THREE CHEERS FOR EVE ENSLER?
Responsibility, White Collar Crime
and Sexual Atrocities in Eastern Congo
By
keith harmon snow

AllThingsPass.com.

“I have just returned from hell. I am trying for the life of me to figure out how to communicate what I have seen and heard in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. How do I convey these stories of atrocities without your shutting down, quickly turning the page or feeling too disturbed?”
Eve Ensler, Glamour Magazine, August 2007

On a visit to Eastern Congo in May 2007, Eve Ensler—the playwright and producer of the Vagina Monologues—was witness to the profound human suffering and unprecedented sexual violence. Ensler came to see what those whose eyes are open cannot deny: the sexual violence and predation in Central Africa is unacceptable, unfathomable, and stoppable. And she has the courage and audacity to write and speak about it.

Three cheers for Eve Ensler!!

Or not?

Through her global campaign to end violence against women, called “V-Day,” and with a 9-page feature article in Glamour magazine in August, Ensler has launched a campaign calling for an end to rape and sexual torture against women and girls in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource, Power To The Women And Girls Of The Democratic Republic Of Congo,” Ensler’s web site explains, “is being initiated by the women of Eastern DRC, V-Day and UNICEF on behalf of United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict. The campaign calls for an end to the violence and to impunity for those who commit these atrocities.” 1

Impunity for those who commit these atrocities?

Ensler’s Glamour article is an apt documentary of human suffering and courage. The doctors working to save and heal the survivors of sexual brutality are heroes. The women and girls who have survived are themselves portraits of courage and human dignity.

In her nine-page portrait of heroism and suffering, there is a single half paragraph that ostensibly addresses the roots of the problem. “The perpetrators include the Interahamwe,” Ensler writes, “the Hutu fighters who fled neighboring Rwanda in 1994 after committing genocide there; the Congolese army; a loose assortment of armed civilians; even U.N. peacekeepers.” 2

THE GLAMOUROUS GENOCIDE

Who is responsible for the brutality?

According to Glamour and Vanity Fair, it is always those rag-tag Rwandan genocidaires who fled justice in Rwanda, or those ruthless Congolese soldiers from the heart of darkness, and the loose assortments of obviously “loose” civilians, and even the U.N. peacekeepers who, in the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC), are men from India, Uruguay, Nepal, Pakistan… and in Darfur, Sudan, it is those damned Janjaweed—Arabs on horseback, you know, the usual dark-skinned subjects.

And there is no mention whatsoever of the deeper realities and responsibilities of white people. Where is the discussion of the backers behind this warfare? Who sells the weaponry? Who produces it? Who photographs the UNICEF poster children and peddles the images of suffering in the Western press for billion dollar profit-driven campaigns that do not in the end uplift the people who they claim to care about?

Why are there gala UNICEF “fundraising” benefits—the Annual Snowflake Ball—in New York hotels with white-tie U.S. Presidents as honorary ambassadors and state department officials from the National Security Council—and $10,000 tickets—held to celebrate people who refuse to address the genocide in Ethiopia or northern Uganda or the U.S.-backed coup d’etat that occurred in Rwanda in 1994? 3

How does it happen that a notorious “dictator” and “cannibal” like Uganda’s legendary dictator Idi Amin could live out his life in splendor in Saudi Arabia? Far more people have suffered terrorism under President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, than under Idi Amin, yet Museveni remains the West’s golden boy in the old Pearl of Africa. In the early years the iron fist of terror was wielded by Paul Kagame, now President of Rwanda, who was then director of Military Intelligence. How does it happen that Taban Amin, Idi Amin’s eldest son, is today in charge of the Uganda’s dreaded Internal Security Organization, the private terror instrument of President Yoweri Museveni?

What we know to be true is that Even Ensler was lucky to get this article in Glamour at all. The magazine is a travesty of violence against women—cosmetics, luxury aids, “health” and “beauty” products, liposuction, breast implants and sexually seductive advertising peddling the “perfect” female body and great American culture of sexual violence—yet Glamour offers a platform for Ensler’s message about sexual brutality of unprecedented human proportions. What’s the trade-off?

It is pure Western white supremacist propaganda serving to underscore the accepted narratives of Central Africa and assist in the consolidation of power over the region.

Glamour’s publishers do not care about the suffering of black people.

What Eve Ensler and Glamour have not addressed are the warlords behind the warlords, the corporations and white collar crime which is never—or selectively, now and then expeditiously, if ever—reported on the pages of Glamour, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, or the other promoters of popular propaganda brought to us by the Conde Naste corporate empire.

Behind the warfare always blamed on Africans, behind the warlords’ deadly battles, are other warlords and corporations from Western countries. The reason people—U.S. and Canadian citizens—are unaware of the issues involved is because of publications like Glamour and the corporations that control them. Ensler’s article begins to look like an advertisement for UNICEF and the so-called “humanitarian” AID industry, which is itself part of the problem, because it remains silent about corporate plunder, organizations partner with the exploiters, and directors are also directors of mining, defense, petroleum and other big multinational interests. UNICEF and “not-for-profit” organizations like it are in the business of perpetuating their own survival.

Asked what to do, Ensler points to UNICEF: “Right now, [the best thing to do is] to give to the V-Day UNICEF campaign at vday.org/congo.”

In the end Ensler’s article—like the few racialized articles about rape in Rwanda, Congo and Darfur that have appeared in Ms. Magazine 4 —is a compelling portrait that serves a narrow political agenda of which Ensler appears not to be conscious. Such articles—appearing in gendered white spaces of privilege like Glamour or Ms. or Cosmopolitan—blame the very (African) victims of an international system of oppression that revolves around permanent warfare economies—U.S., Canada, Britain, Belgium, Israeli, France—and they serve to promote the interests of these by never challenging the perpetrators of chaos and terrorism that are directly aligned with the predominant military-intelligence establishment. When reporting on rape in Central Africa, articles in Conde Naste group publications—as with almost all publications—have never challenged the governments of either Rwanda or Uganda, soldiers of which have committed massive sexual atrocities, crimes against humanity and other war crimes. 5

Indeed, it turns out that Even Ensler is collaborating with certain interests whose involvement in Eastern DRC has never come under scrutiny. In a September 17, 2007 interview with Ms. Magazine journalist Michele Kort, broadcast by PBS, Ensler was joined in a dialog about sexual violence in Eastern Congo by Christine Schuler Deschryver, described by PBS as “from Bukavu in the Congo, who is an activist against the sexual violence.” 6

Christine Schuler Deschryver is married to Carlos Schuler, a Swiss national working for decades in the Kahuzi Biega National Park in South Kivu. Schuler works for GTZ— Deutsche Gesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit—a “German technological cooperation agency.” Because of his gorilla conservation interests, Schuler has been described as “Dian Fossey’s successor.” When things get too hot, Christine Schuler Deschryver leaves Congo for Belgium; husband Carlos negotiates with warlords for “conservation.” Schuler has maintained very untransparent relations with all military forces in the region, and there are questions about mineral plunder and military collaboration and GTZ’s role.

GTZ is a German government institution and GTZ’s involvement in Eastern Congo is notable, given the German links to the Lueshe mine in North Kivu, and the German embassy’s role in exploitation, depopulation and genocide in Congo. One top GTZ executive appears to be linked to German corporate interests seeking to control the Lueshe mine, now controlled by their U.S./German competitors (see below). Kahuzi Biega is rich in minerals coveted by corporations and governments.

Eve Ensler goes on to express some very white supremacist thinking about rape in Congo. “Because there has been no justice,” Ensler states, “because so few perpetrators have been held accountable for the crimes that they're committing, it's becoming as Christine said to me when we were there, like a country sport: rape.”

So, according to this description, Congolese men are universally castigated for “rape as sport,” no matter that this is committed by armed forces backed, armed, and licensed by the West to commit massive sexual atrocities. As shown below, the Congolese militias and National Army serve a deeper, hidden, Western corporate agenda: organized white-collar crime.

Eve Ensler’s privilege and white supremacy here is illuminated by her feminist perspective, her feminist crusade, and it becomes acceptable for Ensler—and Ms., Glamour, PBS, The Washington Post, Newsweek, etc.—to label all Congolese men as sexual predators. This, of course, is the chorus of the Western media to begin with—

Africans are sexually licentious, they copulate like monkeys—only it transcends boundaries and becomes an African condition. Isn’t that why they [sic] are all HIV/AIDS positive?

Ensler further demonstrates her ignorance of events by effectively stating that the United States has said nothing about rape in Congo, because we are allies with Rwanda and Uganda, who suffered genocide and saw the so-called genocidaires flood into Congo, who graciously accepted them. In fact, the U.S. overthrew the government of Rwanda in 1994, and the when Rwandan and Ugandan forces shelled refugee camps in Eastern Congo (1996) they followed this with a campaign of extermination where hundreds of thousands of women and children were hunted, raped, and massacred.

This genocide has not been named. Howard French, New York Times bureau chief in Nairobi at the time, tried to name it, and he comes close in his treatise on Western plunder—A Continent for the Taking—but his efforts were too little and too easily ignored. French moved on to become bureau chief in China, leaving Africa behind. But the truth has not been buried with the skeletons.

The U.S. factions—the Rwanda Patriotic Front and Uganda People’s Defense Forces that backed their invasion of Rwanda—committed massive rapes in Rwanda as well. From 1990 to 1994 the Ugandan/RPF invaders in Rwnada raped as policy, and Human Rights Watch covered it with their reports of mass rape attributed to the Hutu genocidaires.

Ensler regurgitates the accepted narrative and blames the victims of corporate and military plunder aligned with Anglo-American-Israeli interests. To her credit she mentions SONY Playstation and cellphones as culprits, and she suggests action should be taken against corporations, but she blames the illegal mineral trade on the genocidal murderers from Rwanda, the Interahamwe (just as all violence in Darfur is blamed on Janjaweed, and all violence in Afghanistan is blamed on Taliban). But she states that “we don’t know who” is involved behind or beside these. This cultural reductionism feeds the mainstream media discourses that perpetuate oppressions and consolidate Western power.

Many of the criminals involved were named in the United Nations Panel of Experts reports on illegal extraction of natural resources from Congo. Countless others have been named by numerous independent journalists, including this author, over, and over and over.

John Bredenkamp. Billy Rautenbach. George Forrest. Louis Michel. Paul Kagame. Yoweri Museveni. Salim Saleh. James Kabarebe. Walter Kansteiner. Maurice Tempelsman. Philipe de Moorloose.

Nothing is ever done.

Ensler has no idea what she is talking about and, on a certain level, like all the rest of us, Eve Ensler is another Mazungu whitey who has no business being in Central Africa at all, because she has no idea what has happened, or is happening, or why. Her white skin and feminist crusade act as a badge of credibility and insures her privileged access to Western media corporations that benefit from “chaos” and depopulation. When “peace” is discussed it revolves around Western “charity” and “goodwill,” yet more than 100 years of Western involvement in Africa have culminated in permanent slaughter and depopulation across the continent. The raw materials continue to leave.

To get a sense of what Glamour does not report—what the New York Times or Ms. or Newsweek or the BBC or National Public Radio will not tell us—let’s look behind the scenes in eastern Congo and juxtapose the unreported realities with the personal stories of trauma and recovery told by Eve Ensler in Glamour magazine. While the mainstream corporate media always reduces these stories to a few simple facts, and a panoply of supposedly unfathomable black-on-black violence, there are always some skeletons to be found lurking in the shadows of white society.

THERE’S GOLD IN THEM (BLOODY) HILLS

The North and South Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo remain awash in blood. Over the past decade hundreds of thousands of women have suffered sexual violence in these provinces as a weapon of war meant to terrorize local populations and gain control of natural resources. Sexual violence includes mutilations, rape and other forms of torture.

Rwandan-backed General Laurent Nkunda has occupied eastern DRC for several years, and was involved in atrocities, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Congo during the first (1996-1997) and second (1998-2004) Congo occupations by Uganda and Rwanda.

The United Nations Observers Mission in DRC (MONUC) makes possible the occupation of Congo by General Laurent Nkunda today. Nkunda is backed by the military regime of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda and by the baby-faced Jean-Pierre Bemba, the rebel warlord from DRC’s Equateur province whose interests and ties in DRC go back to his dark alliance with the dictator Joseph Mobutu and his Western backers.

The U.S. and European interests backing General Laurent Nkunda run deeper than the blood in the fields and rivers of eastern Congo. The German Embassy in the Democratic Republic of Congo is involved in shady business deals, backing militias and plundering raw materials from Congo, and behind them is U.S. involvement. This has partially occurred through the military control of a mine called Lueshe, located in a village called Lueshe, in North Kivu, some 170 kilometers northwest of Goma. But it also involves coltan, cassiterite, diamonds and gold, and the economic benefits that accrue to those who control land and taxes.

One gold mining firm with vast landholdings in South Kivu province is Canada’s Banro Corporation. Banro has control of four major properties, 27 exploration permits and 5730 square kilometers of gold mining concessions.7 Banro operates only in the Democratic Republic of Congo: see the mining map here: http://www.banro.com/s/Properties.asp.

When we talk about International Criminal Tribunals, who are the real war criminals? What about Simon Village, Peter Cowley, Arnold Kondrat, John Clarke, Bernard van Rooyen, Piers Cumberlege and Richard Lachcik—the directors of Banro Corporation?8 What is the definition of “white collar” crime?

NIOBIUM & THE POLITICS OF SCARCITY

In North Kivu province the Lueshe mine provides a well-documented example of the kinds of nefarious activities that all Western governments are involved with in Congo, and in Africa more generally, and these activities certainly apply to Banro and other corporations—this is how the system works, and who works it. The Lueshe Niobium mining scandal merely provides an excellent case study where the thief has been caught red-handed with his hands in the illegal minerals pot.

The Lueshe Niobium mine has been under the control of pro-Rwandan forces for the past eight to ten years, first under the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) rebels allied with Rwanda and Uganda and Jean-Pierre Bemba, and now under the “protection” of General Laurent Nkunda. But Lueshe’s history is deeply rooted in the controlling interests of the German government and its U.S. and European partners.

The rare earth metal, niobium or “niob” for short, formerly also known as Columbium, is found there, together with tantalum, in the mineral Pyrochlore. Niobium became extremely important within the last twenty years because of its enlarged range of application for aerospace and defense purposes. Niobium is mainly used as an alloying addition in the production of high quality steel used in the aircraft and space industries, as well as in medicine. It is also widely used in basic applications of machinery and construction and in quite large quantities in the production of stainless steel. Niob, like tantalum and columbium-tantalite or “coltan,” is also coveted for the emerging and secretive “nanotechnology” sector—also pivotal to state-of-the-art and futuristic aerospace, defense, communications and biotechnology applications.

There are three principal niobium deposits in the world, all controlled by a company named Arraxa: one in Brazil, one in Canada and the Lueshe mine in DRC. The owner of Arraxa is the U.S. based company Metallurg Inc., N.Y. Mettalurg Inc. is itself a subsidiary of Mettalurg Holdings of Wayne, Pennsylvania, and Mettalurg Holdings is one of many companies in the investment portfolio of Safegaurd International Investment Fund of (Philadelphia) Pennsylvania, Frankfurt and Paris.9

In 1982 Metallurg signed a mining convention with the Republic of Zaire, enabling them to exclusively extract all Pyrochlore at the Lueshe niobium deposit for the next twenty years. A company named SOMIKIVU (Societè Miniere du Kivu) was established. Metallurg ´s 100% subsidiary, the German company GfE Nuremberg (Gesellschaft fuer Elektrometallurgie GmbH), became a 70 % shareholder.

By 1990, SOMIKIVU stopped all production, which was never much at all, because it was apparently insured by HERMES AG, backed by the German Government, to prevent production from the Lueshe mine in order to drive up and control the price of niobium mined and processed at the other sites outside of Congo/Zaire. It was also important to prevent any competitive venture from acquiring the mining rights and subsequently from actually operating the Lueshe mine.

According to available documents, employees of the German Embassy have personally benefiting from, and are involved in, the business of GfE/Metallurg. This involvement has included complicity in extortion, assault, murder, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This involvement includes complicity in sexual atrocities committed by the paid agents of white, Western corporations.

In 1999, after years of inactivity and lost incomes to the Congolese state—a very minority partner manipulated into a position of exploitation as usual—the Lueshe niobium mine was expropriated from its owners by Congo’s new president Laurent Kabila and turned over to the firm E. Krall Investment Uganda (Edith Krall), under a Congolese subsidiary company E. Krall Metal Congo. Nonetheless, with the military backing of Rwanda, RCD rebels operated the mine from 1999-2005 with the help of German Embassy (Kinshasa) affiliate Karl Heinz Albers, also a close business partner of the Rwandan Patriotic Front Government of Paul Kagame. It is also alleged that mercenaries have been involved in securing the mine.

The new owners of E. Krall Metal Congo reportedly tried to visit their new mine in 2000, amidst some of the most serious and brutal fighting in the entire war. The officials were arrested by RCD military who immediately called Karl Heinz Albers, then a permanent resident in Kigali, Rwanda. According to documents provided by Krall, Albers explained that the RCD should not ask questions but “eliminate” the Krall group—kill them on the spot. The RCD Goma secret service chief apparently refused to execute this order and released the people of the Krall group. This action helped the Krall delegation to escape to Uganda but made the RCD secret service chief in Congo subject to assassination attempts by killers from Kigali. The RCD chief only saved his life by immediate emigration to Uganda, where he was nonetheless also subject to several assassination attempts reportedly ordered by Karl Heinz Albers.

Albers was reportedly selling coltan from the Krall concessions to the German firm H.G. Starck. From August 2000 to October 2001 Somikivu shipped some 669 tons of Pyrochlore concentrate to Rotterdam harbor in Amsterdam. After October 2001 shipments went to A&M Minerals in London, a company on the U.N. Panel of Experts blacklist who are alleged to have purchased illegally some 2,246 tons of Pyrochlore concentrate before 2004.

Dr. Johannes Wontka, German citizen and technical director of SOMIKIVU, informed the members of Krall Métal that while Krall may have the legal titles from Kinshasa to operate Lueshe, the SOMIKIVU (Karl Heintz Albers) gang had the power to do so, therefore they should in their own physical interest “disappear”. Dr. Wontka reportedly requested a Major of the RCD army to kill the chief of the “Syndicate Global” the labor union leader of the workers in Lueshe who were on strike due to months of non-payment of salaries. Dr. Wontka reportedly requested that the RCD Major shoot the “whites” that would come soon to Lueshe—the technical delegation of Krall Métal who were on their way—and promised money for the job. By chance the RCD Major was the brother-in-law of the trade union leader whom he was tasked to shoot and therefore he neither shot him nor the ”whites” he was meant to kill, but reported the case to the police.

The general prosecutor of North Kivu eventually confiscated the passport of Dr. Wontka, and Wontka, who tried to flee Congo with his family, was arrested at the border and brought to Goma, DRC.

Then the German Embassy in Kinshasa cranked into gear.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AMBASSADORSHIPS

The German Ambassador to Kinshasa, Mrs. Doretta Loschelder, informed the public by giving press statements that German investors will not invest in Congo projects and that economic support by Germany will not be transferred to Congo if the authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo are going to treat investors in the way authorities in Goma were treating the SOMIKIVU agent Dr. Wontka. Under this pressure, Dr. Wontka was released from prison and within 30 minutes fled Congo against orders of the police and immigration officials.

Mrs. Johanna König, employed at the ministry of foreign affairs of Germany until 2001, and serving at the German embassy in Kigali as Ambassador of Germany in Kigali, was until February 2004 a member of the board of KHA International AG, the holding parent company of the Karl Heinz Albers companies. Konig apparently visited the Lueshe mine with Rwandan military protection. The RCD were also operating the Lueshe mine under forced labor conditions, at one time reportedly involving prisoners from Rwanda accused of genocide by the Kagame regime.

The Krall complaints—well documented—have been brought to officials in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, England and the U.S., all of which have some financial interest or some link in the chain of exploitation. No action has been taken anywhere, and officials of the German Embassy in Kinshasa reportedly continue to benefit from the illegal exploitation of the Lueshe mine. The multinational firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is also invested in the companies exploiting Lueshe and profiting from war, slavery and depopulation in Congo.

Rape was off the agenda at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) until Hillary Clinton showed up in Arusha, Tanzania—the economic beneficiary of the ICTR boondoggle—and pledged $600,000 to be paid after the first ICTR rape conviction. And that’s when they decided to pin rape on Georges Rutaganda, the evil businessman portrayed as the devil in Hotel Rwanda. It was Bill and Hillary’s blood money, and another financial incentive used to whitewash the Clinton’s role in genocide and covert operations in Central Africa.

Add sexual violence to the list, sure, but Eve Ensler’s campaign for an end to sexual violence in Congo must be placed in its proper context: white supremacy and the shock doctrine of global corporate plunder. In this context rape and depopulation are permanent conditions, the real killers get away with murder, and there is endless, brutal revenge by the victors.