Again, there are no reports that we have found that document how the villagers felt about the unfolding changes at Mgahinga. Were Sucker alive and running the project at Mgahinga based on today’s exclusive Western model of conservation, we might as quickly be criticizing Sucker for marginalizing the local population and remaining silent about the green political issues at stake in Uganda, just as we are doing with the BINGOs and DINGOs involved in DRC. But the information is missing from Mgahinga and Sucker is dead.

It may be that Sucker’s reports were optimistically biased in favor of his own interests. More than 2000 people were displaced or evicted from Mgahinga after the national park was declared in 1991, and the average compensation paid was some $27 per person. Compensation was paid for physical structures and permanent crops, but there was no compensation paid for losses of land or land ownership; some people got nothing at all. (33) By any standard, the legitimate landowners and long-term residents were short-changed in the deal.

Mount Elgon is another story for which information is available. The villagers there have a voice, and the evidence is damning to modern conservation.

In 1993, three years before the genesis of Project Elgon, and one year before the death of Sucker, the Ugandan government gazetted Mount Elgon as a national park. Writing in the 2006 New Internationalist Magazine, Timothy Byakola and Chris Lang said, “The people living within its boundaries lost all their rights.”

According to Byakola and Lang, SGS (Societe Generale de Surveillance) thinks the villagers never had any rights to begin with. “The encroachers have never had legal rights to farm the land and the Ugandan Wildlife Authority (UWA) is legally entitled to evict settlers from inside the boundary.”

SGS is a company contracted to oversee a current carbon offset project on Mt. Elgon, whereby guilty carbon users can pay a Dutch organization, Forests Absorbing Carbon-dioxide Emissions (FACE) to have trees planted to counterbalance their carbon emissions.

This “ruthless” eviction of villagers, without compensation, is a story we have heard repeatedly, ad nauseum.

The testimony given by Byakola and Lang is very specific.

“In March 2002, UWA evicted more people from Mount Elgon, many of whom had lived on the land for over 40 years. Park rangers destroyed villagers' houses and cut down their crops. With nowhere to go, the evicted people were forced to move to neighboring villages where they lived in caves and mosques. The families living in the caves had to keep fires burning all night to protect their children from the cold.” (34)

“UWA's park rangers receive paramilitary training,” New Vision reported. The article quoted David Wikikona, a Member of Parliament for the region. “The wildlife people who operate there are very militarized, and have killed over 50 people. People feel that the Government favors animals more than the people.”

New Internationalist Magazine quoted village elder Cosia Masolo, who lived in a nearby village for over 50 years: “When the UWA people came with their tree-planting activities, they stopped us from getting important materials from the forest. We were stopped from going up to get malewa (bamboo shoots), which is a very important traditional food here and is a source of income.”

CARE PENETRATES MGAHINGA

Things were looking unbelievably good in Mgahinga Park from a strictly conservation for-its-own-sake point of view until 1993, when the BINGO, CARE, materialized with planned projects for multiple-use of the Mgahinga forest. Fossey faced the same opposition from the USAID sponsored Mountain Gorilla Project in Rwanda in 1978. After the Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro of 1993, “sustainable use” was the magic phrase that would guarantee funding.

If CARE was going to get funding for “sustainable use” in Mgahinga Park, the first order of business would be to allow honey collectors, herb harvesters, bamboo cutters and other indigenous people access to the park. Sucker was in vehement opposition to these plans. While it was a noble thought to preserve traditional forest uses, the reality of increased population pressure, i.e., more users, he reasoned, would be destructive to the environment.

Klaus-Jurgen Sucker was not alone in his opposition to these plans—international scientists and the Ugandan National Parks organization backed him up. Mgahinga consists of 35 square kilometers, of which two square kilometers were in the “degraded Zone 2.” The fear at the time was that any disturbance would cause the gorillas and other animals to retreat back into the mountains. CARE forged ahead with its sustainable use trials, which resulted in the gorillas and other animals suffering the consequences, just as Sucker had predicted. A group of mountain gorillas with a newborn left the area and did not settle down for days, according to field reports Sucker left behind.

Phillip Franks and Rob Wild were the CARE-DTC Project leaders who swooped into Mgahinga Park with briefcases full of cash and utopian visions of sustainable use. A conflict with Sucker was inevitable. Friends of Sucker say that lobbying the CARE leaders was useless. They also charge that attempts were made to bribe Sucker into silence and complicity, but that Sucker refused the unholy pact.

Meanwhile DTC scheduled regular meetings with villagers to convince them that the involvement of CARE would improve their surroundings and standard of living. Agro-forestry was the first idea, but the farmers only received some bamboo shoots that had been taken from the gorilla habitat. Sucker’s friends and critics of CARE say that CARE was totally unwilling to cooperate with the established conservation projects. By giving the villagers bamboo shoots taken from the gorilla habitat, CARE indicated that it was trying to take over the conservation project and become the sole organization working in Mgahinga. Fossey fought the same battle with the Mountain Gorilla Project that encroached on her turf.

CARE/DTC wanted Mgahinga and the millions of aid dollars that would flow with it.

Eventually, the Ugandan national park system capitulated to the forces behind CARE and ordered Jurgens’s transfer to another Ugandan park on short notice in 1994; he was ordered to leave by August 1994. On June 16 he returned from a trip to Kampala to his home in Kisoro. He had traveled to Kampala to ascertain the reasons for his transfer, and while there he received warnings that his life was in danger. His fiancé said that he was not able to learn more about the reasons behind the threats. Friends say that Sucker felt as if he was in danger in Kisoro and took every precaution to keep his departure and whereabouts a secret, according to testimony in the Gorilla Journal. Nobody, not even his neighbors, knew about his plans.   

Sucker started to pack and made preparations for a transition to the new park warden’s position. He was found dead on June 20, with “a noose around his neck and his feet on the floor.” (35) The other end of the bright red rope was attached to the window bars. The remnants of his last lunch were on the table and packed boxes were everywhere. Everything suggests that Klaus Jurgen Sucker was prepared for the transfer, looking forward to his marriage, and eating his half-finished lunch.

Ugandan and German authorities were quick to speculate that Sucker committed suicide out of the disappointment of his imminent transfer. However, friends insisted that Sucker was eagerly looking forward to starting a family and anxious to marry his girlfriend of nine years. His fiancé maintains that they were shadowed in the weeks preceding his death—there was no farewell letter, and he had another job lined up.

The authorities ultimately listed suicide as the cause of death. However, friends and associates insist to this day that Klaus Jurgen Sucker was murdered.

The autopsy was performed under German conditions, according to Karlowski, and therefore did not take into account the unique situation of the African environment. The official wording was ambiguous: “The situation in which the deceased body was found and the pathological-anatomical evidence do not exclude suicide by hanging.” (Emphasis added.)

Hardly a “CSI-worthy analysis,” Karlowski says, invoking the popular television program.

Fossey’s murder investigation—or lack thereof—including the lost and found again evidence, and lost and found again hair, dueling French and FBI lab reports, bloody flashlights, and another mysteriously hanged man—possess striking similarities.

The reasons friends and associates do not buy the suicide analysis include the obvious facts that Sucker was a dedicated conservationist who clearly had many enemies. These ranged from poachers and smugglers to the leaders of the developmental aid projects that wanted to establish sustainable use projects in such a small national park. Like his predecessor, Dian Fossey, Sucker’s first priority was the protection of the plants and animals that inhabited the park—and he paid the price with his life, they say.

Diary entries from a dead man provide interesting fodder for a deeper analysis of the monkey hole, and a voice whispering from beyond the grave. Sucker’s entries make stark reference to CARE-DTC personnel Rob Wild and Philip Franks who arrived on the Mgahinga scene in 1993.

On March 16, 1994 Sucker wrote:

““The extension of my work permit is prevented by USAID and Rob Wild.””

On March 28, Sucker described a meeting he had with Eric Edroma, the then director of the Ugandan National Parks.

““He (Edroma) took me aside and confided that Rob Wild, Rob Clausen (Director of CARE in Uganda) and somebody else had stormed into his office and vehemently protested against the prolongation of my stay. Edroma tried to straighten things out.””

Diary notes from April 17:

““Philip Franks told Edroma that he feels I am opposing everything that comes from DTC. The work permit has still not come through.””

According to the written testimony of Ulrich Karlowski, Edroma told Sucker that CARE and USAID were blackmailing him. USAID would pull all of its funding they said, if Sucker did not leave Mgahinga. According to Karlowski, three independent sources confirmed his testimony.

By May 1994, there were allegations of pilfered mail from the post office and other machinations by all parties involved.

But it is the diary entry of May 18, 1994 that perhaps sheds the most light into our monkey hole and explains exactly why USAID would be so interested in little Mgahinga Park, its mobile gorillas and Batwa honey gatherers.

““It is apparent that the US-American (sic) government is placing great effort into trying to control the frontier areas into Rwanda. The Mgahinga Project is located in one of these frontier areas which supposedly is (sic) valued for its potential to control, aid, and stabilize the neighboring country.””

In May of 1994, Rwanda was smack in the middle of the 100 days of carnage known as the Rwandan genocide.

Giving the eulogy at the 2006 memorial service of the respected American ex-patriot and African philanthropist, Rosamond Carr, the Reverend Ted Cleary vividly recalled the events of 1994: “In the spring of 1994 there was a tremendous holocaust which hit this country (Rwanda) in a most unimaginable way. It fell into a terrible abyss and seared its mountains and its valleys.” (36)

CARE had made many promises to the local population, but in the year following the death of Sucker only one representative of CARE briefly visited the park headquarters, according to Ulrich Karlowski (brother of Sucker’s fiancé). Feeling abandoned by CARE, the villagers welcomed Bergorilla & Regenwald Direkthilfe (BRD) representatives Karlowski and Karl-Heinz Kohnen in November 1994. The villagers expressed disappointment and said they were “deceived” by CARE/DTC.

In the aftermath, Philip Johnston, at that time director of CARE USA, delivered an ultimatum to BRD that they must recant all allegations against CARE and its employees in the death of Sucker. If BRD did not meet this demand, CARE would demand immediate action from the German consulate. Wishing to avoid an international incident, BRD suggested an inquiry and re-evaluation involving CARE, USAID, Uganda National Parks (UNP) and persons from the International Gorilla Conservation Program (IGCP). BRD backed the proposal by saying that if CARE’s staff had nothing to hide, they would welcome the re-evaluation.

Ten days before Johnson’s threat, BRD received a letter from Edroma, Director of Uganda National Parks, suspending all research work in Mgahinga. This included all studies, not just those of BRD. All access to the gorillas was denied.

In May 1995, after passions had cooled, BRD again went to CARE to see if a compromise could be worked out which would benefit the gorillas and conservation work in general. Philip Johnson said he welcomed the overture, but never stood up to an offer he made for a meeting of all parties involved, including CARE, UNP and BRD, according to Karlowski. (37)

Finally, by August 1995, Edroma called for bids for donor support to the Mgahinga National Park. The organization with highest bid would get the opportunity to manage the park. CARE was ostensibly backed by a 57 million dollar budget from USAID. (38)

Klaus Jurgen Sucker saw his work at Mgahinga as a success that threatened powerful interests beyond his grasp.

““Although this final report should be viewed with consideration to the fact that my involvement in the MGNP (Mgahinga Gorilla National Park) was prematurely terminated,” Sucker wrote to BRD colleagues prior to his death, “the goals of the project, i.e. to establish a functioning national park and to improve the protection of the local flora and fauna, were successfully met. To install another person to continue the project is unrealistic and of high risk, particularly in view of the possible motives for my transfer. Unfortunately, the remaining time available to me before my transfer on August 1, 1994, does not permit me to travel to Germany right now to personally inform you of the current situation. I will undertake everything in my power to personally get in touch with you as soon as possible.””

These are Klaus-Jurgen Sucker's concluding lines in his final letter to the German NGO Deutscher Tierschutzbund, dated June 15. The letter arrived after his death. (39)

Phil Franks is still working with CARE.

A long time CARE executive, Philip Johnston was voted to CARE’s Presidency in 1989. From October 1992 through March 1993, Dr. Johnston served as Coordinator for Humanitarian Assistance for the United Nations in Somalia (UNOSOM) at the request on the U.N. Secretary General. Stationed in Mogadishu, he directed the integration of all “humanitarian” organizations with the military in the wake of civil war and famine. Dr. Johnston was received at the White House by President Bush and thanked for his accomplishments. Of course, Somalia was a debacle where the “humanitarian” community—the misery industry—was the principal agent in the deconstruction of Somalia and the rise of war and suffering. It was all about private profits, and CARE—like Save the Children and UNICEF—were all there for a piece of the donor pie. Journalist Michael Maren exposed the realities in his book the Road to Hell: the Ravishing Effects of International Aid and Foreign Charity (The Free Press, 1997).

By June of 1994, Philip Johnson was the spokesman for CARE in Rwanda, during the height of the atrocities there. Quoted by Knight/Ridder News in a special to the Boston Globe, Johnston commented on the death of local CARE workers—all of CARE’s foreign nationals were evacuated—and predicted a famine in the region.

“Philip Johnston, director of CARE, the world's largest private relief and development agency, said Friday that the confirmed death toll among CARE employees caught in Rwandan civil strife had risen to five and that the fate of many others and of their families, a number in the hundreds, was unknown.”

“Meanwhile, Johnston said, a deepening drought in East Africa threatened as many as 20 million people. In nine countries centered in the Horn of Africa ‘famine is only a few months away,’ he said. (40)

Johnston said nothing about the U.S. military involvement, just as he supported the Pentagon’s true mission in Somalia.

Johnston continued as CARE President until 1996.

Putting the whole (his) story of conservation in the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa under the monkey scope, CARE’s foray into Uganda has remarkable similarities to the Conservation International/DFGF-I landscape projects in DRC today.

CARE officials in Congo have not responded to our communications about CARE projects in the USAID-funded CARPE landscapes that stretch across Central Africa.


A CHALLENGE TO CARE

Reporting for the Chicago Tribune, Paul Salopek’s Pulitzer-prize winning reportage is full of de facto advertisements peddling the interests of the BINGOs and DINGOs operating in central Africa. There were three CARE spokesmen, though one was not identified as such, in one article alone. Salopek quotes WWF experts as if they are purely involved in what we—the general American public—have erroneously come to perceive as wildlife “conservation” dedicated to “environmental” protection. As we have previously shown in this series, and will show more, these BINGOs and DINGOs are involved in all kinds of nefarious activities, even siding with logging companies—in both Congo-Brazzaville and DRC—and petroleum companies—in Gabon—against local people and indigenous resistance movements. Paul Salopek never challenges the hidden agendas of the organizations whose professional experts speak freely in his stories.

One WWF top-level official, a member of the WWF-USA National Council, is Douglas C. Yearley, currently Chairman Emeritus of Phelps Dodge Corporation—a mining giant involved in illegal mining in Congo’s Katanga province. Douglas C. Yearley is also a director of Lockheed Martin, a corporate partner of Zoo Atlanta and a military contractor connected to Beale A.F.B. Of course, World Wildlife Fund is partnered with USAID and CARE in “conservation” projects all over Central Africa. They are also throwing sand in the eyes of the local people.

In “Africa’s Wildlife Runs out of Room,” Salopek quotes Jackson Mutebi, a biologist also working for CARE’s Development through Conservation Program, and the article presents the appearance of being balanced, even critical of Western conservation agendas.

“The rich world wants places like Mgahinga preserved, and they usually get their way, but it’s always at the expense of the local people who live here,” Salopek quoted Mutebi to say. “When these places became parks in the early 1990’s, thousands of villagers lost access to firewood, building materials, food and medicinal plants overnight. They were so mad they were ready to hunt gorillas out of revenge. Our job is to try and find ways to compensate their losses.”

Salopek’s next paragraph presents CARE biologist Jackson Mutebi (quoted above) doing just what he says needs to be done. “Dozens of local workmen were putting the finishing touches on a gigantic water tank,” Salopek wrote, noting Mutebi’s leadership. “The metal cistern, paid for by the United Nations, eventually will supply 36,000 nearby villagers with tap water. The water is being piped from a wetland inside the park. Prime gorilla habitat.”

However, in the equations of power that exist today the net losses to the environment and people in Uganda are huge. These equations of power—structural factors dictating structural violence—are not explored by Paul Salopek or the Chicago Tribune.

While CARE’s DTC project will pump water from a swamp in “prime gorilla habitat” to some 36,000 villagers, the national water supply annually suffers a massive loss of fresh water from Coca Cola bottling operations in Uganda. A typical Coke plant will annually turn some 1,000,000 gallons of water—no matter how you look at it—into sludge.

Mining and petroleum operations in Uganda further devastate water and soils, and big multinational agribusiness—some of the partners and corporate sponsors of BINGOs like CARE and the IGCP partner Fauna and Flora International—dump tons of pesticides into the environment. Genetically modified crops are another blight on the commons of Uganda and these too come with the partners of the BINGOs and DINGOs.

Coke is a major partner of CARE. “Coca-Cola and CARE have been partners for decades as investors in a better world,” CARE’s corporate alliance PR reads. “The Coca-Cola Company and CARE are working hand-in-hand to create significant, effective and sustainable solutions to address global water and sanitation concerns.”

This is greenwashing.

Any positive impact of CARE’s operations in Mgahinga is more than offset by the detrimental and sustainable exploitation of Uganda by CARE’s corporate allies. These include big pharmaceutical companies (Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer); big agro-business (ConAgra, Cargill, McDonalds), big nuclear (GE, Exelon), big transport (Boeing, Daimler-Chrysler, Delta, Ford, General Motors), big chemical (3M, Abbott Labs), big timber (Weyerhaeuser, also a member of the Congo Basin Forest Partnership), and big defense and intelligence (Boeing, Ford, GE, Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Lockheed Martin).

President Museveni personally sampled the first Coca-Cola products produced at the Coke bottling plant constructed in Uganda in the late 1990’s.


Figure 2: President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, sampling Coke.

CARE is also partnered with ORACLE, the intelligence and defense company involved in high-tech satellite mapping, the company we met in Kong: Part Four: the Map.

But these “conservation” and “humanitarian” organizations’ ties to devastation and despair in Central Africa—as opposed to development and prosperity—run deep and silent. U.S., U.K. and Israeli interests are all over Uganda, and Uganda—like Kenya—serves as a major base of military operations and support for U.S. military and economic agendas in Somalia, Congo and Sudan. USAID is pivotal, and is now considered a major affiliated partner in the new AFRICOM—the Pentagon’s Africa Command. (41)

“AFRICOM aims to bring together intelligence, diplomatic, health and aid experts. Staff will be drawn from all branches of the military, as well as USAID and the departments of state, agriculture, treasury, and commerce. These nonmilitary staff may be funded with money from their own departments as well as the DOD.” (42)

USAID is a “soft” asset of the U.S. Department of Defense, and USAID has been involved with the Pentagon’s so-called “counter-terrorism” and other initiatives for years. According to one USAID document, “Combating terrorism also requires closer coordination between the Department of Defense (DOD) and USAID.” (43)

USAID is also aligned with the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa (PCHPA). PCHPA’s advisory committee members today include Olivier Legrand of Conservation International, three USAID directors, and the President of the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa from the U.S.

PCHPA co-chairmen from 2000 to at least 2004 included President of Uganda Yoweri Museveni. Other members included Peter Seligman, CEO of Conservation International and George Rupp, President of the BINGO International Rescue Committee, and a member of the board of the Pulitzer Prize committee for 2001, the year Paul Salopek won a Pulitzer for articles.

The Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa is deeply tied to interests connected to the DINGOs of the “conservation” arena, including the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Conservation International. Africa Society sponsors include Archers Daniels Midland, Coca-Cola, Chevron-Texaco, Exxon-Mobil, Daimler Chrylser, and Ford—many of the same corporate partners of CARE.

Not only involved with CARE, the African Wildlife Foundation is one of the BINGOs involved with USAID, CI, WWF, JGI and the DFGF-I. AWF partners include the European Commission, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Forest Service, and USAID. It is not surprising to find that one of the AWF’s premier sponsors is Barrick Gold Corporation. It is also not surprising that one AWF director, Walter Kansteiner, is deeply connected to gold and coltan mining in eastern Congo today, and was a National Security director for William Jefferson Clinton.

“CARE works with poor communities in more than 70 countries around the world to find lasting solutions to poverty,” reads the CARE USA web site. “We look at the big picture of poverty, and go beyond the symptoms to confront underlying causes. With a broad range of programs based on empowerment, equity and sustainability, CARE seeks to tap human potential and leverage the power of individuals and communities to unleash a vast force for progress.”

CARE USA is based in Atlanta, Georgia, the corporate base for the Georgia Institute of Technology, Goodworks International, Georgia Research Alliance, Zoo Atlanta, and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International—the mapmakers, monkey smugglers, and Mayor of our Kong series who are exploiting central Africa.

CARE doesn’t care about people, or the environment, and they didn’t set out to build local capacity or any kind of equitable “development” in Mgahinga National Park, just as they are not doing in Congo. CARE and DFGF-I and Chemonics set out to capture donor funding: they want to get at the money, and grow their organizations, and cycle the money back to themselves, and to do that they must have control of the land, the natural resource base, and the gorillas—a saleable commodity.

Klaus Jurgen Sucker stood in the way of CARE’s control of the landscape. With Sucker gone the proposals could be written, the promises made, the funds captured. But the actual work didn’t need to proceed in the field with any seriousness, just as “capacity building” in Congo is meaningless as long as a clique of powerful white interests—with their requisite black partners bribed and rewarded—controls and manipulates the system from start to finish.

Accountability for these projects is unnecessary, because this is Central Africa. The territory is inaccessible territory—the promised roads never repaired. The leaders are corrupt—because they are rewarded for corruption and are working for a corrupt clique. The Congolese and Ugandan people can’t run their own show, they are uneducated—the promised schools never built, the education stunted. Where schools do exist, they are typically the most rudimentary and insulting examples of patronage, still they are held up as evidence of our generous support. The “education” itself is the most elementary: no books, no computers, no desks, no windows, and no paper: nothing to insure that students will be able to take charge of their own future and compete with foreign “experts” for the only paying jobs that might exist. And it is impossible to learn when one is sick and hungry. Outsiders who question the state of affairs maintained by the misery and conservation industries—and their elite cliques—are either ignored altogether, or are quickly and arrogantly challenged. “Who are you? What do you know about it anyways? You have not been here. You don’t know what it is like. This is Africa.”

THE SILENCING OF THE LAMBS

The ongoing war in northern Uganda involves massive rapes, killing, tortures, and extrajudicial executions as a policy by the Ugandan military. Some 1.3 million people have been displaced in the Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts of northern Uganda. There are over 73 camps with from 1000 to 50,000 people in them, all forcibly displaced by UPDF soldiers, with over 350,000 people out of some 400,000 people displaced from the Gulu district alone. (44)

Forced displacements occurred after UPDF bombed, and burned Acholiland villages, and beat, killed, raped and threatened people into moving. Some of the displacements occurred prior to 1993, but the most recent round of forced displacements began in 1996 and peaked in the years 2002-2005. (45)

The entire “conservation” community, as in Congo, and Rwanda, is silent. Paul Salopek said nothing about the Ugandan military “adventures” in Rwanda, Congo, or Sudan, involvement in war and devastation, but ultimately aimed at private profit and resource plunder. The Chicago Tribune has not reported on the true causes for the conflict and suffering in northern Uganda: almost no one has. Of course, they have not reported on the big oil and gold investments in these areas either.

Indeed, this is Africa. Things fall apart.

Insight into the priorities of the “international community” can be gained by examining the 2001 report Beyond Boundaries: Transboundary Natural Resources Management for the Mountain Gorillas in the Virunga-Bwindi Region, published by the Biodiversity Support Program, a consortium of the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and the World Resources Institute, that was funded by USAID. (46)

From 1998 to 2001, the BSP effort (1998-2001) brought together the “conservation” authorities from three warring states: the Office of Rwanda Parks and Tourism and National Parks, the Institute Congolais Pour a Conservation de la Nature (I.C.C.N.) from Congo, and Uganda Wildlife Authority. As the title of the report indicates, these experts addressed difficult issues affecting the transboundary gorilla habitats in the Great Lakes region—those nomadic gorilla groups and the inconvenience of the international borders of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.

The report offers insights into the mechanics of international wildlife protection applied to a war zone that has claimed millions and millions of people’s lives.

“In all three countries the park staff also works closely with military authorities, to ensure security in and around the parks for park staff as well as visitors to the parks,” the authors reported. “In Rwanda and DR Congo the military has provided training for park guards, and park management has held special training sessions with military staff on the value of conservation and the forest. Owing to the political climate, the park guards patrol and monitor the park accompanied by military staff. Joint military-park patrols are currently the norm in all three countries, and joint patrols between countries also involve both park staff and military. The military also provides protection for tourists, researchers and veterinarians entering the park to conduct their normal activities.” (47)

How do conservation organizations achieve what the United Nations, the Security Council, the “international community,” and national governments cannot achieve? How is “international cooperation” to protect gorillas and gorilla habitat achieved in a landscape awash in human blood? Why is the protection of wildlife a higher priority than the protection of the millions of people who live in the Great Lakes region?

It is notable that conservation agents from National Parks and their agencies are jointly patrolling parks with military staff, but it is even more intriguing that the militaries of the three countries can maintain “joint patrols between countries.” Yet—even after the production of monumental United Nations Panel of Experts reports qualifying the operations of these government militaries and their elite trafficking networks in destabilizing the region and naming both the regional and international agents and corporations involved—little has been done to stem the illegal commerce in natural resources, illegal weapons shipments, the money-laundering or extortion, or the massive slaughter of innocent men, women and children.

Said differently, while the DFGF-I and CARE and USAID and the International Gorilla Conservation Project secured the international and in-country political will to protect some 700 mountain gorillas, and even institutionalized the economic, political and military infrastructure to make such massive protection initiatives possible, they have also willfully secured the political will to allow, even facilitate, widespread and sustained looting, torture, rape and massacres. These are institutionalized, as well, in their own ways, as international and regional policies for land acquisition and depopulation.

This is structural violence. This is what the Western mass media is silent about. This is what the mythologies of the Western mass media are all about, and what the conservation organizations and humanitarian agencies are covering up or deflecting attention from.

The juxtaposition between the atrocities—massive war crimes, crimes against humanity, acts of genocide—and the hustle and bustle of international tourism, with military chaperones into the gorilla areas is perhaps the most telling. Is it any wonder that Daryl Hannah and her escorts encounter locals who “look angry, as though we are insulting them by driving past, as foreigners do each day, on $1,000-a-day safaris to see the gorillas?” (48)

“Privately,” Paul Salopek wrote, in one of his central Africa pieces, “some of the wildlife biologists involved (in Central Africa) admit that a fierce game of public relations one-upmanship—rooted in competition for donor funding—has marred the race to conserve Africa’s last true wilderness.”

It was a massive understatement.

“There's a lot of talk that goes into thin air," said a foreign park planner in Cameroon, Paul Salopek continued. “We don't cooperate, we don't even talk to each other, and a lot of effort gets duplicated.”

Closing out his article on Mgahinga, where he disparaged Klaus-Jurgen Sucker as a bulldog warden whose work paled in comparison to the BINGOs who ruined him, Paul Salopek points readers a few miles to the east, across the Congo border. Salopek’s trip in 2000 from Mgahinga to the Virunga’s National Park in Congo—home to the other half of the world’s gorilla populations—found a “spooky, derelict national park that (had) doubled as a battlefield for nearly two years.”

That’s where we took the Road to the Tayna Conservation Center in 2007. We set off to find out about the millions in USAID funds disappearing in a landscape where the same has happened to millions of innocent people. We wanted to check out the initiatives of the BINGOs and DINGOs, like the population control programs of the Jane Goodall Institute and their USAID and Conservation International partners.


NEXT: “The Road to Tayna—Fear and Loathing in the CARPE Landscape”

NOTES:

1: Klaus J. Sucker; “The Mgahinga Gorilla National Park,” article in Wildlife Clubs of Uganda 1992, pp.27-29 www.klaus-juergen-sucker.de
2: Mid-term Evaluation of the CARE Development Through Conservation (DTC) Project; Grant Number 617-0124-G-00-91-01-00; http://rmportal.net/sitemap
3: Communication between Ulrich Karlowski and Georgianne Nienaber, June 26, 2007.
4: Testimony regarding Klaus Sucker’s reports and diary entries in this investigation is generally taken directly from the written remarks of Ulrich Karlowski, the brother of Klaus Jurgen Sucker’s fiancé.
5: Indian Country Today; March 3, 2007
6: Letter from Tom Butynski to United States Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service; December 13, 2005.
7: http://allafrica.com/stories/200301020115.html
8: http://www.tws-west.org/sac-shasta/images/magpie_07-2005.pdf
9: http://www.unep-wcmc.org/protected_areas/index.html
10: http://www.iucn.org/themes/wcpa/pubs/pdfs/somersetwest.pdf
11: http://www.unep-wcmc.org/protected_areas/transboundary/somersetwest/somersetwest-10.html
12: http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/~rsgs/expedits/reports/Africa.htm#1997/3
13: See: Howard W. French, Africa: A Continent of the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa; and Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999.
14: See: Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999; keith harmon snow and David Barouski, “Behind the Numbers: Suffering in Congo,” Z Magazine, July 2006; “Stolen Goods: Coltan and Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Dena Montague, SAIS Review, Vol. XXII, No. 1,Winter-Spring 2002.
15: Private interviews, keith harmon snow, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2004-2007
16: http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/anthro/chapman_files/kibale/Consortium.html
17: Colin Chapman, et al, “Thirty Years of Research in Kibale National Park, Uganda, Reveals a Complex Picture for Conservation,” International Journal of Primatology, Vol. 26, No. 3, June 2005; DOI: 10.1007/s10764-005-4365-z.
18: Colin Chapman, et al, “Thirty Years of Research in Kibale National Park, Uganda, Reveals a Complex Picture for Conservation,” International Journal of Primatology, Vol. 26, No. 3, June 2005; DOI: 10.1007/s10764-005-4365-z.
19: Interview, September 2006, keith harmon snow
20: Letter from Terry L. Maple, PhD. To U.S. Department of the Interior, December 10, 2005
21: http://www.ippl.org/05-26-06.html
22: Ibid
23: http://www.sunshine-project.org/biodefense/NBAF/UGANBAFEOI1.PDF
24: Traditional sawing: a log is positioned over a pit with a man above (lifting) and one below (guiding).
25: Gorilla Journal.
26: Fossey Archives, McMaster University, Hamilton ON and Woman in the Mists, Farley Mowat p. 349.
27: Mark Dowie, “Conservation Refugees,” Orion Magazine, November/December 2005.
28: Evaluation of the Development Through Conservation (DTC) Project; Grant Number 617-0124-G-00-91-01-00; http://rmportal.net/sitemap
29: http://www.berggorilla.org/english/gjournal/texte/10bwindi.html
30: http://www.iicd.org/photos/iconnect/Stories/Story.import3958
31: Letter from Sam Tumuhaise to New Vision,  July 23, 1994
32: Ulrich Karlowski. “For a Fistful of Dollars,” Gorilla Journal, 1996
33: W.M. Adams and Mark Infield, COMMUNITY CONSERVATION AT MGAHINGA GORILLA NATIONAL PARK, UGANDA, (undated: 1999?).
34: New Internationalist, July 1, 2006
35: www.kilimajaro.com/gorilla/brd/klaus2.htm
36: Video record of Rosamond Carr Memorial Service, November 2006.
37: Ulrich Karlowski. “For a Fistful of Dollars,” Gorilla Journal, 1996
38: BRD Archives: www.kilimanjaro.com/gorilla/brd/1-1995.htm
39: http://www.kilimanjaro.com/gorilla/brd/klaus.htm
40: Randolph Ryan, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, June 4, 1994.
41: Numerous USAID and U.S. State Department media advisories cite USAID’s support of AFRICOM and discussions with the Pentagon about support of AFRICOM.
42: Stephanie Hanson, The Pentagon’s New Africa Command, Council on Foreign Relations, May 3, 2007, http://www.cfr.org/publication/13255/.
43: Doug Menarchik, USAID and the War on Terrorism, USAID Summer Seminar Series, August 9, 2005: 
44: Karen Parker, Forced Displacement in Northern Uganda, United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, http://www.webcom.com/hrin/parker/sub01wsu.html.
45: keith harmon snow, “Hidden War, Massive Suffering: Another White People’s War for Oil,” Global Research, May 26, 2007 http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=49.
46: The BSP began in 1988 and reportedly closed down in 2001.
47: Annette Lanjouw, et al, Beyond Boundaries: Transboundary Natural Resources Management for the Mountain Gorillas in the Virunga-Bwindi Region, Biodiversity Support Program, c/o World Wildlife Fund, Washington DC, 2001: P. 27.
48: Richard Bangs, “Silverback Mountain: Where Gorilla Roam,” Richard Bangs Adventures: http://adventures.yahoo.com/b/adventures/adventures2988;_ylt=AmDtN9V6xjqmWv3YnomVQsTDW8sF;_ylu=X3oDMTBjamtzcG1mBHNlYwNoei1zdG9yeQ .