The Winter festivities means something different for all of us. For most it means reveling in the pleasures of Christmas shopping and gift giving and receiving. For the cynics and the less fortunate it is a reminder of the inequalities that still plague this world due to the greed of humans. For peoples of numerous religions it is a time of prayer, public displays of penitence, and religious celebrations. For most, it is a time to spend with one's family. For the poor and the destitute, it is an dreaded reminder of their situation and misery, and the bitter cold.
For me, three days in December will represent an incredible opportunity to meet, and learn from, one of my heroes - Harry Fear.
Harry is a British independent journalist, reporter, and documentary film-maker, now residing in Gaza. During the "Pillar of Defence" operation in the most recent escalation of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, Harry was the only "western" journalist who dared reporting throughout the entire vicissitude. Without a formal studio or professional equipment and with a barely working internet connection, Harry reported for hours a day simply through skype.
His genuine reporting gave millions insight into the real situation in Palestine, the severity of the Israeli bombings on civilian centres in the Gaza strip, and kept the world informed about the true ramifications and effects of the PoD operation - all the while the mainstream media was either silent about, or complicit in, the genocide taking place in Palestine. ______________________________________________________________
For many and myself Harry Fear does not only represent the pinnacle of dedication to independent journalism, but is also the inspiration for many pro-Palestinian activists through his relentless commitment to the Palestinian cause. It reminds us that the plight of the oppressed is not limited to a geographical area or to an ethnicity, but it is a responsibility of all those who have a vibrant moral conscience, worldwide - from Cuba, to Ireland, to Palestine, people of conscience have stood, stand, and always will stand in the future, with and support the oppressed and the abused.
Harry Fear will be speaking at different venues in three of the largest cities in The Netherlands (The Hague, Amsterdam, and Utrecht) to university students, members of the academia Dutch politicians, members of the media and, of course, the public at large. He will speak about both his recent reporting from Gaza, as well as his work as an independent journalist and as a loud voice outside the choir of the mainstream media.
So, if you live in the Netherlands, please check if you can make it and come enjoy a wonderful discussion and debate with Harry Fear!
Check below when Harry Fear will be in a town near you!
The Hague – Monday, December 17th, 2012 @ the International Institute of Social Studies – in cooperation with ISS Students.
Amsterdam – Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 @ Universiteit van Amsterdam (Amsterdam University) – in cooperation with the International Socialist Students Association.
Seventeen-year-old Rishi Chandrikasing was shot dead by police on Novemeber 24th, 2012 after an anonymous phonecall reported "someone" who "may have a gun" in the Holland Spoor station of The Hague, the Netherlands.
Rishi was approached by three officers, one of which was in plain clothes, and told to raise his hands, without being told why. When Rishi reached for his belt to pull his pants up, one of the officers drew his weapon and shot him fatally in the neck.
The family and friends have set up a shrine in the spot where he was shot, consisting of a few candles, flowers, and photos of Rishi.
Last week, the police and security forces attempted to forcibly remove the flowers and candles that his family and friends had placed where he was shot as a memorial. They preferred not to engage the people present and instead snuck in during the early morning to do so.
Last night (December 9th, 2012) a number of friends of Rishi and activists paying their respects were confronted by the police while attempting to re-establish the memorial shrine. I was late for the vigil but as soon as I arrived I immediately noticed the heavy police force in the station. I attempted to reach my comrades but I was stopped and not allowed to do so by the private station security.
After being almost beaten for asking what was going on and demanding information as a resident of the Netherlands, I decided to go to the other entrance and ask for some information:
I was then focibly dragged out of the underpassage and told to leave.
I then decided to return to the main entrance to the platform to at least record what was happening. The twenty-two people at the vigil were surrounded by at least as many policemen and security people, standing menacingly around them. They were roughed up by the Dutch police, who then proceeded to arrest the person who was filming these abuses.
You can see a member of the security force come out of nowhere at 00:19 and immediately attempts to grab the phone. After insisting for a few seconds that I had every right to film, i was rushed by the man and arrested.
I was charged and fined for "Obstructing Police Procedures" while standing at least 15 meters away from the scene. Other than an almost insignificant bump on my forehead I suffered no injury, which is more that can be said for the protesters. In the cell, I was able to document three substantial face injuries, including an anonymous protested with the right side of his face maimed, and another with clear nail marks on and under his eyelids from the security/police forces when they tried to pull him out of the crowd and arrest him.
This issue has become somewhat controversial as the rise of xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment in the Netherlands has been on the rise for a few years now, as has its opposition. Some accuse Rishi of being a criminal due to his alleged involvement in a stabbing, and and such his shooting was justified, but some basic factors have to be considered.
Even if Rishi had a criminal record, how is that in any way, shape, or form relevant? That would mean that I would be justified in being shot because I have a criminal record? How about if it had been your brother, your son?
If he was investigated in a stabbing, he still would be innocent until proven guilty and does not provide a reason for him to be shot - still don't see how this makes any difference in the story. The fact that he was investigated for a stabbing is irrelevant in any case, since they only identified him AFTER he had been shot so, they had no idea who he was or what he had done.
Just to clarify, not only he he was absolved of the crime but he also, as a matter of fact, even received reparations for the legal and personal damages he incurred.
Since the police code requires the policeman to be willing to sacrifice his or her own life to prevent the death of an innocent, including a suspect, as well as telling suspects what they are being stopped for, we can also add that...
The policeman should have not used possible lethal force (a gun) without strong enough suspicion, which they lacked (an anonymous phone call saying that "someone MAY have a gun" is not nearly suspicion enough).
The policeman, if he did feel threatened enough, had the right to use a gun but had no right to wound fatally without definite proof of the other person having a firearm him/herself or that was making an attempt to his life - yes, even at the risk of being shot first.
If he did not shoot the youth in the neck on purpose, he was obviously not well trained, and the persons or institution that were responsible for making sure that he was sufficiently able to be a policeman should be severely chastised.
In essence, to most of the people squawking about this: Your arguments make no sense. The policeman is either incompetent, or a murderer, and in either case someone should be held accountable. It may have been a mistake, but it was no accident. An accident is when a gun falls and a shot comes out of it, hitting someone. I am not saying this policeman WANTED to fatally shoot the youth. I'm saying that he did, without a good reason. That is murder. It may not have been premeditated, or intentional, but it's murder. Had it happened to any person other than a policeman, there would be no question.
You should be THANKFUL for the people who are standing up for YOUR RIGHTS!!! Because when they will be gone and all those who dared to fight are jailed or murdered, you would have wished that you had helped them.
For about a week now a virtual campaign of awareness and action to secure the capture of Joseph Kony, named KONY 2012, has gone viral over the Internet. Before I start my commentary about this campaign, it is important to me to state my position clearly on Joseph Kony, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), and their practises.
I am in no way, shape or for a fan of Joseph Kony, and I am in full concordance with most of the sane people of this planet with the belief that he should be stopped. For over two decades this criminal has terrorised peoples of various nations in pursuit of a void agenda which is none other than his grandiose megalomaniac complex. In this pursuit, he and his forces have been directly responsible for the suffering of millions under multiple forms including rape, torture, mutilation, pillaging and burning of entire villages, and the infamous use of child soldiers which are often forced to murder their own parents before being drugged and indoctrinated into Kony's training camps. His past and current activities have spanned over the Central African Republic, Sudan (now mainly South Sudan), the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.
The KONY 2012 campaign's message consists of a video (below) which is emotionally compelling and manipulative, and portrays and documents the efforts of a small group of Caucasian Americans in bringing awareness of the topic of Joseph Kony, the LRA and child soldiers to a wider audience. The video also explains how their first attempts to get the U.S. Congress “on board” for the cause were unsuccessful, while their second attempts were nothing but the contrary. Additionally, the ending of the video capitalises on President Obama's efforts to deploy 100 military “advisors” to Uganda to capture and/or kill Joseph Kony, and the jubilation of these activists when hearing the news.
Now, I have absolutely no problem with a dedicated group of activists raising awareness about a most certainly essential problem to be solved. I do, however, have enormous reservations about the nature of, and the actions called by, this campaign. I do not know the people intimately involved in the efforts personally, so I cannot gauge the veracity of their intentions. What I can do, however, is gauge the irresponsible and possibly catastrophic repercussions that this campaign is almost certain to have. I believe that this campaign (if not already intended to do so from its conception) will be utilized as a tool to galvanize the U.S. People and the international community, and provide the United States and perhaps NATO with a moral imperative to justify military action in that region, consequentially destabilizing China's interests and influence.
What's Under Their Feet???
In order to understand the interest that the U.S. and/or anyone else might have in this region, one must first analize the resources present, and often that means asking yourself “what's under their feet that might be valuable?”. The tri-border region between Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC is one of the most metallurgically rich deposits on the planet, in addition to the large diamond reserves and the recently found presence of large amounts of crude oil. One of the most lucrative businesses of the region is related to Coltan mining. Coltan is the short name for columbite–tantalite, a mineral that is imperative to the electronic industry and that is essential in manufacturing almost any and all electronic products from computers, to DVD players, to cellphones etc. This tri-border region contains an approximate 80% of the total Coltan reserves in the world, mostly concentrated in the DRC's side of the border.
The DRC and its people have always been cursed by the riches under their feet since their enslavement under King Leopold II of Belgium in 1885. For the past decade armed militias and rebel groups have exploited and enslaved local populations forcing them to work in extremely dire conditions to extract the Coltan that is then sold, trough various intermediaries in the neighbouring countries of Rwanda and Uganda, to (mostly) European and East Asian companies. According to researcher J.C. Richardson, the profits that are derived from these activities are enormous, reaching as high as US$ 20 million per month for a single armed group, and are often re-invested in the arms and recruitment tactics that continuously fuel the armed conflicts in this region.
Since as early as a decade ago, China has developed an aggressive strategy of trade networks and relations with numerous African countries, to ensure the continuous and relatively cheap flow of those natural resources it needs to maintain its manufacturing superiority of low-cost goods and electronics. Among China's most important present and future African partners are Angola, which provides china with enormous amounts of its oil production, and the DRC, which has signed multiple multi-billion dollars agreements with China to allow Chinese firms to exploit its enormously rich mineral deposits in the eastern region bordering Rwanda and Uganda.
Many African nations are eager to enter in trade relationships with Chinese firms as they provide an alternative method of economic exchange. Instead of providing direct funds to governments in exchange for the resources, the Chinese instead pledge to develop the infrastructure and train the workfroce around such industries, from which they would also benefit. This practice, however, has been widely criticized in Europe and the United States as being a proto-colonial method of control, and that most of the deals China offers usually provide little benefit to their trading partners. On the other hand, many African citizens and nations feel that, for once, foreign investment is bringing positive change for the population at large instead of being stuck at the elite level in the form of capital. The bottom line is that China is gaining enormous political, economic, and perhaps military influence throughout sub-Saharan Africa, while anti-American and anti-West sentiments continue to rise.
Kagame and Museveni – Puppets and Puppeteers
Another aspect that must be looked at is the history of Uganda, Rwanda, their current political leaders and the various rebel groups, and their stated ideologies, that have proliferated in the border region between these nations. To begin with, it is important to know that Uganda is perhaps the most important U.S. Ally in Africa, and the first of a list of so called “new generation of African leaders” – a term utilized in Western circles, and popularized by President Clinton in 1998, to denote those African leaders that were in favour of the capitalist economic policies.
Perhaps the thing that irritates me the most in U.S. Foreign policy is the double standards and the ability to use blatant false flag attacks and conspiracies to start conflicts to further their interests...
President Museveni has been president of Uganda for 32 years (and of course is an ally of the world democratizing force known as the U.S.A) and has been often criticized, to little avail, for his involvement in the 1990-1994 Rwandan civil was and the consequential genocide in which 800,000 Tutsis were massacred in a period of only 100 days.
Few know that the Rwandan Civil War was sparked by the attempts of a Rwandan Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), to outs the Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana who had led Rwanda to be a fairly prosperous nation in the two decades he was in power after having ousted the previously Belgium-supported Tutsi ruling class. The RPF was eventually successful in shooting down the presidential aircraft with President Habyarimana on board, giving the Hutu majority an excuse to begin their extermination of the Tutsis.
In his book, Brass Plates, Black Ops, & Big Oil: The Blood Politics of Bush & Co., Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen has compiled compelling documentation showing that the initial RPF invasion of Rwanda from Uganda, ruled by pro-U.S. President Museveni, in 1990, "had the military backing of the first Bush administration [1989-1993], including Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney," and that the aim of the RPF was to overthrow Rwanda's Hutu president. Madsen also further exposes how the RPF deputy leader, and now current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame was trained at US Army installations in the United States and when, during the 1990 invasion of Rwanda, the RPF's leader was killed, "Kagame became the head of the guerrilla army, and his ties with the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department became closer." Classified UN documents revealed that Annan and Albright were aware of this information.
It came out in a French National Assembly inquiry that, "the U.S. even supplied the RPF with the Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles that were used to shoot down the Rwandan presidential aircraft," (pp. 238) and that a UN investigation team got a hold of information that, "a company linked to the CIA leased the warehouse used to assemble the missile launchers” (pp. 227). However, the investigation was closed down once the relationship to the US was realized. Following a similar investigation in the shooting down of the aforementioned presidential aircraft, members close to the parliamentary inquiry had revealed a disturbing connection to what Madsen describes as a "shadowy organization" composed of powerful political and oil interests, commonly known as the "International Strategic and Tactical Organization."
However, back in 1994, faced with the UN’s delay, but also concerned about its image as a former patron and arms supplier of the Habyarimana regime, France announced on June 15 that it would intervene to stop the killing. In a June 22 vote, the UN Security Council gave its blessing to this intervention; that same day, French troops entered Rwanda from Zaire. While intending a wider intervention, confronted with the RPF’s rapid advance across Rwanda, the French set up a “humanitarian zone” in the southwest corner of Rwanda. Their intervention succeeded in saving tens of thousands of Tutsi lives; it also facilitated the safe exit of many of the genocide’s plotters, who were allies of the French.
The 1994 Genocide was thus indeed successful in its intention to outs the French-supported Hutu Habyarimana government with a U.S.-supported Tutsi Kagame government – with the aid of the CIA and U.S. Special Forces and the already pro-Western Uganda under Museveni. The aim was to install an aglo-american protectorate in Rwanda which, along with the already established Museveni regime in Uganda, would serve as a foothold for future military interventions in Africa but, perhaps most importantly from the American perspective, as a neo-liberal and neo-colonial agenda in resource rich Central Africa.
In a way, it was a proxy undeclared war between France and the United States.
The existence of Oil in the western regions of Uganda, such as near the village of Kyehoro, has been suspected as far back as the 1920s but formal exploration have only begun in 2007. In late 2010, the Oil and Gas exploration firm Tullow Oil announced the discovery of an approximate 2.5 billion barrels of oil about 3.5km under the surface of lake Albert and its surroundings.
Is it a coincidence that within a year of finding an enormous oil reserve in a U.S. allied nation bordering the most substantive economic interests of China in Africa, that the U.S. would send troops under the guise of some morally imperative deed such as the capture of Kony?
The border region between Uganda and the DRC has actually recently already been partitioned in blocks bought by oil extracting corporations. A recently leaked plan, summarized in this report, from the British firm Tullow Oil reveals the proposed partition of this area between itself, the Canadian firm Heritage, owned by the notorious mercenary fighter, Tony Buckingham, who has a history of military involvement in Angola during the civil war, the South-African Divine Inspiration Consortium and other African or state owned companies.
KONY 2012
How does, you might ask yourselves, the KONY 2012 campaign fit into this complicated geopolitical puzzle? Well, in numerous ways...
White Man's Burden
To begin with, ideologically the whole campaign reeks of proto-colonial tendencies and seems like a (not so well) disguised version of the “White Man's Burden”, the belief that it is up to the white, civilized societies and nations to tell Africans how to straighten their acts, and go in their countries and do it for them (sometimes by force) if they are unwilling or unable to do so. But regardless of this philosophical opinion, there are facts that need to be known.
Anti-Homosexuality Involvement
The Invisible Children group claim Uganda to be their base of operation. Coincidentally, Uganda under Museveni is one of the most homophobic nations on the planet, and has led the front in a battle being waged by the parliaments of numerous African nations towards their homosexual populations. This has resulted in passing a series of laws that criminalize and heavily punish the sexual activities of homosexuals by labelling them as crimes such as sodomy, and have even sought to outlaw homosexuality and its practices altogether. After much debate, this bill has been re-proposed in the month of February of 2012.
Recent scrutiny of Invisible Children's (IC) tax reports point to a strong financial link between the non-profit organization and the Discovery institute as well as "The Call". The first is an organization leading the fight on behalf of Christian extremists to promote the pseudo-scientific (and that's already too much of a compliment) creationist ideology of Intelligent Design and incorporate is into public school curriculums. The second is an organization whose leader, Lou Engle, "claims homosexuals are possessed by demons, calls God an "avenger of blood" and a "terrorist", and in May 2010 staged a rally in Kampala, Uganda, at which Engle warned of a gay menace to society and shared a stage with one of the authors of Uganda's notorious Anti Homosexuality Bill"
The fact that the IC campaign has received and accepted such enormous sums from both these groups, perhaps to provide material and moral support for the anti-homosexuality campaign that is now taking place in Uganda, is not only highly suspicious but also sickening. This report by Bruce Wilson describes in detail the funding process, the connections to far-right wing Christian organizations, and their connections to Ugandan anti-homosexuality activists.
War Propaganda
Perhaps one of the most despicable aspect of the KONY 2012 campaign is is not-so-subtle call for military action to extirpate Joseph Kony. The video calls for "direct intervention", which implies the use of boots on the ground, drone activity, and possible drone strikes causing more civilian casualties than actually eliminate targets.
Not only I believe that it is absolutely irresponsible to increase the military confrontation in a region that is already littered with rogue armed militias and unsupervised government troops from a variety of nations, but the efforts by the U.S. in stabilizing the area are not a new phenomenon and have been undertaken since the establishment of AFRICOM (U.S. African Command) in 2007 and have yet to achieve any meaningful degree of success.Additionally, numerous recent reports also suggest that the actions of the United States towards capturing Joseph Kony and eliminating the LRA, despite the occasional numbers manipulated to create the illusion of success, have been mostly unsuccessful and have also failed to produce any meaningful result or decrease in LRA activities.
If you are in any doubt as to what the true purpose of AFRICOM is, perhaps it is useful to remember that at an AFRICOM Conference at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller declared the programme's mission meant maintaining "the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market." A coincidence, perhaps, but the United States military has been running an extensive continent-wide programme under AFRICOM including the building of a string of new drone airfields in the Horn of Africa (conveniently in-land enough to deal with Uganda and Kenya too), and the trans-Saharan Operation Enduring Freedom, to "fight al Qaeda in the Maghreb."
Phil Lancaster, one of the authors of the 2011 International Working Group on the LRA report, Diagnostic Study of the Lord's Resistance Army and former head of the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration division of the UN Mission in the DRC (MONUC), predecessor to MONUSCO admitted in an interview that the U.S. state department "doesn't know any more than anyone else what is going on inside the LRA... The important thing now is what Kony is actually doing and as far as anyone can tell, he is still in control and calling the tune the rest of us dance to."
Another aspect of the militarist expression of the KONY 2012 campaign is their complete disregard for the atrocities that are instead committed, perhaps even on a larger scale, but the Ugandan Army itself, which has been repeatedly condemned by Human Rights Watch as having "committed crimes against civilians with near total impunity".
The absurdity of it all is that Joseph Kony is not even longer in Uganda, and hasn't been since 2006.
If Joseph Kony belongs in Prison, or at the ICC, so do the Ugandan Army official responsible for equally brutal atrocities, as well as President Museveni for his responsibility in controlling his army, and his involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. THE LEADERSHIP OF THE IC GROUP IS SEEN POSING IN THIS SHOCKING PICTURE with members of the brutal Ugandan Army.
Environmental Devastation
Ugandan Wildlife Association reports that lead levels in the lake have skyrocketed to nineteen times their standard levels within the past year.
According to a report of the Ugandan National Forest Authority:
The primary oil prospecting area in Uganda is the Albertine Rift; this area is located in the northernmost part of the western rift of the East African Rift System. Covering an area of 20,000 km2, the Albertine Rift stretches from the border of Sudan in north to Lake Albert in the south. This area is the most species rich eco-region for vertebrates in Africa. It has high species diversity, including 39% of Africa’s mammal species, 51% of its bird species, 19% of its amphibian species and 14% of its plant and reptile species. It harbours more endemic species than any other region in Africa and also contains 79 threatened terrestrial vertebrates.
According to officials at WWF Uganda some impurities can be found in some oil drilling chemicals, such as Barite, known to exist with traces of mercury, lead, cadmium that can be the likely source of heavy metal contamination. These metals are known to cause cancer and birth defects are also harmful to animals, birds and plants.
In addition, the exploratory process requires that a process known as flaring, lighting the crude oil to determine its quality, have already been witnessed to have caused the migration of local wildlife due to the black soot that engulfed the surrounding areas for weeks, the excessive heat, and light. In addition, flaring pits remain uncovered, and local wildlife has been seen drinking from it.
For further information about the destructive environmental impact of this practice in the Albertine region you can check out this report by the Kampala Independent.
In essence...
I believe that this campaign (if not already intended to do so from its conception) will be utilized as a tool to galvanize the U.S. People and the international community, and provide the United States and perhaps NATO with a moral imperative to justify military action in that region, consequentially destabilizing China's interests and influence.
Further Reading
A Colleague Blogger of mine has done a wonderful job in the past weeks in providing up/to/date information about the shady and possibly misleading activities of the IC group... Please do read his blog for a more informed and up to date critique of the campaign! - http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/
Dangerous ignorance: The hysteria of Kony 2012. Article by Adamn Branch, senior research fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, Uganda, and author of Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda - http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/201231284336601364.html
