carries his draft card from the Vietnam war in his wallet,” wrote Rebecca Hamilton in Fighting for Darfur, “its status is marked ‘1-0′—conscientious objector.” [21] The irony is thick as the blood in South Sudan. While the media always underscores Reeves’ supposed morality—was it a commitment to non-violence or a refusal to support an imperialist war?— Reeves openly advocated more conventional U.S. military war against Sudan. His draft card in his wallet offers proof of his saintliness. Dr. Reeve’s struggle with leukemia is also invoked as irrefutable evidence of his saintliness.
Reeves’ statements before the U.S. Congress sound like pro-SPLM military briefings. “The SPLA has not, so far, successfully attacked in a major way the oil infrastructure.” Reeves is responding to U.S. Congressman Ed Royce, Chair of the U.S. House of Representatives Africa Subcommittee in March 2001. “There have been attacks on the oil pipeline as it approaches Eritrea. There have been attacks and seizures of individual wells, but the security is very, very extensive. The scorched earth warfare that the government of Sudan has conducted has created a cordon sanitaire that has made it virtually impossible for the SPLA to deploy resources that would allow for major military attack on the infrastructure in the Unity and Heglig fields.” [33]
There is no rest for the wicked, and so the Council of Wonks will not stop their war until the National Islamic Front Government of Sudan is gone. It doesn’t matter how messy it gets.
“Security cooperation between Khartoum and Washington [Central Intelligence Agency] and London [Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)] has increased sharply in volume over the past two years, for instance in the number of documents handed over and the numbers of joint liaison meetings,” reported Africa Confidential. The article stated obvious facts that the policy wonks have hidden. “Some Western strategists regard the longer term plan to engage the NIF regime on security, and also more widely in peace negotiations with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, as regime change by stealth.” The same AC article reported: “Western intelligence sources briefed journalists that some teams of U.S. Special Forces units were operating in northern Sudan in pursuit of terror cells and Al Qaida units.” [34]
In a speech before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights on June 16, 2011, Roger Winter—described as “the former U.S. special envoy to Sudan”—called for immediate military action against Khartoum in order to strengthen the South Sudan army and, ostensibly, to halt attacks on civilians.
“Take a military action against a Khartoum military target now,” Winter said, adding that the goal would be “to strengthen the SPLA in meaningful ways as a deterrent against Khartoum aggression, provocation and attacks against civilians.” [35]
Like Reeves and the other members of the Council of Wonks, Winter blames all the violence on Khartoum and he inflates mortality estimates out of thin air. “Winter said that any commitments made by the Khartoum government are unreliable and that the government’s actions had led to the death of three million people.” [35]
No matter their hysteria, their warmongering, or their lack of credibility, these guys continue to be widely celebrated and published. Evidence suggests that the system appreciates them precisely because they obfuscate reality and inculcate necessary illusions. “We are, once again, on the verge of genocidal counterinsurgency in Sudan,” screamed the mad doctor and indefatigable dink at Smith College, in his June 13, 2011 Washington Post Op/Ed titled “In Sudan, Genocide Anew?” “History must not be allowed to repeat itself.”
Irish Catholic gun-runner Daniel Eiffe is another shady intelligence operator who is never mentioned by Dr. Eric Reeves, and certainly a friend of Roger Winter and the Council of Wonks.
“This year, the Republic of South Sudan officially became a state,” reported Eoin Butler, in the Irish Times, “thanks in no small part to a diminutive former priest from County Meath [Ireland], who also has gunrunning, renegade militancy and newspaper publishing on his CV.” [36]
“How did a diminutive priest [Daniel Eiffe] go from providing humanitarian aid for the victims of civil war, to taking up arms in support of one side?” Butler asks. Eiffe is the publisher of the Sudan Mirror, a pro-SPLA and pro-Christian South Sudan newspaper published with the support of Trociare and other international AID agencies.
In the early 1990’s, Eiffe was employed by Norweigan People’s Aid, a gun-running NGO that uses humanitarian relief as its cover. Eiffe organized weapons and logistics for the SPLA through Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni in Kampala, Uganda. [36] USAID has funded Norwegian People’s Aid for years; USAID support in 2010, for example, was $8.5 million (while other U.S. government agencies gave NPA $6.9 million in 2010).
Photo: Daniel Eiffe in Juba, Sudan.
The rebel priest ‘commander’ Dan Eiffe’s Sudan Mirror is also funded by USAID, ensuring that the people of the new South Sudan are properly educated about the wonders of their new found freedom and democracy. The Office of Transitional Initiatives (OTI), a subsidiary of USAID, in conjunction with the Sudan Development Trust (run by Eiffe) set up The Sudan Mirror and the Sudan Radio Service. USAID’s OTI also works with PACT, another U.S. government NGO ‘charity’ front staffed by former U.S. government officials, intelligence and financial planners, including a close relative of the Bush family.
Eighteen months after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement [sic] that ended Sudan’s two-decade civil war had been signed, few Sudanese knew its details. This was precisely because the power brokers involved—including USAID and Roger Winter, U.S. government officials, and the leadership of the SPLA—do not represent the people or their best interests.
“That began to change in April and May 2006, when USAID launched an initiative to help more than 150,000 people in five Southern Sudanese states access details of the agreement and participate more fully in implementing the peace. Documents in Arabic and English were distributed to all government officials in the south, and an official summary was developed and published in English and Arabic. The Sudan Radio Service created audio versions of the summary in seven languages—Moro, Arabic, simple Arabic, Toposa, Shilluk, Dinka, and Nuer—and the Sudan Mirror published 22,000 summaries to be included as supplements in its Easter edition.” [37]
The Sudan Mirror has also been supported by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, a British government-backed organization, akin to the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI), all involved in “promoting democracy and human rights” through subversive and clandestine programs aligned with NATO intelligence and defense operations. [38]
Daniel Eiffe’s ties to Roger Winter and USAID are outlined in a 1998 expose by the right-wing Lyndon LaRouche publication Executive Intelligence Reveiw. “Eiffe himself operates out of Wilson Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, and has a forward base at Lokichoggio, Kenya, along the border with Sudan. Even in July, after the scandals around the NPA had exploded in Norway, Winter’s U.S. Committee for Refugees brought Eiffe to Washington to lobby for money, a stance that was endorsed in July 29 [1998] hearings by the Africa Subcommittee of the House of Representatives, in which Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice called for funding non-governmental organizations operating outside of the United Nations’ Operation Lifeline [Sudan]—a clear reference to the NPA.”
Sudanese refugees at the Ethiopian border: A makeshift refugee camp sports the usual western misery industry branding meant to stand out for fundraising purposes and product placement in western media productions. Miserable conditions in Sudanese IDP and Ugandan and Ethiopian refugee camps in South Sudan dictate high levels of disease and death, and whole generations have been lost to misery. Conditions at Sudanese refugee camps in Ethiopa, Kenya, and Uganda were equally miserable. Photo c. keith harmon snow, Pochalla, Sudan, 2004.
In a 2009 radio interview, Daniel Eiffe stated that in June [sic] 1998 he stood in the U.S. Congress and said to the congressmen and women: “Southern Sudan is apartheid at its worst. Apartheid is a tea party in comparison to what happens in Southern Sudan.” Eiffe confirmed that he was in Washington “meeting with Congressman Donald Payne, the head of the [Congressional] Black Caucus, he’s very close to Clinton, he’s a good friend of mine.” [39]
Donald Payne was one of the Council of Wonks closest collaborators.
A few key details about the Council of Wonks’ Francis Deng are also in order. Sudanese diplomat Francis Deng is on the board of the ‘charity’ International Alert—which is also funded by the Westminister Foundation for Democracy. Other International Alert funders are USAID, Bread for the World, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
In formulating the U.S. position on Sudan, Francis Deng worked closely with the prominent U.S. government official Elliot Abrams. “For example, on Sudan, we helped elevate the issue of religious persecution in southern Sudan,” said Abrahms, then chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “and for that matter in northern Sudan, to get it more attention from the president and the National Security Council and the secretary of state and make it a larger item in U.S. foreign policy.” [40]
Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, and retired U.S. Marine Corps officer Oliver North were pivotal players in the Iran-Contra affair—all were serving under the administration of then U.S. president Ronald Reagan.
In Francis Deng we find another choice topic for a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Deng has the perfect cover: he has for many years been the United Nation’s Special Adviser to the Secretary General on Displaced Persons and, since 2007, the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Deng began his long and distinguished career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: common sense suggests he is a Central Intelligence Agency spook.
If Francis Deng is merely an honorable diplomat, then Americans are equally foolish in their acceptance of the drug-dealer-turned-Christian-savior cover story provided for Sam Childers—the infamous ‘machine gun preacher’ of south Sudan.
A mercenary who could not possibly operate in south Sudan without the sanction of the U.S. and commanders Roger Winter and Dan Eiffe, Sam Childers has been backed by the Museveni regime and the SPLM—who put a unit of SPLA soldiers under Childers’ personal command. Childers exemplifies the countless fronts in which militarized Christianity operates in South Sudan with both open and clandestine U.S. support. Of course, machine-gun preacher makes a great ‘documentary’ film for oblivious propaganda consumers and arm-chair human rights patrons. “God protects me in Africa,” Sam Childers always says.
Remember the trial of Henry Kissinger? Can a case be made that Roger Winter should be indicted and charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide? [41]
Where was Roger Winter in the 1970’s? His public dossier suggests that he started with the U.S. Committee for Refugees in 1981, at the age of 38; he was director of USCR by the middle of the 1980’s and transitioned to USAID working in Sudan from 2001 to 2006. Then he became some kind of Special Adviser in south Sudan, and they even created a special office for him in Washington.
Back in the 1980’s, Roger Winter also worked with USCR in Indochina at a time when U.S. intelligence and defense operations were assisting ‘refugees’ fleeing the Pol Pot regime after decades of U.S. state-sponsored terrorism there; these ‘refugees’ would have included a phalanx of political and military operatives who supported U.S. covert operations like ‘Pheonix‘.
Winter’s ties to guerrillas in Central Africa pre-date the SPLM war in Sudan. In the early 1980’s Winter backed the National Resistance Movement (NRM) guerrilla war—led by Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame and other Hema-Tutsi elites—against the Milton Obote (2nd term) government in Uganda. Winter regularly visited Museveni’s NRM guerrilla’s in the bush. Winter is alleged to be one of the architects behind the false accusations blaming the Obote government for genocide in the Lowero Triangle. (The same tactic was used in Rwanda in 1992 to blame the Juvenal Habyariman government with genocide.) Most likely, Winter also advised the NRM in some of the nasty tactics in low-intensity warfare, including Psy-Ops and ‘pseudo-operations’—where NRM guerrillas disguised as government forces committed atrocities—terrorizing the population. [42] The terror tactics seen in Uganda appeared later in Rwanda (1990-1994) and again and again in the bloody Congo wars (1995-present). The signature of Museveni and Kagame’s guerrillas is all over the Congo, where pseudo-operations and Psy-Ops have been used to blame RPF atrocities on someone else (FARDC, Mai Mai, FDLR, LRA, Interahamwe).
For the duration of the 1980’s Winter advanced the militant plans of the Banyarwanda—Rwandan Tutsi elites who had ruled over the Hutu masses but fled Rwanda in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Roger Winter and the USCR even funded their propaganda tracts advocating guerrilla war. Working with the Tutsi diaspora, Roger Winter and the Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora USA organized the International Conference on the Status of Banyarwanda [Tutsi] Refugees in Washington, DC in 1988, and this is where a military solution to the Tutsi problem was decided. The U.S. Committee for Refugees reportedly provided accommodation and transportation for the event.
“Roger Winter is an intelligence operative,” says Dr. Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, a former Rwandan government official who fled Rwanda under threat of death in April 1994. “Winter organized the meeting of the Rwandan [Tutsi] diaspora in Washington, D.C in 1988. The USCR was one of the contributors to the RPF journal Impuruza.”
The best known of the RPF-Banyarwanda publications was Impuruza, created by Dr. Alexandre Kimenyi, a Rwandan Tutsi in the U.S., where it was published from 1982 to 1994. Like most RPF publications Impuruza circulated clandestinely in Rwanda amongst Hutu and Tutsi elite. This publication began the process of dehumanizing the Hutu people and set the stage for the ongoing genocide against them—a genocide facilitated by Roger Winter, funded by western tax-payers who have been betrayed by the military-industrial-media complex.
“Winter followed the activities of the RPF in Uganda, including visiting the battlefield,” says Dr. Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro. “He visited RPF forces in Rwanda before April 6, 1994. I met him first in Washington in 1988. The second time I met him was in Chicago in 1995 at a conference on Rwanda organized by a Rwandan Tutsi at the University of Illinois. Alison Des Forges was there too. [43] Roger Winter tried to stop the conference from happening. Winter handed out pro-RPF literature prepared by the U.S. Committee for Refugees. Then he was in Congo [Zaire] after the RPF and AFDL launched their military offensive to topple Mobutu regime. After the overthrow of Mobutu his target became Sudan where he sought the overthrow of the central government, but then settled with the independence of South Sudan. In South Sudan he serves under the cover of an adviser to the government of South Sudan. So, what is next? He has accumulated success after success.”
Acting as a spokesman for the RPF and their allies during the earlier stages of the RPF guerrilla war, Roger Winter appeared as a guest on major U.S. television networks such as PBS and CNN at times when the RPF was committing atrocities (e.g. in northern Rwanda 1990-1993). Winter and Rwanda ‘genocide’ propagandist Philip Gourevitch also made contacts on behalf of the RPF with American media, particularly the Washington Post, New York Times and Time magazine. U.S. Rep. Donald Payne worked closely with them to support the RPF’s low-intensity wars in Africa and the necessary propaganda in the U.S., Canada and Europe. Later, when the war in south Sudan shifted to Darfur, Donald Payne sponsored the hegemonic Darfur Genocide Accountability Act.
Roger Winter and Jeff Drumtra, another USCR agent, released numerous pro-RPF policy statements and alerts during the RPF assault of 1994. Winter and Drumtra were amongst the first U.S. officials to advocate that the civil war in Rwanda in 1994 be declared a genocide against Tutsi civilians. After April 6, 1994, they also worked to delegitimize Rwandan interim government.
“Effective policy requires a proper understanding of the root causes of the violence in Rwanda,” Winter and Drumtra wrote in a USCR alert. “The U.S. media have generally mischaracterized Rwanda’s massacres as amorphous, uncontrollable ‘tribal violence’ that Westerners cannot possibly understand or affect. Other reports mistakenly imply that the huge numbers of deaths are due to crossfire in the civil war between the government army and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).”
Winter and Drumtra helped shift the simplistic media accounts from their focus on tribal warfare to a new focus on coordinated and planned campaign of genocide being committed by the Hutu power structure. The International Tribunal on Rwanda has never proved that the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda was planned by the “Hutu power structure” or “extremist Hutus” as has always been claimed. Roger Winter is one of the first to spread these ideas, which rely on simplistic reductionist arguments and distortions of the facts. On the other hand, Kagame’s role in facilitating the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis is now becoming more clear. In taking the pro-RPF position he took, and Winter facilitated the dehumanization of millions of Hutus and set the stage for the invasion of Congo-Zaire two years later. The parallels with south Sudan are striking.
Unclassified Roger Winter document: Dated May 3, 1994 and stamped “UNCLASSIFIED”, this document demonstrates the pro-RPF advocacy of Roger Winter and his associate, Jeff Drumtra, under cover of the U.S. Committee for Refugees during the so-called ‘100 days of genocide’ (April 6 to July 15) in Rwanda in 1994.
“USCR urges the U.S. and U.N. to declare formally that the massacres in Rwanda constitute genocide as defined in international law,” Winter wrote. “This declaration is an important step necessary for establishing the moral, legal, and political contact for forceful action by the international community: the international Genocide Convention of 1951 legally requires the international community to take action ‘appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide’.” [44]
Of course, there was no international action taken to stop the slaughter in Rwanda. Contrary to the disinformation campaign suggesting the United States knew what was happening and failed to act is the hard truth that the United States RPF proxy was prosecuting a terrorist war. The United States had no intention of stopping it, because we started it. It is the same story, slightly different, with the SPLM in Sudan.
“No independent observers have accused the RPF rebels or ethnic Tutsis of involvement in shooting down the plane of President Habyarirnana on April 6,” Winter and Drumtra wrote, producing some of the earliest disinformation befogging the double presidential assassination of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira. Roger Winter steered attention away from the RPF (who were all Ugandans) and their western defense and intelligence backers. [45]
“No neutral international observers have accused the RPF of participating in massacres during the past month,” Winter and Drumtra continued. The disinformation that the RPF was a disciplined army was spread far and wide through the western media, always repeated by western journalists who helped cover up the egregious atrocities of the RPF. “The RPF, which currently controls at least half of Rwanda, should be encouraged to maintain the discipline of its troops,” they wrote, “abide by internationally recognized rules of human rights and honor its pledge to cooperate fully with human rights investigators of the U.N. and other agencies.” [45]
Winter further called for the Pentagon to jam the radio broadcasts of the “extremist Hutu” radio station. He also referenced his ties to the Pentagon directly. “USCR urges the U.S. to use immediately its technical capability to ‘jam’ the radio broadcasts of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), which Rwandan extremists have used to disseminate their racist, hate-filled violence. In recent days this radio station has broadcast messages to the militias and to the public exhorting them to accelerate the slaughter. U.S. military personnel have told USCR that the U.S. military has the ability to jam these broadcasts almost immediately.” [45]
The May 3, 1994 communiqué makes it clear that Winter had easy access to Kagame and other RPF commanders or officials, including RPF cadres in the United States—relations that began long before May 1994. Winter called for immediate protection for Rwandan’s currently in the United States, a critical step to provide domestic U.S. protection for Tutsis in the diaspora whom Winter was working with. [45]
The USCR disinformation insinuated that there was some distinct and distant separation between Roger Winter and the RPF and between Roger Winter and the U.S. military in Rwanda. In fact, as a covert operator, Winter moved in and out of western-backed guerrilla campaigns in Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and Sudan, always supporting the U.S./U.K./Israeli factions. Roger Winter’s propaganda, routinely and unquestioningly published by such mainstay U.S. institutions as the Washington Post, included pro-RPF and pro-SPLM pieces that furthered the psychological operations generated by the Pentagon and its RPF and SPLM proxy forces in the region.
At the height of RPF terror operations inside Rwanda (1994-1995) and Congo-Zaire (1995-1998), where millions of Rwandan Hutus and hundreds of thousands of civilian French-speaking Tutsis and millions of Congolese civilians were subject to the most egregious atrocities, Winter was whitewashing the RPF (UPDF) crimes and blaming the victims.
“Take the case of the 120,000 suspected perpetrators of genocide now in Rwanda’s jails,” Winter wrote in February 1998. “Many have never been formally charged, a fact that most of my colleagues view as an egregious abuse of human rights and proof that Rwanda’s leaders lack commitment to basic rules of justice. I see it differently. I regard their jailing as a human rights victory. Most of the country’s judges, attorneys and investigators were killed during the genocide or fled the country, leaving no means of trying these 120,000 prisoners. But they are still alive and awaiting trial. They have not been gunned down or chopped apart in a frenzy of revenge for the genocide many of them committed. Instead, they have remained in jail while the Rwandan government tries to rebuild its judicial system. The detention of suspects for trial indicates a willingness to abide by fundamental human rights principles under difficult circumstances.” [46]
In fact, the RPF did chop up Hutu and French-speaking Tutsi people in the coldest of cold blood, both out of sight of the world community in Rwanda from 1990 to 1994 and, as with the massacre of over 10,000 civilians at Kibeho and other refugee camps inside Rwanda in 1995—in plain sight of the entire world. Kibeho was so cold-blooded that the trenches that would become mass graves were dug days in advance of the RPF attack.
Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo: Rwandan refugee camps that spotted the eastern frontier of the Congo (then Zaire), around Goma and Bukavu, were attacked by the RPF and U.S. troops in the fall of 1996. The Kagame regime began sending guerrilla death squads into Zaire as early as the summer of 1994, when the massive refugee exodus from Rwanda occurred. Photo c. keith harmon snow, 2006.
Roger Winter routinely lied, distorted the facts, and produced disinformation to cover up the RPF atrocities—including the genocide against at least 300,000 Hutu civilians in Eastern Congo from 1995 to 1998.
“After the [1994] genocide, we failed to push hard enough to expel genocidal killers from refugee camps,” Winter wrote, in 1998, exercising the standard good-versus-evil, savages-versus-saviors dichotomy that has been used to wholly dehumanize both the former Habyarimana government leaders and the Hutu people more generally, and to facilitate the genocide against them, “and we shrank from the truth that it was worth risking bloodshed to force a separation between killers and legitimate refugees.” [46]
The truth that we shrink from is that the former Habyarimana government leaders were under attack, and they had a right to defend their country and their families.
Winter was meeting with the ‘ADFL rebel leaders’ in eastern Congo and defending them in the Washington Post even as the rebels were slaughtering Hutu people and Congolese civilians in the most ruthless campaign of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in recent contemporary history, and one that—some 14 years after the atrocities occurred—was finally, though tepidly, referenced as ‘genocidal’ in a 2010 United Nations “Mapping Report” for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. [47]
“Some leaders despise their own citizens,” Winter opined, in 1998, defending the guerrilla-democrats that Madeleine Albright and Philip Gourevitch and the New Yorker magazine lauded as ‘a new breed of African leader’. [48] “But sometimes governments are more inexperienced than evil.”
The so-called ‘inexperienced’ leaders that Winter was defending were Rwanda’s Kagame and Uganda’s Museveni (Ethiopia’s dictator Meles Zenawi was typically included in this group) and the reference extended to SPLA guerrilla commander John Garang and ADFL puppet ‘commander’ Laurent Kabila.
Paul Kagame’s operational military tactics and methods of information control were far from anything we might define as ‘inexperienced’.
Kagame’s doctrine of ensuring information shutdown was central to his strategy in the invasions of Rwanda and Congo-Zaire.
“We used communication and information warfare better than anyone,” Paul Kagame told Nik Gowing in an interview on 8 April 1998. “We have found a new way of doing things.”
“Many believe that this highly effective strategy of information control and access shut down was the result of Kagame refining the knowledge of information warfare he acquired during a U.S. Command and Staff course in 1990,” wrote Nik Gowing, in a 1997-1998 study funded by the European Union. [49]
“Rwandan officials laugh off these suggestions. They say Kagame only spent three months out of a planned twelve months as a Ugandan officer on a training course at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. He cut short his studies to return to lead and plan the RPF advance into northern Rwanda after the commander, Fred Rwigena, was killed in action. However Kagame himself acknowledges the importance of the Fort Leavenworth contribution to his thinking, especially in information warfare and communications. Kagame confirmed that “central to my studies in Leavenworth” were “organisation, tactics, strategy, building human resources, Psy-Ops [psychological operations], information, psychology and communications among the troops.” [49]
Nik Gowing’s credentials are very interesting. From 1989-1998, Gowing worked variously as an international consultant, BBC World news anchor and diplomatic editor for Britain’s Channel Four News. His reports were aired frequently by the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, NBC’s SuperChannel and CNN International. These are the same institutions that covered up Kagame’s low-intensity guerrilla operations and subsequent crimes. In 1994, Gowing was a resident fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. [49]
Nik Gowing was also a Visiting Fellow in International Relations at Keele University, a board member for the British Association for Central and Eastern Europe, a member of the Director’s Strategy Group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, and a governor of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy—the British think tank that is funding pro-SPLM propaganda in alliance with USAID and Irish gunrunner Daniel Eiffe.
Nik Gowing’s potentially volatile 1998 conference paper did nothing to hold anyone account for recent past abuses or to forestall the terrorism that the ‘new breed of African leaders’ would soon unleash on Central Africa.
“The full picture of Rwandan, Ugandan and—arguably—non-regional involvement has yet to be uncovered,” Gowing wrote. Like Samantha Power in her September 2001 Atlantic Monthly disinformation feature “Bystanders to Genocide,” Gowing suggests that the many high-level sources he interviewed are honest and their statements can be taken at face value. “Extensive high-level interviewing for this study has provided evidence of limited political, logistical and advisory support by both regional and nonregional powers. Hearsay and circumstantial evidence is reported. However, despite widespread concerns at the time of writing there is scant documentary proof or evidence of either direct backing or complicity. Rwandan officials from Vice President Paul Kagame downwards deny emphatically any such relationship.” [49]
Really? It seems that the evidence of foreign backing for the RPF/UPDF invasion was readily available. Notably, though Gowing interviewed and quoted many ‘humanitarian aid’ professionals on the ground in Central Africa, most are not named, and he never mentions Roger Winter. “There remain many ‘whisky talk’ suspicions about outside, non-regional involvement,” he concluded. [49]
Both the U.S. and France deployed large teams of special operations forces in Central Africa. In Goma, at this time, a western war correspondent photographed U.S. Special Forces machine-gunning unarmed refugee men, women and children in what he described as “one of the most horrible examples of mass atrocities I have ever seen.” He was later threatened into silence by U.S. officials. The U.S. military was all over Bujumbura, Kigali and Entebbe. [50]
“U.S. agents were seen with rebels in Zaire,” reported the Boston Globe on October 8, 1997. “Active participation is alleged in military overthrow of Mobutu.” [51] Was this Roger Winter?
To funnel selected intelligence to United Nations headquarters’ Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), the U.N. had created a special multinational intelligence Situation Center (SitCen) in New York. The SitCen’s new Information and Research (I&R) Unit existed from 1993 to 1999, providing “significant and useful intelligence about arms shipments, belligerent activities,” noted Canadian military expert A. Walter Dorn, “and the status of refugees and [making] several prescient predictions and warnings.” [52]
The SitCen was staffed and informed by Russian, French, British, and U.S. defense and intelligence officials seconded to the operation. “These individuals maintained substantial links to the intelligence services of their home countries, most having come from these agencies. They were ‘the interface’ with these intelligence services. In return for the loan of these officers and the information they provided, the nations sought the U.N.’s coded cables (situation reports) from the field, some of which may have made their way back to national capitals, a prospect that displeased some U.N. Secretariat officials.” [52]
The U.N.s DPKO received credible intelligence documenting that Kagame’s RPF forces were engaged in ‘pseudo-operations’ that are the signature of Kagame’s and Museveni’s guerrilla terrorism in the entire region: disguising themselves and their atrocities as the work of the ‘enemy’—the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Mai Mai, the FDLR, the Interahamwe, government forces of Milton Obote in Uganda or Juvenal Habyarimana in Rwanda—pick your bogeymen.
“The I&R Unit reports describe night raids by the Zairian rebel [ADFL] forces…. In an act of deception, the government of Rwanda stationed its forces ‘under the disguise of Banyamulenge’ in Zaire to protect hydroelectric plants that provide power to both Rwanda and Burundi (19 December 1996).” [52]
“The I&R Unit boldly asserted that the Tutsi rebellion was backed by ‘American teams’ (6 February 1997). Despite official U.S. support for the Canadian-led humanitarian mission in November-December 1996, the Unit alleges that the U.S. sought to undermine the operation: ‘On the American request to deter the deployment of a U.N.-authorized Multi-National Force led by a Canadian General, the RPF [Rwandan army] along with ADFL [rebel group] elements lured the ex-FAR and Interahamwe in a combat operation north of the Muganga camp (Zaire).” [52]
“If these allegations were true,” Dorn wrote, “it has a striking parallel with duplicity in the Congo mission in the 1960s. While U.N. forces were protecting the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba as part of a U.N. operation explicitly backed (and partly paid for) by the U.S., CIA operatives in the Congo were trying to assassinate him and later backed the Army Chief Joseph Mobutu as he seized the Presidency.” [52]
“The U.S. position after the attack was clear: it wanted the mission aborted,” wrote Dorn. “The U.S. estimate of the number of remaining refugees was almost 400,000 less than the consensus figures used by the humanitarian community. Lieutenant General Maurice Baril, the Multinational Force Commander, was suspicious of U.S. reports of numbers, which were too rapidly sliding downwards. Members of the I&R Unit had briefed him on what they believed was [U.S.] disinformation. Both the French and British officers in the Unit were tracking the numbers. France was providing figures from overflights with Mirage jets. The British officer was gaining information from U.N. agencies on the ground (e.g., UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, etc.). They both concluded that the U.S. numbers were far too low.” [52]
“One is left to wonder if a strong early U.N. intervention could have saved the Congo from the subsequent chaos and loss of over three million lives,” Dorn concluded, “or at least have mitigated the human tragedy.” [52]
Had Kagame been stopped cold in 1998, millions upon millions of Congolese people, and uncountable Rwandan people, would likely not have been raped, mutilated or killed—and the Congo would be a very different place than it is today.
Gowing’s report reads like an after-the-fact apology of why and how journalists and ‘humanitarian’ NGO’s couldn’t report the truth about the mass slaughter of Congolese IDPs and Rwandan refugees. “I had no doubt it was genocide,” he quotes one unnamed NGO insider to say. “We still had no doubt, but should we say it was genocide? No.” [52]
According to the glowing Western propaganda, the new breed of African leader was supposedly determined to steer Africa in a new direction, and it would behoove the world to allow them some latitude in their excesses. “Central Africa’s new leaders have the enormous task of reassembling nations that are among the poorest on earth, ethnically divided,” wrote Roger Winter, “riven with corruption and saturated with arms and shadowy groups willing to use those arms to gain power.” [53]
Roger Winter never failed to remind the good and caring media consumers of the West about the shadowy forces of evil who are ‘saturated with arms’ and—unlike the guerrilla forces of the SPLM or the NRM or the RPF (or Roger Winter himself)—willing to use these arms to destroy all the good that had been ostensibly achieved through Roger Winter’s selfless dedication to human rights and statecraft.
“The military in Rwanda is more willing to listen to criticism if we acknowledge the difficulties they face in waging counterinsurgency wars,” Winter added, again casting the criminal aggressors as the aggrieved victims. Looking back at Winter’s statements made at the time these crimes were fresh (1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, etc.), we see in his unabashed defense of the murderous ADFL guerrillas—themselves comprised mostly of the RPF and UPDF and some smaller numbers of Eritrean, Ethiopian and SPLM regulars—a conscious admission that massive atrocities had been and were still being committed. Yet Winter apologizes away all responsibility. [53]
Does Roger Winter ever suggest that the United States or Israel should acknowledge the difficulties that the Government of Sudan faces in waging its “genocidal counterinsurgency war” against the SPLM?
“It seems certain that thousands of Rwandan refugees and genocidaires (those who commit genocide) were killed last year [1997] during the civil war [sic] that brought Congo’s new leaders to power,” Winter wrote. “Less certain is whether [Laurent] Kabila and his colleagues [Kagame, Museveni] actively sought to kill refugees—or whether the deaths resulted from poor military tactics, lack of troop discipline or the actions of foreign soldiers. A U.N. human rights investigation is examining those questions.”
Roger Winter had it both ways. He regularly described Kagame and the RPF as highly disciplined and responsible, good-intentioned and cooperative, open to human rights monitoring. Here he is dismissing the brutal slaughter and the hunting down and killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent and unarmed Hutu civilians—mostly women and children—on the grounds that perhaps the ADFL [read: RPF] were suffering from “poor military tactics” or “lack of troop discipline.” We should excuse the RPF, faced with “the difficulties of waging counterinsurgency war,” but when the Government of Sudan is faced with counterinsurgency war they are guilty of genocide. [53]
Pochalla, south Sudan: Suffering Ethiopian refugees get a sermon in 2004. Photo c. keith harmon snow, 2004.
While we observe these rationalizations of cold-blooded murder, remember that Roger Winter ostensibly worked as an advocate for refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), employed by an organization called the U.S. Committee for Refugees. According to his supposed job description—ever touted by the western press and U.S. State Department—Winter was an advocate for vulnerable people caught up in the maelstrom of war. However, he behaves instead like an apologist for murder who blames the victims and protects their killers.
“For more on this story we are joined by Roger Winter, the director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, a private, non-profit organization advocating protection and assistance of displaced persons,” reported National Public Radio icon Charlyne Hunter-Gault on May 17, 1997. “He spent almost two weeks with the leader of the rebel movement, Laurent Kabila, since the conflict began more than four months ago.” [54]
Charlayne Hunter-Gault advanced several lines of disinformation already put in motion by the U.S. State Department and its subservient western media organizations. First was the idea Laurent Kabila was the ‘leader of the rebel movement’, the ADFL. This fiction was peddled with the utmost seriousness in the western press. Combined with the Psy-Op that this was a ‘homegrown rebellion’ against President Mobutu, this served to render Kagame, Kabarebe, Museveni, Salim Saleh and the real ADFL leadership invisible. Even more invisible, then, was the Pentagon’s involvement. [54]
Second was the false theme that Roger Winter had only recently established communications with the ADFL ‘rebels’, and this around the time of the fall of the city of Kisangani—some eight months into the genocidal campaign against the Hutu refugees in Congo-Zaire’s forests. In reality, Winter was in constant liaison with the U.S.-backed RPF rebels as they invaded Congo-Zaire from Rwanda. As previously noted, Winter’s comraderie with the RPF power structure was established as early as 1988 in Washington D.C., and he was no stranger to RPF operations zones during the four year civil war (1990-1994) in Rwanda.
Deflecting the gaze of western media consumers from seeing the truth—that this is a western-backed invasion led by a western proxy army in contravention of international law—Charlayne Hunter-Gault asks the standard leading question about Tutsis being under attack, falsely framing the discussion of war and plunder in Congo-Zaire around the need to protect Tutsi people from genocide of the kind that (we were all told) spontaneously erupted in Rwanda. “Because this started,” Charlayne Hunter-Gault points out, “of course, when the Tutsis in the Eastern part of Zaire were threatened with expulsion by Mobutu, rose up in arms, and so [Kabila] joined that.” [54]
“Exactly. What happened was, in my view, that what was triggered, the fuse was lit by this so-called planned expulsion of the Banyamulenge, this Tutsi population you’re talking about,” Roger Winter duplicitously explains. “But it’s rapidly evolved far beyond the Tutsi issue or Rwanda-related issue, as a lot of outsiders would seek to make it. What it’s become is a struggle for a new Zaire. That’s what’s unfolding right now. And it’s important to have that as the context, not some exterior outside forces.” [54]
Roger Winter’s deceptions run deep. To begin with, the whole notion of Banyamulenge rights in Congo-Zaire is highly contested. Instead, the pro-Tutsi agenda uses the argument of an ever present threat of a Tutsi genocide in Congo-Zaire as carte-blanche justification for Kagame’s military operations in eastern Congo. In the PBS Newshour interview with Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Winter revealed that he had visited ‘rebel’ bases, plural, a remarkable impossibility for your average humanitarian aid worker, made possible in fact by Roger Winter’s close association with the rebels, the U.S. military and the intelligence establishment. This is the profile of a covert operator, a cold warrior, an Iran-contra gunrunner type outfitting rebels and providing a liaison for logistics and communications in low-intensity wars. [54]
Rwanda, Congo-Zaire, Sudan—Roger Winter ran a covert arms operation for the United States military, funding and supplying and advising guerrillas in-low intensity warfare.
“Well, let me say when I was with [Kabila] the last week or so of January,” Winter said, “it was very clear to me that young [Congolese] men of all ethnic stripes from all over the country were rallying to that cause. I went to some military training bases, and the young men who were training were not Tutsi. They were from Chaba. They were from all over the country, and exiles returning. He was setting up a civil structure to govern, as it were, the areas that were under his control, and the great bulk of the people were not Banyamulenge. They were from all over the country.” [54]
In fact, the ‘rebels’ were most heavily drawn from the ranks of the RPF and UPDF, with assorted Ethiopian, Eritrean and SPLA regulars, and some Congolese Tutsis (Banyamulenge). In fact, there were also plenty of Congolese boys—the ‘kidogo‘ child soldiers—and these were intentionally armed and sent to the frontlines where they were meant to draw enemy fire. The kidogo—the Sons of Congo—were sacrificed, in cold blood.
Roger Winter was on the ground in eastern Congo during the RPF attacks on refugee camps, shuttling back and forth between the Kivu provinces and the U.S. embassy and RPF headquarters in Rwanda.
According to professor Filip Reyntjens, one of the foremost experts on Central African affairs: on 16 November 1996, “the day after the attack against Mugunga refugee camp, Roger Winter organised a meeting between Laurent Kabila, the ADFL figurehead, and U.S. special envoy Ambassador Richard Bogosian, Ambassador Robert Gribbin, and a U.S. military colonel reporting to U.S. General Edwin P. Smith military and U.S. diplomats.” Dr. Reyntjens exposes the false statements made by Ambassador Gribbin and General Smith. Major Richard Orth, a long time agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was an ardent RPF collaborator, to the point of embarrassing the U.S. State Department. [55]
U.S. Major-General Edward Smith stated categorically that aerial and satellite reconnaissance backed the US claim that almost all the refugees had returned to Rwanda. The Pentagon and U.S. State Department’s recent production of satellite images for anti-Hutu asylum removals in the U.S. is striking evidence that the U.S. has superior intelligence about what was happening where and when. [50]
Knowing perfectly well that U.S. covert forces and military advisers were on the ground in support of the RPF invasion, Winter produced disinformation to counter international efforts to provide a multinational peacekeeping force to intervene to protect some 1.2 million Hutu refugees in eastern Congo-Zaire. In another USCR production co-signed by Jeff Drumtra Winter wrote: “We should only send troops to eastern Zaire if their purpose is to disarm Rwandan Hutu killers who participated in the 1994 genocide.” [56]
Winter sold the same disingenuous line used in Rwanda in 1994: an international peacekeeping force would only strengthen the ‘Rwandan Hutu killers’. “As long as the international force pledges not to confront the killers,” Winter wrote, November 21, 1996, clearly working on behalf of the RPF and not for the protection of vulnerable Rwandan and Congolese populations, “the force would not be useful and could be counterproductive.” [56]
Winter was not the only one who lied. U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson and Madeleine Albright did their share, lying through their teeth about the Pentagon’s holocaust in Zaire.
Winter then redoubled the lies, providing doublespeak about Pentagon forces being deployed to ostensibly protect Rwandan Hutu refugees that were forced back to Rwanda, and downplaying the numbers of returning Hutu refugees: “U.S. officials have indicated that a small American military contingent will help provide humanitarian assistance inside Rwanda to 600,000 former refugees who have returned home in the past week.” [56]
Translated to tactical and strategic military language: The RPF wanted a clear path to dominate the enemy–eliminating as many Hutu people as possible–and achieve a decisive military victory. Hutu refugees were not only slaughtered in Congo-Zaire, but also on return to Rwanda.
Roger Winter was blatantly supporting the RPF military campaign, while disingenuously arguing that it best served the interests of millions of Rwandan survivors. These were absolutely destitute human beings, ematiated, hopeless and sick after months of intentional starvation under an macabre UNHCR policy of intentional withholding of food in the camps in eastern Congo: the World Food Program rations were stored over the summer of 1996 and only disbursed to arriving RPF troops in September and October. These were the survivors of the RPF bombing campaign against the refugee camps–survivors of some 6 years of persecution and terrorism against them that began with the RPF invasion of October 1990.
Kagame complained that an international force deployed to eastern Congo-Zaire might strengthen his adversaries and inhibit the RPF’s absolute victory. These strategic objectives had previously been demonstrated to succeed: between April and July of 1994, Kagame threatened the international community promising that the RPF would attack U.N. troops if the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR II) was expanded and strengthened. Instead, UNAMIR was gutted. As evidence of their belligerence–and their determination to annihilate the Rwandan masses–RPF troops engaged in combat with the French-led forces from the U.N.-authorized ‘Operation Turquoise’ dispatched on June 21, 1994 to create a safe zone’ in the southern prefectures of Rwanda.
Congolese Armed Forces (FARDC) in North Kivu: The U.N. creation of FARDC ‘integrated’ brigades offered the perfect ‘Trojan Horse’ to facilitate Rwandan military infiltration of eastern Congo. Photo c. keith harmon snow 2005.
Following suit in Congo-Zaire in 1996, Kagame’s RPF troops and Pentagon backers similarly lobbied to prevent international forces from being deployed to provide any humanitarian protection for the millions of refugees. Roger Winter was their point man in Washington, their leading advocate in the propaganda diplomacy to win hearts and minds for the RPF plans, and he is culpable in the subsequent war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide that have occurred in the Great Lakes since, beginning with the first UPDF invasion of Rwanda of 1 October 1990 and up to the present day Rwandan occupation of eastern Congo.
While the Pentagon and U.S. State Department and the U.N. Security Council feigned concern for some 1.2 million Rwandan refugees in eastern Congo-Zaire in the fall of 1996, they had no real intention of doing anything but stalling, enabling the RPF to advance the invasion as the Pentagon proxy. This involved U.S. covert forces, heavy weaponry provided by Washington, troop deployments supported by C-130 aircraft, and state-of-the-art Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) support, including massive satellite dishes installed on Idjwe Island in Lake Kivu and in the Ruwenzori Mountains on the Uganda border.
Roger Winter’s ploy for the RPF succeeded in forestalling a multinational intervention. The western press seized on the idea that western policy-makers could do nothing but stall and argue about who would pay for ‘humanitarian’ troop deployments.
Winter and the USCR also engaged in the sinister campaign to convince the world that hundreds of thousands of refugees from Rwanda and Burundi–now mixed with hundreds of thousands of IDPs from Congo–were few in number, had all neatly crossed the border back to ‘safety’ in Rwanda and Burundi, or simply could not be found. Again, nothing could have been further from the ugly truth. [56]
“Uncertainty persists about the number, locations, and condition of Rwandan refugees in Zaire in the aftermath of violence in the past month. Several hundred thousand Zairians have also been affected by the violence,” Roger Winter and Jeff Drumtra stated in the USCR report of November 21, 1996. [56]
Winter’s USCR communiqué of November 26, 1996 responded directly to the international debate about the massive discrepancies in the estimates of the numbers of refugees (and IDPs) remaining in Congo-Zaire. However, Roger Winter further advocated that the only reasonable and effective solution to aiding these refugees (and IDPs) was to negotiate with the ADFL rebels for “improved access by humanitarian workers into eastern Zaire using Rwanda as a staging base for humanitarian supplies.” This advocacy relied on the oft-stated premise that the RPF military were the good guys, that they had “stopped the [Tutsi] genocide of 1994,” and it relied on the Psy-Op that the RPF was a disciplined, responsible and accountable fighting force that could be trusted to do the right thing according to international norms. [56]
In this disinformation communiqué, Winter proposed that the numbers of uprooted Rwandan, Burundian and Zairean people remaining in eastern Zaire were between 510,000 and 950,000. He also reported that the USCR had conducted nine site visits to eastern Zaire and Rwanda since 1994–making it clear that Winter maintained a constant presence in the region.
While covering up the massive RPF atrocities and U.S. covert forces machine-gunning of Rwandan refugees and Congolese civilians from Bukavu to Kisangani and all the way across the vast Congo, the western propaganda system finally declared that the refugees had rescued themselves. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
“Americans can be forgiven if they are frequently confused about foreign policy,” wrote the U.S. State Department media conduit Johanna McGreary, who uses journalism as her cover . “Like last week, when the pictures and the words looked remarkably out of synch to anyone trying to make sense of events in Africa. There was Bill Clinton announcing that the U.S. would participate ‘in principle’ in an international military force to rescue more than half a million sick and starving Rwandan refugees caught up in brutal tribal war. Even as he spoke, hundreds of thousands of them appeared on TV screens, marching safely out of Zaire back across the border to the homeland they had fled two years [earlier].” [57]
Time Magazine November 25, 1996: “How Should we help? In Zaire, refugees rescued themselves.”
Amongst the most egregious and offensive examples of the contempt, arrogance and white supremacy of the capitalist media system, this ‘news’ feature was published even as hundreds of thousands of innocent refugees–mostly women and children–were being hunted down and killed by the U.S. proxy forces directed by Roger Winter.
Over the next nine months, Hutu refugees who fled westward into Congo’s forests were hunted all across the vast Congo, into Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville. With a bounty in U.S. dollars paid by UNHCR, they were even hunted in Gabon, Cameroon, Angola and Zambia.
“In northwest Rwanda, reports suggest that government troops have killed thousands of people during counterinsurgency operations,” Winter continued, not specifying the year(s) he is referring to, as he in turns performs mental gymnastics to shield the RPF and UPDF domestic terror operations inside Rwanda. [56]
The Kagame/Museveni war machine massacred at least tens of thousands of Rwandans (mostly but not only Hutus) as it invaded northern Rwanda from Uganda, 1990-1994, and these were not “counterinsurgency operations”, but insurgency. Declassified documents produced by relief organizations during the so-called ‘100 days of genocide’ in 1994 show that it was the RPF killing Hutus–and not genocidal Interahamwe or the Hutu Armed Forces of Rwanda (FAR) killing Tutsis–and dumping the bodies in the Kagera River of northwest Rwanda. [50]
Throughout the late summer and fall of 1994 the RPF continued to commit massive atrocities against the population, documented in part by the infamous Robert Gersony, a highly respected consultant hired by UNHCR, whose then unwelcome report remains buried in the bowels of the United Nations. The premeditated mass murders at Kibeho in 1995 followed. In 1996 and 1997 scores of thousands, at the very least, of refugees returning from Congo-Zaire (the survivors of the coordinated RPF attacks against refugee camps in Zaire) were slaughtered in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park. [50]
In the end, Roger Winter sounds more like the Council of Wonk’s Goebbels-esque Minister of Propaganda, Dr. Eric Reeves. “What is less clear is the extent to which the killings are intentional massacres, or whether genocidaire insurgents are again using civilian populations as human shields in combat zones.” [56]
‘Genocidaires’ are Hutus by international consensus, and Hutus are genocidaires by international consensus, and genocidaire is the code word used to describe the local bogeyman ever out to destroy democracy in the Great Lakes theater.
Does anyone see the irony in Roger Winter’s suggestion that Rwandan genocidaire insurgents are “again using civilian populations as human shields in combat zones?” Such is exactly the modus operandi of the SPLM. Classic guerrilla warfare as practiced by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement has been premised on the SPLM’s ability to disappear into the vast landscape and become invisible amidst the civilian populations of South Sudan.
This is classic low-intensity warfare, and it is combined with modern propaganda, psychological operations, electioneering, and ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ promotion by means of the distrubution of large sums of cash, the purchasing of local agents and the commodification of civil society through punishment and reward.
The recent “Arab Spring” uprisings in Khartoum signal further destabilization by the U.S. and its allies. The SPLA have been armed and are being prepared to complete the mission of regime change in Sudan. It happened the same, slightly differently, in Rwanda.
This is how the United States of America, Canada, Britain, our European allies, and Israel, have carved a ‘newly independent state’ out of the formerly autonomous sovereign nation of Sudan. This is how the same western alliance used low-intensity warfare to bring disaster capitalism to first Uganda, then Rwanda, and then the Congo. Wonkfare in America, warfare in Africa. It is time to issue indictments. ~
keith harmon snow is a war correspondent, photographer and independent investigator, and a four time Project Censored award winner. He is the 2009 Regent’s Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work, outside of academia, contesting official narratives on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide while also working as a genocide investigator for the United Nations and other bodies. He has worked extensively in the Great Lakes region of Africa. From 2004 to 2006 he worked as a consultant for Genocide Watch and Survivor’s Rights International, and he traveled to south Sudan in 2004. He worked as genocide investigator for the United Nations in Ethiopia in 2005.
NOTES:
[1] Rebecca Hamilton, Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
[2] Steve Weissman, “Rwanda – Whose Genocide?” truthout, March 31, 2004. Stephen R. Weissman, formerly Staff Director of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, has been a senior governance adviser to the U.S. Agency for International Development, associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Ford Foundation program officer.
[3] Max and Paul Warburg and other associates financed the rise of Adolph Hitler. While German members of the Warburg organizations affiliated with I.G. Farben were tried and convicted at Nuremburg, neither Max nor Paul nor any of their top affiliates at the U.S. subsidiary of I.G. Farben were ever charged. See, e.g.: Antony C. Sutton, The Empire of I.G. Farben: Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Clairview Books, 2010.
[4] The Aspen Institute has hosted Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame, and it’s board of directors include Nicholas Kristof (the Darfur, Sudan ‘genocide’ Pulitzer winner) and Madeleine Albright (former Secretary of State during the Clinton administration’s covert operations in Africa). The Aspen Institute describes itself as an “international non-profit organization dedicated to informed dialogue and inquiry on issues of global concern.” However, along with Fareed Zacharia–whose productions in Newsweek support some of the West’s most flagrant Psy-Ops against Western ‘news’ consumers–are a whole phalanx of defense and intelligence operatives. Most notable in relation to wars and interventions in Africa include Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former CIA Director John Deutch, former Secretary of Defense William Perry (1994-1997), and New York Times Corporation ‘journalist’ Nicholas Kristof.
[5] Eliza Griswold, “The Man For a New Sudan,” New York Times Magazine, June 15, 2008.
[6] For this story, all subversive guerrilla campaigns will be identified using the names of their political wings: SPLM, NRM, RPF, and ADFL. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) is the political wing of former commander John Garang’s guerrilla forces called the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The National Resistance Movement (NRM) was the political wing of Yoweri Museveni’s guerrilla forces called the National Resistance Army (NRA); after 1986, the NRA were renamed the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF). The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was the political wing of Paul Kagame’s guerrilla forces called the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA). The ADFL refers to the acronym attached to the forces of the Alliance for the Democratic Liberation of Congo-Zaire, though these were comprised most heavily of RPA and UPDF regulars, virtually all of whom came from Uganda.
[7] Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellon Press, 1999: p. 463. [8] See, e.g., keith harmon snow, “The Winter of Bashir’s Discontent: AFRICOM’s Covert War in Sudan,” AllThingsPass.com, March 4, 2009.
[9] Daniel Siryoti, Shlomo Cesana, The Associated Press and Israel Hayom Staff, “Israeli ‘Elements’ reported to be Arming South Sudan Army,” Israel Hayom, August 8, 2012.
[10] See: keith harmon snow, “Gertler’s Bling Bang Torah Gang: Israel and the Ongoing Holocaust in Congo,” Dissident Voice, February 9, 2008.
[11] Personal communication, Luke Chuol, July 31, 2012.
[12] William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony, Cambridge University Press, 1996: p. 82.
[13] Eric Thomas Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA, M.E. Sharpe, 1994.
[14] USAID operative Brian D’Silva and Department of State operative Ted Dagne will not be addressed at length in this report. According to their own bios: Brian D’Silva has over 25 years of experience working on Sudan issues and in Sudan. He served as Ford Foundation Visiting Professor at the University of Khartoum and also with USAID/Sudan in Khartoum in the 1980s. In the 1990′s, he worked on Sudan issues from USAID’s Regional Office in Nairobi. Ted Dagne is Specialist in International Relations, Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade at the Congressional Research Service, the public policy research arm of the U.S Congress. Ted has also served as a Professional Staff Member for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and as Special Adviser to U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan and to the Assistant Secretary of State, Department of State. Ted has conducted over 2,000 major studies on African affairs and he is the Associate Editor of the Mediterranean Quarterly Journal.
[15] James A. Chapman, et al, Agriculture and Natural Resources Strategy Assessment, Chemonics International, for USAID Project No. 650-0071-3-30123, December 1987.
[15-a] See, e.g., keith harmon snow, Oil in Darfur? Covert Ops in Somalia? The New Old Humanitarian Warfare in Africa, Global Research, February 7, 2007.
[15-b] Eric Reeves, “Regime Change in Sudan,” Washington Post, 23 August 2004: p. A15.
[16] J.F. Pirro, “John Prendergast: A Larger-Than-Life Humanitarian With an Undying Mission,” Mainline Today, November 16, 2011.
[17] Dr. Yaa-Lengi Ngemi and the CongoCoalition’s letter to editor Hobart Rowland and writer J.F. Pirro were posted on the article on December 15, 2011, but were subsequently deleted. The letter is reproduced here in full:
[Dear Hobart Rowland:
About J.F. Pirro describing John Prendergast [JP]: Since 2000 when we published our book, GENOCIDE IN THE CONGO, we have struggled to raise the issue of Gongo genocide by attempting to expose the criminals, their sponsors, and their apologists. It has been a long struggle because those dying are Africans and Black while those benefiting are mostly whites outside of Africa. And, until a white person sees the little 9 year-old African girl being gang raped as his own little daughter or the 30 year-old woman who is gang-raped then mutilated then her genitals carved off and carried away as his own wife or sister, until then, white journalists and “activists” can only scratch each other’s back, blow each other’s trumpet in order to make themselves feel good, raise money, hobnob all over the world giving the poor and the downtrodden scraps left over after they have enjoyed the money they raise in the name of “doing good” or “preventing genocide and crimes against humanity” instead of STOPPING the genocide going on RIGHT NOW.
Take your subject, JP, whom we have confronted in New York City (Columbia University) and Washington D.C. (a few times). While you sing his praises, the Congolese people who have been dying since 1996 have NO use of JP, though he might go by there and spread some crumbs around from the money he raises and lives by. WHY? Let me put it this way for you to understand: It’s like raising money to feed someone in chains and who is being tortured everyday instead of denouncing and getting rid of the brutes torturing the man.
To wit, your JP has NEVER denounced his former boss Bill Clinton who was behind the invasion of the Congo in 1996, in the first place (watch on Youtube “Crisis in the Congo: Uncovering the Truth”, so you can get an idea; with apologies to a great friend of mine who, rightly, feels the video does not give the whole truth).
Neither has your JP ever before denounced Paul Kagame–Bill Clinton’s personal friend and Hitler-in-Chief–for the millions of Congolese dead at his hands, nor exposed Hyppolite Kanambe, the former intelligence officer in Paul Kagame’s army who was set up in the Congo as “president”, a.k.a. “Joseph Kabila”.
We confronted your JP and he couldn’t defend his stance. Now he is beginning to “mention” Rwanda and Uganda; however, Enough Project continues with its line of business: Do not denounce Bill Clinton, Kagame, Museveni, Kanambe, or the multinationals, and do not call the world governments (who actually are behind the genocide in the first place) to either demand that Kagame and Museveni get out of the Congo and carry their Trojan Horse, Kanambe “Kabila” with them or that the world governments go in the Congo, as they did in Europe against the Nazis, and kick out the Rwandans, the Ugandans, and Hyppolite Kanambe who have been slaughtering the Congolese.
We understand, of course, that the views of Black Africans like us won’t make either your JP or his former master Bill Clinton loose his sleep over the millions of Conglese killed while they trot all over the place as “humanitarians”. Thus the Genocide in the Congo goes on, the gang rapes continue, and Enough blames it on “minerals” and promotes laws on “minerals” (they won’t even demand that the US Congress implements Law 109-456 that was signed by George W. Bush in 2006 because it will expose their sponsors. Just imagine, if, during the European holocaust, the world had talked about passing laws to denounce the use of Jews in the factories in Germany instead of denouncing and going in there to get rid of Hitler and his killing machine.
Yeah, as you wrote, “whatever it takes to raise the funding”, that’s what Bill Clinton, your JP, and their likes are all about. And, whether the Clooneys, the Mia Farrows, the Ryan Coslings, and their likes embrace the Bill Clintons and your JP out of blind admiration or ignorance, that’s between them and the Almighty GOD (I, too, voted for Bill Clinton twice, but I’d rather denounce him after I found out the Truth, than end up as the Rich Man in Hell begging Lazarus for some H2O through Abraham).
Now, keep in mind that there are whites who, like Keith Harmon Snow, have decided that WE ARE ALL HUMAN BEINGS AND GOD’S CREATION so, they will denounce anyone, Black or white, who pussy-foot around instead of denouncing and acting to rid the world of those funding, promoting, committing, and apologizing for the GENOCIDE anywhere in the world like that of the Africans in the Congo. Them we embrace and pray that the Good Lord strengthen them and protect them. And, those like you, we pray that either you be converted to the Truth or may the Great God deal with you however he sees FIT.
Prof. Yaa-Lengi Ngemi, President of Congo Coalition and author of Genocide in the Congo.]
[18] Rebecca Hamilton, “Special Report: The Wonks Who Sold Washington on Sudan,” Reuters, July 11, 2012.
[19] Eric Reeves, “Genocide’s Victory,” Op/Ed, Boston Globe, December 8, 2007.
[20] “Fascism is only the organized political expression of the structure of the average man’s character. It is the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine-civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life.” Wilhem Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus), 1933.
[21] Rebecca Hamilton, Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011: p. 139.
[21-a] Five different perspectives on the ongoing crisis in the Darfur region explore the ethical and political questions behind popular calls for humanitarian intervention and regime change in Sudan. Panelists include: Co-Director of the IAC in New York, Sara Flounders; Professor of Anthropology, Dr. Elliot Fratkin; investigative journalist, Keith Harmon Snow; researcher on war crimes, Dimitri Oram; and Associate Professor of Anthropology, Enoch Page. This event on the crisis in Darfur was held on July 6, 2006 at Smith College in Massachusetts. Listen to the panel presentations reproduced on KPFA’s Guns & Butter radio show in two parts on August 16 & 23, 2006: Part one: <http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/22236>; part two: <http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/22351>.
[22] See, for example: keith harmon snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia? The New Old “Humanitarian” Warfare in Africa,” February 1, 2007; and “Merchant’s of Death: Exposing Corporate-Financed Holocaust in Africa,” Global Research, December 7, 2008.
[23] See, for example, the discussion of Nicholas Kristof’s propaganda in: keith harmon snow, “Petroleum and Empire in North Africa: Muammar Gaddafi Accused of Genocide? NATO Invasion Underway,” ConciousBeingAlliance, March 3, 2011.
[24] Personal communication, Rene Lemarchand, August 2, 2012. René Lemarchand is a French political scientist who is known for his research on ethnic conflict and genocide in Rwanda, Burundi and Darfur. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, and has worked as a USAID consultant in Côte d’Ivoire (1992-1996) and Ghana (1997-1998).
[25] Roger Rosenblatt & Sebastio Salgado’s story, “The Last Place on Earth,” Vanity Fair, July 1993, was turned into a coffee table picture book published in December 1994.
[26] See, e.g., Ann Garrison, “South Sudan Independence? Really?” July 10, 2010; and Profile: Joseph C. Wilson, Africa Confidential, accessed December 11, 2010.
[27] Prendergast et al, Sudan: The Lost Boys: Child Soldiers and Unaccompanied Boys in Southern Sudan, Human Rights Watch, Vol. 6, No. 10, November 1994.
[28] Makau Mutua, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
[29] John Prendergast, Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, Hyperion, 2007: p. 142-143.
[30] Director of U.S. Committee for Refugees to Present Lecture, Press Release, Smith College, March, 1999.
[31] Prior to Public Talk, Smith Professor to be Honored for Sudan Advocacy, Press Release, Smith College, October 16, 2000.
[32] While warning the reader that Mahmood Mamdani’s scholarship as regards Sudan and the Great Lakes of Africa is compromised by his formerly close relationship to Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame and the NRM during the bush war (1980-1986) and years after (1986-1996), the reader can find an excellent accounting of Dr. Eric Reeves’ disinformation and manipulation of mortality statistics in: Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics & the War on Terror, Pantheon, 2009.
[33] AMERICA’S SUDAN POLICY: A NEW DIRECTION? JOINT HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON AFRICA AND SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS OF THE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS, FIRST SESSION, MARCH 28, 2001, Serial No. 107-8.
[34] “Sudan/Britain: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” Africa Confidential, January 2005.
[35] “Former U.S. Envoy Calls for Military Action Against Sudan,” Sudan Tribune, June 16, 2011.
[36] Eoin Butler, “Our Man in South Sudan,” The Irish Times, Saturday December 17, 2011, <http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/magazine/2011/1217/1224309123073.html>.
[37] See: USAID Photo gallery, “Sudan: Disseminating the Peace,” USAID web site, 2006, http://gemini.info.usaid.gov/photos/displayimage.php?pos=-894.
[38] “Sudan Mirror Sheds Light:” http://www.wfd.org/case-studies/sudan-mirror-sheds-light.aspx.
[39] 2009 interview with Dan Eiffe, publisher of Sudan Mirror, part 1: http://citizenshift.org/interview-dan-eiffe-publisher-sudan-mirror-nairobi-kenya; part 2: http://citizenshift.org/interview-dan-eiffe-part-2-publisher-sudan-mirror; and part 3: http://citizenshift.org/node/23679&term_tid=54.
[40] Daniel Pipes and Patrick Clawson, “Interview with Elliott Abrams: ‘Religious Freedom is More Important Today’,” Middle East Quarterly , Winter 2001.
[41] Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Verso, 2001.
[42] “Pseudo-operations” were developed, defined and practiced during the so-called ‘Mau Mau insurgency” by British military commander Frank Kitson, and their efficacy did not escape notice of the Pentagon. See, for example: Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-Gangs, London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960; Frank Kitson, Low-Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency & Peacekeeping, Faber & Faber, 1971; and Kline, Pseudo-Operations and Counter-Insurgency: Lessons from Other Countries, U.S. Army War College External Research Associates Program, June 2005.
[43] See: keith harmon snow, “The Rwanda Genocide Fabrications: Human Rights Watch, Alison Des Forges and Disinformation on Central Africa,” Dissident Voice, April 13, 2009.
[44] See, e.g., Roger Winter, “Power, not tribalism, stokes Rwanda’s slaughter,”The Globe and Mail, April 14,1994 (reprinted by the US Comrnittee for Refugees, Washington, D.C.).
[45] Roger Winter and Jeff Drumtra, “Responding to the Rwanda Crises: Declare Genocide and Other Policy Steps,” News from the U.S. Committee for Refugees, May 3, 1994–a six page USCR document “unclassified released in full” by the U.S. State Department on 8 June 2004.
[46] Roger P. Winter, “How Human Rights Groups Miss the Opportunity to do Good,” Washington Post, February 22, 1998, p. C02.
[47] Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993-2003: Report of the Mapping Exercise documenting the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed within the territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003, August 2010, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/ZR/DRC_MAPPING_REPORT_FINAL_EN.pdf
[48] Philip Gourevitch, “Letter from the Congo: Continental Shift,” New Yorker, August 4, 1997.
[49] Nik Gowing, ‘Dispatches from Disaster Zones’: The reporting of Humanitarian Emergencies, Conference Paper, London, 27 and 28 May 1998.
[50] See: keith harmon snow, “Pentagon Produces Satellite Photos of 1994 Rwanda Genocide,”ConsciousBeingAlliance.com, April 6, 1994.
[51] 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.
[52] See: A. Walter Dorn, Intelligence at UN Headquarters? The Information and Research Unit and the Intervention in Eastern Zaire 1996, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2005, pp.440 – 465, <http://www.walterdorn.org/pub/31 >.
[53] Roger P. Winter, “How Human Rights Groups Miss the Opportunity to do Good,” Washington Post, February 22, 1998, p. C02.
[54] Charlayne Hunter-Gault, “Zaire in Turmoil,” PBS Newshour, May 17, 1997, <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/africa/jan-june97/zaire_03-17.html>.
[55] Filip Reyntjens, The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996-2006, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
[56] Roger P. Winter and Jeff Drumtra, Military Deployment in Eastern Zaire Would be Misguided, USCR Press Release, 27 November 1996, <http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Urgent_Action/apic_112796.html>.
[57] Johanna McGeary, “How should we help? Humanitarian missions can’t cure political conflicts,” Time Magazine, November 25, 1996, <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,985572,00.html#ixzz22DI97Mxt>.
Related articles
- Foreign adviser to S. Sudan president flees Juba after disclosure of corruption letter (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- South Sudan pound rises after Qatari bank import deal (news.terra.com)
UK blocks probe into Malaysian massacre
Press TV – September 5, 2012
The British High Court has chosen to support the government rather than justice seekers by blocking calls for an official inquiry into British troops’ carnage of 24 Malaysian plantation workers in December 1948.
Relatives of the victims who wanted to challenge the government’s decision not to conduct an investigation into the massacre at Batang Kali said the killings are a “blot on British colonization and decolonization” and blasted the court for failing to order an inquiry despite presence of adequate evidence to justify one.
Judge Sir John Thomas said he sees “no grounds” for “disturbing” the decision by Foreign Secretary William Hague and Defense Secretary Philip Hammond to oppose the relatives’ demand for an inquiry.
The killings happened during the Anti-British National Liberation War led by Malayan fighters against British colonizers that killed 2,478 civilians.
“We are appealing. As long as the injustice remains, the families will be pursuing legal action,” said solicitor John Halford, who represents the victims’ relatives.
Related articles
- Malaysians lose High Court battle over 1948 ‘massacre’ (morningstaronline.co.uk)
Featured Video
Thomas Fazi: NATO’s Hybrid Warfare – Deception & Permanent War
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
UAE tortured, killed journalist for opposing Israel normalization
The Cradle | October 31, 2026
UAE security officers detained, tortured, and killed Emirati poet and news editor Habib al-Sayegh in August 2019, shortly after he published a column opposing UAE normalization with Israel, according to a newly published book.
“Princes and Thieves,” a book by investigative journalist Matthew Cole published on 25 October, alleges that UAE security officers raided Sayegh’s Abu Dhabi home shortly after the publication of the column, hooded him in front of his wife and took him to a detention facility where he was tortured to death.
His interrogators reportedly pulled out several of his teeth with pliers and beat him repeatedly with a sharp metal object.
On 11 August 2019, Sayegh criticized the UAE’s plan to normalize relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords in his weekly column for Khaleej newspaper. The column was titled “Israel Is Our Real Enemy and A Dangerous Project.”
Sayegh described Israel as “a real and natural enemy” while questioning “who authorized the normalizers to speak on behalf of everyone?”
Nine days after the column was published, Emirati state media announced his death, without stating a cause. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- US Approves Sale of 500 Patriot Missiles to Ukraine, Deliveries May Take Years
- German Imperialism: An Urgent Explainer
- Backed by AAP, West Virginia Proposal Would Allow Dental Hygienists to Give HPV Vaccine to 9-Year-Olds
- Poland Is the Symptom and Europe Is the Patient
- UAE security forces tortured, killed journalist for opposing Israel normalization: Report
- They Compared the Spice to the Drug. The Spice Won — Again. (Part 2)
- Thomas Fazi: NATO’s Hybrid Warfare – Deception & Permanent War
- Wrong, AP and NPR: Europe’s 50,000 Heat Deaths Are a Computer-Model Estimate, Not a Real Body Count
- Questioning Your Doctor Is Now Considered A Psychological Problem (Seriously)
- London tourism expo promotes Israeli agency linked to theft of Palestinian land
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
