Investigations by  Georgianne Nienaber

"Congolese in Goma live with wooden wheels"

Mapping the Road to Tayna - "Kong" Part Six

“There is too strong of a linking of funds to geographic areas without adequately linking them to existing governance regimes. Specifically, this led several observers to characterizing the landscape grants as “pork” for the conservation movement with minimal CARPE ownership by national governments.”--The Weidemann Consortium, 2006

The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International gets a lot of mileage out of Dian Fossey. Today their web site hosts original photos of Dian Fossey working in the field at Karisoke, the research station Fossey built in Rwanda. DFGF-I has plans to expand and market the Dian Fossey name worldwide, an entire industry in the making, all mapped out in terms of market share and “protected” primates. There is even a photograph showing Dian Fossey’s grave in Rwanda.

But Dian Fossey would be turning over in that grave if she knew that the little old lady in Iowa who donated twenty bucks to gorilla conservation through today’s Fossey Fund was getting scammed.

Putting the sordid, sensational, and squalid (his) story of “conservation” in the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa under the monkey scope, CARE International’s foray into the environmental scene in Uganda has remarkable similarities to the Conservation International, CARPE and Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International landscape projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) today.

One can argue that the Road to Tayna began in little Mgahinga Gorilla Park, in 1993. The Hanged Man and the Mwami of our series both had remarkable tales to tell, but only the Congolese Mwami lived to tell his. Meanwhile, in 2004 USAID was telling Congress another story altogether—a story contradicting the press releases, propaganda and out right lies propagated by wildlife organizations in and around Virunga National Park and the CARPE landscape partners in pork.

For our international readers, the terms “pork” and “pork barrel” refer to government excess in spending that benefits the constituents of a politician or some private entity. The term originated on U.S. slave plantations where the slaves were given the dregs of slaughtered pigs—what remained in the “pork barrel.”

The “pork” terminology gains new meaning when we examine and comprehend the DFGF-I “Pigs for Profit” program from the Tayna Conservation area.

The Weidemann Report

In a telling memo written in December 2004, Robert Hellyer—USAID Mission Director for DRC—wrote to the USAID Africa Bureau in Washington regarding the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), the “principal vehicle for United States participation in the Congo Basin Forest Project.”

“Of the more than 60 million people that live in the region,” Hellyer wrote, “about 22 million are located in urban areas. At present rates of population growth, the region is expected to contain 150 million people by the year 2025. Population density is on the whole quite low, with a regional average of 14 persons per square kilometer. ”(1)

There it is. Buried in the February 2006 Annex of the supporting documents for the report of the Weidemann Consortium—an evaluation of the CARPE program in Central Africa—is the admission that the rational of “overpopulation” was bogus. For all the satellite sensors, the population control programs, the hand wringing by UNESCO and Conservation International and Fauna and Flora International and Richard Leakey’s ranger-training operation called Wildlife Direct—the alphabet soup of BINGOs and DINGOs gathering like hyenas for the kill around the perimeter of Virunga and Kahuzi-Biega National Parks—“the population density is on the whole quite low.” (2)

Robert Hellyer elaborates on the global demand for petroleum and timber, and on the adverse impacts of human populations in a landscape—Congo—where “it is in the self-interest of the United States government” to support “sustainable development” in the region. Hellyer confirmed that CARPE and USAID are not interested in the Congolese people, or even biodiversity protection, but only in the interests of the United States.

How many of the claims of the BINGOS—the big conservation NGOs—are real and how many public relations? They all claim community partnerships and sustainable development, but what is the situation for the people on the ground in Central Africa?

The centerpiece of our KONG series and the framework, upon which all of the deceptions can be displayed, is the Tayna Gorilla Reserve.

Tayna Gorilla Reserve (RGT)

The Tayna Gorilla Reserve is located some 50 kilometers west of the spine of the Great African Rift Valley and the “spooky”—in the words of Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Salopek—Virunga National Park (VNP). Salopek’s trip in 2000 from Mgahinga National Park in Uganda to the Virunga National Park in Congo found a “spooky, derelict national park that (had) doubled as a battlefield for nearly two years.”

The VNP landscape encompasses 790,000 hectares (1.95 million acres) of rich equatorial swamps, plains that rival the brawny savannahs of the great South African Kruger Park, and steppes that merge into the Mountains of the Moon snowfields of the Ruwenzoris. Lava plains old and new flow down slopes of volcanoes and buffer the last refuge of the king of the volcanoes—the inspiration for the mythical KONG—the embattled mountain gorilla.

This is a land that once formed the cradle of civilization, but humans here are also fighting a losing battle for survival. As we noted in KONG: The Hanged Man (http://coanews.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1964), in recent years hundreds of thousands of refugees—mostly women and children—fled west from Rwanda into Virunga’s forests and were hunted down and slaughtered by Rwandan and Ugandan forces. The mapping agencies, the money, the scientists, the humanitarians and family planners, and the crooks on the run all followed the doomed humans.

The Tayna Gorilla Reserve is the flagship Community Conservation Program of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I). As DFGF-I boasts on their website, it is “a program that empowers local people to protect and preserve their heritage.” The claim is repeated in a jungle of press releases published as independent news, in lavish reports, fundraising campaigns, and expensive, glossy, full-color brochures.(3)

However, there is a damning indictment of DFGF-I published in the Annex of the Weidemann Report. Comments by Jefferson Hall, the former Assistant Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Africa Program, caution that DFGF-I is totally incapable of managing the Tayna conservation landscape or the CARPE conservation project at Kahuzi-Biega.

“In the Maiko-Tayna-Kahuzi Biega Landscape, the Landscape Lead,” Hall notes, Conservation International “has no implementing activities on the ground or presence in the Landscape or the country.” (emphasis added) Hall characterizes the DFGF-I as a sub-recipient whose involvement will cause conflict. He notes that DFGF-I does not have a cooperative agreement with CARPE or the experience or capacity to take the Landscape Lead. Hall recommended that activities on the ground should be a prerequisite for Landscape leadership.(4)

It seems that both CI and DFGF-I were inexperienced and incapable, but went ahead with their program anyway. Were Hall’s comments based upon predatory competition for funding, or was WCS supporting the Mwami’s claims that Tayna was in shambles? Were the hyenas of the conservation clique breaking ranks, now that the prey was down?

The ecology of the Democratic Republic of Congo is certainly worth protecting, but in terms of dollars spent and pressure put upon the humans that share the land, at what cost? Home to endangered human primates and their endangered relatives—the Grauer’s gorillas, the chimpanzees and another twelve species of non-human primates—there are more than eighty species of mammals in the Tayna forested area, including elephants, leopard, buffalo and the rare okapi. It is an achingly vibrant and beautiful landscape.

This area, especially north of Lubero District, could probably feed all of Africa–certainly all of DRC. This countryside of stunning vistas is the most fertile in the world. While we were perched on hills that that roll 2500 meters above sea level into verdant valleys, our eyes feasted on virgin timber and cultivated fields. Beautiful women wrapped in colorful fabrics tended to maize and tethered their goats in grasses that ringed the family plots. Chronological time may have marched forward, but these villagers have been living the same lifestyle for hundreds of years. It is one of the most breathtaking landscapes on earth.

It is also drenched in blood. At this writing—July 2007—there are 700,000 internally displaced people struggling to survive in North and South Kivu—CARPE Landscape 10—and the security situation is deteriorating.

The Paper Trail to Tayna

Members of the United States Congress should read the 127 plus page Weidemann Report. Beyond accusations of the ubiquitous pork, it fries the bacon of the BINGOs and DINGOs and their chief funder, USAID.

The Weidemann Report described the initial design and scope of CARPE as “insufficient” for the undertaking. Policy coordination is/was assessed to be “dispersed across a confusing array of U.S. Government and NGO organizations whose efforts were very unevenly implemented in scope, scale, and geographic focus.” (5)

Washington D.C. is described as “isolated” and landscape partners “cut off” from each other and Washington and even from the structures of power in DRC. In other words, Washington hasn’t got a clue what is going on in Central Africa as far as results from dollars spent in the human misery and conservation sectors. No surprises there—given the black hole of dollars that vanished with Hurricane Katrina and the absence of accountability at home.

We submitted a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) (6) to USAID in January 2007, asking for a partial evaluation of Tayna that has not been answered. No independent party has ever evaluated the program at the Tayna Center for Conservation Biology (TCCB). The Mwami on the run insisted that CARPE had evaluated the horrible conditions in villages and at the “university.” Just six sentences into the Weidemann Report we ran headlong into the Monkey Smuggler of our series and the vindication of the Mwami’s Tale, told to us in a hotel room in central Africa in 2006.

“Meetings in Goma DRC and the team’s initial travel itinerary to Kahuzi-Biega were organized by Patrick Mehlman, Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund program director. Unfortunately, due to heavy rains, those travel plans had to be cancelled.” (7)

In fact, Patrick Mehlman of DFGF-I and Carlos Bonilla of Conservation International prepared the only existing written evaluation of the project at the Tayna Gorilla Reserve. The CI Final Report to USAID CARPE was written in December 2006 and revised by Mehlman for Conservation International (CI) in May of 2007. The report summarizes activities at both Kahuzi-Biega and Tayna Conservation areas. Graphs, charts and maps take up much of the content. There is one very small photo of the TCCB “university” from a distance, which reveals the tops of buildings. But it was all done by the Monkey Smuggler and his partners at Conservation International.

Our Congolese conservation insider had warned us that the grant writers, the biologists, the evaluators and the accountants were all the same people—the conservation clique—but we couldn’t believe there was no oversight or accountability.

Kahuzi-Biega and Tayna are two distinct parts of CARPE landscape No. 10, described in the Mwami’s Tale of our series. Was Tayna ever on the CARPE evaluator’s agenda? Does it matter? Kahuzi-Biega was not evaluated either, unreachable by the Weidemann team due to “heavy rains.” Millions of dollars lost in the jungle, and those promised roads never delivered.

Both projects are largely funded by USAID, with money filtered through CARPE, Conservation International, Pfizer Corporation, UGADEC and other “conservation” entities. (8) USAID contributed $5,496,104 to Conservation International over a period of three years through CARPE, and $2,804,449 went to Tayna and the TCCB “University.” (9)

However, Patrick Mehlman’s report says the “total amount of USAID CARPE funding for Conservation International for the reporting period was $4,678,286.” (10) Mehlman’s numbers conflict with numbers in the Weidemann Report. Notably, DFGF-I contributed $131,580 as “match funding,” meaning some sort of trade and not actual dollars, and Pfizer Drug Company donated $425,000 worth of “medicines” through DFGF-I. At Tayna we saw chemical sterilization drugs with the Pfizer label. The U.S. Congressional Gorilla Fund threw another $283,000 into the pork barrel. The Jane Goodall Institute provided leveraged funding of $634,988 from USAID and its own coffers. (11)

Readers of this series will recall that Clare Richardson, CEO of DFGF-I, was the “expert witness” at U.S. government hearings on the Congressional Gorilla Fund.

In another play on numbers, Conservation International repeats the $2.8 million figure, but adds another $1 million from the Global Conservation Fund. Costs for TCCB infrastructure were estimated at $500,000 with labor contributed by “hundreds of villagers.” (12) In our interview with Pierre Kakule at the DFGF-I compound in Goma, Kakule told us that the bricks for the project were made by “orphans.”

Readers need to download the FLASH (FLASH LINK = www.rabbitsliketrumpets.typepad.com/Tayna/index.html) presentation included with this story for a close-up look at the “infrastructure” at the Tayna Center for Conservation Biology. The pile of bricks, manufactured by the orphans, is now overgrown with weeds.

The money trail is huge and complicated, but we would need accountants and whistleblowers from ENRON to sort it out, or maybe the black magic of the Defense Contracts Audit Agency, which has already completed an audit on DFGF-I—the “proprietary” audit that remains classified. (13)

On February 10, 2006 we asked the Jane Goodall Institute about JGI’s work in the Tayna and Kahuzi Biega areas. Africa Program director George Strunden answered (3/3/06) that JGI received $1 million in USAID for eight areas in Eastern DRC. We then asked JGI to clarify programs and levels of JGI funding in the field in Eastern DRC in 2003, 2004 and 2005. After repeated inquiries an email arrived on May 31, 2006. The answers to our questions were non-answers, obtuse and evasive.

“All of our funds go toward our fieldwork,” responded Nona Gandelman of JGI. “It is our only focus in this area. We assess what’s needed to do the job, and then we do it, based upon approved budgets from our funders. Our budgets are targeted to get the job done.”

The current CARPE cycle runs for seven years, and USAID is required by law to do periodic evaluations. Weidemann Associates were hired to evaluate the program under something called RAISE ICQ. “This 5-year funding cycle began on September 29, 2004. The IQC ceiling is $20 million,” says the Weidemann website. (14)

For a part of a $20 million, five-year evaluation pie, Weidemann Associates flew a four-person assessment team to DRC under the USAID RAISE PLUS IQC task order. The team arrived in early October 2005. Three U.S. based members read a bunch of “key” documents and prepared some “key assessment questions” for “key actors” before they landed in… Congo. (15)

The team reportedly interviewed representatives of all U.S.-based CARPE partners, but later decided that 2-4 hour meetings were not sufficient or adequate, and so they e-mailed “key assessment questions” to each partner organization; two CARPE partners did not respond.

The questionnaires make interesting reading. The CARPE partners challenge and openly castigate competing member organizations—a bunch of hungry BINGOs and DINGOs after the same piece of USAID funding.

Hyenas Gathered for the Kill

U.S.-based members of the Weidemann team traveled to Congo and were joined by the fourth member—“a local area specialist”—on October 29, 2005. They spent one week in Kinshasa, and flew to Gabon—with meetings in Libreville and site visits to CARPE Landscape 2. During week three, they flew back to Kinshasa and then to Goma, where they split up “to maximize their resources and time.”

The team leader focused on the Virunga landscape by traveling to Rwanda (Kigali, Ruhengeri, Volcanoes National Park), and then back to the southern region of the Virungas Park in DRC. Other team members flew to Epulu, DRC, to assess “progress” in the Ituri landscape, and then flew to Beni, North Kivu, where they met with commercial loggers and CARPE partners. Returning to Kinshasa they drafted some conclusions and recommendations for CARPE officials. (16)

Let’s get this straight: a team of three U.S. consultants—with one Congolese “area expert”—reads some “key” reports stateside, and then flies into the war-torn Congo—chewing on a $20 million pie. So they land in Kinshasa, stay at luxury hotels, fly to Gabon—more luxury hotels in the most expensive country in Africa—fly to Gamba in Shell Oil slave country down south, fly back to Kinshasa, fly to Goma, jump to Kigali, email a questionnaire—and go nowhere near Tayna or Kahuzi-Biega because it’s raining?

The “commercial logging” stop in Bena was with ENRA, a company (and plantations) owned by the family of warlord Jean Pierre Bemba, which ships finished mahogany furniture and parquet floors to Belgium. There is a cooperative CARPE project with ENRA on logging concessions which involves the Wildlife Conservation society (WCS). (17)

The evaluation team missed the remote villages and people who most needed the light of truth shined upon their situation—and the validation or refutation of the conservation claims about helping them. The spotlight instead was on the minions of KONG, the logging, the volatile Virunga Park, Ituri, Rwanda and other areas of most importance to USAID and multinational interests. No one visited the interior villages.

The Weidemann Report criticized the linkage of funding to specific geographic “landscapes” without “accountability to the village governances” which signed over the land in the first place. We would later confirm this and find that—like the hapless villagers in recent Greenpeace reports who traded salt for vast tracks of virgin forests—the villagers in the CARPE program traded land for “universities” and “health clinics.”

The 2004 CARPE partner report of Conservation

International indicated simple goals had not been attained—less than 50% of the Mwamis had either been reached or supportive of the project and “at least” 300 children were directly attending education activities. A grand total of two typewriters and supplies were delivered to each of 8 UGADEC projects. (18) CI noted that Tayna had “enough infrastructure and equipment for land-use planning,” but as we would witness at the end of the road, there was nothing that could by any stretch of the imagination grant “university” status to TCCB.

In a sad indictment of priorities, 3000 human samples of fecal material were analyzed for worm infestations and compared against GORILLA samples. This study was done to protect the gorillas from human worm infestations and not the other way around, as any humanitarian might expect. ONLY the people who participated in the study were treated for worms. The scientific results “examined that the gorillas living closest to humans have the highest rates of infestation.” Never mind the humans!

CI specifically singled out DFGF-I as having “some staffing and equipment but this is insufficient for effective management.” (19)

It was in 2004 that the Mwami on the run sent correspondence after correspondence to DFGF-I and CI, pleading that someone, anyone, do something about the deplorable conditions at the reserve. (See Kong Three: The Mwami’s Tale: http://coanews.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1911.) Meanwhile, CI reported enough money for “at least seven international conferences are (sic) attended by upper staff members.” (20) The CI report corroborates what our conservation expert told us about Congolese never being invited to attend international conferences. That privilege is reserved for the elite staff of the BINGOs and DINGOs.

How much money is spent on elite conferences for career specialists from the U.S. and Europe? Here’s how the money comes around, and comes back around.

In responses to a U.S. Congressional inquiry of September 2006, USAID outlined some conferences and expenditures. In FY 2005 there were 3,909 USAID personnel sent to 1,479 events; in FY 2006, there were 1,513 USAID personnel sent to 1,029 events. (21)

Some fourteen USAID people attended one week-long conference in Toronto on AIDS in the summer of 2006. USAID reported “estimated” travel costs at $75,000, conference fees at $14,000, and salary expenses of around $34,300. (22)

That’s $123,300 exclusively for USAID staff, at one posh conference, and there were 2,508 conferences attended by USAID personnel (2005-2006) all over the world. Then there are the thousands of technical, conservation, mapping and “humanitarian” conferences for other agencies, programs and business sectors like CARE, ESRI and GRASP—the Great Apes Survival Project.

In FY 2006 the total amount spent by the USAID and its agencies and offices on conferences—including general support, programming, staff salaries, travel and other associated costs—was $7,139,550; and in FY 2005 it was $8,939,525.(23)

For all the money pumped into the Tayna project, for all of the glossy brochures produced by the DFGF-I, the luxury conferences, the cocktail parties, the National Press Club luncheons, the celebrity endorsements, for all the new entities, organizations and alliances continually being created to ostensibly address the crucial issues—the results for the Congolese people are underwhelming.

“The DFGF-I project completed two radio broadcasts per month; two television broadcasts per quarter; and one brochure pamphlet per quarter” for conservation education efforts for the Congolese. (24)

And they gave out nineteen pigs in the DFGF-I “Pigs for Profit” program.

But the mapping continued and the socioeconomic data was stored, analyzed, assimilated, and summarized in a 2004 document summary written specifically for CARPE “partners” and “work plans” in the Tayna-Kahuzi landscape projects. What is telling is that the document has been removed from the CARPE website since the beginnings of our investigation became public. However, we have hard copies of the 2004 summaries found through this Google search, which has also vanished from the web .We do know that data was collected for gorilla and chimp distribution, and GPS coordinates for villages were charted and stored. GPS data points described “anthropogenic disturbances” and “socioeconomic baseline data” on population centers, demography, resource use, and “illegal extraction” using “IRM participatory mapping techniques.” (25) The “participatory mapping” of IRM, as we already pointed out, is a scandal of intellectual property theft.

Again, this now occult report came out in 2004 at the same time that the Mwami of our series charged through correspondence after correspondence that the Mbingi orphans were not being fed, and that there was no money to pay staff at the university, and that promises made to villagers were not kept.

In July 2004, Mwami wrote a letter directly to Clare Richardson of DFGF-I.

“RGT (Tayna) is currently in a structural crisis as a result of the management methods practiced by DFGF-I here in Congo. The member associations have lost respect for the structures of UGADEC (26) as a result of DFGF-I’s activities, which include diverting funds, suffocating innovations and encouraging elitism… there is a tribal bias to the development projects undertaken by DFGF-I, to the detriment of those areas rich in primate species. The true chiefs and landowners have been excluded from the management of the project, and not one has been placed on the office staff.”

And the mapping went on and on, and GIS data was flowing into the databanks under the heading of “socio-economic” data. The “pictures, aerial photographs, demarcation reports, and GPS points of positions” were duly reported in 2004, but the Mwami was ignored, and finally he was driven from his village by the henchmen of Pierre Kakule.

What Comes Around Comes Back Around

The Annex of the Weidemann Report is more fodder for understanding the predatory competitions at play as the BINGOs and DINGOs fought for their share of the conservation kill in the CARPE landscapes.

The African Wildlife Fund (AWF) took “exception” with the Weidemann Report suggestion that “None of the implementing partners are reporting on indicators 1.3 and 1.4,” which are intermediate benchmark indicators of progress on project goals.

“It is true that only in year three have we been in a position to adequately address these intermediate results, but we are now achieving results for these (intermediate reports) and will be reporting on these in the FY06 annual report.” (27) AWF turned its homework in very late. Conservation International attacked AWF, miffed that it was not singled out for praise in the disposition and distribution of sub-grants. “(With regard to) the assessment that only AWF has had success with sub grants to NGOS, we would like to call to your attention the fact that CI has provided significant sub grants to local NGOs such as TCCB Tayna, the community organizations under UGADEC and Vie Sauvage a conservation DINGO using international implementing NGO partners such as DFGF-I as technical and administrative hubs on the ground.”

CI was very unhappy with the assertion that CI was “virtually not present in the region.” Their sputtering winded response is almost indecipherable, but seems to confirm that “what (criticism) comes around comes back around.”

“On several occasions we explained that CI’s approach to limit its staffing growth is the result of a global institutional strategy that primes the work with partners and the building of local capacities through significant funding transfers rather than the unsustainable expansion of its own operative structures. This approach is consistent with addressing the concerns stated elsewhere in the report about limited capacity building for local institutions, as well as their financial and institutional sustainability.” (28)

CI soon enough stated huffily that “the landscape approach has limited local buy-in and fits awkwardly with existing local management structures.”

And there it is again: “the landscape approach has limited local buy-in.”

This is a massive understatement for so-called “conservation” programs involved in a war-torn landscape rife with extreme poverty, unspeakable crimes against women, resource plunder, and death.

Perhaps this explains why frustrated staff at the ‘university” handed us a plastic bag which contained a stinking, greasy, decaying gorilla hand and a patch of fur from a poached Okapi.

There is no real protection of wildlife in the Tayna Gorilla “reserve.”

Unsurprisingly, CI also slammed IRM, one of the chief mapping agencies. “The contributions from the IRM/Remote sensing activities have been limited and any interpretation of these data without significant ground-truthing would be of limited value.”

Pierre Kakule of DFGF-I told us that IRM had done extensive mapping of the Tayna Reserve when we visited him at the DFGF-I office in Goma. It might be important to mention that while we were there our Bodyguard Rob Poppe was lobbying Kakule for a job to train rangers at Tayna. The obvious question remains unanswered. “Where did all of the information gathered by IRM end up?” What does it mean that the “contributions” from millions and millions of dollars of high-tech mapping “have been limited” and “would be of limited value?”

The National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) lobbied for its share of the conservation kill. NASA complained about “the current precarious status of U.S. satellite assets for monitoring the Congo Basin Forests.” No matter that at least 23 satellites are continuously monitoring the region.

But it was Jefferson Hall of the Wildlife Conservation Society who laid it all on the line for the CARPE partners.

“Our experience of partnership amongst the four lead NGOs (AWF, CI, WCS, and WWF) during both CARPE and other programs has shown that none of these NGOs has the legal and administrative capacity to negotiate and execute USAID subcontracts rapidly. Thus, structuring CARPE according to this proposal would result in delays of a year or more in implementing activities in some of the Landscapes.”(29)

The paper trail alone verified the Mwami’s accusations of mismanagement of the Tayna landscape, but it was no substitute for a visual and audio record—the ultimate ground truth to compare against the public relations blitz.

Rather, considering the amount of dollars available for an evaluation of the CARPE landscape and the cost of the Tayna program alone, it is stunning to realize that no one but the BINGOs and DINGOs who receive American tax dollar generated funds has ever taken the time to go to Tayna to find out if anything that is advertised—like community development or university educations—actually happens.

“Our village, Bukonde, is in the Tanya landscape,” said one local source that cannot be identified. “There is no development in our village, no hospitals, no schools, no roads, no transport, and no food.”(30) The man explained the need to shoot and eat wildlife to survive.

His story is the story of Congo, since the very beginning, since Leopold.

Kakule first came to Bukonde in 1998, promising the usual: schools, clinics, roads—in exchange for cooperation to protect the gorillas. After years of neglect, unpaid labor, lies and more lies, the people said “enough.” Kakule paid the soldiers, and soldiers came. People were beaten and arrested and hauled off to jail, far-away, in Lubero. The poorest people in the world scraped up enough money to bribe the freedom of their friends and relatives. It didn’t take much; soldiers make $18 a month.

“The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund wants to have our land and land from the other seven villages in the Groupement Munzoa.” He explained. “Pierre Kakule is a very dangerous man. He’s exploiting our forests without bringing development. There are a lot of health problems here: malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria, tuberculosis, and other fevers. There are many problems to give birth.”

The many stories about the brutalization and thievery endured by the villagers and the heartbreaking tale of the Mwami compelled us to go to Tayna. It was a risky, expensive, emotional pilgrimage, but it sure cost a lot less than $20 million.

Next: Hitting the Road and Hitting the Wall of Deception in Tayna

(1) Cover Memorandum for the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE) FY 2005 Annual Report Submission from USAID/DRC Mission Director Robert Hellyer to AA/AFR Lloyd Pierson, December 17, 2004
(2) John Pielemeier et al, Mid-Term Assessment of the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), Final Report, The Weidemann Consortium, February 2006. http://carpe.umd.edu/resources/Documents/search_categories/year-2006/
(3) www.gorillafund.org
(4) Annex H: Partner comments on draft assessment Mid-Term Assessment of CARPE II, John Pielemeier et al, Mid-Term Assessment of the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), Final Report, The Weidemann Consortium, February 2006; http://carpe.umd.edu/resources/Documents/search_categories/year-2006/
(5) Weidemann Report, p. 9
(6) FOI- 074/07
(7) John Pielemeier et al, Mid-Term Assessment of the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), Final Report, The Weidemann Consortium, February 2006; http://carpe.umd.edu/resources/Documents/search_categories/year-2006/
(8) UGADEC is the Association Union Gorilla Conservation for Development in the East of DRC.
(9) John Pielemeier et al, Mid-Term Assessment of the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), Final Report, The Weidemann Consortium, February 2006; http://carpe.umd.edu/resources/Documents/search_categories/year-2006/
(10) CI Final report to USAID CARPE (FY 03-06)
(11) Ibid
(12) http://web.conservation.org/xp/frontlines/people/06230602.xml
(13) Conversation with Congressman James Oberstar’s Office, March 2007
(14) http://www.weidemann.org/RaisePlusLimitedScope.htm
(15) John Pielemeier et al, Mid-Term Assessment of the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), Final Report, The Weidemann Consortium, February 2006; http://carpe.umd.edu/resources/Documents/search_categories/year-2006/
(16) John Pielemeier et al, Mid-Term Assessment of the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), Final Report, The Weidemann Consortium, February 2006; http://carpe.umd.edu/resources/Documents/search_categories/year-2006/
(17)http://carpe.umd.edu/resources/Documents/SI_Ituri_ForestryInventory_TechnicalRpt_Sept2006.pdf/
not_available_lang?set_language=en&cl=en
(18) CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL, Maiko Tayna Kahuzi-Biega Landscape, 3/1/2004.
(19) Ibid
(20)http://carpe.umd.edu/partners/workplans/ci/CI_Monte_Alen_wkpln_fy04_3rd_wksht_Maiko_wkpln.pdf.
(21) Questions for the Record Submitted to Lisa Fiely, USAID Chief Financial Officer by Senator Coburn, U.S. Subcommittee Federal Financial Management, Government Information and International Security Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, September 14, 2006.
(22) Ibid.
(23) Ibid.
(24)http://carpe.umd.edu/partners/workplans/ci/CI_Maiko_Tayna
_Kahuzi_Biegawkpln_fy04_w_budget.pdf
(25) Ibid
(26) UGADEC is the Association Union Gorilla Conservation for Development in the East of DRC.
(27) Comments by Adam Henson of African Wildlife Fund, Annex H: Partner comments on draft assessment Mid-Term Assessment of CARPE II, John Pielemeier et al, Mid-Term Assessment of the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), Final Report, The Weidemann Consortium, February 2006; http://carpe.umd.edu/resources/Documents/search_categories/year-2006/
(28) Annex H: Partner comments on draft assessment Mid-Term Assessment of CARPE II, John Pielemeier et al, Mid-Term Assessment of the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), Final Report, The Weidemann Consortium, February 2006; http://carpe.umd.edu/resources/Documents/search_categories/year-2006/
(29) Annex H: Partner comments on draft assessment Mid-Term Assessment of CARPE II, John Pielemeier et al, Mid-Term Assessment of the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), Final Report, The Weidemann Consortium, February 2006; http://carpe.umd.edu/resources/Documents/search_categories/year-2006/>
(30) Private interview, Goma, DRC, August 2006.

Primate Worship? Or Depo-Privations?

Life-Span for Congolese Women Less than Famous Chimp "Hiasl" in Captivity

"Hiasl" is a captive chimpanzee that will soon see his day in court. An attorney has been hired, Hiasl's slick legal briefs are being groomed, and when Hiasl appears before the court in Vienna the judge will be asked to grant Hiasl the rights of a human being.

This is one of the lead stories on CNN right now, and the feature highlights how the legal team representing Austrian chimp "Hiasl" will include the famous primatologist Jane Goodall.

Will they make a monkey out of the judge?

Goodall and other animal rights experts will attempt to convince authorities that Hiasl should have human rights. This is a rather stunning turn of events, given that the very people who live in the areas where Hiasl comes from have hardly any human rights at all.

In the jungle of international human rights, the primate protection community and international conservation organizations can hardly be said to care a sniff for the rights of the humans who live in the environments of the great apes themselves.

Take "Florence Njagali," (name changed) a sixteen year-old girl who was raped by soldiers when she was fourteen. Florence is lucky--she is alive to tell the tale. Indeed, she dreams of the day when CNN reporters and Anderson Cooper and the monkey-show of CNN will descend on her village and bring her face to the international primate protection scene. Why, Florence would even be willing to hop up and down, and scratch her head like her cousins in the forest, if she could only get some attention shined on the exploitation of her land.

Florence lives today in a remote village in the eastern Congo, the Great Lakes Region of Africa, known also as one of the last refuge landscapes for two of humanity's nearest living relatives: the chimpanzees and gorillas of the Great Ape family, a family which includes humans. But CNN better hurry: the average age of life in these parts is about 40 years old for women and for men.

With a lifespan of 60 years in captivity, and a monthly expense account of $6,800 for food and veterinary bills, Hiasl's "human rights" far outstrip the rights of our poor Congolese woman. Florence couldn't imagine what she might do with $6,800 a month-- she has never seen more than $20 in one place in her life. She's got no bank account, and there aren't any banks. She doesn't receive a government check, because there isn't what you'd call a government, and the postal system hasn't worked for years.

Alas, back in Vienna, with café au lait and cappuccinos at their desks, the attorneys representing the already wealthy chimp will argue that Hiasl is a person and therefore has basic human rights. "We mean the right to life, the right to not be tortured, the right to freedom under certain conditions," Eberhart Theuer told the Associated Press. Poor Hiasl needs a guardian who can look out for his rights, activists like Goodall are saying.

Human rights proponents might want to look more closely at the propensity to popularize primate protections over people protections.

Florence Njagali lives in a zone that is championed for conservation protection by a host of big non-government organizations-insiders call these the BINGOS. These are corporatized entities that have, since the days of Dian Fossey and the notebook-toting-hippies in the forest, professionalized the international monkey business.

These BINGOS have a lock on the aid contracts and control massive programs all around Central Africa. They call them BINGOS because they get all the funding, at the expense of grass-roots programs and little mom-and-pop primate protectors who can't compete with privatization of the rainforest and the international groups that hold it hostage.

We found our little Congolese girl Florence slaving in her fields, tending to goats and maize, carrying a pocket full of bananas, on the lookout for marauding guerillas, while conservation organizations which tout donations to her welfare were nowhere to be seen and, worse still, while millions of USAID dollars dedicated to her welfare remain unaccounted for.

Indeed, this business is slipperier than a banana peel!

During the years of conflict in DRC alone, human rights groups have estimated that tens of thousands of woman and girls have been raped and worse in eastern DRC. Some of the survivors are as young as three years old. Where is the outcry for guardians? Where are their advocates? Have the international human rights defenders and primate protectionados lost sight of the people for the forest?

The wards in hospitals in Goma, in Eastern Congo, are packed, with no room to walk between the cots, with woman and children who have been raped, beaten with burning tires, and left to die. Mosquitoes and flies feed on the festering wounds while moans are all that remain of their voices. Who will speak for them?

The Great Apes Project, based in Seattle, supports Hiasl and advocates the right to life, the protection of his "individual liberty," and the "prohibition of torture."

A USAID supported clinic, deep in an all-but-inaccessible part of Congo is denying the right to life and self-determination to the village it serves. The Jane Goodall Foundation and DFGF-and other gorilla groups-accept money from USAID for "community health."

The BINGOS run these private money shows-did we say money shows? We meant monkey shows-out of sight, out of mind, and entirely out of the press. No oversight, no unfortunate explaining to do!

JGI collaborates with the partnership in the development of a Community Centered Conservation (CCC) Program in the Graueri Landscape of eastern Congo. And like the other BINGOs-who are billed in the American press and television shows as wildlife conservators-JGI is also involved in "community health." Congolese doctors and nurses have told us that this involvement requires convincing the local women-the poorest, most illiterate woman in the world-that they should not be having babies, because having babies is "dangerous to their health." The doctors have been trained to say this!

Babies lead to more babies, because three out of five will die, and the two that grow up will soon be eating monkeys for survival and sneaking into the land controlled by the BINGOS for primate conservation and international tourism.

How do you conserve primates in the wild? You stop hungry people from trying to keep their children alive. Don't worry about feeding the people, or selling their resources back to them, or giving them a job in mining the diamonds, gold, coltan or niobium coming out of these areas and into the profits of the mining cartels in America, England, and Vienna.

JGI's "partnership" with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and Conservation International is funding a clinic which tells women that it is dangerous for them to have children, but acceptable to go on an unsupervised regimen of Depo Provera. The Depo comes with all kinds of nasty side-affects, but the nice thing about illiterate black people in Congo is that you don't have to tell them what they can't otherwise read. Women gain weight, get infections, have all kinds of hormonal imbalances-and you don't have to worry about whether or not they will get proper treatment, there's no equipment to speak of and the local medical facilities promised by the conservation organizations-if they exist at all-are as barren as the women who are choosing permanent sterilization.

This partnership is clearly spelled out in recruiting documents (easily found on the Web) as "a partnership between Conservation International (the Landscape lead organization) and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGFI is the implementing partner). JGI collaborates with the partnership in the development of a Community Centered Conservation (CCC) Program in the Graueri Landscape of eastern DRC." (Employment ad placed by EngenderHealth: Consultant Scope of Work: Support to the Jane Goodall Institute/DRC)

When one woman came back to a clinic complaining that she was getting sicker and sicker, the JGI-trained doctor told us that he told her to go home and "be happy-- it didn't cost you anything and now you won't be having children you can't take care of! If it gets worse, you can always come back."

So our hormonally imbalanced two-legged but unappreciated primate hopped right in her brand shiny new 4x4 SUV and went home to watch Jeopardy on her TV and wish for her own private utopia... just like the people who work for the international monkey agencies do... right?

Wrong.

The woman from our clinic, indeed, does not have an SUV. She does not even have any shoes. She has one dress, and a basket to haul her manioc, and a hungry family and her grass-thatched hut is a five-mile trek through the bush!

And the condoms at the clinic remain stacked in boxes. The women die of malaria and tuberculosis and malnutrition and diarrhea. Why? Could it be possible that the habitat is being saved for lowland gorillas and chimpanzees?

This is the nouveau conservation, the international outcry for the protection of gorillas, and chimps, and bonobos, and the expropriation of the land, people and resources in Africa. Meanwhile, according to statistics from April 2007, more than 1000 people die every day in the provinces along Congo's eastern frontier. And so while the popular Viennese primate Hiasl will soon appear in court, the rights of people in Congo remain completely trodden upon.

KONG: The  Monkey Smuggler, the Mwami, and the Hanged Man

In his 2007 State of the Union message, U.S. President George Bush said "To whom much is given, much is required,” when referring to aid for Africa.

Certainly unknowingly, Bush precisely defined the problems inherent in foreign aid with those eight words. The American taxpayer has contributed billions to the African continent, but has been betrayed in the bargain with conservation and humanitarian organizations that have become self-serving cottage industries in black Africa, while expanding and exploding into corporate behemoths in the white world. These organizations are accountable to no one but their own pockets and governed by boards of directors with personal and business interests in the success or failure of third world ventures. NGOs spread like weeds in the fertile plains of graft and opportunity that define the landscape of foreign aid. American zoos and animal laboratories form unholy alliances with conservationists and sanctuary operations that bet their prestige on the charisma of mega-fauna such as the great apes, while poor, illiterate African women are forced into sterilization programs so that humans do not intrude upon gorilla habitat. This is a systematic campaign—Professor Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College calls it “the Greening of Hate.”

Consider this--African conservation efforts are creating a growing class of refugees that are strategically positioned into refugee camps which “protect” foreign borders. In addition, the world’s remaining great apes have become pawns in what amounts to sanctioned smuggling. In 1999 Congressman Jim Jeffords (VT) introduced legislation known as the Great Apes Conservation Act, which appropriated $5,000,000 A YEAR from 2000 through 2004 to “assist in the conservation of great apes.”

As a result, the competition has become intense to acquire gorillas, orangutans, bonobos and chimpanzees in order to obtain a piece of the funding pie. When the bill came up for renewal in 2005, the “expert witness” called before Congress to testify on behalf of this bill was Clare Richardson, CEO of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGFI), which stood to gain significantly from its renewal.

760 gorillas live in over 140 zoos worldwide. Of these, 300 western gorillas live in U.S. zoological institutions. 74 gorillas live in African sanctuaries which are shrouded in secrecy and zealous protection by British and American veterinarians and “researchers.” The Holy Grail, the endangered mountain gorilla, is represented by an orphan hoarded by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project—American organizations based in Rwanda. This orphan has acquired a significance which rivals that of the Christ-child in the halls of primatology. If she cannot be released into the wild, which will almost certainly become the case, who gets the prize and the millions of tax dollars which will certainly follow? Certainly not the Rwandan people, who will ultimately see this orphan crucified upon the cross of conservation interests. Most Rwandans have never seen a mountain gorilla.

Put into historical context, in the early 1990’s the concept of working with indigenous communities was the vogue. Buzz words such as “community-based resource management,” “sustainable development,” and "participatory mapping" became non-sequiturs, that when deftly inserted into grant applications, became the winning combination on the slot machine. These terms were generated by the conservation organizations and not the indigenous communities, whose interests and national identities were sacrificed upon the altar of science. Since then the trend has been asset accumulation by the Big International NGOs (BINGOS) and increased marginalization of the same indigenous communities.

Of course, none of this is new. It is rooted in the dictates of capitalism, where the natural evolution of any entity today seems predicated on unlimited growth, profits, careers, and corporate identity. The international "humanitarian" and “aid” and "human rights" communities are mirrors of the conservation boondoggle. Indeed, when we speak of an "international community" — be it conservation or aid or human rights — the boundaries of these "communities" and the people selectively allowed to be in them-- are as gated as the compounds of the primary beneficiaries working in the underdeveloped world.

The combined revenue of the U.S. branches of the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy was $965 million in 2000, according to the World Watch Institute. Conservation International has offices in D.C. and Arlington--a calculated proximity to lobbyists and the beltway. It can be proven that many of the BINGOS have incestuous ties to representative foreign regimes run by what one anonymous official termed “cabals” of cooperative crime partners, multi-national corporations which operate there, and that the U.S. taxpayer is paying for it all through USAID programs.

Getting the story sometimes becomes the story, as the only way to reach the tribal territories, plantations, gorilla sanctuaries, and villages in question is to journey into the over-sensationalized “heart of African darkness” itself. It required years of research, special visas, endless hours cramped in coach on overseas flights, press credentials obtained through the United Nations Mission to the DRC, translators for the enigmatic local languages, which include French-influenced Swahili and Lingala, personal bodyguards, lots of money we did not have, and a wing and a prayer that we could get in and out without losing our cameras, audio equipment and worse. Sometimes prayers were useless and keith harmon snow was briefly held prisoner by a local militia group before the UN intervened. He was also arrested numerous times, and Georgianne Nienaber was robbed of her video record and interviews, and "detained" for two days in Goma by the DGM ( Direction Generale de Migration) after being accused as a "spy" by white, well-paid, elite agents of western conservation interests. The reporters’ involvement in the story is noteworthy only because it demonstrates the lengths that conservation interests will go to protect their turf and secrets.

The mainstream media could not be more disinterested and misinformed, and it seems rather obvious that they are intentionally misrepresenting and misreporting the obvious stories. Profit is a powerful prerogative in the primate protection paradigm, and the press plays its proper part in propagandizing the taxpaying public. Years of begging for logistical support by keith harmon snow went unanswered while Anderson Cooper gave free airtime to a monkey-smuggler, and CNN spent weeks covering Oprah Winfrey’s $40,000,000 school for girls in the idyllically named “Henley-on Klip” near Johannesburg South Africa. But the afore-mentioned Hogwart Academy for Girls could not cast a spell powerful enough to erase the reality of life for the poorest of the world’s poor. Our final journey into Congo ended much the same as it began, and we together faced the specter of Walikale and Tayna--two rural Congolese villages in the heart of gorilla conservation territories that will be the centerpieces of our pathetic tale--with no one but friends, family, and a lonely, be-spectacled, sick, diabetic chief who lie puking on a floor in a hut in Uganda, giving a goddamn whether we succeeded--or not.

All politics is local, and while American citizens may or may not share an interest in the preservation of African wildlife, which is in itself a noble cause; they certainly have a vested interest in the disposition of their tax dollars, especially when these dollars are going to companies and organizations operating on the African continent, but registered as non-profits in the United States. USAID’s budget for “foreign assistance and humanitarian aid” was $9.5 billion, with $4.5 billion jointly managed with the State Department.

$43.6 million dollars plus $30.2 M in matching funds has been earmarked for one conservation program in central Congo alone.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service kicked in $100,000 and the US Forest Service, $737,000. Freedom of Information Act requests take years for resolution, calls to Conservation International’s (CI) African Office are ignored, the US Forest Service gets jittery about answering straightforward questions about their involvement in the Congolese programs, threats are made, gorillas are shifted across national boundaries with little or no accountability, tribal leaders are forced from ancestral lands, slavery is rampant on rubber plantations, impoverished woman are coerced into sterilization and drug trials, and the poorest of the world’s poor and their natural resources continue to be exploited by militias, henchmen, and economic interests propped-up by western interests.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the acrimonious trinity composed of USAID, CARPE and business interests in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the three-headed dog that guards the maws of Hades. Like the mythical Cerbeus, covert interests in the darkest part of Africa protect the secrets of third world intervention, allowing the money to flow like spittle through the creature known as “foreign” aid, with accountability burned and buried with the dead, displaced, and disenfranchised. In Greek mythology, just a few heroes were able to pacify the creature, and only Heracles brought Cerbeus to the land of the living as part of the gauntlet of his Labors. Not all conservation organizations are created equal; some are corrupt and work hand-in-glove with militias to confiscate tribal lands with promises of money that never materializes. In 2004, The World Watch Institute published a report on conservation organizations which temporarily shook their secretive world.

“In June 2003, representatives of major foundations concerned with the planet’s threatened biodiversity gathered in South Dakota for a meeting of the Consultative Group on Biodiversity. On the second evening, after dinner, several of the attendees met to discuss a problem about which they had become increasingly disturbed. In recent years, their foundations had given millions of dollars of support to nonprofit conservation organizations, and had even helped some of those groups get launched. Now, however, there were indications that three of the largest of these organizations—World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Conservation International (CI), and The Nature Conservancy (TNC)—were increasingly excluding, from full involvement in their programs, the indigenous and traditional peoples living in territories the conservationists were trying to protect. In some cases there were complaints that the conservationists were being abusive.”

The role of civil society in developing nations has been increasing to the extent that NGO’s and non-profits operating on the African continent have become major players on the world stage. The influence they wield can be directed for the common good of the African people and their severely endangered ecosystems. However, abuse has become rampant in some quarters, sometimes funded by American and international aid programs. However, taxation certainly does, and while it would be impossible to examine and track the disposition of all US tax dollars in Africa, it is possible to look at one project, one example of how American tax dollars have gone to fuel questionable practices by conservation organizations in central Africa.

More formidable than the three-headed dog, transparency and accountability in the heart of Africa became an elusive muse, hidden by a fabric of secrets, lies, and competition, which literally pulled the “wool” over the lamp of truth. Political Scientist, David Gibbs, observes: “the view that the United States has always championed national self-determination and opposed colonialism—is the most obviously flawed.”

Gibbs suggests that a new model of foreign intervention, one that establishes the interests of business and the proximity of business interests to positions of power, has taken precedence over the altruistic model of American involvement in third world aid programs.

The “business conflict model” (Gibbs) assumes that business interests affect all aspects of US foreign policy. One can examine the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo and argue that American business interests have influenced everything from the assassination of Congo’s first president to the rise and fall of the Mobutu regime. The study of colonial interests in the third world fill a good portion of university libraries, and a full understanding is all but impossible for the average American who just wants to know that his/her tax dollars and personal donations to aid organizations are being used to assist citizens of the third world, that is, assuming that Africa even enters the conscious mind of the “average” American.

Here is the story of the Monkey Smuggler, and how he rose to the top of the heap in the halls of conservation and formed an unholy alliance with a Congolese henchman.

Here also is the tale of one “chef”—a tribal chief—a Mwami--who swears he is on the run from an assassination attempt engineered by a Congolese man who is the local “hero” of the conservation organization known as CARPE, funded by USAID, assisted by the U.S. Forest Service, and wrapped in the mantle of the good name of the murdered naturalist Dian Fossey. The alleged assassin was feted at a luncheon at the National Press Club, awarded $20,000 by Conde Nast and American Express as a conservation award, and at the same time his henchmen were allegedly smuggling gorillas and bonobos to the bushmeat trade.

Finally, the tragic story of the hanged man who out-Fossied Dian Fossey and met the same fate.

The cast of characters, including the monkey smuggler, the alleged henchman/assassin, the monkey torturer, the hanged man and a possibly disengaged federal wildlife administration notwithstanding--the involvement of at least $46 million in USAID funds under a program that will admittedly “benefit the United States,” strongly suggests that David Gibbs is correct when he states that Congolese chiefs have been used for a hundred years and counting as instruments of colonial rule.

Next: THE MONKEY SMUGGLER (EXCERPT)

“God damn it Preston, all you had to do is look her in the eye and lie.”

--Producer Carl Denham in KING KONG.

In the late fall of 2005, the Hollywood film, King Kong, opened to sellout crowds everywhere. The high-action cinematography and special effects combined with the racy recycled story of Beauty and the Beast to bring home a walloping fortune for everyone involved. Behind the film however is a trail of conservation organizations, primatologists and public relation firms peddling billions of dollars in conservation programs for Central Africa. Behind these conservation organizations, funding them, or working with them directly, are some very interesting species. As you penetrate deeper and deeper into this jungle of surprises, the landscape gets curiouser and curiouser….

Notes:
1. Interview of Betsy Hartmann by Fred Pearce, New Scientist Print Edition, 20 February 2003.

2. Charles C. Geisler, “Endangered Humans,” Foreign Policy Magazine, May-June 2002.

3. Michael Maren, The Road to Hell

4. Great Apes Conservation Act of 1999, S1007 IS; http://www.koko.org/help/gaca99.pdf

5. Chapin, Mac, “A Challenge to Conservationists,” World Watch Institute.

6. PowerPoint from USAID and Biodiversity Symposium, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, May 31-June 2, 2006

7. CARPE documents

8. Chapin, Mac,” A Challenge to Conservationists,” World Watch Institute

9. David N. Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention, (University of Chicago Press, 1991) p.23.

KONG PART TWO: THE MONKEY SMUGGLER and the FEMME FATALE

“God damn it Preston, all you had to do is look her in the eye and lie.” --Producer Carl Denham in KING KONG

In the late fall of 2005, the Hollywood film, King Kong, opened to sellout crowds everywhere. The high-action cinematography and special effects combined with the racy recycled story of Beauty and the Beast to bring home a walloping fortune for everyone involved. Behind the film, however, is a dark forest of conservation organizations, primatologists and public relation firms peddling billions of dollars in so-called “conservation” programs for Central Africa. Behind these conservation organizations, funding them, or working with them directly, are some very interesting species. As you penetrate deeper and deeper into this jungle of surprises, the landscape gets curiouser and curiouser.

The King Kong industry is very much alive. You will find Kong paraphernalia peddled at Starbucks and Burger King, but there’s a whole jungle of Kong related products on sale out there. The King Kong media machine ground into gear long ago, but by January 2006, King Kong articles ran in many print magazines, including WIRED, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. In February 2006, Turner Broadcasting (CNN/TBS/TNT) ‘scooped up’ the rights for the television network premier of King Kong, from owner-producers NBC/Universal, with broadcast slated for 2008. Universal Studios Home Entertainment began peddling the King Kong DVD in March 2006, and there are numerous King Kong computer games.

Universal has also issued a limited edition King Kong MasterCard. “The card is part of a broader effort by Universal to cultivate long-term awareness for ‘King Kong,’” reported one Kong web site, “and with over 300,000 monthly visitors and 65,000+ forum posts to the “Kong is King” site, they definitely seem on track.”

Exactly what does ‘cultivate long-term awareness for King Kong really mean? What ‘track’ is the King Kong industry on? Remarkably, there are many real life parallels to the characters and events in the King Kong epic. Included in these are interests connected to Universal Studios. One interesting entity cashing in on the King Kong frenzy is the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I). Behind or partnered with them are a whole troop of multinational corporations whose interest in gorilla conservation appears to be a front for the control and exploitation of Banana Republics.

This monkey business is very curious. We have all the standard archetypes found in Hollywood movies. There is the Femme Fatale, the Monkey Smuggler, the Mwami, the Mad Scientist, the Map, the Missing Money, the Mayor, the Rebels, Tarzan, and, at the center of it all, the Heart of Darkness. Indeed, this story definitely leans toward the dark side. It is a tale of woe and deception, and if it doesn’t break your heart it will undoubtedly leave you beating your chest in fury.

The King Kong story is pretty simple. A film producer from New York sets off seeking his fortune—in this case the production of a blockbuster film—based on a faded old map. “I’m talking about a primitive world,” film producer Carl Denham tells his sponsors in an opening scene, “never before seen by man.” The financiers are unconvinced: they want to know what happened to all the money so far. Against their interests, pursued by the police, Denham sets sail for some uncharted tropical island. This is how the movie King Kong opens.

Producer Carl Denham and his team sail from New York on a tram ship steamer, their creditors chasing after them, and they follow the mysterious, faded map until they stumble across an uncharted island shrouded in fog. Enter the savages, the dinosaurs, and the gigantic silverback gorilla, KONG. The film ends some three hours later when the great ape, straddling the spire of the Empire State Building after his capture and high-society debut, is pumped full of lead by period biplanes, the aerospace weapons of the era. Kong falls to the ground. U.S. soldiers in WW-I uniforms pose for photographs next to their most recent trophy. Kong is dead.

Seeing the cold-blooded marketing and then murder of Kong—an apt representation of how most humans treat animals—anybody with half a heart feels deeply for the plight of gorillas.

THE MONKEY SMUGGLER

After the ship sets sail from New York in the new King Kong epic, we soon learn that the ship’s captain is a wild animal trader. Captain Englehorn is a rough, dark, mysterious pirate with a foreign accent. The hold of his steamship, Venture, is filled with cages used to haul the animals he has captured from the wilds. Bottles of chloroform roll out into public view and Englehorn aggressively orders a ship’s hand to hide them. The inference is that he is dealing in contraband, smuggling rare creatures unloaded for a hefty price in western ports of call. In the end, Captain Englehorn is called upon to use his animal capture skills to trap the mighty ape, Kong.

In real life, Dr. Patrick Mehlman, hired in 2001 as Vice-President in charge of Africa Programs for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I), based in Central Africa, has also played the role of animal smuggler. Dr. Alecia Lilly, Mehlman’s now ex-wife, has played her part in this too. While these may be uncanny coincidences—animal smuggler in film, animal smuggler in real life—the already questionable activities of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in central Africa are further called into question given the background of several of its principal officers.

In the mid-1990’s Patrick Mehlman and his then-wife Dr. Alecia Lilly worked for Laboratory Animal Breeders and Services of Virginia, Inc. (LABS), a U.S.-based company involved in the buying, breeding and selling of primates for biomedical research. The company has since reorganized as Alpha-Genesis Inc. For several years, Mehlman was the Director of the LABS Primate Center and the Chair of the LABS Animal Care and Use Committee responsible for all animal health and welfare issues at LABS.

In 1996, prior to their joint discharge from LABS, Mehlman and Lilly, an animal psychologist who is also a DFGF-I officer involved in Central Africa today, were involved in the illegal and unauthorized use of painful shock collars on primates at LABS sites. The collars were in direct violation of the Animal Welfare Act and the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Dr. Lilly instructed her immediate staff to keep the use of shock collars secret from other LABS personnel, and there were also claims of other irregularities involving the animals connected to Dr. Mehlman and Dr. Lilly’s projects. For example, “the clinical veterinary staff was often not allowed to examine, prescribe treatment for, or administer clinical care to sick or injured animals assigned to these projects.”

According to a letter by LABS President Dr. David M. Taub, an internal investigative report “clearly shows that the incidents did occur, that Dr. Mehlman knew of, approved, and condoned this action, and that his wife Dr. Alecia Lilly actually conducted the shocking procedures.”

But Dr. Mehlman’s involvement in the international smuggling of primates was a more serious issue. In June and July of 1996, LABS Director Dr. Patrick Mehlman traveled to Indonesia to negotiate LABS’ purchase of some 1400 crab-eating macaques from an Indonesian firm, Inquatex, involved in primate capture, breeding and export. According to court documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Mehlman was aware that the colony of macaques was not captive-bred, and that Indonesian officials had been bribed to get the required CITES (Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species) permits for international sale. Mehlman engaged in a deal with Agus Darmawan, a man known for illegal animal trafficking, knowing full well that bribes had been paid to the government of Indonesia, and that LABS would be engaging in illegal activity if they worked with the Inquatex firm.

Mehlman proceeded to negotiate the purchase, notwithstanding the illegality of it, and by May 1997, four shipments totaling 846 crab-eating macaques had been shipped into the United States, with 327 of these being wild-caught primates, in contravention of International and United States law (the Lacey Act). The shipments also contained pregnant and baby primates, some as young as 3-4 weeks old—international law strictly forbids the export or import of baby primates. The smuggling was exposed after Dr. Shirley McGreal of the International Primate Protection League (IPPL) received an eyewitness report from a person who had seen dozens of baby monkeys pathetically packed in crates at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. The primates were shipped via Air France, and the IPPL dubbed it the “Air France Baby Monkey” case.

Ignoring the illegal monkeys, nonetheless the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for enforcing importation regulations, cleared shipments in Chicago and Los Angeles as "100 percent" inspected. The crab-eating macaques suffered horribly and miserably during their confinement in torturous conditions. The wooden crates included pregnant mothers, nursing infants, and some were as young as four weeks old. Blood was spattered all over some cages, and the primates inside literally disintegrated in transit. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Report said, “two females painted their compartments with blood, one very extensively.” The set designers in Kong brought the crude wooden cages used by the partners of Patrick Mehlman to life, and we see them in the smugglers hold of Captain Englehard’s ship, Venture.

At the time of the 1997 shipments, LABS had over a thousand monkeys on Morgan Island in St. Helena Sound, over 1,000 in the town of Yemassee, South Carolina, and over 1,000 at a compound in the rural community of Early Branch in Hampton County, South Carolina. Alpha Genesis Inc. maintains three primate “research” centers today. Photos taken on Morgan Island revealed piles of monkey skulls, piled in macabre heaps on blue tarps. In the 2002 article Inside the Monkey Farm, writer Becci Robbins, told how former employees said it was standard practice to leave monkey corpses in the open to let nature take its course. “We would put the dead monkeys in an enclosure where beetles could feed off them.” When monkeys died the staff at LABS would record the tattoo numbers and collect the skulls as a way of keeping inventory.
Skull Island, indeed.

LABS of Virginia purchased the primates for some U.S. $700,000 to $800,000. CITES documents were forged or altered to indicate that the primates were captive-bred, when in fact they were taken from the wild. LABS officials were later found by a U.S. court to be indirectly but knowingly funding illegal bribes to the Indonesian government.

Mehlman and Lilly were fired from LABS in December 1997. They subsequently filed lawsuits against LABS of Virginia and three owners, including Dr. David Taub, in early 1998, citing wrongful discharge. Dr. David Taub, the now former owner and later President of LABS (after LABS was sold), was also the Mayor of Beaufort, Virginia.

In the ensuing court cases, the U.S. government in 2002 eventually charged the defendants—LABS and the three LABS officials—with eight felony counts and four misdemeanors in violation of U.S. law: four counts were for ‘smuggling goods into the United States.’ Patrick Mehlman became the chief witness of the prosecution, against his former employers.

One court case established that Mehlman clearly acted in violation of Indonesian law and U.S. law in his role as the principal agent working for LABS Virginia. In one document provided to the court, a letter from Mehlman to LABS directors regarding his visit to Indonesia, Mehlman states that they (LABS) might need to put a conservation front on their relationship with the Inquatex facility in Indonesia, “both for the ethically right reasons and to protect ourselves against animal rights activities.”

Mehlman’s communications to company officials describe the importance of bribes—called ‘baksheesh’ in Indonesia—in maintaining the operations of the Inquatex facility in Indonesia, and he discusses the need for LABS to protect themselves against any potential problems arising from the capture and sale of wild primates, in case they got more deeply involved with Inquatex. In this letter, Mehlman clearly acknowledges the illegality of the proposals, and the actions he took, and he warns his bosses of the risks.

“If we are going to get involved in a deal where feral (wild) caught animals are sold from a colony,” Mehlman wrote, “and the colony is restocked with more ferals, we could come under fire for engaging in anti-conservation behavior. We are violating the spirit of the CITES convention.” Mehlman’s letter documented CITES “charity”—bribes—being paid to the Indonesian government at $300 per month, with an additional $1000 per month in other “charity.” However, instead of recommending that LABS not deal with shady firms violating international CITES laws, Mehlman recommended that LABS take precautions that would cover LABS against any appearance of violating the CITES convention.

In fact, in his original mission to Indonesia in advance of the purchase of primates for LABS, Patrick Mehlman knowingly set out to work with Agus Darmawan, who had previously supplied orangutans to a U.S. animal dealer convicted of smuggling orangutans in 1994.

And there’s more.

In his July 11, 1996 memorandum to LABS directors, Patrick Mehlman outlined a proposal for LABS to take over the operations of the Inquatex facility in Indonesia. For this pursuit Mehlman produced elements of an operations plan that included a chart titled “Cost of running Inquatex (sic) as it was described to me.” In his breakdown of expenses, Mehlman included “charity” line items that totaled over $13,450 in monthly expenses relating to payments to secure the first illegal shipment of Inquatex primates.

LABS was found guilty of indirectly but knowingly funding Darmawan’s practice of paying off Indonesian government officials. After a sticky situation arose in Paris around the first shipments of May 1997, Air France refused to carry any more shipments of primates from Indonesia, but LABS expressed its willingness to make further illegal payments in order to resume shipments. In an internal LABS memo, Dr. Taub stated to partner Dr. Charles Stern that it was imperative to avoid transit of illegal primates through Chicago O’Hare airport, and that bribes should be paid—“money well spent” he wrote—to insure that Atlanta be the port of entry for further shipments. Patrick Mehlman was the principal go-between.
Patrick Mehlman was not charged with any legal infractions. The lawsuits proceeded into the year 2005, and trials and retrials were held. LABS principal Dr. David Taub was dismissed as a defendant (at one point) after his doctor provided a note about his poor health, though he had no problem performing his duties as Mayor of Beaufort, Virginia. The twelve jurors—carefully selected to exclude any who might have strong beliefs about animal rights or experimentation—decided that Mehlman and Lilly had been wrongfully fired and awarded Mehlman $1.73 million and Lilly $602,000, for a total of over 2.3 million dollars.

Dr. Mehlman and Dr. Lilly filed additional lawsuits against LABS and its directors claiming "Conspiracy, Wrongful Discharge in Violation of Public Policy and in Violation of the South Carolina Unfair Trade Practices Act.” In 2004, the company ‘LABS’ was found guilty of one count, fined $564,675 and sentenced to probation, but Dr. David Taub and the other two LABS defendants, Charles Stern and Curtis Henley, were let off.

The “Baby Monkey Case” involving Patrick Mehlman galvanized the animal rights movement. The case inspired a 1999 survey that indicated possible wrongdoing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the very agency charged with oversight and investigations of such cases. According to a summary compiled by the International Primate Protection League (IPPL), “sixty-one percent of law enforcement agents employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service responded to a survey conducted by the U.S.-based organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Wildlife agents reported serious problems—ranging from obstruction of justice by agency managers to political interference with agency decision-making.

Kevin Adams, Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Division of Law Enforcement until October 2006, has denied that political considerations led to apparent inaction in the case of a series of monkey shipments. To complicate matters, Adams was removed from his position. He has not yet been replaced.

After reading the PEER report, IPPL contacted Adams to ask whether political considerations were interfering with the handling of the still unresolved "Baby Monkey" case. Adams stated: “Have I ‘caved in’ to...pressure and thwarted this investigation? No. There is no political pressure, the investigation is progressing, and we are meeting our responsibility to the resource and the public...Please be assured that our agents continue to pursue the investigation of the 1997 monkey shipments.”

The current President and CEO of DFGF-I, Clare Richardson, hired Patrick Mehlman as Vice-President in charge of Africa Programs in 2001, even while the Baby Monkey Case was yet to be resolved. The DFGF-I position was not advertised, and there was no competition for the job. Alecia Lilly was also put on the DFGF-I payroll, but it seems that Mehlman was hired because of the relationship of Alecia Lilly to Dr. Hoerst Dieter Steklis at Rutgers. Alecia Lilly was a research student who studied primatology at Rutgers University, under Dr. H. Dieter Steklis.

H. Dieter Steklis held a variety of positions with DFGF-I until his "resignation" in 2005. Steklis worked in Rwanda from 1991 to 1993 and he was responsible for administering USAID monies that are subject to a current U.S. government audit investigation. In the mid-1990's he received millions of dollars in USAID grants for "academic" research work. In the early 1990s, the DFGF-I launched an ambitious team effort, using GIS (Geographic Information Services) tools, to "map and
characterize the Virunga habitat of the endangered mountain gorilla and to provide a means for long-term assessment of gorilla habitat use and monitoring of habitat change." The abstract for Steklis's paper, A Geomatics Approach to Mountain Gorilla Behavior and Conservation, is prominently featured on the website of a company called ESRI.

ESRI provides real-life parallels to the mysterious map of Skull Island in King Kong. The gorilla habitat mapping project was initially directed by DFGF-I's Dr. H. Dieter Steklis, in collaboration with a Georgia Tech scientist named Dr. Nicholas Faust. DFGF-I partnered with the high-tech Idaho-based Earth Search Sciences Inc. (ESSI) and its affiliate firm, Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), both connected to a defense and intelligence company called Oracle. ESRI has worked in the defense sector for years, initially focused on supporting defense mapping organizations and advanced terrain analysis and other cartographic military necessities for military base development. "Now as a result of Congressional mandate," said expert John Day in Military Geospatial Technology, "technology is being deployed into a wide range of warfighter, intelligence and base support programs; and ESRI is playing a leading role in that
transformation."

“I’m talking about a primitive world,” said producer Carl Denham, wielding his faded old map, “never before seen by man.” But the maps of this story are not faded, and they are never old, though they are certainly hidden from public oversight.

In the affidavit of February 6, 1998, filed by Dr. Alicia Lilly in her lawsuit against LABS Lilly stated, “I am a primatologist...throughout my career I have been involved in federally funded research studying primates and issues such as investigating the relationship between behavior and neurophysiology, immunology, predicting aggression, parasitology management and developing pathogen-free breeding colonies.”

Prior to Mehlman’s involvement in 2001, DFGF-I worked only at the Karisoke Research station in Rwanda, but Mehlman was tasked with expanding DFGF-I programs in the region from Rwanda into the vast forests of tiny Rwanda’s mighty neighbor to the west, the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Patrick Mehlman connection provides compelling fodder for the countless stories of abuse in Congo. The Monkey Smuggler is no fairy tale. It has a solid foundation in reams of Freedom of Information Act requests, and in county, state and federal court records.

Mehlman is now significantly involved in the massive CARPE program—the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment—through his association with Conservation International (CI) and its head, Russell Mittermeier. CARPE is heavily funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). His former wife, Dr. Alecia Lilly, is still employed by the Fossey fund in Rwanda and Goma, DRC and is involved with an “orphan gorilla” program which is also cloaked in the obfuscations of local conservation organizations.

THE FEMME FATALE

At the heart of the King Kong tale is the white damsel in distress. Like the 1930’s Tarzan classics written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the sassy white female makes the adventure, and her sexuality is the central draw. Ann Darrow makes her Kong debut in a flimsy nightgown and she closes the film in an equally seductive dancing gown. The seductress captures the imagination of the viewers, adding a titillating energy of subliminal sexual desire.

Ann Darrow (actress Naomi Watts), the heroine of the Kong film, is a metaphor for the real life femme fatales of the primate conservation community. A central character is Dian Fossey, the primatologist whose pioneering research on the mountain gorillas of Rwanda led to her murder in 1985. Another is Sigourney Weaver, the Hollywood star who played Dian Fossey in the late 1980’s Hollywood film Gorillas in the Mist. And then there are Jane Goodall, the internationally renowned chimpanzee specialist, and Birute Galdikas, another female primatologist made famous by her pioneering research on orangutans. The most recent femme fatales to enter the fray are Daryl Hannah and Madison Slate.

The three female primatologists—Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas—became known as ‘Leakey’s Angels’ for their affiliation with world-famous anthropologist Louis Leakey. Goodall’s affiliation with Leakey began in 1960, and she began studying chimpanzees at Gombe (Tanzania) before Dian Fossey began studying gorillas at Karisoke (Rwanda). Galdikas, the third of ‘Leakey's Ladies,’ began studying orangutans in Indonesia soon afterward. Galdikas has yet to write a popular book, but Goodall enjoyed some early success, starring in a 1963 documentary by National Geographic, the major sponsor of her work, and publishing four books in 1970-1972. Only In the Shadow of Man (1971) was a commercial hit, and Goodall didn't star in another documentary until 1984, or publish any new books from 1972 to 1986. Twelve of Goodall's 13 major film credits and 19 of her 23 books followed Gorillas in the Mist, as Goodall demonstrated the poise and charisma to build upon Fossey's breakthrough, while Fossey herself did not. However, it was Fossey alone who scored the hit that made great ape conservation a global cause.

Of the three of Leakey’s Angels, in death the murdered Fossey has become the visionary.

“The man who kills the animals today is the man who kills the people who get in his way tomorrow. He recognizes the fact that there is a law that says he must not do this or that, but without the reinforcement of this law, he is free to do as he chooses,” Fossey wrote to Leakey.

Fossey’s writings indicate that she understood current and predicted future environmental clashes and racism that would lead to genocide. Fossey’s own struggles with conservation issues, such as misdirected funding, are metaphors for current political clashes in the Central Africa region today. In Fossey’s day the conflict was over trade and smuggling routes through the Virunga Mountains. Since her murder, technological developments such as surveillance by remote sensing have introduced ethical questions regarding the proper disposition of newly acquired conservation data which can be used for military planning in underdeveloped countries, especially in the cauldron of ethnic unrest that exists in places like the Congo/Rwanda/Uganda border. (Note that when we use the term “underdeveloped” to describe a foreign nation we are indicating that it has intentionally been left in a state of under-development or mal-development, at the mercy of predatory capitalism.)

Both Fossey and Goodall have organizations named after them. Both organizations have been receiving millions of dollars in annual incomes, assets and expenses. The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, until December 2005, existed as both a U.S. (DFGF-International) and a European organization (DFGF-Europe), but the two entities were, and remain, quite literally, at war. The losers in this international conservation battle are both the people of Central Africa and the primates that the organizations are ostensibly dedicated to saving. Like the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), both the DFGF entities are active in primate conservation in Central Africa, and the story of their internal war is in itself a story of greed and corruption hidden from the public which funds them.

In 2005, JGI and DFGF-I teamed up in what was called a Historic Partnership for Gorilla Conservation and Community Development in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). “In their separate spheres working on behalf of great apes,” a press release reads, “both the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and the Jane Goodall Institute have developed the same conservation philosophy: Effective conservation must begin with the needs and priorities of local communities.”

The biggest funders and partners of JGI and DFGF-I include the big non-government conservation organizations—the “Big NGOS” or BINGOs—like Conservation International (CI), World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and African Wildlife Foundation (AWF). USAID is a major sponsor, providing over $1,000,000 annually, of U.S. taxpayers’ money, to both JGI and DFGF-I, for the past several years, and USAID has supported DFGF-I for almost a decade. Of course, USAID supports all the BINGOs.

The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Jane Goodall Institute—whose financial resources are now in the millions of dollars a year—are part of the second tier of “conservation” corporations that might be described as “lesser” BINGOs. These include the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and World Resources Institute (WRI), and the U.K.-based Fauna and Flora International (FFI). To appropriately denote and categorize, and for the purpose of clarity, we hereby dub these tier-two corporate “conservation” organizations DINGOs—disgraced NGOs—because they too are the beneficiaries of boondoggle budgets. The DINGOS may hold lesser monopolies on conservation funding, but they nonetheless all brandish the cross of conservation as they conquer new lands and indigenous people through questionable “conservation” activities—and an unpalatable arrogance—all around the world.

According to one USAID report, “since FY 2001, USAID has responded to the need to support gorilla conservation efforts through support to The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I), the International Gorilla Conservation Program (IGCP) and WCS.” (The IGCP is a consortium of AWF, Flora and Fauna International and WWF.)

Painting a rosy picture of gorilla conservation efforts they have funded, USAID reported that “mountain gorillas in Central-East Africa, for example, are found in areas near the highest human population densities and growth rates in Africa and are menaced by rapidly increasing agricultural expansion. Despite these circumstances, signs of hope remain. The mountain gorilla populations in Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda have increased by 10 percent during the past ten years (from 320 to approximately 355 individuals).”

USAID funds are authorized through the Great Apes Conservation Act passed by the U.S. Congress. DFGF-I’s partnership with Conservation International, through their Global Conservation Fund and the USAID-funded Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), was itself a three-year funding package worth over $3 million to DFGF-I.

The partnership between Jane Goodall Institute and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International “is part of a multimillion dollar initiative by Conservation International and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International to protect a 7.4 million-acre conservation corridor in the eastern region of the DRC,” reported the Jane Goodall Institute in 2005. “Stretching from Maiko National Park and the Tayna Gorilla Reserve to the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, the corridor is home to about 5,000 remaining eastern lowland gorillas and 10,000 chimpanzees.”

It is also a corridor of despair, devastation and death cast upon the uncivilized savages who have the audacity to continue living in the land of the leviathan Kong. The swath of eastern forests in Congo is drenched in blood, and the contemporary survivors of “conservation” and “development” languish in lasting testimony to the legacy of 100 years of Leopoldian lust.

THE KING OF KONG

Hollywood stars are always good partners: they can say or do anything they want and still win votes and sympathy. Three-time Oscar nominee Sigourney Weaver is the Honorary Chair of the Board Trustees of the DFGF-I, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Weaver recently visited Rwanda for the first time since the late 1980’s shooting for the film Gorillas in the Mist. On October 19, 2005 the DFGF-I announced their co-sponsorship, with Animal Planet and the BBC’s Natural History Unit, for the production of a new documentary titled Gorillas Revisited with Sigourney Weaver. The film aired on Animal Planet on June 25, 2006.

“The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International has a unique connection to Universal Pictures’ King Kong,” the DFGF-I press release said—in a major understatement of their corporate collaboration. “To prepare for his role as King Kong, Andy Serkis studied gorilla behavior at the world famous Dian Fossey Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda.”

Andy Serkis, the actor who played Gollum in Lord of the Rings, is King Kong himself. Serkis became a board member of the DFGF-I in December 2005, after traveling with DFGF-I gorilla expert Dr. Tara Stoinski to study the behavior of silverback gorillas at the London Zoo and at the Karisoke Research Station in Rwanda. Sources in Rwanda complain that Serkis was reportedly given ready access to three research groups of gorillas—the “Pablo”, “Shinda” and “Beetsme” groups—that are restricted from visitations with anyone not of moneyed or celebrity status. The Office of Rwanda Tourism and National Parks (ORTPN) has five other groups that they take tourists to. Dr. Tara Stoinski, a primatologist, is also the manager of conservation partnerships for Zoo Atlanta, where DFGF-I is based, and she is affiliated with Rutgers University—the H. Dieter Steklis connection—and Georgia Tech University—the ESRI connection—and both are tied to DFGF-I interests.

Attempts to contact Sigourney Weaver went through her publicist and the producers of Animal Planet. Preliminary communications indicated that it was critical that letters to follow—revealing and/or questioning the activities of the DFGF-I of which she is an integral part—be held in strict confidence for Sigourney Weaver’s eyes alone. Responses from Weaver’s affiliates assured us of confidentiality. However, in a clear breach of privacy law, communications were channeled through DFGF-I, and it is not known whether Weaver ever received the confidential communications. Her publicist certainly did.

Actress Daryl Hannah was the conciliation prize for ordinary people willing to pay for a “$1000 a day” safari into Rwanda’s gorilla territory in March 2006, also accompanied by a DFGF-Europe staffer and adventurer Richard Bangs of Richard Bangs Adventures. While recounting the trip, one DFGF-E staffer described, incredulously, how poor people stared at the celebrities as they moved through the landscape in fancy 4x4 SUV’s.

Both Sigourney Weaver and Gollum-turned-Kong Andy Serkis were on hand with other celebrities—including Monica Kaufman, Ted Turner, and Andrew Young, former U.S. Ambassador and Mayor of Atlanta—for a gala DFGF-I benefit held in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 7, 2005. Everyone who attended the exclusive gala was treated to a private pre-release screening of the Hollywood film, King Kong, negotiated through DFGF-I’s connections to producer Peter Jackson and Universal Studios. Tickets to the red carpet affair sold for $500, $200 and $75, but requests to the DFGF-I concerning how much money was raised have not been answered.

In November 2005 Conde Nast Group, the popular magazine empire, gave its prestigious U.S. $20,000 “Worldsaver” Conde Nast Traveler Environmental prize to Pierre Kakule Vwirasihikya, a DFGF-I project leader and alleged assassin in Congo. Pierre Kakule is partnered with DFGF-I and Conservation International in eastern Congo through Patrick Mehlman. “Pierre is leading a revolution in conservation,” Juan Carlos Bonilla, head of Conservation International's Central Africa Division was quoted to say.
The DFGF-I’s Congolese program director, Pierre Kakule Vwirasihikya—“a park ranger and tribal chief (who) risks his life to save endangered gorillas”—was nominated for his Conde Nast award by actress Glenn Close and actor Harrison Ford, and Kakule was chosen as finalist by a panel of judges that included both Close and Ford.

WCS patron Glenn Close is on the Board of Advisers for the Wildlife Conservation Society. Close was a ‘major donor’ for the WCS ‘Congo Gorilla Forest’ at the Bronx Zoo, and she is a narrator for National Geographic wildlife specials, and an ardent Democratic Party (Clinton/Kerry) supporter. Harrison Ford is a director of Conservation International.

Of course, it might be only coincidental, but it might not, that the father of actress Glen Close was at one time the personal doctor of the former dictator of Congo/Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko.

GORRILLA WARFARE

In December of 2005, officials of the DFGF-E and DFGF-I met behind closed doors in Atlanta, Georgia, and with their highly paid lawyers they wrestled with the contentious issue of who has the rights to the Dian Fossey name. The meeting and its outcome remain shrouded in secrecy. What is known is that the DFGF-International directors and lawyers, using threats of lawsuits, bullied the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund-Europe into forfeiting all claims to using Dian Fossey’s name.

Early in 2006, while DFGF-Europe was coming to grips with the legal attack by DFGF-I, the Conde Nast magazines were running numerous fluff pieces about actor Andy Serkis and actress Naomi Watts (Ann Darrow), and the blockbuster King Kong epic.

In February 2006 the DFGF-Europe changed their name to The Gorilla Organization (the name DFGF-Europe will be retained for this writing). The DFGF-E would not comment for this story, presumably due to threats of further lawsuits in the event of any public disclosure of the Dian Fossey legal conflict.

“Supporters who remember the pioneering work of Dr Dian Fossey, who was murdered in 1985, may also recall that she called the organization she founded to protect the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, the Digit Fund, after her favorite gorilla, named Digit, was killed by poachers in 1978… In 1992, the Digit Fund U.K. changed its name, under license from Dian Fossey's estate, to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund Europe to honor Dr. Fossey and promote her inspirational work.” So reads the Gorilla Fund’s explanation for the name change. “Now, 14 years later, it has changed again. This time to better reflect our broader brief – we now work with lowland as well as mountain gorillas – and the wider audience the fund has attracted over the years… Now, as we expand our work to help other kinds of gorillas, being named after someone who is strongly associated with the Virunga mountain gorillas is not necessarily an advantage. ”

One source that wishes to remain anonymous told us: “We have seen a map of the world, showing nations in which DFGF-I has copyrighted or expects to copyright Dian Fossey’s name. It looks like a map of the colonialist British empire.”

DFGF-I President and CEO Clare Richardson apparently walked into the meeting with a collection of maps that eventually covered the walls. The maps, covering areas all over Africa, Asia and Latin America, apparently laid out—for the apparently very astonished DFGF-Europe executives—the future corporate expansion of DFGF-I. The message delivered by lawyers was: this is Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International turf, these are our future brand name and trademark business areas, and DFGF-E will not be impinging on our expanding corporate Empire. DFGF-E was forced to relinquish its claim to the Dian Fossey name and legacy.

One former DFGF staff reluctantly admitted his/her serious concerns about the misdirection of funds and possible illicit activities of the DFGF-I. The individual is frightened of the legal clout of the DFGF-I, and about the possibility of direct physical violence that could result from going public with information he/she possesses.

Agents of the Western conservation cabal targeted journalist Georgianne Nienaber, the co-author of several of the pieces in this series, during her visit to Central Africa in February 2007. Nienaber connected to Western conservation “community” through email. She set up a mission, and met with an insider named Robert Poppe, who offered professional security, logistics and transport, under armed guard, and took her into the war-torn bush. After conducting interviews in North Kivu, DRC, Georgianne Nienaber—an accredited MONUC journalist—was robbed by Robert Poppe, accused of espionage, and held and interrogated under hostile conditions. Poppe, a former Special Forces soldier from Britain, threatened to have Nienaber arrested by the Congolese Immigration Authorities, and he confiscated her video equipment, and recorded interviews. Poppe derailed Nienaber’s mission as evidence of corruption became clear through candid field interviews and inspections. Subsequent to her departure from DRC, Poppe, who was angered by an internet post that told the story but mentioned no names, repeatedly threatened Nienaber with a lawsuit. The U.S.-based web site host eventually pulled the post link because Poppe continued to threaten a lawsuit after Nienaber returned to the U.S. The action by Poppe also put Congolese sources at risk, and one dedicated Congolese conservation professional received threats and is afraid for his life.

Poppe was overheard to say, “I will make it impossible for her (Nienaber) to ever work in Congo again.”

Now Nienaber’s name and cell phone number have been listed on the Internet for PHONE SEX IN RWANDA and PHONE SEX IN CONGO, compounding the crimes of theft, extortion and detention without charge against her with cyber stalking and sexual harassment. The cost of posting the phone sex listings is $40—way beyond the possibility of the ordinary Congolese citizen.

Others who have questioned DFGF-I officials have been intimidated or indirectly threatened. Claims about questionable activities of the DFGF-I in Central Africa include accusations about the misdirection of funds, smuggling of primates and primate bones, exhumation of Fossey’s gorillas for anthropological studies, and the possible involvement of DFGF-I staff in military and illegal mining activities. There is even an accusation that DFGF-I officials orchestrated a massacre of local people near the Tanya Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This is the heart of the Mwami’s Tale.

The discrepancies between what the DFGF-I and their primary partners, like Conservation International and the Wildlife Conservation Society, are reporting, and what others working on the ground in central Africa are experiencing, are worrying, to say the least.

What happened to the millions of dollars in USAID funds given to DFGF-I? What are the true accomplishments and impacts of BINGO and DINGO conservation?

As I will imminently show—having worked as a journalist and human rights investigator in the region from 2004 to 2007—the realities on the ground in Central Africa are disturbingly different from those painted in the fundraising drives and brochures produced by the DFGF-I, WWF, WCS, CI, AWF, Fauna and Flora International, other big conservation organizations, and their partners and sponsors. Are these conservation programs merely providing a smokescreen for other activities? How do King Kong and Hollywood play into this?

THE MISSING MONEY

Remembering the thugs in the film King Kong, some people are asking what happens to all the money scooped up by conservation organizations with links to the King Kong industry.

In 2005, after years of opaque activity, the subject of DFGF-I expenditures of USAID funds came into question. A Freedom of Information Act request was submitted regarding DFGF-I’s failure to file required A-133 audit forms on its USAID funding. These A-133 forms are federally mandated from every non-governmental organization (NGO) receiving USAID monies, which come from U.S. taxpayers.

In September of 2005, US Congressman James Oberstar was contacted by a constituent who claimed that the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International—self-declared as the premier gorilla conservation organization on the planet—had failed to file federally mandated audits (Form A-133) after receiving millions of dollars in grants from USAID.

Congressman Oberstar’s informal inquiry found that, indeed, the DFGF-I had failed to file required forms accounting for millions of dollars in USAID money.

“USAID is covering up for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International,” said a source close to this investigation, in January 2006. “They have backed off their investigation of where the million’s of dollars in grants went.” The source claims that DFGF-I officials working in Congo and Rwanda are using the gorilla conservation as a front for other activities. The source also provided information revealing the interesting backgrounds of top-level DFGF-I directors. “The little old lady in Iowa who sends in her five bucks to save the gorillas would freak out if she knew where her money was really going,” the source said. “The gorillas are getting zip in the wild.”

Congressman Oberstar demanded that USAID produce a report on the activities of the DFGF-I in Central Africa, but as of this writing there had been no substantive action by the DFGF-I or USAID. Oberstar noted that the DFGF-I has violated U.S. law by not filing required audit reports. “I’m personally pursuing the matter” Oberstar told a reporter for the Rwanda-owned state newspaper, the New Times, in November 2005, “and have to make sure that USAID explains to the government why DFGF-I has not been presenting their audit reports.”

The Rwandan state-run newspaper New Times reported that DFGF-I President and CEO Clare Richardson told their reporter that DFGF-I had presented audits to USAID in March 2005. The New Times also reported that the Director General of the Office of Rwanda Tourism and National Parks (ORTPN), Rosette Rugamba, told the New Times that she didn’t understand the activities of the DFGF-I. “I don’t know what they are doing in Rwanda. They have been here for over three decades claiming they are doing research work but they haven’t given us any results,” she told the New Times. “The living conditions of the DFGF-I trackers are miserable and yet the DFGF-I has lots of money.”

According to Congressman Oberstar’s office, on March 31, 2006, Congressional Affairs at USAID told a House International Relations Committee staff-member “that an audit is being conducted by a third party auditor, but it has not yet been completed.” Also, the U.S. government Office of Acquisition and Assistance was reportedly forcing DFGF-I to respond to all allegations leveled against them about finance and budget issues.

The “third-party” auditor performing a “private” audit is the Defense Contract Audit Agency…an interesting choice given that the funds in question were allocated for…gorilla conservation?

“The Defense Contract Audit Agency,” reads their web site, “is under the authority, direction, and control of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), is responsible for performing all contract audits for the Department of Defense (DoD), and providing accounting and financial advisory services regarding contracts and subcontracts to all DoD Components responsible for procurement and contract administration.”

The Defense Contract Audit Agency completed the DFGF-I / USAID audit in March 2007, but the audit has not been released due to the claimed “proprietary nature” of the audit. Why is the U.S. Department of Defense Contract Audit Agency auditing a DINGO conservation organization like the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund?

Is this about gorillas? Or guerrillas?

A Freedom of Information Act request determined that DFGF-I has not filed audits for more than two years, while they received a total of at least $4,693,384 from USAID between September 24, 2001 and September 29, 2004.

DFGF-I also receives funds from private donors, foundations and corporate sponsors, and they have regular fundraising drives where callers solicit donations from members and the general public. Sponsors and friends, listed in DFGF-I documents for January to December of 2003, in the $25,000 and above category included: Dr. and Mrs. Nick Faust; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Daniel K. Thorne Foundation; Zoo Atlanta and a corporation called Oracle. The MacArthur and Thorne Foundations are regular funders of DFGF-I, Dr. Nicholas Faust ran the ESRI mapping program for DFGF-I—and a whole bunch of intelligence and defense projects—and the others all offer some interesting jungle stories indeed.

Enter Kong and the connection to the Mad Scientist.

Turner Broadcasting (CNN) was credited with a gift in the $5000 to $9999 category. Interestingly, one CNN journalist, Gary Strieker, became a member of the DFGF-I Board of Trustees. Strieker’s conservation reportage is fairly run of the mill, unless you are a wildlife enthusiast from the U.S. or Europe, who places more importance on endangered species than on human life, and then it is fantastic, hard-hitting, exclusive stuff. The theme generally relies on discourses that universally blame the locals, who are amongst the poorest people in the world, for eating or poaching the great apes or chopping down forest or having too many children. In a few good, hard-hitting pieces CNN seems to go after Asian logging companies. In either case however, Gary Strieker’s CNN reportage never establishes any connections to, or stories about, the deeper, hidden realities of western involvement in war, mining, extortion, pillage, dictatorship, arms-running, genocide, disease, or population control programs in Central Africa. Like virtually all of the western media, there is never any attention to the perpetuation of structural violence or the institutions of control and domination. Never.

We asked Gary Strieker if he found it strange that Patrick Mehlman was hired even before he was out of court with the monkey smuggling case. Strieker dismissed the questions about Patrick Mehlman and the Oberstar investigations as baseless rumors not warranting the attention of the DFGF-I board. But Strieker’s claim that “I haven’t done any stories on DFGF-I,” is remarkable, coming from a board member for the organization, because it simply isn’t true.

The public relations and media departments of the conservation BINGOs and DINGOs—like Wildlife Conservation Society and Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and World Wildlife Fund—are self-perpetuating propaganda machines. The power of the WWF in Britain insures that the British Broadcasting Corporation—the BBC—runs every WWF press release, uncritically, as a “news” feature. DFGF-I and the whole cabal of conservation DINGOS get their own free press, not only with the BBC, but even through such “alternative” and award-winning news venues as the Environmental News Service (ENS), which also runs the BINGO and DINGO press releases unchallenged and unedited. ENS won a Project Censored award for reporting a top censored story, but they would not discuss the terms of their relationship with DFGF-I, whose press release was presented verbatim as news from Kinshasa, Congo. And then there is CNN, and Conde Nast Traveler, and the Smithsonian, and Voice of America, and—the premier purveyor of primate productions—the National Geographic.

On May 3, 2007, CNN's Anderson Cooper interviewed our leading Femme Fatale, Jane Goodall, on her work with chimps in Africa, and he followed on May 4 with reportage from Congo, where his expert of choice was DFGF-I's Dr. Alecia Lilly.

How many of the claims of the BINGOs and DINGOs are real and how many public relations? They all claim community partnerships and sustainable development, but what is the situation for the local people on the ground in Central Africa? If key people involved in primate “conservation” have been involved in illegally smuggling primates into U.S. laboratories for biomedical research, what else are these organizations capable of? Is it merely a coincidence that many of the people who appear to be running the show in the wildlife conservation community are intimate with defense and intelligence interests, and with international mining and petroleum corporations who are plundering Africa?

What is the role and mission of Dr. Patrick Mehlman in Central Africa today? People in Central Africa are asking the same questions. For example, when a local wildlife professional in Goma turned over evidence that United Nations MONUC employees were smuggling chimpanzees out of Goma, DRC, nothing was done about it. Russians and Ukrainians fly the MONUC aircraft in DRC—Air MONUC—and as pilots in charge of the planes the contraband chimp cargo was easily carried. Hard evidence was provided to Patrick Mehlman as early as 2005, but there was never any official investigation, or even an informal response. Mehlman was based in Goma, and he didn’t have any problem pushing primitive stories about nut-cracking, tool-using gorillas in the same time period.

While Patrick Mehlman began in 2001 as Vice-President of Africa programs for DFGF-I, at some point he apparently transitioned into the position of Africa Programs Director for DFGF-I. Both programs were reportedly based in Central Africa, but Mehlman also purchased a sizeable home in South Africa and is known to travel almost as widely as Russell Mittermeier—the head of Conservation International, and perhaps the world’s most-traveled and well-healed tourist—all on conservation dollars.

By 2006, Mehlman and his wife Alecia Lilly had divorced. Lilly was Vice-President of DFGF-I Africa Programs, and Mehlman was working—in some murky capacity—for both Conservation International and DFGF-I. According to a February 2007 report from the International Conference on Sustainable Management of Forests in DRC, Patrick Mehlman was listed as the Regional Director of the Central Africa Program for Conservation International. As of May 21, 2007, Dr. Alecia Lilly is listed as Vice-President of DFGF-I’s Africa Programs, but Patrick Mehlman is not listed anywhere on the web sites of DFGF-I or Conservation International.

This monkey business is indeed primitive. The environmental and economic facade begins to unravel when the influence of the U.S. Forest Service in the CARPE landscape program becomes evident. Given that funding and budget cuts are running rampant through U.S. forestry and wildlife programs, this begs the question: how can the United States afford to be so intimately involved in foreign conservation efforts? Patrick Mehlman’s flow diagrams at the introduction of the Tayna Landscape project shed some light on the wild web of connections, and that brings us to the sad tale of the Mwami—a traditional tribal chief—on the run from “conservation” in his home territory, a remote war-torn landscape, overrun by DINGOs and BINGOs, in Central Africa.

KONG PART THREE: A MWAMI’S TALE

 

HENCHMEN AND HEARTBREAK IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS

I visited two large villages in the interior… where I found that fully half the population now consisted of refugees… nothing had remained for them at home but to be killed for failure to bring in a certain amount of rubber or to die from starvation or exposure in their attempts to satisfy the demands made upon them…I subsequently found other members of the tribe who confirmed the truth of the statements made to me.

British Consul Roger Casement, describing Congo, 1904

One hundred years ago, the Report of British Consul Roger Casement was a prescient narrative that foreshadowed conservation scandals festering in modern day Congo. Some ten million souls were sacrificed between 1895 and 1905 for profit at the close of the Industrial Revolution. Now, a century of “development” and “enlightenment” later, Casement’s description of refugees suffering the fate of foreign exploitation in Congo is an accurate and jarring description of life in remote, impoverished, war-torn villages in Central Africa.

 

At the turn of the century, rubber and ivory of the Congo basin became the source of Leopold’s wealth and the bastion of his power, but it was built on slavery. The enslavers were Henry Morton Stanley and his Colonial cabal, the Force Publique—itself comprised of conscripted and enslaved natives as soldiers and henchmen—and for every native killed to enforce the system of taxation and terror, a hand was cut off and brought back to account for the bullet expended. The severed hands of men, women and children were piled high in the Colonial outposts along the Congo River.

Territorial concessions to colonial powers soon became the prize all over Africa. Congo developed smoothly under the oppression of Belgian Colonial Rule, always at the expense of the natives, and in parallel with the exploitation of the people and the expropriation of natural resources. By 1960 Congo had a standard of living as high as Portugal, but under the Mobutu dictatorship, backed by outside interests, the Congo degenerated.

Unfortunately the ruin and sorrow of tragedy, combined with exotic locales, makes good cinematography. Enter Tarzan, Indiana Jones, and the lasting and repackaged epic, King Kong, the primordial mythology of Beauty and the Beast.

Behind the Hollywood fantasies, wildlife habitat for tourism and scientific research became yet another prize—like gold, diamonds, coltan, cobalt, copper, timber, rubber and oil—all taken from Central Africa. And the exploiters imported terror. Indeed, for the people of Congo, suffering and death are a way of life. Now, the million-dollar question seems to be: How are “conservation” and “development” reconciled with the bloodbath that is Central Africa today?

HEART OF DARKNESS

While the film King Kong was set on a remote tropical island, the story definitively evokes images of Central Africa. It is no coincidence that Jimmy, the deckhand on the tram ship steamer that sets sail from New York harbor in King Kong, is reading Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness.

The Kong epic’s Skull Island is a place inhabited by cannibals and headhunters who massacre innocent white people for no reason at all, claiming the white people’s blood and bones, and using their live bodies for ritual sacrifice. The “innocent” whites in Kong could be likened to Dian Fossey, “murdered by poachers” in the dark, inhospitable forests of Rwanda. In the Kong epic it is the sexy Ann Darrow, the ritual white woman, the white goddess in sexually revealing clothes, who is offered up to inflame the western fears against the dark, sub-human plotting of the naked, black savages. On the other side of the savages’ coin is the sexual fantasy offered to the imaginations of viewers.

The natives on Skull Island are zombies, rolling their eyes and shaking their bodies in the standard representation of voodoo and spirit possession. They are the Mai Mai warriors of the Congo, the Mau Mau of Kenya, or the Hutu Interahamwe militias of Rwanda. Portrayed as savages in the film King Kong, they personify the kinds of images purveyed by western media in their misrepresentative portraits of war in the Congo—the very Heart of Darkness. But the images beamed to us out of Africa by Hollywood and the international media both manipulate reality and manipulate our consciousness, because they are taken out of context. They are no longer the truth.

Take away the fictitious beasts and imagined creatures, and the forests of Skull Island are remarkably like those of the Mountains of the Moon—the Ruwenzories, the Virunga Mountains and Volcanoes National Parks, the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, and the Kahuzi Biega National Park in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. These are moist, cool, cloud forests with mosses and vines, steep inclines and treacherous ravines.

Which is the place rooted in the viewer’s psyche? Skull Island? Or is it Central Africa?

“This (gorilla conservation) project has stretched the boundaries of the application of advanced technologies for regional primatological research,” reads one Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I) press release. “It is being conducted in an extremely remote and uncharted region of the world in the face of great political, and social, unrest.”

Uncharted? Congo? Hardly. Congo has been mapped and re-mapped and mapped again by Western intelligence and defense technologies with each technological advance. And the very fact that high-tech—or even low-tech—primate research is still being carried out “in the face of great political, and social, unrest,” attests to the racial inequity of the human condition and devaluation of human life. Hollywood narratives of savagery further the degradation, and allow the BINGOs and DINGOs of conservation and development and humanitarian aid to justify their platforms of dehumanization.

With six or eight or ten million dead in Central Africa since 1994, how can primate conservation and research continue, and how can it be justified? Is the bloodshed incidental or innate to the Western conservation enterprise?

There remains no ‘uncharted’ region of the world. But because ‘uncharted wilderness’ as such does not exist in the real world, it has to be manufactured. Like Hollywood, conservation organizations have played their roles in manufacturing images of a people-free wilderness, but the process of driving the people from their own land is never shown.

“It’s no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture,” wrote Mark Dowie in a courageous and prescient article in Orion magazine. “But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Even the more culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention.”

CONQUEST BY COMMUNITY CONSERVATION

Over the past 100 years, the white, Western world has maintained an inequitable relationship with Africa. At the forefront came the great white hunters bagging their trophies. As the animals began to disappear, the great white hunters shifted attention to conservation—to secure and perpetuate the great white hunt—and to profit from tourism.

Our three premier femme fatales—Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas—began their primate conservation projects in parallel in the 1960s, and through the 1970s and 1980s their projects proceeded amidst an exponential expansion of the conservation “sector.” The rise in global consciousness about earth and species decline brought with it an expanding animal rights movement and, finally, the more philosophically based interests in protecting biodiversity for its own sake. Along with the conservationists came the population programs, and species of radicals like EARTH FIRST! and ZERO POPULATION GROWTH, whose ideologies are premised on a Western imperial hubris that is blinded by its own bias: whiteness, affluence and a bourgeois white privilege.

After almost fifty years of massive investment in the conservation sector in Africa—at least tens of billions of dollars since the 1960’s—why are the big flagship species like gorillas and rhinos and elephants so close to the brink of extinction? Indeed, what the BINGOS involved in the Garamba National Park, located on Congo’s northern frontier, won’t tell you, is that the White Rhinoceros, as a species, is finished. Not a single press release has been issued which announces the loss of this flagship species in Congo. To do so would raise untidy questions demanding untidy answers, and the questions of accountability of public funds sunk into Rhino conservation would sit as awkwardly as a white rhinoceros in the living room. Fifty years of conservation dedicated to the white rhinoceros in Congo resulted in a complete and total failure to protect the species.

The intense competition between rival conservation organizations for control of Africa’s wildlife took a new turn with the birth of “community conservation.” The concept evolved about ten years ago, but for decades the BINGOs and DINGOs have been waving banners of respect and autonomy for indigenous people. Nouveau conservation ostensibly turned control of endangered species and wildlife habitat over to the local people who stood to gain—or lose—the most from their protection.

Pandering to the proposal that native populations must have a stake in their own wildlife and the territories they live in, the BINGOS and DINGOS pushed millions of dollars in projects, and the new mantras to garner funding became “community conservation” and “capacity building” and “participatory mapping.” The community conservation projects soon included family planning initiatives. Population control programs were pressed on local people to prevent their intrusion into “pristine” habitat, and to stop starving people from eating animals that are of interest to foreigners.

In an article in 2000, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek described this nouveau conservation as “a sweeping, last-ditch battle for the soul of wild Africa… a vast and controversial testing ground for the theory of “community conservation.”

“Organizations such as the International Gorilla Conservation Program, the World Bank and CARE have chosen the misty jungles and crowded villages of southwestern Uganda,” wrote Salopek, whose story applies equally to Congo, “as a vast and controversial testing ground for the theory of ‘community conservation.’ The idea is simple: To save what’s left of Africa’s fading wildlife, experts say, the animals must in essence be given back to the Africans, so the Africans will feel more of a kinship with them and feel the need to protect them.”

“Africa for the Africans” and “Africans in control of Africa” and “African leaders for African people.” Look to the media to find countless permutations of this comforting mantra. What Salopek didn’t say was that CARE programs are partially funded by Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman and other invasive corporations.

Tourism would provide the money to build schools and infrastructures and fill village coffers—or so the theory went. To control the land, conservation organizations would win over the hearts and minds of the villagers. Treaties were signed, and contracts, and promises of development and shared futures proliferated like invasive exotic species. It had all happened before. Newly repackaged, it has happened again, and again, and again. It is the his-story (sic) of conquest by conservation.

THE MWAMI MYSTIQUE

“But it was some story,” wrote Frederic Hunter in Waiting for the Mwami, his book about writers writing about Africa. “An interview with an African king, demigod to some; autocrat to others... Being received by the Mwami of Kabare, absolute ruler of a quarter-million tribesmen here, is like stepping four hundred years back into 1563. He would make the Mwami a traditionalist rogue, a charming anachronism, and sprinkle gems of his wisdom throughout the piece.”

The key to the access and control of local communities in Central Africa was obvious to anyone who understood African culture. The Mwami—the Chief—the “lord of the lands”—protector and father—would guarantee access if and only if his cooperation could be won.

“Mwami” also means “king” and the kingdoms are the traditional territories of the Kivus, north and south, the provinces in Congo that today are awash in blood. Mwami is a dignified, revered title, a birthright, and in the rich cultural history of Ruanda-Urundi and Kongo, the Mwamis were demigods. African creation myths tell of three heavenly children who fell to earth by accident—the genesis of the Mwami lines of descent. The Mwamis trace their lineage and powers to these divine founders and the people trace their cosmologies to the Mwamis living amongst them.

The late Rosamond Carr, philanthropist to Rwanda and friend of the murdered primatologist, Dian Fossey, sums up the relationship of the Mwamis to their subjects in her book Land of a Thousand Hills. In 1957 Rosamond Carr attended festivities surrounding the 25th anniversary of the reign of a local Mwami. Carr was shocked to see that the Mwami seemed to accept all of the lavish gifts with indifference—some were not acknowledged at all. Her African companion reassured her: “But Madame, everything belongs to the mwami. The land, the crops, the people, and the animals are all his.”

This is a telling reality. The omnipotent power of the Mwami offers an important cultural concept—one that has been exploited to wrest concessions from native populations who cherish deep religious and familial ties to their trusted kings. Anthropologist John Oates examines this concept in Myth and Reality in the Rain Forest: How Conservation Strategies are Failing in West Africa. Dr. Oates notes that the “community conservation” model pursued by Western conservationists overlooks the ethnic rivalries and differences, and the old and new antagonisms that could prevent cooperation between communities. The first loyalties of communities would always be to the chiefs, the Mwamis, or the ethnic lines of their familial descent, and never to a broad concept of wildlife corridors or world heritage landscapes imposed by outsiders.

Or perhaps there was no overlooking of anything, because exploitation is premised on the capacity to divide, and then conquer.

In Central Africa, the BINGOs and the DINGOs have been stitching together vast tracts of territory defined by the CARPE Program—the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment—as “landscapes.” These include the Maiko National Park (NP) of North Kivu (CARPE landscape No. 10) and the Kahuzi Biega National Park (CARPE landscape No. 11) that stretches from Bukavu, South Kivu, to the vast tropical forests of North Kivu, and the Tanya Gorilla Reserve, at the center of our Mwami’s story.

The twelve CARPE landscapes encompass 680,300 square kilometers of Central African land. From the Monte Alen-Monts de Cristal National Park (CARPE landscape No. 1) in Equatorial Guinea, to the Virungas National Park (CARPE landscape No. 12) in the Great Lakes region, the twelve “priority” biodiversity landscapes, stretching across Central Africa, are part of a vast forest of “conservation” initiatives defined by acronyms and big institutions. The Congo Basin Forest Partnership, for example, like CARPE, is connected to the Pentagon, and NASA, and that’s not all.

Stitching together these “landscapes” on the scale of the CARPE project would test the contention by anthropologist Dr. John Oates that jealousies, insecurities, competition and corruption would prevail and that the poisonous potential of money would open old wounds and create new antagonisms.

The emergence of the Tayna Gorilla Reserve (RGT) is a case study in promises made and broken to the village chiefs and people of Congo. It is a tale as old as Congo itself—a story of rivalry, greed, lies, even murder—and it exposes the soft underbelly of the conservation ideal and the dishonorable and duplicitous manifestations of human nature.

The Tayna Gorilla Reserve is located some 50 kilometers west of the spine of the Great African Rift Valley. Home to endangered human primates and their endangered relatives, the Grauer’s gorillas, the chimpanzees and another 12 species of non-human primates, there are also more than eighty species of mammals in this forested area, including elephants, leopard, buffalo and the rare okapi. It is an achingly vibrant and beautiful landscape, strategically located in the heart of the Congo Forest Basin.

The Tayna Gorilla Reserve is also the flagship Community Conservation Program of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I). It is “a program that empowers local people to protect and preserve their heritage,” DFGF-I claims on their website. The claim is repeated in a jungle of press releases, fundraising campaigns, and expensive, glossy, full-color brochures.

The Fossey Fund’s local and national partners are the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN)—the DRC wildlife authority—and a Congolese federation of community-based nature reserves, the Union for the Conservation of Gorillas and Development in Eastern DRC (UGADEC).

In November 2005, Conde Nast Group, including Hollywood glitterati in the form of actors of Glenn Close and Harrison Ford, gave its prestigious U.S. $20,000 “Worldsaver” Conde Nast Traveler Environmental prize to Pierre Kakule Vwirasihikya, a DFGF-I project leader at Tayna Gorilla Reserve. At the time of the award, Kakule was a partner to Dr. Patrick Mehlman, the elusive monkey smuggler of this series, and then Vice-President of Central Africa operations for DFGF-I.

Patrick Mehlman now operates as some kind of go-between for DFGF-I and Conservation International. One document pegs him as CI’s Regional Director of the Central Africa Program, but he is not listed with other staff on either the DFGF-I or CI web sites. In recent years, Mehlman moved from monkey smuggler to Vice-President of DFGF-I operations in Rwanda, and finally to a close association with Russell Mittermeier, the President of Conservation International.

The CI mission “to conserve the Earth’s living heritage, our global biodiversity, and to demonstrate that human societies are able to live harmoniously with nature,” is another way of saying that managing natural resources is a process of “sustainable” development.

John Oates criticizes the linkage of nature conservancy with economic development as a profound mistake, which leads to “an exercise of materialism at local, national and international levels.” Indeed, the word “sustainable” in this context means to use natural resources in a paradigm of unlimited economic growth—and to “sustain” access to them for Western interests in their ruthless global competition for disappearing resources.

USAID initiated its twenty-year Central African Program in “biodiversity conservation” in 1995. Phase Two of CARPE will be in effect until 2011 and Phase Three will kick in after that. USAID is invested in the region for the long haul. Total leveraged funds for CARPE are $150 million, with $74 million coming from USAID. Interestingly enough, in the official U.S. documents describing the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, AFRICOM—which will consolidate U.S. military power of EUCOM, CENTCOM AND PACCOM—the Pentagon will be working with USAID as a partner.

In making the CARPE grants, USAID emphasizes “landscape-level conservation, sustainable use and market-based mechanisms”—all of which are the red flags waved by expert John Oates. In the case of the Tanya Gorilla Reserve, this means that the indigenous population is not managing the money at the village level, regardless of the high-profile PR by the BINGOs that say otherwise.

According to CI, Pierre Kakule’s conservation vision and initiative at Tayna “has become an exemplar of how biodiversity conservation can benefit human welfare” because “it is remaking the lives of thousands of war-weary indigenous people who depend on healthy forest ecosystems and stable communities for their livelihoods and, in this case, sometimes their very survival.”

The people at Tayna who work for the USAID/CI/DFGF-I project, according to locals, are not being paid. Our own evaluation found a school in shambles and a health clinic/hospital that is little more than a dilapidated exoskeleton. The “operating room” would not be adequate to “have a boil lanced,” according to one U.S. physician who examined our photos. Press releases and well-placed “news” stories by DINGOs and BINGOs paint quite a different picture.

Reports from CI and DFGF-I have trumpeted hopeful statements about the great apes, even while fundraising documents declare their imminent extinction. According to one press release, “This recent research also indicates that earlier surveys appear to have missed or underestimated important priority areas for this (Grauer’s) gorilla’s overall distribution.”

According to DFGF-I, “The Tayna Reserve is an innovative grass-roots project that has as its goals both the conservation of biodiversity and rural development. This biodiversity reserve… is entirely managed by local stakeholders, and receives technical advice, training, and financial assistance from DFGF-I.”

All across the region, from the remote mining outposts of Walikale to Rutshuru to Tanya, three sites which can be pin-pointed on a map of the North Kivu region, the stories are told of how Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and their partner BINGOs and DINGOs—WWF and Conservation International and the Jane Goodall Institute—arrived on the scene, promised the world, stirred up trouble, and left. As if it were a bad dream, people see their communal lands expropriated, they see hunters and gatherers excluded, and mass forced displacements of locals to protect the unholy alliance of conservation corporations, and the boundaries of vast “conservation” reserves, their communal birthrights, taken from them.

And some of them see the research and the fancy 4x4 SUVs and armed escorts and the other evidence that gorilla and chimpanzee projects deep in the forest—being run by privileged foreign primatologists and anthropologists and whole troops of specialized other-ologists with GPS mapping equipment and hundred thousand dollar budgets—are ongoing. The locals never see the scientific papers—most are illiterate and uneducated and couldn’t read them if they tried—and they never travel to the fancy foreign conferences where research is presented and celebrities rub shoulders.

Said one local Congolese expert who works for the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature, “there is a cabal of insiders who get all the money, and they work together to get all the money, and even if you know more about your own land or your own animals than they do you are never allowed to travel to these fancy conferences in Paris or Washington or Vienna to present your knowledge.”

This Congolese expert’s credentials couldn’t be more appropriate to the primate conservation mission in Central Africa, but instead of collaborating and promoting him, the conservation “clique”—as he describes it—has attacked him.

“I am losing my job and whether innocent or not, the clique has already engaged me in a serious battle, to which I don’t have the means. For this I need your help and support as we should make sure that the truth is known and improve on the way people act and how they mishandle funds from various sources on (sic) the name of biodiversity conservation and poor Congolese livelihoods.”

Today the man lives under constant threat and in fear for his life.

MILKING THE MWAMIS

The paper trail that outlines the expropriation of the Tayna Gorilla Reserve and communal lands begins not with the Mai Mai or Mau Mau but with the official legal instrument, the MOU—the “memorandum of understanding” in the geekspeak of conservationists. Juan Carlos Bonilla, Director of the Africa Division of Conservation International, wrote the MOU that emphasizes the importance of the Mwamis to the international conservation project at Tayna. (Curiously, Bonilla’s biography is listed on the web site of the U.S. Department of State, but nowhere on the web site of CI.)

“We have partnered with the mwami, traditional rulers with actual power to influence land-use allocation among local populations. These councils are resulting in voluntary easements over traditional land rights to allow for community-managed conservation areas, while concentrating economic activities in areas to be targeted by development projects.”

The Conservation International MOU relies on UGADEC—the consortium of local NGOs—as their vehicle to provide mutual support and channel technical and financial assistance to the process. Both ICCN and UGADEC receive technical support from CI’s main implementing partner in the landscape, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I) and its partner the Jane Goodall Institute. CI partners WCS and WWF also support ICCN in Maiko (Tayna) and Kahuzi Biega.”

In 2005, while still Vice-President of Africa Programs for DFGF-I, Patrick Mehlman wrote in a publicity brochure that the decree which gazetted the Tayna Nature Reserve was accompanied by “contracts in which the complete management and the responsibility for protecting the reserve(s) is ceded by the national park authorities to the local people.”

How was this done? By expropriating the institution of the Mwami? Controlling the relations between the mwamis and their local territories, their petite kingdoms? Is this the application of that tried and true method of resource acquisition, divide and conquer?

Describing the award given to DFGF-I’s Pierre Kakule, for example, Conde Nast Traveler credited Kakule and Patrick Mehlman with organizing the mwamis and the local communities in eastern DRC behind gorilla conservation, and through this, establishing the Tanya Nature Reserve. “Following the Tayna model,” Conde Nast Traveler wrote, “other communities are now setting up seven contiguous gorilla reserves that will create a 2.5-million-acre corridor linking the Maiko and Kahuzi-Biega national parks.”

In 2005, cracks began to appear in the facade of the Tayna project as rumors circulated about alleged strong-arm tactics practiced by the DFGF-I’s local award-winning chief, Pierre Kakule. This was not the first case of allegations of misdeeds perpetrated by the Congolese conservationist. The accusations intensified, and in early 2006, a story was making the rounds through competing conservation organizations that a conflict over Tayna boundaries resulted in the deaths of “several villagers.”

According to a Congolese gorilla expert, connected all his life to gorilla conservation in DRC and Rwanda, another local expert whose life would be in danger if we named him, the statements from the DFGF-I press releases are patently untrue. This source traveled to areas purportedly involved in the DFGF-I programs.

“I recently went to visit some of these areas,” the source stated. “I spent ten days in one place. You should see the hard life of the people in there. No help at all from anyone, while the media are mobilizing and making all these claims about support from conservation organizations.”

“The DFGF-I never used its funds to help the threatened Grauer’s gorillas through protection in Kahuzi Biega or in assisting the communities living around the park,” the gorilla expert continued. “Poor people around the park are suffering from malnutrition, diseases, lootings, and many women have been raped, but we always heard that the DFGF-I were funded in millions of US dollars for the gorilla’s protection. The populations of Grauer’s gorillas are more vulnerable today due to the war in the eastern DRC, and gorilla habitat has been cut down for militia shelters. Meanwhile the DFGF-I—Patrick Mehlman and Pierre Kakule—are saying that the number of Grauer’s gorilla remains higher, which is wrong, and wrong.”

Eyewitness reports from the Tayna Gorilla Reserve say that anti-poaching patrols, among others, are not being paid the amounts publicized by DFGF-I.

“The (anti-poaching) teams work hard days and nights to achieve the goals. Do you know how much they are monthly paid? Thirty dollars. It was very astonishing to read that DFGF-I claims to pay them $100 each a month while most of the children of the park guards suffer from malnutrition and some don’t go to school for lack of monthly educational fees.”

In another interview, a well-known conservationist reported that an incident took place on or around 2003 in neighboring Walikale. Allegedly, there is a Governor’s Report on the incident in which one community member was killed and many others injured. Kakule allegedly used a puppet mercenary to carry out the atrocities. The conservationist also refuses to be named for fear of retaliation and an abrupt termination of his/her career.

The supporting background to this allegation is that villagers in the Walikale community realized that there were possibly many gorillas in the area and approached DFGF-Europe to help them organize a community-based conservation project. According to locals in Walikale and Goma, DFGF-E and DFGF-I apparently had it out over control of local landscapes and the CARPE funding that came with them. In the end, DFGF-E apparently took the Maiko National Park, CARPE landscape 10, and DFGF-I took the others. At the same time, Kakule and Patrick Mehlman were trying to woo support for the neighboring Tayna Gorilla Reserve Project—support that was essential to garnering millions in USAID dollars.

The Tanya Gorilla Project includes the “Tayna Conservation Center for Biology,” or TCCB, a research school established by Pierre Kakule, but while CI and DFGF-I press releases of March 2007 tout the Tayna success story, teachers at Tayna’s “American University” report that salaries are unpaid.

“Concerning our situation at TCCB (Tayna Conservation Center for Biology), I can’t tell you that many things have changed. They only paid up to February. March, April, and very soon May are still unpaid. So I can’t say that the salary is regular. Besides all the problems we discussed nothing is fulfilled. Please keep advocating for us.”

Testimony collected on the ground in Walikale, Tanya and Goma indicate that mining operations connected to international mafias—governments and embassies and multinational corporations—proceed in or around these conservation areas. The hospital at Walikale is a wreck, counting one or two archaic microscopes, a handful of slides and Petri dishes, and a stirrup table for women as its only capital equipment. There are also stores of donated pharmaceutical products like Depo Provera. (See Georgianne Nienaber and keith harmon snow, “Primate Worship? Or Depo Privations?” COA News, May 9, 2007).

The locals in Walikale, as throughout eastern Congo, have been brutalized again and again, with rampant and uncountable incidents of crimes against humanity, torture, mass rape and genocide. According to an April 2007 report by the ENOUGH campaign of the International Crises Group—itself a specious “think-tank” entity worthy of DINGO status—the death rate continues at more than 1000 people every day in eastern Congo.

What position does the conservation community take on the massive human rights atrocities and war crimes? Consider the Joint Communiqué by ICCN and its conservation partners issued by the BINGOs and DINGOs in December 2007—after gorillas and hippos were killed by armed elements.

“A crisis of unprecedented proportions in the Virunga National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in North Kivu, DRC, has been allowed to develop over the last few months,” it begins.

The statement was not referring to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced refugees, or about starving, homeless, distraught villagers forced off communal lands for conservation by the same BINGOs and DINGOs.

“Savage assaults on wildlife from the Mai Mai, FDLR (Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda) and other rebel groups coupled with a flourishing and unchecked trade in meat and ivory has led to a precipitous decline in numbers of wild animals. The scale of this slaughter is particularly apparent with the decimation of hippos in and around Lake Edward, these have declined from 30,000 to less than 200.”

Savage assaults on wildlife! While the slaughter of hippos and gorillas can certainly be described as savage, there is no comparable outrage expressed for the massive loss of human life and unprecedented human misery in the same areas, in the same timeframes.

The Joint ICCN Communiqué—picked up by all the international press—was addressed to His Excellency Joseph Kabila Président de la République Démocratique du Congo, to Mr. William Lacy Swing, United Nations Special Representative to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and to Major General Patrick Cammaert, General Officer in Command of Eastern Division of MONUC, the top U.N. military commander, from Holland, in the region. The statement called on the above officials to (1) Uphold Congolese law and intervene immediately to remove illegal militias and illegal settlements from the Virunga National Park; (2) Intervene immediately in support of the ICCN to prevent further poaching of protected species and to maintain the integrity of the Virunga National Park; and (3) Intervene immediately to cease the intimidation of ICCN rangers and local communities by armed rebel groups within and around the periphery of Virungas National Park.

While the people and organizations who issued the ICCN Communiqué were asking that military force be used to “cease intimidation of ICCN rangers and local communities,” it is clear that the concern lay with the wildlife, and the protection or support of the ICCN wildlife authority, and the call to “cease intimidation of… local communities” was merely cosmetic lip service necessary to maintain some minimal semblance of concern for human beings. The demand for immediate intervention to “remove illegal settlements” from Virunga National Park is also a call against desperate local people forced to endure inhuman conditions and unprecedented misery due to war and displacement. The Joint Communiqué was stamped with the logos of DFGF-I, The Gorilla Organization, CI, WCS, ICCN, ZSL (Zoological Society of London), WWF, IGCP, UNESCO, the African Conservation Fund and the European Union.

In the course of this investigation, repeated attempts were made to communicate with the conservation organizations in question to get their sides of this story and fairly represent their positions. Given numerous opportunities, the officials of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund refused to answer any questions beyond simple enquiries. While an appointment was requested with Fauna and Flora International, part of the International Gorilla Conservation Program (IGCP), officials could not find the time to meet to discuss their activities when we were in Cambridge, U.K., where they are based. Sally Coxe, founder of the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, operating in CARPE landscape No. 7, refused to respond to even the most basic questions.

To be fair, many conservationists working in Africa are good-intentioned people with good hearts. For the innocent victims of Congo however, the road to Tayna is the road to hell and it has been literally paved with blood.

A call to Frank Hawkins’s, Technical Director for Conservation International, requesting clarification, resulted in a suggestion that we call Patrick Mehlman or Juan Carlos Bonilla. Repeated calls and emails to Bonilla have gone unanswered. Due to the heavy travel schedule of Russell Mittermeier, the President of CI, his secretary deemed the possibility of arranging an interview to be virtually impossible.

And then we met one of the Mwamis from the Tanya conservation area. And he had all the time in the world…

Given his health and the scale of his suffering, this won’t be very long at all.

THE MWAMI’S TALE

“They tried to kill me because the area that belongs to the Mwamis has many animals… very bad if I stayed with the project because they want to take this area away.”
 

Meet Mwami, an obviously frightened man from a village in Tayna. We will refer to him by his title only, becuase his life is in danger. The all-too-human demigod wears a baseball cap. He sits before us in a wicker chair in a hotel room in Central Africa and barks accusations of attempted assassination and theft of ancestral lands. He is old for his years, frail, suffering from constant headaches and diabetes and other undiagnosed ailments. He is talking about Pierre Kakule Vwirasihikya and his hired henchmen, local agents of the conservation clique—the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Conservation International.

The windows are closed, shades drawn, at the Mwami’s request, and some 120 pages of documents litter the floor. In a typically agitated, excited Congolese manner our Mwami-on-the-run explains why he is fleeing to another country. He keeps asking for water—lots of water—because of his sickness. He looks about to pass out or suffer a stroke. Sweat runs down his face, steaming his oversized glasses. Each time he makes a point he gestures to the papers scattered on the carpet and shouts a number—every document is meticulously referenced by circled numerals. He coughs out his story between gulps of water and nervous glances at the hotel room door, double-bolted at his insistence.

Waving his arms and complaining about his headache every few minutes, Mwami begins his story by telling us something we had already heard, but had dismissed as un-provable. Mwami swore that there have been at least four attempts to “remove him” from the “landscape project” at Tayna Reserve.

The story of bad blood between Mwami and Pierre Kakule begins in Mbingi, a remote village in the Lubero District of North Kivu. Sometime prior to 2003, Mwami was involved with Actions Development Plateau Bilateral Luholu (ADPBL or L’ADPBL), a local organization of chieftains that provided assistance for malnourished children, orphans and widows in Mbingi. Mwami signed an agreement with Kakule to share in the administration of the orphanage.

In March 2003, a meeting was held among the principal sponsors of ADPBL. Nine persons attended the meeting, including Kakule and Mwami, and the discussion centered upon a promised donation that never materialized.

The “wives of members of the DFGF-I” are supposed to have a representative in DRC who will distribute money “according to needs,” the letter reads. Mwami charged that $10,000 was promised in 2003, and directly challenged Kakule about the missing funds. Mwami claims that Kakule confiscated the ADPBL’s $10,000, and that it never reached the orphans. The $10,000 was promised “by a group of women in Atlanta,” Mwami said, adding, “only Kakule knows the name of this organization.”

Atlanta is the headquarters of the DFGF-I.

While visiting the Mbingi orphanage, we asked caretakers there if they knew anything about the budget or sources of funding for the orphans. We were told, “It is Pierre Kakule’s secret.”

It was no secret that the only source of food we saw there were several open bags of ground meal, infested by rats. In fact, our surprise visit to Mbingi in February 2007, found half-starved, stunted orphans with distended bellies in a setting reminiscent of the poor house in Oliver Twist. These orphans are touted in DFGF-I’s press releases and on their web pages as one of their “success” stories in Tanya and DRC.

Another of our Mwami’s letters shows that DFGF-I was aware of the orphans’ plight several years ago. Resiliation Contract ADPBL-RGT, datelined Goma, April 19, 2004 is addressed to the “Director of Orphanage at Mbingi,” and Pierre Kakule signs it. The letter breaks Kakule’s contract with ADPBL, and has Kakule blaming ADPBL for the missing money.

In an attachment to this letter, Kakule’s partner, Mwami Alexandre Muhindo Mukosasenge, from Bamate village, recommends that DFGF-I take responsibility for Mwami’s nephew, who has been admitted, but not funded, to Montréal University. Mwami Stuka, the chief of Batangi, is also mentioned in the letter.

Although Tayna is a community initiative and the land is property of the state, management is the responsibility of the Batangi and Bamate village chieftains.

Mwami maintains that Kakule turned these two ruling chiefs against him because of the missing orphanage money, and because Mwami made allegations that signatures on land agreements were forged.

Mwami insists that the promise to provide a scholarship for his nephew was made by CEO Clare Richardson and V.P. Mehlman of DFGF-I. Mwami was able to produce his nephew’s acceptance letter to the university, but there is no record of the verbal promises allegedly made by the Fossey fund. Would an impoverished Mwami from the remotest regions of war-torn Congo urge his penniless nephew to apply to a Canadian university, with no other possibility of funding, without some sort of encouragement?

Did the DFGF-I offer to trade scholarships for land and then back off the deal when the leading Mwami refused to cooperate under coercion?

The missing $10,000 from the orphanage turns out to be the tip of the million-dollar iceberg. And million dollar icebergs disappear quickly in Central Africa.

In Goma proper we found a massive, blue-roofed mansion that Pierre Kakule is completing on Lake Kivu. When asked directly, “Are you building a home on Lake Kivu?” Kakule denied it. This is no ordinary African home, but an expensive mansion in the making in the most posh and gated lakeshore community in Goma. In fact, area residents indicated that Kakule is building two mansions, almost side by side—the tip of the funding iceberg rising on the cools shore of Lake Kivu. Kakule has another plot of land with another modest compound on it, and this one is near the DFGF-I offices.

According to Mwami, “My area has three fourths of the gorillas in Tayna. When Kakule realized I did not have to sign over my rights and that I could reclaim them after I confronted him about the orphan’s money, he chased me out of my administrative job in Tayna.”

There is more.

In July 2004, Mwami wrote a letter directly to Clare Richardson of DFGF-I.

“RGT (Tayna) is currently in a structural crisis as a result of the management methods practiced by DFGF-I here in Congo. The member associations have lost respect for the structures of UGADEC (Association Union Gorilla Conservation for Development in the East of DRC) as a result of DFGF-I’s activities, which include diverting funds, suffocating innovations and encouraging elitism… there is a tribal bias to the development projects undertaken by DFGF-I, to the detriment of those areas rich in primate species. The true chiefs and landowners have been excluded from the management of the project, and not one has been placed on the office staff.”

It gets worse.

“A division based on tribal ethnicities has been engineered leaving a portion of land which makes up roughly one third of RGT without any of the agreed financial or structural support.”

The letter was copied to Patrick Mehlman of DFGF-I, and to Conservation International’s Carl Morrison, Juan Carlos Bonilla and Olivier Langrand.

We also presented the letter, in person, to a board member of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International who resides in Africa; the testimony collected from Mwami was also presented. The board member responded dismissively, and was unwilling to raise the issue formally. He/she answered with a terse letter suggesting that the war in the region would prevent anyone from going in to investigate allegations of corruption and threats of murder. He/she has refused to communicate since.

And so we have a DFGF-I board member indicating that an investigation of corruption is impossible, that the atrocities and guerrilla warfare in and around these conservation areas leave them inaccessible. A rather remarkable admission from the board member of one of the many conservation BINGOs and DINGOs whose gorilla research, field surveys and land acquisitions for “conservation” in the CARPE landscape program have proceeded virtually unchecked, amidst war and cataclysms in the Central Africa region, for decades.

The DFGF-I board member dismissed the accusations saying, “There are two sides to every story.” Indeed, one side of this story is Kakule’s blue-roofed mansion. On another side are the half-starving orphans in Mbingi—dressed in green prison garb, the Tanya Gorilla Reserve logo on their shirts—known as “Kakule’s orphans.”

There are millions of dollars in elite institutional research projects ongoing—in or around or about—all of these conservation areas; projects involving BINGOs and DINGOs and Universities like Rutgers, U. of Maryland, South Dakota State and Georgia Tech. Huge conservation conferences continue all over the world, involving governments and government departments like USAID and GTZ (German Agency for Technical Cooperation). There are a slew of Western based research centers like the Great Ape Trust of Iowa. Zoo interests also predominate, like the Frankfurt Zoological Society, the Bronx Zoo and the Atlanta Zoo. And yet, with all this activity, with layer upon layer of new “conservation” initiatives targeting primates, there has been no action taken to date to investigate the illegality and corruption of fifty years of “conservation” initiatives or their structural relationships to perpetual poverty and depopulation in Central Africa.

Professor David Gibbs writes about the relationship between Congolese chiefs and colonialist forces in his book, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention. If we substitute “CARPE” or “DFGF-I” or “Pierre Kakule” for “Administration,” as he uses it, we then have the obvious realities in Central Africa today.

The chiefs “were not always subservient toward the administration,” Gibbs writes. “Administrators complained about the ‘incompetence’ of Congolese chiefs, because the chiefs did not always cooperate with colonial directives…” The colonial administrations solved the problem by creating new indigenous authorities to bypass the chiefs who could not be manipulated, one way or another, into doing what needed to be done. “In other cases, uncooperative chiefs were simply removed.”

Added to this are the 2005 allegations that Pierre Kakule’s co-founder of the Tayna Project—a man named Jean Claude Kyungu—was threatened with death and pushed out by Kakule in 2001. Kyungu’s involvement in the acquisition of tribal lands is clearly spelled out in the December 1999 issue of the Gorilla Journal, published by Berggorilla & Regenwald Direkthilfe, an organization “dedicated to the conservation of gorillas, especially the mountain gorillas, and their habitats,” according to their website: “Jean Claude Kyungu and Kakule Vwirasihikya visited the area together to sensitize local chiefs regarding the necessity for biodiversity conservation in that area. On April 8, 1999, the chiefs of Batangi and Bamate signed an agreement to set land aside in order to create a new gorilla reserve.”

The summary of reasons for the creation of a reserve, a document created by Kakule and Kyungu, harks back to the imaginary “threats” faced by KONG.

“The most important threats to the gorillas are now overpopulation in the mountainous part of Lubero territory, and increasing destruction of the forest as a result of immigration, for example in Bapere collectivity where the population density increased from 3.3 people/km² in 1982 to 10 people/km² in 1998,” Kakule and Kyungu wrote.

According to our Mwami, “if you were from the one-third of the reserve that actually had animals, (including the elusive lowland gorilla), you were kicked out of the “university” at Tayna.”

Why? Because Kakule wanted to acquire lands that actually had gorillas—and woe to the villagers who would not vacate this territory, first described by Kakule and Kyungu as “overpopulated” in 1999.

We visited Tayna in February 2007 and learned that the gorillas were at least two days walk from the crumbling Tayna compound.

Shortly after our visit, the latest addition to the roster of Femme Fatales, Madison Slate, arrived at Tayna with film crew and crayons in hand. Jason Auslander chronicles Madison’s odyssey into the land of Kong in the April 29, 2007 issue of The New Mexican. In “A Troubled Land,” Auslander describes the total lack of animals, let alone gorillas, and the constant requests by villagers for health care.

A TROUBLED LAND INDEED

Midway through the long interview session with our displaced and dying king, a former student from the “American University” at Tayna joined us. The student, a distant relation to the Mwami, provided additional corroboration and information.

Mwami and the student concurred that DFGF-I’s Pierre Kakule has “chased” villagers away from the Tayna area that had gorillas. When we asked how, they said, “Kakule brought soldiers (Congolese) to kick them out by cutting them, killing them, beating them.”

A chief named “Manole” from the village “Ngumba” was murdered in June or July of 2006, they said. The allegedly murdered chief was 70-80 years old, and was a grandfather of the student.

Mwami’s voice rose to almost a shout as he told us that at a conservation meeting in Goma, held in Kakule’s office, Kakule told the assembled chiefs, “If you want to become like me, I will kill you.”

Evidently, in the case of chief Manole, someone did.

We asked Mwami what he wanted and why he was giving us this information. “I want DFGF-I and Kakule out of Tayna,” he said. We then asked Mwami to give us specific instances of why he feels that his life is threatened. He explained from memory, his plight, in riveting detail.

The first incident involved a case of mistaken identity, which was a stroke of good luck for the Mwami, since it seems he believes he was the intended target when the “wrong person” was arrested by security forces near his home village.

The second involves Mwami receiving a mysterious phone call telling him to take a car and collect a letter at a certain hotel. The courier refused to come to his home, but Mwami was told the courier would be waiting in a truck. Suspicious, Mwami sent someone else to the rendezvous, but the courier was nowhere to be found, and the letter was never received.

As the noir account continues, later the same night at approximately 21:30, it was dark and stormy and Mwami was in bed. His children were doing homework in the living room. They heard someone outside who tripped and fell on the volcanic rock. Then the person tapped at the door, saying “hodi” (hello, is anyone there)… and then power came back, lights came on, and the person fled.

After this incident, Mwami was subpoenaed to appear at Lubero, 300 km away from his home. According to his account, the military were stationed on the road and had been instructed to stop him. When Mwami did not materialize, one soldier and one chief went to Mbingi, the Chief of the Collectivity, and asked where Mwami was: he told them Mwami was in Goma. The suspicious chief lubricated the tongues of the military, and they spilled the beans: they said they had received orders to kill Mwami. Mwami’s contacts then sent word that “they are waiting for you on the road to Limbongo.”

Mwami says that another source of the antagonism between him and Kakule is that Mwami went to Kinshasa to inform the Minister of the Environment that the declaration regarding Tayna as a protected area was false. He and other Mwamis insisted that Pierre Kakule had forged their signatures.

We submitted a FOIA request to USAID, asking for copies of the original agreements, which can be compared to signatures supplied by the Mwami, but these are reportedly in process and have not been released.

Meanwhile, Mwami says that he knows his life is in danger and he cannot wait much longer for “something to happen.”

Finally, after the original FOIA was filed with USAID on January 1, a FOIA seeking information about DFGF-I funding and the Tayna projects, former students of the Tayna “university”—TCCB—reported on January 25 that Kakule was pressuring them to return their tuition to him. Teachers had not been paid for six months. The students wondered whether Kakule wanted the money, or whether USAID was pressuring Kakule to account for the funding.

The results of this harassment of students by Kakule are chilling since they began after we instituted a FOIA request on the status of the university. We had requested the number of students and the exact funding, since teachers had complained of not being paid. Was this a coincidence, or had USAID alerted Kakule that questions were being asked?

“We were called by Kakule this Friday, and he wanted money,” some students communicated. “We were students at TCCB before he chased us away.” TCCB, again, is DGFI and Pierre Kakule’s centerpiece “community development” project, the Tayna Conservation Center for Biology.

The students knew that USAID had funded the university and now Kakule was asking them for money to pay back USAID. The students were asking us if it was really USAID that wanted money from them, or Kakule. The students also alleged that the executive secretary of UGADEC, Busanga Changui, was in collusion with Kakule and was planning on killing former students (names withheld).

In an email received May 2, 2007, the Mwami gave a list of changes he thinks would benefit the Tayna Preserve. When asked again what he wanted to see from an investigation, Mwami again stated clearly that he “wants DFGF-I and Kakule out of Tayna.” In spite of all he has been through, Mwami said his hope was “that the lands will be reunited in love.”

Of all of Mwami’s 102 pages of documentation, none ties the players together more closely than “Document 2,” “Presentation de Patrick.” On first glance the document seems to be nothing more than notes on talk given by DFGF-I’s Patrick Mehlman that outline the background on the planned CARPE protected areas, the history of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, and a brief mention of an external evaluation of the CARPE program in Tayna. A crudely drawn organization chart shows the flow of money from USAID to CARPE and then to DFGF-I. From DFGF-I, money also goes to a player named Innovative Resources Management (IRM).

IRM is another USAID funded community “development” project in DRC run out of Washington, D.C. Active all over Congo, IRM’s particular niche and marketing strategy for winning big conservation funds centers around one of the other pivotal leveraging schemes used to exploit foreign lands and people today: “participatory mapping.” IRM has used USAID funds to purchase a sizeable boat that plies the Congo River conservation areas from Kinshasa to Kisangani, just like the steamers did in the bloody heyday of Henry Morton Stanley.

IRM comes armed with millions of dollars and satellite mapping technologies and the maps they generate, and they go into villages and win the hearts and minds of locals. They promise Congolese people—the poorest most isolated people in the world, often illiterate—a chance to map and control the resources around them. They promise them something they have never in their entire lives known to exist: agency.

They work with the chief, or the Mwami, and they throw a lot of cash around, and at the end of the day—many months or even a year later—they walk away with their satellite generated map which now can be overlain with all the newly gathered communal knowledge about local resources, hunting wisdom, agriculture, fishing rights, mining discoveries, forest secrets, gas bubbles in the swamps—and even popular trails.

This is no crumpled and disintegrating map held of the kind wielded by producer Carl Denham in Kong. This is intellectual property theft.

This is the future of Congo.

FREEDOM OF MIS-INFORMATION

The Freedom of Information request, filed on January 1, 2007 with USAID, has yet to be answered. This information would at least answer the allegation that signatures were forged on documents that committed tribal lands to the Tayna Landscape Project. It would also shed some light on missing funds. Recalling Part One of this KONG series, the USAID, CI and DFGF-I monies were subjected to an Audit by the U.S. Department of Defense Audits Agency. And the results of the audit are today a guarded secret.

Meanwhile, on May 1, 2007 “revisions” were made to the “Official” report on the Tayna Landscape Project by none other than Patrick Mehlman, the real life Monkey Smuggler in Part One of our series: KONG. Both Mehlman and CI’s Juan Carlos Bonilla are listed as authors on the “revised” Tayna report which was posted on the CARPE website.

The Mwami’s Tale has been making the rounds for at least two years with no takers. Kill a gorilla, though, and the world-wide press goes haywire with unvetted stories of the Mai Mai and other “rebel troops” hatching a plan to murder every last remaining gorilla in Northern Kivu. The savage villagers in King Kong would be no matches for the specter of tribal warriors drummed up by the mainstream press.

From Reuters to the BBC to obscure gorilla discussion forums, the lead paragraph from the latest model story in this saga, datelined Kinshasa, May 21, 2007, read EXACTLY the same in every venue: “Congolese militia are threatening to slaughter rare mountain gorillas in Congo’s Virunga National Park after they raided the eastern reserve at the weekend, killing a wildlife officer, officials said.”

Jean Claude Kyungu, the former partner of Pierre Kakule, is now Project Manager for the Mt. Tshiabirimu Gorilla Project, in the Virungas, where the gorilla incident occurred.

The saga repeats itself, like the epic King Kong film, in all its manifestations, repeats itself. Conservationist-cum-mercenary Robert Poppe summed it up succinctly after an attack on the Virunga gorillas in January. The killings began around January 5, he wrote, but there were NO denials by anyone, and there was NO world outrage, until the photos of a dead gorilla came out. Robert Poppe is working in a fairly high-level capacity on the ground in Central Africa today.

“Agreed, we are in the backwater of the world here,” he wrote, in January 2007, “the Belgiums (sic) managed to kill 10 million (people) here and no one batted an eyelid; the Rwanda genocide, one million in 100 days; not much has changed. There is nothing humanitarian NGO’s like better than a good famine and some starving kids, that’s what brings in the publicity and the cash. Pictures of a dead Gorilla will do the same for DFGF-I, WWF, the Gorilla Organization, etc. To be honest the killing of the gorilla will be forgotten in a month and sadly it will not have changed much here, but we will continue to do what we can and continue the fight.”

There is an important point to make as we consider the Mwami’s Tale. A study was recently completed in Garamba National Park, DRC. Unsurprisingly, research revealed that local social institutions and tribal leadership play a key role in regulating and preventing wildlife killing for the bushmeat trade. The authors of the study concluded that anti-poaching patrols were peripheral to successful intervention to stem illegal activities. What really mattered were local people and local institutions.

In other words, instead of publishing unvetted press releases submitted by the BINGOS and DINGOS, blaming everything on the locals, the victims one way or another, perhaps the international press should step up and interview tribal leaders in North Kivu. Alas, under the current terms of engagement, it would be yet another manipulation if they did.

Veritas vos liberabit. The truth shall set us free. Maybe.

Our Mwami, other tribal chiefs, and the people of DRC do not have massive publicity machines to tell their sides of the story. They have no administrative assistants and press offices, no travel budgets, no legions of attorneys, Congressional lobbyists, or contacts in the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa or the Washington D.C. beltway. Public relations and propaganda for primate protection remain the private terrains of BINGOs and DINGOs and their corporate funders. Indeed, the hundreds of thousands of dollars and pounds likely spent on the lawyers for the DFGF-I and DFGF-E legal battle over the Dian Fossey name could have built a school or a clinic in Walikale or Tanya, and this would have done far more to arrest the decline of the great apes in Central Africa.

The gorillas have become celebrities, and with their rising stardom, comes the inevitable exploitation by conservationists, militias, zoos, scientists, and anyone who sees that peddling a primate can perpetuate their profession. Dian Fossey said it best when she wrote that she was concerned that the media coverage of gorilla deaths promoted by the fledgling but opportunistic DINGOs of her day would cause people to “evangelistically” (sic) climb aboard the “save the gorilla bandwagon” without thinking clearly where the money was going. She called her African staff the “backbone of Karisoke,” and used her own meager inheritance to pay them. Meanwhile, even then, the funds that were solicited in her name and in the name of ‘Digit’—her favorite but martyred gorilla—disappeared. Fossey realized that without the heart-felt support of the indigenous people, the gorillas did not have a chance.

MERCENARIES IN THE MIST

The Mwami’s tale was the final impetus that drove us to the far reaches of the Tayna Gorilla Reserve to investigate the reality for ourselves. Our journey resulted in video corroboration and interviews gathered with the assistance of Robert Poppe, former employee of the London Zoological Society and former Special Forces operative (SAS) from Britain. Poppe set up the logistics and security to travel and gain access to potentially dangerous and still war-torn areas. As another indication of how funds are gobbled up with little or no benefit to the people or primates, we spent $1000 just to rent the 4x4 vehicle: that is more money than many local villagers could dream of earning in their short lifetimes. In the end, Robert Poppe stole our video interviews, equipment and notes.

Robert Poppe is today working as a paramilitary agent training rangers for the Congolese government and its conservation clique in the Virungas. Poppe has some as yet unqualified responsibilities for operations in the gorilla areas of the Maiko, Tayna and Kahuzi Beiga conservation areas—CARPE landscapes No. 10, 11 and 12. He is a professional soldier, Special Forces—he says so himself—and his story exemplifies the jungle of private interests involved in the King Kong landscapes. Poppe likes guns, lots of guns. He also worked “in Rwanda for several months during the civil war in 1994,” he said, but that is a remarkable admission for a white Special Forces soldier, because the mythology of genocide in Rwanda, we have been told, over and over, involved only those bloodthirsty killing each other, savagely and mindlessly—Hutus and Tutsis with machetes and macabre axes and hoes… butchery re-enacted by the Skull Island zombies in King Kong.

What was professional soldier Robert Poppe doing in Rwanda in 1994?

“The world must really see what is really going on here,” wrote Robert Poppe, January 18, 2007, just a few weeks before our rendezvous in Goma, where Poppe would serve as our security and transport logistician to facilitate access to Tanya and the Virungas. “It’s strange; the term Gorillas in the Mist is often used to promote the magnificence and mystery of the gorillas and the region. The problem now is that the mist that surrounds the Gorillas is misinformation, hyperbole and downright lies being promulgated by many “conservation” organizations.”

Privately, Robert Poppe repeatedly complained about conservation run amuck in Central Africa’s gorilla territories. That is why we contacted him, and how we came to be working—we thought—in the interests of truth and cooperation on behalf of the people and biodiversity of Central Africa, the stakeholders and their birthrights, and for the gorillas.

Publicly, Robert Poppe pressed a different, more expedient line, one that would hopefully serve his private interests as a conservation liaison with what amounts to a private fiefdom working for the “clique” of elite conservationists in Africa. Protecting the status quo turns out to be more important than presenting the truth and standing up for the most downtrodden people in the world.

“The DFGF does fantastic work,” Robert Poppe wrote, explaining his plans, in an email which appeared on a gorilla group’s website. “But it has a huge income concentrated in a small area and it is obviously not working as it should, demonstrated by the loss of three gorillas this month. I think it’s about time to question where the DFGF spends its money. I am a former intelligence officer and trained anti-terrorist expert. And as such I would intend to target the money men in the far east and the U.S. who fund the hunters in Africa.”

(I) “want to really hit the gun and hunting lobby,” he wrote another time, giddy with ideas. “Did you know DRC has twice as many hunting areas as national parks? All out of operation but a really good selling point to get the hunting industry interested in conservation here!! Yes, sounds a bit warped, I know, but they have what the rangers need: camouflage clothes, quads, outdoor stuff in general! (Oh and guns! Lots of lovely, shiny guns!!! Sorry must stop listening to (musician) Toby Keith, and (I) spent too long hanging around with rednecks in Iraq!)”

But Robert Poppe didn’t like what he heard local people telling us—complaints about the matrix of conservation and corruption, emotional outpourings about suffering—and he had never heard it before, because no one ever bothered to ask. After confiscating our interviews and testimonies, Robert Poppe told us that if the videos were ever viewed, “Some of the footage we have has the potential to do immense damage to (conservation) organizations and individuals and we both must protect ourselves.”

We demanded return of the stolen tapes and equipment and we were told, “It will ruin conservation in the Virungas.” When we persisted we were threatened. But our tale of hired British mercenaries running amuck in Virunga Park is yet another story. We still have a hanged man and a trip to the Tayna Gorilla Reserve to explain. And for that we will need… THE MAP.

NOTES:

1 Casement Report, British Parliamentary Papers, 1904, LXII, Cd. 1933
2 DFGF-I Press Release, “Using Advanced Spatial Technologies for Gorilla Habitat Analysis – DFGF-I,” < http://www.travelersconservationtrust.org/projects/dian_fossey.html >.
3 Mark Dowie, Conservation Refugees, Orion, November 10, 2005.
4 Chicago Tribune, March 12, 2000, Africa’s Wildlife Runs Out of Room
5 Rosamond Carr, Land of a Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda, Viking/Penguin, 2000
6 www.gorillafund.org
7 Worldsavers: Conde Nast Traveler’s 16th Annual Environmental Awards, November 2005: http://www.conservation.org/xp/news/press_releases/2005/101705.xml
8 www.conservation.org
9 USAID Power Point
10 CARPE documents and Weidemann Report
11 “Conserving Biodiversity and Saving Lives,” Feature Story, Conservation International, August 23, 2006.
12 The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International Reports Gorillas in Eastern Congo More Numerous Than Expected, DFGF-I Press Release, September 26, 2005: .
13 P.T. Mehlman, The Conservation Action Program: Eighteen Months After Inception, DFGF-I web site, September 2002.
14 Private communication,
15 Memorandum of Understanding
16 The Dian Fossey Gorilla Journal Spring 2006.
17 Worldsavers: Conde Nast Traveler’s 16th Annual Environmental Awards, November 2005: http://www.conservation.org/xp/news/press_releases/2005/101705.xml
18 Private communication, Interviewee No. 10, 7 January 2006.
19 Ibid.
20 Email record, January 2005, Witness
21 Phone Conversation with redacted interviewee, November 30, 2005
22 Private Communication, Witness, May 2007
23 ICCN Joint Communiqué, Crises in The Virunga National Park, December 17, 2006.
24 ICCN Joint Communiqué, Crises in The Virunga National Park, December 17, 2006.
25 ICCN Joint Communiqué, Crises in The Virunga National Park, December 17, 2006.
26 Georgianne Nienaber phone records
27 Document 3: “Compte Rendu de la Reunion Du 27 Mars 2003” (Minutes).
28 Mwami’s documents: Goma le 19Avril 2004
29 Gibbs p.56
30 FOI -074/07
31 Email Correspondence with FOIA office, February 26, 2007
32 Email correspondence with former student of Tayna
33 Confidential email
34 Email from Mwami to Georgianne Nienaber, May 2, 2007.
35 Mwami’s Documents: “Presentation de Patrick.”
36 Conservational International CARPE USAID Final Technical Report for Monte Alen-Monts de Cristal Landscape and Maiko Tayna Kahuzi Biega Landscape by Patrick MEHLMAN — last modified 01-May-2007 13:54: Contributors: Patrick MEHLMAN, Christopher KERNAN, Juan Carlos BONILLA, CI
37 Gorilla Journal, No. 20, June 2000
38 Private communication from Goma, DRC, Robert Poppe, January 20, 2007.
39 E. de Merode et al, “Armed Conflict and Protected Areas,” Biology Letters, 2007.
40 Fossey Archives, McMaster University
41 Ibid
42 Public correspondence between Robert Poppe and Birgitte (?), .
43 Private communication, Robert Poppe to Georgianne Nienaber, January 18, 2007.
44 Email from Robert Poppe to G. Nienaber, February 15, 2007. Copied to Robert Muir, Frankfurt Zoological Society

KONG PART FOUR: THE MAP, THE MAD SCIENTIST, THE MAYOR

“I’m talking about a primitive world,” film producer Carl Denham tells the thugs bankrolling his enterprise in the new Hollywood film King Kong, “never before seen by man.” Denham waves about his faded map, and the cinematography repeatedly zooms in on the sketchy details of the crusty, tattered old thing.

Our map story begins with the Mercator Projection. At the time of its creation in the mid-sixteenth century, the world was being conquered by sea, and sailors needed a map that would accurately show direction and distance. Latitude and longitude were plotted on a straight line, as if the earth were flat, and this incorrectly sized Africa in comparison to the “civilized” world. A good example of the shortcomings of the Mercator projection map is that the island of Greenland appears to be about the same size as Africa, when the land of Kong is actually fourteen times the size of little, mis-named frozen Greenland.

In 1974, Dr. Arno Peters developed a map that puts Africa in its proper perspective with the rest of the world. Africa is visually a giant compared to Europe or North America. When Peters unveiled his map at a European conference, it created angry debate in the world press as the white world suddenly felt small compared to big, black Africa.

Next came the maps offered by the National Geographic, tucked and folded inside the cover of the familiar yellow magazine—maps that point our thoughts away from present exploitation of the underprivileged world and into the romanticized yet primitive past. The archeological maps, the ancient mariner’s maps, even the modern oil map of Africa, according to the version put forth by National Geographic, are indisputably incomplete.

Hollywood gave us the mythological maps of King Kong and Indiana Jones, whose hero—Harrison Ford—serves on the board of directors of one of the BINGOs in this story, Conservation International.

Maps, maps, the Empire and its predilection for maps.

As the myth of a flat world finally died with Columbus and his three conquering ships, the world was proven round once and for all, and attempts to represent a three dimensional sphere on a two-dimensional surface simply would not suffice any longer.

The modern world, a world impossible for Kong’s Carl Denham to imagine, has developed such sophisticated forms of mapping that they have become de rigueur in the defense and surveillance industries. GIS (Geographical Information Systems) relies upon overlays to literally sandwich together separate coverage analysis, such as rivers, mountains, streets, highways, and village paths.

GPS (Geographic Positioning Systems) use an array of satellites to calculate position, speed and direction by triangulation. These signals travel at nearly the speed of light and are extremely accurate.

Both GPS and GIS are dependent upon the marriage of surveillance with technology. Sophisticated imagery produced by fixed wing aircraft, satellites, and radar bounced off the earth from NASA Space Shuttle missions brought high tech maps to both the civilian and defense sectors of society.

Figure 1 – A map of Africa before the use of modern mapping technology.

Figure 2 – A modern map of Africa using GPS & GIS technologies.

The international “conservation” sector is heavily invested in these complicated, high-resolution mapping technologies. The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and its gargantuan partners—USAID, Conservation International, Wildlife Conservation Society, National Geographic Society and the Georgia Institute of Technology—have led the charge in this area.

This is their private, lucrative foray into the underprivileged world, a venture seldom seen by the general public—who pays for it.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are annually funneled into the scientific mapping industry under the banners of “conservation” and the now prominent buzzwords of “sustainable development” and “capacity building.” This kind of mapping poses no problem if you are searching for your apartment complex on Google Earth, or if you want to see how much bamboo a group of mountain gorillas has devoured in its daily movements through the Virunga Mountains. If you are a small country, surrounded by hostile neighbors who want to know about population and troop movements on the border, it is another issue altogether.

In the Mwami’s Tale of this series, we introduced another specious “conservation” entity named Innovative Resources Management (IRM). Active all over Congo, IRM’s particular niche and marketing strategy for winning big “conservation” funds centers around a pivotal leveraging scheme used to exploit foreign lands and people today—pirating indigenous knowledge and intellectual property rights through the euphemistic nonsequitur of “participatory mapping.”

Waving the cross of conservation, IRM marches into remote villages, and instead of trinkets and beads and bibles, IRM is armed with millions of dollars worth of satellite mapping technologies and the maps they generate. IRM goes into villages and wins the hearts and minds of locals by promising Congolese people—the poorest most isolated people in the world, often illiterate—a chance to map and control the resources around them. They work with the chief, or the Mwami, and they throw a lot of cash around, and at the end of the day—many months or even a year later—they walk away with their satellite generated map which now can be overlain with all the newly gathered communal knowledge about local resources, hunting wisdom, agriculture, fishing spots, mining discoveries, gas bubbles in the swamps, forest secrets—and even popular transport or travel routes.

Even if these sophisticated maps and overlays were given to the villagers in a language they could understand, they would be absolutely useless. Most of these equatorial African villages are lucky if they have a transistor radio donated by the United Nations station Radio Okapi, let alone generators, computers, expertise, or software needed to view the digitized maps. Consider also that the villagers have gotten along for hundreds of years and more without maps. It is the outside corporate, forestry, mining and military interests that want “ground truthing” of the data beamed by satellite into corporate boardrooms and military compounds. Ground truthing is mapping on location. The visual inspection assessment of ground features through GPS calibrates the information beamed into the computers of nouveau cartographers.

The ground truth for the locals is that the world is very flat: they can hardly see the horizon of today’s suffering or tomorrow’s dinner or the perpetual threat of militia attacks.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION

But while most remote villages have never seen the maps their communities generously participated in making, the highly technical IRM maps have shown up in the possession of the World Wildlife Fund and other BINGOs and DINGOs. In some cases, the WWF offices in rural Congo are located within the remote, walled-in, security-protected compounds of Western extraction enterprises like the Blattner Group’s SAFBOIS company’s logging operations at Isangi, downriver from Kisangani. The little black and white panda—the WWF logo—can be seen on the SAFBOIS maps, giving them the “conservation” seal of approval.

Participatory mapping, indeed. But for whose benefit?

The Western concessionaires—logging and mining—possess the most futuristic and high-tech satellite generated maps of the areas they are exploiting. By peddling a “participatory” agenda, and presenting a united front in supposed opposition to the exploiting companies, the “conservationists” from WWF and DFGF-I and IRM have used the carrot of “participatory mapping” to swindle their partner communities. The stick comes when the locals have the audacity to complain: government paramilitary forces are immediately called in and locals are abused or arrested or both. And so—day by day—the indigenous communities have less and less because their communal landscapes are being plundered or exploited, while the list of broken promises from the BINGOs and DINGOs grows longer and longer. The local people always end up the poorer, and they are universally blamed for their own suffering.

“These conservation organizations are only throwing sand in the eyes of the poor local people,” says one local Congolese doctor working in rural Congo. “They pretend to care about the environment and they pretend to be helping the villagers stop the logging but they have a hidden agenda that is against the local people.”

A 2004 report by the USDA Forest Service (FS) summarizes the results of an exploratory trip to western Democratic Republic of the Congo. The purposes of the trip were “to observe ongoing activities in community forest planning under the aegis of USAID’s Central African Regional Program for the Environment—the CARPE Landscapes Programs—and Innovative Resources Management's (IRM) Community Options and Investment Tools (COAIT) planning process, to determine feasibility of community forest management and sustainable timber harvesting, and to identify opportunities for further FS involvement,” the report reads. COAIT is an initiative of Innovative Resources Management.

In words we can all understand, this means, “Let’s figure out how best to sustainably exploit these people and harvest their forests using all kinds of sophisticated smokescreens that make us a lot of money.” (These scientific programs proliferate and are repeatedly funded for doing nothing partly because they entertain highly scientific language meant to exclude common, ordinary readers.)

Like Carl Denham’s primitive trek in Kong, this was a land unseen and definitely uncharted—but only in terms of resources for the White Western invaders.

The FS expedition went from the western Congolese city of Mbandaka south to Bikoro and across Lac Tumba and up the Ubangi, Congo, and other rivers to many remote villages. It covered over 464 km (290 mi) by four-wheel drive, pirogue (dugout canoe), and trekking.

In a telling comment within the report, the authors wrote, “IRM should include French and Lingala or other appropriate local language on the legend of its participatory community maps. French and appropriate local language should be incorporated in IRM’s printed training materials. In addition, a dictionary, glossary or other listing of definitions and criteria for identifying items in the map legend should be provided in appropriate languages.

“We witnessed the IRM team working with communities to review maps… (and) were extremely impressed by how well the participatory mapping exercise resulted in high rapport among IRM project leaders, local IRM facilitators, community leaders, and community members,” the report says.

The report cited the possibility of “non-appropriate uses” of the data, a comment we took as an indication of the potential for abuse to arise. So late in 2006 we asked Mike Chaveas, head of Africa programs for the USDA Forest Service, if IRM took the advice put forth in the report not to formalize the GIS data because of the potential of “non-appropriate uses.”

Mike Chaveas first quoted the report back to us: “Although the participatory maps nicely depict the approximate locations and sequences of roads, trails, rivers, villages, vegetation conditions, wildlife, and resources, we concurred with IRM that the maps should not be used to estimate absolute areas or analyze spatial patterns of forest vegetation conditions and resources. We mention this here not because it was suggested to do so, but the maps, being formalized in a GIS system, could otherwise easily lend to such analyses by others, which is simply not an appropriate use.”

What? Now there are mysterious “others” involved who might abuse the process and inappropriately use the maps? Our question about the potential for abuse was not answered.

So, they can’t use the maps to quantify forest resources, except when they quantify forest resources, later. No wonder they need a map. But who are these technical maps for?

And what is the USDA Forest Service doing in equatorial Africa anyway, when the U.S. Forest Service cannot manage infrastructure at home due to funding shortfalls?

The official explanation from their website is that the U.S. Forest Service is “is providing assistance in setting-up a local Remote Sensing and GIS lab and training local technicians in to properly collect and analyze data related to the utilization of the forest resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo with the goal of supporting forest law enforcement by enabling officials to identify any illegal logging activities outside the legally attributed forest titles or within the protected areas.”

This raises the question of what is a legitimate government, and what is meant by “lawlessness,” and who is involved in “illegal” logging or mining. Having personally visited remote areas all over the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo (DRC’s little neighbor), Gabon, Cameroon and Uganda, we can attest to the laws of the jungle that exist there. If anyone can demonstrate that any manner of legitimate “law enforcement” is present in these regions, well, we will eat their map.

The Maps in this story have their own unique genesis, and they help us follow the hidden and secretive trail through the forests of monkey business in Central Africa. It is impossible to overstate the scale or scope of the research projects—and annual financial investments—of the technologies discussed below, both within and outside of the subject under scrutiny here: what the world has been given to understand as “wildlife conservation.”

GORILLAS IN THE BITS

Our genuine conservation heroine and Femme Fatale, Dian Fossey, had been laboring alone for almost ten years at her remote research station at Karisoke in Rwanda, on the steep slopes of the Virunga volcanoes, when her chief study subject and star of many National Geographic specials, the gorilla “Digit,” was killed and mutilated by poachers Fossey suspected of capturing specimens for foreign zoos. Digit died defending his gorilla group or “family unit.”

When Walter Cronkite made the announcement of Digit’s death on the CBS evening news, Fossey’s funding troubles were over. Contributions poured in from all over the world. Thus in 1978 the “Digit Fund” was born. But Dian Fossey, ever above even the whiff of monetary scandal, refused to manage the incoming funds. Fossey hired lawyer Fulton Brylawski to oversee the organization of the Digit Fund—a fund that would not squander resources on high overhead and huge salaries for its staffers. She wrote passionately to Shirley McGreal of the International Primate Protection League (IPPL) explaining how the Digit Fund would work directly to stop poaching within the Virungas. The Digit Fund would not become Digit’s “blood money,” and “every postage stamp” “would be accounted for,” Fossey wrote.

Primatologist Ian Redmond is one of the original students who worked with Dian Fossey at Karisoke in Rwanda for years. “Dian felt very strongly that the little old lady who gives a dollar in some village in the mid-western States (should know) that the money is spent protecting gorillas,” Redmond told Canadian author Farley Mowat, “and not going to a large fund which was supporting officers and vehicles and film shows and all the other stuff which is generally considered to be desirable in the conservation establishment.”

Today Ian Redmond works as chief consultant to the UNEP/UNESCO Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP) and as a trustee of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund-Europe (the Gorilla Organization). He has authored or co-authored several highly influential and highly funded international reports on the plunder of columbium-tantalite (coltan) out of Congo.

Unknown assailants murdered Dian Fossey at her Karisoke research camp in 1985. It appears that Fossey got in the way of elite smuggling networks operating in the Virunga Mountains. The circumstances of her death are still unresolved. A mysterious orange folder, containing maps supplied by a poacher, has vanished since her murder. Was Fossey murdered for these maps?

Many Rwandan contemporaries of Fossey are under current indictment by the ICTR (International Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal), but Fossey’s death is considered a lesser crime than that of genocide, and so remains largely ignored by the courts. Protais Zigiranyirazo, chief suspect and ex-governor of Ruhengeri Province, where Fossey lived and worked, languishes in custody but remains silent on the topic of Dian Fossey.

Shortly before Fossey’s murder on December 26, 1985, the acting chargé d’ affaires of the U.S. embassy in Kigali, Helen Weinland, returned to the States for some routine medical exams that took longer than necessary. It was this turn of events that left Emerson Melaven as her temporary replacement after the Christmas holiday. Melaven may have been ill-equipped for this sudden elevation to a sensitive diplomatic post, since he had previously been the representative of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Rwanda. In early interviews with the international media, Melaven stated that he and his colleagues were impressed by the Rwandan government’s response to the murder.

Helen Weinland’s memoirs of those days paint a different picture. She indicates that she followed initial events surrounding the murder with some frustration that she was not back at her post in Kigali. By the time she returned very little progress had been made in the murder investigation. Weinland states unequivocally that “…it is difficult to believe that the trial to find Dian’s killer was a rigorous search for the truth.”

Ten years later, even more suspicious events surrounded the death of gorilla researcher Klaus-Jurgen Sucker—the man believed to have out-fossied Fossey in his work in nearby Mgahinga Gorilla Park. Sucker is the Hanged Man of our series and we will tell his tragic story in Kong: Part Five. Both Fossey and Sucker were at odds with outside conservation BINGOs and DINGOs of their era.

Dian Fossey became a wealthy woman only after her death. Her last will and testament, which gave all of her savings to the Digit Fund, was overturned in 1988 by her stepfather, and the money that was destined for the gorillas was redirected to his private trust.

The Morris Animal Foundation, under the guidance of Ruth Keesling, took over the remains of the Digit Fund in 1986. The name was changed from the Digit Fund to Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, after a court battle erupted, which remains shrouded in secrecy, and which caused the split of the Digit Fund into DFGF-International and DFGF-Europe. Ruth Keesling was ousted in a takeover by the current CEO of the DFGF-I, Clare Richardson, a British national. Richardson was formerly a fundraiser for the Atlanta Zoo, and the DFGF-I currently operates in a tax-free space on the grounds of the Atlanta Zoo. Dennis Kelly, President and CEO of Zoo Atlanta, was elected to Secretary of the board of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International in November of 2006. Note that Zoo Atlanta “partners” include Chevron-Texaco, CNN, Georgia Tech University, and Lockheed-Martin, the world’s largest and most secretive aerospace and Defense Corporation.

The whereabouts of Dian Fossey’s private research materials are shrouded in secrecy. Some insider’s claim that Fossey’s original possessions were literally stolen by DFGF-I from the Digit Fund offices when the new CEO for DFGF-I, Clare Richardson, showed up at the Digit Fund offices in Colorado with a moving van and, without authorization from Keesling, crated everything off to a warehouse in Atlanta. There are claims that some of Fossey’s original letters and artifacts have been removed to the private residences of DFGF-I officials who may be using them—selling them or repackaging her research—to further their private interests and careers.

Clare Richardson, CEO of DFGF-I, sent a fundraising letter in late 2006 about a “DAUNTING” DFGF-I project to restore and protect Fossey’s original papers and diaries, which are “disintegrating with age.” The estimated cost of the project would be $150,000.

Curiously, when we first approached the Fossey Fund in 2004 about viewing the documents, we were told that the files were then under the process of digitization and that the warehouse was “dark and dusty.” Offering to bring a flashlight possibly put DFGF-I on their guard that we might shed some light on the disposition of Fossey’s records, and the disappearance of Fossey’s properties. DFGF-I’s Clare Richardson responded with a request for resumes, references and all manner of background on us, which we supplied: and then our credentials and information were promptly “lost.”

However, Fossey’s painstakingly detailed maps of gorilla movements in the Virungas are no tattered, musty old things, like the map coveted by Carl Denham in the recent cinematographic version of King Kong. Combined with cunning marketing, Fossey’s original overlays on Belgian contour maps proved to be just the gimmick the DFGF-I needed. Waving the Fossey maps around, DFGF-I partnered with USAID and the Department of Defense in the project which triggered the as yet unreleased “proprietary” audit of USAID monies spent by DFGF-I beginning in the early 2000's. Read Kong Two: The Monkey Smuggler. In short, millions of USAID—U.S. taxpayers—monies are unaccounted for, since Richardson’s takeover.

As early as 1992, with incoming grants, the DFGF-I began investing money in the new science of GIS and GPS and the many interconnected mapping technologies on the cutting edge of geographic exploration and mapping sciences. One of the new technologies DFGF-I invested in was remote sensing from airborne (fixed-wing) or satellite platforms. According to published information, the DFGF-I established its GIS and remote sensing program in conjunction with researchers at Rutgers University in 1992.

The DFGF-I forays into state-of-the-art GPS, GIS and remote sensing were, at least on the public face of things, to map gorilla habitat and food sources, and evaluate the “human encroachment” on gorilla territory. The claim is that remote sensing of the gorilla habitat provides essential information about food sources, like the availability of species of bamboos, or encroaching threats from slash-and-burn agriculture (human activity), or other changes to gorilla habitat.

It is certain that bamboo is not the map’s hidden treasure. 

The remote sensing arena has proliferated due to the efficacy of these technologies in identifying deposits of minerals or hydrocarbons—literally prospecting from aerospace platforms—and the data was therefore far more significant than a few species of bamboo. Besides, Dian Fossey thoroughly mapped the location of gorilla food sources in and around her base camp at Karisoke during her eighteen years in the Virungas.

The record shows that DFGF-I’s initiatives in remote sensing occurred in partnerships with two high-technology research firms, the Idaho-based Earth Search Sciences Inc. (ESSI) and an affiliated firm, Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI).

In their own words, in 1995 the DFGF-I “began working with other researchers and scientists to use the latest geospatial technologies to advance their studies of human encroachment (emphasis added) and gorilla habitat loss. This collaboration resulted in the formation of the Center for Conservation Technology, a program of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International.”

Suddenly, the focus had shifted from bamboo to population issues. Recall, also, that “overpopulation” was similar terminology used by alleged henchman Pierre Kakule of the Mwami’s Tale—see Kong: Part Three—to justify the establishment of the Tayna Gorilla Reserve in the DRC.

The Center for Conservation Technology was a partnership established with the Government of Rwanda, the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), Zoo Atlanta, the DFGF-I, Clark Atlanta University’s Center for Theoretical Study of Physical Systems, the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA), which is a public-private research funding organization for Georgia’s universities, and the National University of Rwanda (NUR).

This was no small-scale field conservation project. And it is just one of perhaps thousands like it.

“The project is using satellites and aircraft to carry instruments that analyze the spectrum of light reflected from soil and plants,” reported the New York Times. “Different plants and soil types reflect distinct spectrums, allowing scientists to construct point-by-point maps of the forest and its resources, including the stinging nettles, wild celery, thistles and bedstraw that mountain gorillas like to eat most.”

So now, the New York Times tells us, we are looking for wild celery. Hmmm. Not that this food source will benefit the local primates, uhh, we meant local people….

“As powerful as the project’s influence on conservation is likely to be,” the New York Times said, “it could carry an even greater importance for a Rwandan government that is struggling to recover from years of war and civil strife. Government ministries, several of which are involved in the project, hope to use it as a way to train people in the use of computers and sophisticated communications technology, said Joseph Mutaboba, Rwanda’s representative to the United Nations.”

As the New York Times then noted, there were deeper objectives to the DFGF-I project—objectives connected to the Rwandan government, certain government ministries and the United Nations.

It is also important to note that GPS and GIS and their related technologies are considered “turnkey” technologies essential to both overt and covert defense and intelligence operations. Understanding the “geography” and “mapping” is considered crucial to achieving the objectives of any mission, and these technologies are central to that.

For example, according to the U.S. military: “GPS in military is used for navigation (marine, aircraft and land navigation), bombing from aircraft, artillery spotting and correction. It is also used for intelligence and logistics by Special Forces, for enemy radar location, signal intelligence, submarine tracking, and mine location. GIS technologies also serve important weather related functions during defense and intelligence operations.”

Special Forces were heavily involved in Central Africa between 1990 and 2000, and they have maintained covert operations there, at some significant force levels, since 2000.

At a Congressional hearing in the USA in early December 1996, Republican Congressman Chris Smith asked the U.S. State and Defense Departments whether the U.S. government was providing military training to Rwanda.

Ambassador Richard Bogosian, then the State Department's Special Coordinator for Rwanda and Burundi, denied that any military operations were ongoing, beyond basic humanitarian relief.

According to Amnesty International, “Congressman Smith later found out that a detachment from the U.S. 3rd Special Forces Group (airborne) had trained between 35 and 40 Rwandese troops in a Joint Combined Education and Training (JCET) exercise in Rwanda called “Falcon Gorilla” during July and August 1996. Documents show that this mission was clearly aimed at conducting and planning counter-insurgency operations linked to incursions into then Zaire (Congo). The primary objective of the mission was to train, assist and advise selected Rwandan Patriotic Army officers in skills including basic rifle marksmanship, commando tactics, night land navigation and small unit tactics.”

Besides troop deployments and monitoring, there is also another application for GIS, GPS and remote sensing technologies: prospecting for precious minerals and petroleum. Several press releases from the DFGF-I or its remote-sensing partners, Earth Search Sciences Inc. (ESSI) and Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), actually point to their projects as being beneficial to the Rwanda government for defense and mining applications.

“Beyond gorilla habitat analysis,” reads the ESRI press release titled Mountain Gorilla Preservation Helps Rebuild Rwanda, “GIS and remote sensing technology can also help the government update its maps, manage its agricultural lands, relocate refugees, and analyze the impact of their (refugee) camps (areas known to suffer from deforestation due to trees being used for firewood and temporary shelters), as well as explore for minerals.”

The above historical description of the beginnings of the DFGF-I programs in GIS does not mention all of the DFGF-I projects in this arena. In April 1994, the Space Shuttle Endeavor was launched into orbit carrying the Space Radar Laboratory (SRL-1). In September 1994, another Shuttle carrying the SRL-2 was launched. These technologies are described in publicly available literature as “imaging radars that are being used to study earth.” The European Space Agency also had satellite remote sensing flights over Rwanda and eastern Congo in August 1994 (the ESA has monitored the region by satellite since at least 1994).

On April 6, 1994, the plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, and the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan army, was shot down on approach to the airport in Kigali.

On April 11, 1994, five days after the double presidential assassinations in Kigali, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12906: Coordinating Geographic Data Acquisition and Access: The National Spatial Data Infrastructure. “The NSDI may involve the mapping, charting and geodesy activities of the Department of Defense, relating to foreign areas, as determined by the Secretary of Defense.”

Like the NSDI, the nature of DFGF-I’s relationship with NASA is shrouded in secrecy. However, according to what information has been published, the DFGF-I collaborated with NASA ostensibly to secure satellite remote-sensing data collected over certain areas of high interest to the gorilla conservation community.

One of the DFGF-I’s principal scientists at the time was Dr. Dieter Steklis from Rutgers University, and for the DFGF-I mapping project Steklis employed a Rutgers colleague, Scott Mandry.

“NASA was flying a research radar system on the Space Shuttle in 1994, so Scott Mandry contacted former colleagues there (he worked at NASA previously), and arranged for the Virunga Conservation Area to be imaged during the shuttle flight,” Steklis said.

“This produced the first cloud-free remotely sensed view of the entire region, which was used to create an initial vegetation map. The two shuttle flights in April and September of 1994 were during and after the terrible upheaval in Rwanda, so the DFGF-I was able to record the deforestation and other effects of the many refugee camps that were near the Virungas.”

NASA had obviously released geographic terrain data to DFGF-I from the 1994 flights.

Note that NASA would not have released the entire data set, but only the unclassified data set stripped of “sensitive” military and intelligence information. The project was actually managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in affiliation with the California Institute of Technology, both in Pasadena, CA, and this was government-sponsored research under contract NAS7-1260. JPL and Caltech are involved in highly classified programs, and have been for years.

MAPPING THE APOCALYPSE—THEN AND NOW

On June 6, 2007, “climatologist” Bill Patzert from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that, due to global climate change, the “world is no longer normal.”

The expert’s prescription for recovery is a massive “good old-fashioned pandemic that wipes out millions” of people. When we heard this, our ears perked up, since this is exactly what is happening in Africa today. Consider how this relates to DFGF-I’s repeated propaganda war about “human encroachments” into gorilla habitat—and identifying, by any means possible—the location of these encroaching humans.

In 1999, Earth Search Sciences Inc. was contracted to undertake a remote-sensing mission flyover of Virungas Volcanoes National Park. Dr. Nicholas Faust was the principal scientist in charge. The ESSI mission, coordinated with the Rwanda government, occurred in August 1999 with a fixed-wing aircraft. ESSI, the Rwanda Government and the DFGF-I all received data sets after the mission—massive files with megabytes of bitmap data. According to Dr. Nick Faust, the DFGF-I project with ESSI in Rwanda lasted from 1998 to 2002, and was “pretty much concluded” some time ago.

“Dubbed PROBE-1,” the Associated Press reported at the time, “the sensor flew in a twin-engine Cessna over the green-shrouded dormant and extinct volcanoes of northwestern Rwanda where the gorillas roam, recording reams of environmental data so detailed that it has filled 22 CD-ROMs. Researchers hope the information will help them to better understand the habits, the coping mechanisms and the threat to Rwanda’s remaining 310 mountain gorillas from encroaching human settlement. The probe, a ‘hyperspectral sensing instrument,’ successfully scanned the 10 varieties of bamboo eaten by the gorillas in the three sweeps it made during a week last September, reading 128 bands of light or wavelengths, instead of the normal three picked up by orbiting satellites. The probe was developed by the Idaho-based Earth Search Sciences, Inc., one of whose owners is media mogul Ted Turner (CNN).”

Again the euphemism, encroaching human settlement, is carefully crafted into the press release.

Multiple sources have confirmed that DFGF-I CEO and President Clare Richardson personally delivered some 21 CD-ROMs of raw data from the 1999 PROBE-1 remote sensing over-flights directly into the hands of Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa, a high-level official from Rwanda’s Ministry of Defense; President Paul Kagame was completely informed. Richardson and other DFGF-I officials also met with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Rudasingwa for private discussions.

In 2006, The World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT 2006) announced the addition of Rudasingwa, who was then a former Rwandan Ambassador to the U.S., and a current visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, to the forum’s roster of speakers and panel participants, including General Colin L. Powell, USA (Ret.), former United States Secretary of State (2001-2005), one of the principle signatories and/or architects to the CARPE related Congo Basin Forest Partnership during his time as Secretary of State.

According to Dr. Nicholas Faust, the DFGF-I also gave a private briefing to the U.S. Embassy in Kigali. Asked which Department of Defense or intelligence agencies were present, Dr. Faust referred the question to the DFGF-I.

DFGF-I, as we have noted, has refused to answer any questions.

According to available tax and other financial records, it appears that the DFGF-I was about to go under until they got the USAID money for imaging studies in the mid-1990’s.

“I know for sure that the late nineties were the worst financial years at the Karisoke Research station,” one insider claims, reiterating concerns about personal safety in speaking out. “In 1998, Karisoke operations—direct gorilla support from DFGF-I—were less than $100,000. But tax forms show $660,000 in assets for that year. Where’s the money?”

Is the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International involved in spawning worthless research, or in clandestine defense and intelligence activities, or in mining adventures in Central Africa? Is the National Geographic Society also playing a supporting role in furthering defense, intelligence and mining interests in the region? Or is this merely a poignant example of how the money that is pumped into wildlife conservation and development projects in Central Africa is cycled back to the networks of privileged individuals and institutions connected to where that funding comes from in the first place?

DFGF-I's remote sensing initiatives regularly received tremendous amounts of press. Kicking it all off in December of 1999, for example, the National Geographic EXPLORER aired a television documentary about the DFGF-I remote sensing mission, titled Gorillas on the Edge; the documentary was rebroadcast on CNBC in March 2000 with a spotlight on Earth Search Sciences Inc. (ESSI).

There were additional remote sensing over flights of Central Africa involving DFGF-I in partnerships with NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense. According to public information, “data have already been processed, but have not been released outside of NASA and DOD. We (DFGF-I) are working to be some of the first to have access to this data of our study area.”

The DFGF-I programs in these high technologies transfers evidently won’t end with Rwanda. “We want to provide the training and equipment for local universities to learn to collaborate internationally,” said CEO Clare Richardson. “Ultimately, we want to have centers for GIS and remote sensing dotted around the globe.”

Reminds us of that meeting in Atlanta in December 2005, where the top brass of the DFGF-I—and their highly paid corporate lawyers—presented their map of the future Dian Fossey® brand universe and its global corporate Empire to the horrified officials of the DFGF-E, and their lawyers.

GIS and remote sensing centers dotted around the globe? Hmm. The latter statement by DFGF-I CEO and President Clare Richardson is very telling, given that the gorillas exist today only in several biodiversity hotspots in Central Africa. What is the real agenda of the DFGF-I?

THE WANNABE FEMME FATALE

DFGF-I sponsors and friends, listed in DFGF-I documents for January to December of 2003, in the $25,000 and above category included: Dr. and Mrs. Nick Faust; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Daniel K. Thorne Foundation; Zoo Atlanta; and Oracle Corporation. The MacArthur and Thorne Foundations are regular funders of DFGF-I. Turner Broadcasting (CNN) was credited with a gift in the $5000 to $9999 category, and we shouldn’t forget that CNN journalist Gary Strieker is a member of the DFGF-I Board of Trustees.

Described as a veteran correspondent, Gary Strieker was CNN International’s Chief Environmental Correspondent in Africa. Gary Strieker’s stories about primate conservation appeared in the late 1980’s, throughout the 1990’s, and into the new millennium. In this period he did numerous pieces with award-winning independent environmental reporter Karl Ammann about the bush meat trade and great apes conservation in Africa.

CNN connections to DFGF-I don’t stop there, but only a few of these will be illuminated at this point. For one thing, Gary Strieker took Rhett Turner, son of CNN media mogul Ted Turner, to visit Rwanda’s Karisoke gorilla research groups that are open only to moneyed interests: neither Rwandans nor ordinary western tourists can visit these animals.

“Gary Strieker provides sympathetic press on CNN for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International,” charged one DFGF-I critic. “It’s not about gorilla conservation. The theory is that Rwanda lets the U.S. fly over their airspace to get oil and uranium information, and in return Rwanda gets defense maps. Forget about the gorillas. This would explain why a third rate NGO like DFGF-I can stonewall Congress and get away with it. There’s no accountability, no audits, no pressure. And it’s a huge conflict of interest that Gary Strieker provides favorable DFGF-I coverage on CNN when he is sitting on the DFGF-I board.”

      

   

 

Asked about the potential conflict of interest cited above, Gary Strieker stated: “I have never done any stories about DFGF-I on CNN.” A brief search for Gary Strieker publications or broadcasts shows otherwise.

In “Poaching for Baby Gorillas Turns Deadly,” November 30, 2002, CNN correspondent Gary Strieker features as his experts on gorillas primatologist Amy Vedder of the Wildlife Conservation Society, a woman with a deep connection to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International story, and Dr. H. Dieter Steklis, Rutgers University professor, then Chief Scientific Director of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and former coordinator of the DFGF-I remote sensing operations.

Dr. Amy Vedder was a student of Dian Fossey’s who worked with Fossey at Karisoke in Rwanda. It is no historical secret that the Vedder hated Fossey. In her speeches and writing—in a systematic campaign of character assassination of the dead—Vedder has characterized Fossey as raving drunk and maniac.

Fossey biographer Farley Mowat summed up the state of affairs at Karisoke after Vedder’s arrival there as a “viper’s nest.”

Amy Vedder was employed by USAID before she was hired by the Mountain Gorilla Project, one of the DINGO’s of Fossey’s era. This association also connects Vedder with Emerson Melaven, who was in charge of the investigation of Dian Fossey’s death. Vedder is mentioned in this connection because she would become involved with satellite mapping of Central Africa in the late 1990’s—as one of the “collaborators” in Central African countries for “validation of the regional image classification” through NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Amy Vedder was responsible for setting up the Congo Gorilla Forest at the WCS Bronx Zoo in New York, a six-acre exhibit boasting “over 300 animals, including the one of the largest breeding groups of lowland gorillas” in the world. The Congo Gorilla Forest doesn’t once mention or refer to gorilla research pioneer Dian Fossey. Lowland gorillas are the prize of the Tayna Project and centerpiece of the Mwami’s Tale. The WCS Gorilla Forest is literally falling apart, and while it charges fees that are claimed to be directed toward gorilla conservation in Central Africa, some gorilla experts believe the funds are misappropriated for other WCS operations in New York.

Amy Vedder was one of the individuals who carried Dian Fossey’s body down the mountain, wrapped in a sleeping bag, so the omission of Fossey’s important historical contribution to gorilla conservation is rather remarkable.

Many of Vedder’s press releases suggest that she, Amy Vedder, is single handedly responsible for the survival of the Mountain Gorilla as a species. But, Amy Vedder was only an understudy for the roster of true Femme Fatales to enter the life and times of Kong after Fossey’s death.

Vedder’s biography, posted by a booking agent, Grabow Entertainment, says in part, “in addition to her in-depth work with mountain gorillas, Amy Vedder has managed wildlife conservation programs in over 100 projects on four continents while serving as Director and Vice President of the Wildlife Conservation Society. She has recently initiated a new program entitled “Living Landscapes,” in which large scale conservation efforts are extended beyond the borders of parks and reserves to meet the needs of wildlife species in contexts of complex social, economic, and political interests.”

Once again, the subtext speaks of extending conservation interests beyond the borders of parks and into the lives, hearts and hearths of indigenous populations, and always for their betterment. But the ground truth for the locals, as we have mapped out, and will map out again, is starkly, and horribly different.

On April 17, 2005, CNN ran a video story with Gary Strieker reporting on gorilla survival from the Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda. His primary sources for this story were Clare Richardson, CEO of the DFGF-I, and another British national, Katie Fawcett, a DFGF-I researcher based in Rwanda.

Challenged with the information that he had, clearly, reported on DFGF-I activities for CNN, Gary Strieker maintained that this simply was not true. Offered the exact date and title of the earlier story from 2002, Strieker finally consented that, well, perhaps he had done one story after all which had some DFGF-I link to it. But that was the only one, he said, and it was quite some time ago. When we suggested that there were definitely other stories that he was perhaps forgetting about, Strieker hung up the telephone.

“So why did Strieker tell such a BIG lie?” asks one source close to this story.

“Gary and I have worked on a few pieces for CNN,” said journalist Karl Ammann. “And he is doing the post-production now for another one in return for U.S. rights. The pieces we do together are straightforward. I was not aware that he was on the board of DFGF-I until you told me. I do not know how much any of the board members really knows what is going on. They seem to mostly appoint ‘donor type of characters’ who can then throw some cocktail parties. I have told JGI (Jane Goodall Institute) board members what is going on with JGI projects in Africa and generally I find they have no clue… Whenever I take on an NGO the story tends to be the same. Everybody lives on telling success stories and the reality on the ground tends to be the opposite.”

Notably, in 1994, Gary Strieker was the CNN correspondent who covered the cataclysm in Rwanda. Amy Vedder has also written extensively about Rwandan politics. Like virtually every single Western media source, the story sold to the public was the story of the “One-Hundred Days of Genocide.” The Western media failure to accurately cover the events of 1994, which CNN and Gary Strieker played a part in, was another of those tidied up frameworks that peddled the mythology of tribalism and savagery in Africa. The savage zombies depicted in KONG are symbolic of the real-life images of genocide in Rwanda.

The deeper military realities were completely hidden.

“I was with the RPF (Rwanda Patriotic Front), behind their lines, during the war,” says Strieker. This admission helps to explain the one-sided reportage that whitewashed the U.S. involvement in genocide in Rwanda from 1990 to today.

In a major military psychological operation—PSYOPS—against the western public, the media saturated the public mind with images of the dead, the withered, fleshless skulls and mangled skeletons—the mindless tribal slaughter—of black Africans killing black Africans. According to the media it was hopeless: Joshua Hammer for Newsweek reported that the best “we could do” is to “sit out the slaughter and wait.” These images of withered skeletons have been replayed to the Western “news” consuming public again, and again, and again. They always accompany some mythological text spinning the sordid tale of how the U.S. was a “bystander” to genocide.

In a telephone interview, CNN correspondent Gary Strieker admits that he operated as an embedded reporter behind the safety of the Rwandan Patriotic Army lines. As the conflagration unfolded, Gary Strieker—one of few journalists to cover the unfolding carnage—operated only from within the “safe zone” behind the lines of RPF control.

ENTER THE MAD SCIENTIST

For another, more curious connection behind the sordid stories and manufactured myths, as we have already noted, Ted Turner is an owner-shareholder in Earth Search Sciences Inc. (ESSI), which in 1999 loaned the state-of-the-art “hyperspectral” probe to the DFGF-I / Georgia Tech team who performed the interesting “studies” in Rwanda under the direction of Dr. Nicholas Faust.

Dr. Faust is the “Mad Scientist” of this tale, as much as there is one, and he won’t be waving a tattered old map. Dr. Faust is one of the DFGF-I sponsors cited previously in the “$25,000 or above” category of donations

Along with CEO and President Clare Richardson and Dr. H. Dieter Steklis, Dr. Nicholas Faust is one of the key architects of the GIS related thrusts with the Rwanda government and the National University of Rwanda (NUR). Dr. Faust is said to be part of the deep “inner circle” of the Western classified remote sensing and intelligence arena.

“The idea of tying GIS, geographic imaging, GPS, and communications together is a fairly new concept that we hope to explore through this collaboration,” explained Dr. Nicholas Faust, in several gorilla conservation articles.

Dr. Faust is the principal DFGF-I research scientist for GIS projects and associate director of the Georgia Tech Center for GIS. He is the co-founder of a GIS software technology program called ERDAS—Earth Resources Data Analysis Systems. He is the principal scientist behind both the ESRI and ESSI corporations, and he is deeply involved in the Georgia Research Alliance.

Dr. Faust’s replies to all inquires, while not hostile or openly un-cooperative, were terse, simplistic and generally uninformative and evasive. Asked if the DFGF-I remote sensing projects were tied to international security and intelligence interests operating in Central Africa, either the interests of the United States, Belgium or Rwanda, Dr. Faust inquired, “What interests are these?”

Dr. Faust later responded that he “did not know of any U.S. security interests” in the Central Africa region. However, Dr. Faust is clearly aware of defense and intelligence interests, because they are listed on ESSI’s own web site. Asked if remote sensing activities by ESSI and DFGF-I would also “clearly benefit U.S. defense and intelligence interests,” Dr. Faust replied: “Not clear to me??”

When asked about the sanitation of remote sensing data, whereby the defense and intelligence establishment removes all sensitive information before anything at all—like vegetation information for a gorilla conservation organization—is declassified and allowed to enter the public or commercial arena, Dr. Faust replied: “I’m not aware of such a sanitization procedure or what raw data would look like.”

However, other information suggests that Dr. Faust is intentionally obfuscating the picture.

A publisher’s blurb for the book Landscape and Life along the East African Rift: the Virunga Mountains, Rwanda, by Robert E. Ford—a scientist who worked in the Virunga Mountains from 1983 to 1992—notes that it “includes a few satellite images taken by the SIR-C (Shuttle Imaging Radar) mission of NASA and JPL, Pasadena. The actual images were first “cleaned-up” and prepared for interpretation for the Dian Fossey Mountain Gorilla Project by the Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis of Rutgers University as part of a public-use NASA contract.” The publisher’s use of quotes around “cleaned up” underscores the “public-use” aspects of the declassified data.

“The big picture is that the USAID-CARPE Program is not releasing the resolution they are getting,” says one remote sensing expert working for a company on the inside of defense and intelligence programs. According to this expert, who used the example of a commercial satellite called LANDSAT, “If you look at the images they have released from the LANDSAT satellite…they have removed the detail.”

“If the government (USAID) asks for imaging, they have to pay the commercial company (ESSI or ESRI) for it. Then the government usually asks that the imagery be removed from the commercial site—where any of us can buy it—for a certain amount of time. If the government requests this, it is usually done. Of course, the buyer (CARPE, or DFGF-I, funded by USAID) does not want to anger the government (USAID) so they will take the detail from the image so that the image is worthless to anyone who could take it from their (buyer’s) web site. This also hides exactly what they are seeing and mapping. It would be nice to believe that all they care about is gorilla habitat.”

Examples of highly sensitive remote sensing maps cleared or sanitized for “unclassified” publication can easily be found on the Internet. The statement by Dr. Nicholas Faust—denying that remote sensing information is not highly screened and sanitized by defense and intelligence interests—is ludicrous.

When asked about the DFGF-I coming under fire for failing to provide required audits, Dr. Faust commented that the “ESSI flights and analysis were done FREE for publicity for a National Geographic special.” Further outlining the DFGF-I’s piggybacking on top of the funding of others, one news story about the collaboration with PROBE-1 reported, “Much of the money for the first two years of the project is from a $300,000 grant from the state-financed Georgia Research Alliance.”

If these facts are true however, and the DFGF-I was piggy-backing its remote sensing work on other funding, then it suggests that there may be an even greater lack of transparency for DFGF-I activities because some of the activities the DFGF-I is claiming to spend funds on—for example, remote sensing—have actually been donated by partner organizations, like ESSI and Georgia Tech. If the DFGF-I has not had to pay for these projects, or at least some of them, for which they have received USAID funds, then where is all the money going?

When asked a very specific question “about how researchers expect GIS technologies to benefit the gorillas, for example, given the rates of human encroachment, the illegal militias operating in these areas, and the criminal activities of these,” Dr. Faust answered with these incomplete sentences: “Monitor vegetation health and distribution (habitat). Potential food groups for gorillas (nettles, bamboo, etc).”

Huh? Excuse us? There are huge disconnects between the questions asked and the answers Dr. Nicholas Faust has given. Will researchers use bamboo and nettles to fight off the heavily armed militias who are always accused of poaching gorillas—those alleged Mai Mai savages, for example, whose representations we saw in the Skull Island savages of Kong—or use stinging nettles to fend of soldiers of all stripes and nationalities who are raping young women and girls and pillaging whole villages in the region?

Dr. Faust initially responded to a question about DFGF-I remote sensing projects in 1994 by declaring that the DFGF-I had not been involved in remote sensing in Rwanda in 1994. He later stated that he was not involved with the DFGF-I until 1998, suggesting that he didn’t know about the Space Shuttle Endeavor flights at the height of the “genocide.” But a later comment suggests that he did know about the NASA flights of 1994.

In fact, it is not plausible to believe that Dr. Nicholas Faust, who joined Dr. Dieter Steklis to lead remote sensing projects in Central Africa, would begin the projects in 1998 without first being or becoming familiar with preceding research. Also, comments by his close remote sensing affiliate, Dr. H. Dieter Steklis, indicate that the plan was always to produce vegetation maps of the Virungas by combining hyperspectral data collected by fixed-wing in 1999 with the 1994 NASA data. They also claimed they would translate some of Dian Fossey’s original findings onto the maps they would make.

Responding to questions about the risk of transitioning such key defense and intelligence technologies to foreign governments—or their falling into the hands of terrorists—Dr. Faust indicated that the data collected by remote sensing projects in 1999—using the ESSI Probe-1 technology—was of rather poor quality. If this is true, it is the ultimate condemnation of this technology, and further indication that a lot of so-called “conservation” money is being thrown into a big black hole, a “heart of darkness” centered on private moneyed interests, but one that feeds off the blood of poor Africans.

“Your email indicates that the resolution (of these technologies used by ESSI and DFGF-I) isn’t very good,” Dr. Faust was asked in follow-up question, “so you are saying that there can’t be any kind of National Security issue—and even the gorilla vegetation, for which the surveys are undertaken, isn’t represented very well... Is that correct? “Yes,” Dr. Faust replied.

However, contradicting Dr. Faust’s statements are his own countless research papers lauding the incredible efficacy of these technologies. There are also his own organizations’ press releases: “The PROBE-I instrument delivered highly accurate images” (emphasis added), reported ESSI. “If current satellite technology were like a magnifying glass,” reported Dr. Larry Vance, founder and chairman of ESSI, “our PROBE-1 technology would be the equivalent to an electron microscope. A satellite may be able to tell you a particular area is a forest, but PROBE-1 can tell you what kinds of trees and plants are in that forest and the state of its health.”

But the kinds of bamboos and species of plants are not all that the PROBE-1 can see. Examples of the power of certain remote sensing and imaging technologies include the two Lacrosse American Spy Satellites KH-12, whose optical sensors, perpetually pointed back at earth, can snap clear photographs of objects on the ground that are no larger than a paperback novel, from 120 miles up (264 kilometers).

It is important to recognize that Dr. Faust has been heavily involved in “counter-drug-enforcement” initiatives, involving federal intelligence agencies, and with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Faust is also deeply involved with the Georgia Institute of Technology, known to be a hotbed of CIA activity and CIA-backed academics, with many connections to the National Security apparatus.

Dr. Faust has been the principal investigator on research projects at Georgia Tech that were funded by the Department of Defense (Army Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research). Dr. Faust has also presented countless papers on GIS technologies and remote sensing. One of these, at a Department of Defense sponsored conference, listed Dr. Nicholas Faust’s affiliation as U.S. Department of Defense; his paper was co-authored with seven people all listed as U.S. Department of Defense.

“Nick Faust is downplaying the capabilities of remote sensing,” says one remote sensing expert who evaluated Dr. Faust’s responses to inquiries about the DFGF-I and his work in Central Africa. “DFGF-I employs similar techniques, depending upon the funding outcome it is seeking. For example, the numbers of Grauer’s and lowland gorillas seem to rise and fall depending upon the circumstances. When requesting federal funding, DFGF-I paints a dire picture of the numbers of gorillas remaining. When touting its accomplishments, DFGF-I points to significant increases in the populations. In a similar manner, Dr. Faust downplays the capabilities of Probe-1 when asked about military and mining operations that seem counterproductive to environmental goals. But DFGF-I and ESSI both tout the advanced capabilities of Probe-1 in press releases that laud the environmental work that they are supposedly doing in the Great Lakes Region.”

“But all that ESSI does these days is mineral exploration for DOD and others,” this expert claims. “They are very up front about military applications of what they do.”

“These guys aren’t looking for habitat,” comments another remote sensing expert who has visited ESSI facilities and works in the classified arena, “they are looking for oil, which is what they do, and they probably got funding for habitat assessment from USAID and are using the data to provide their owners with oil, minerals and uranium info. I’m not aware of any natural resource vegetative project that they have done in the past. It strictly sounds like taking the taxpayer dollar to fatten some oil guy’s pockets.”

Indeed, looking at ESSI’s and ESRI’s government and corporate partners, one might get the idea that there really is something very slippery going on behind the King Kong screen. Before we get into that dark forest of invasive species, it is important to remember what we are talking about: gorilla “conservation” in Central Africa.

The Environmental Sciences Research Institute was born at Harvard University in the 1970’s, and they expanded rapidly. ESRI became increasingly defense and intelligence oriented, but their classified portfolio took off exponentially in 1989, when ESRI was awarded a $10 million contract with the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency. In 2002 ESRI was selected as a subcontractor to defense giant Northrup Grumman on a $72 million contract from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency; the team provides critical GIS software and mapping technologies for mission applications for the Department of Defense. ESSI partners today include the George Herbert Walker Bush connected Barrick Gold Corporation.

ESRI has worked with its partner company, Oracle, since 1995. ESRI’s other partners include Intel, National Geographic, and the secretive U.K. aerospace and intelligence firm BAE Systems. BAE Systems is known for connections to clandestine mercenary activities in Africa. BAE connected John Bredenkamp is one of Britain’s 50 richest men, a crony of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, an arms dealer and long-time exploiter of Congo’s mineral wealth, and a friend of Washington interests.

Several of ESRI’s annual GIS industry conferences have had very notable conservation themes.

At the 21rst Annual ESRI International User Conference in 2001, Wildlife Conservation Society explorer J. Michael Fay spoke about his 15-month, 1,200-mile trek through Central Africa. This became known as the Central Africa ‘Mega-transect’ and it was purportedly part of the impetus behind the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), a massive project advertised by numerous National Geographic magazine features and film specials.

The enthusiasm generated after the talk spurned ESRI to create a Web site with the mission of raising some $3.6 million to purchase the logging rights to about 600,000 acres of Gabon’s Langouz Forest and support legislation to make it a national park. Fay’s “mega-transect” benefited from regular helicopter drops of supplies costing tens of thousands of dollars a day, and given the quality of life of the people in Central Africa, the expedition’s funding levels were obscene.

As defined by USAID: “The Congo Basin Forest Partnership seeks to promote economic development and alleviate poverty, while promoting forest conservation programs in Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Republic of the Congo… CARPE will contribute to the partnership’s goals through its investment in the greater Basin area, while the U.S. contribution will help further CARPE’s goals through its support to the eleven priority landscapes within the CARPE project area. Implementing partners include: African Wildlife Foundation, Conservation International, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Peace Corps, Smithsonian Institution, U.S. Department of Agriculture/Forest Service, University of Maryland, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, University of Virginia, Wildlife Conservation Society, World Resources Institute, and World Wildlife Fund.”

Dr. Jane Goodall was the speaker at the 25th Annual ESRI Conference in 2005. In front of an audience of 14,000 people, Dr. Goodall described her amazing observations, gleaned over 40 years of chimpanzee studies at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, but she pointed out that the chimpanzee population was ‘vanishing as we speak.’ What was once a population of one million is now down to 150,000. “There are many reasons why they are disappearing,” according to Dr. Goodall.

When ESRI and its Conference attendees laud the work of J. Michael Fay or Dr. Jane Goodall, and seek to support it, what kind of “conservation”—meaning conservation of what, for whom, and until when—do these backers have in mind? Secretary of State Colin Powell negotiated the CBFP treaty with regional nation-states of the Congo Forest Basin, including Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Gabon, Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.

Examining the U.S. logging and mining companies which signed onto the CBFP—companies like Georgia Pacific and Weyerhauser—it is clear to see—for anyone willing to open their eyes—that the CBFP has much more than a wildlife and nature “conservation” agenda, unless we define conservation to mean reserving for tomorrow what we don’t yet need to feed the machines of today. Perhaps, on the other hand, “conservation” in this context translates to setting aside “nature reserves” in otherwise impoverished countries for the exclusive use of high-paying customers from the West—which will apparently include the foot-soldiers of the Department of Defense sent to train in some remote tropical forest walled off by the client-government and its extensive security apparatus.

Notable examples of client dictatorships in Central Africa today, and CBFP signatory countries, include Gabon, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Uganda and DRC. But in this case, conservation translates to acquisition and control and, ultimately, the not-so-new ethic of an age-old land-grabbing imperialism that throws out the rightful, traditional owners of the land. Remember the Mwami’s Tale?

THE MAYOR and HIS CRONIES:

In Kong: Part Two: The Monkey Smuggler, we met the Mayor of Beaufort Virginia—Dr. David M Taub, the former owner and then President of the monkey-smuggling firm, LABS of Virginia. The second Mayor to surface in this story is the Honorable Andrew Young, Mayor of Atlanta. Recall that when the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund held their gala fundraiser and pre-release King Kong showing, one of the big name celebrities they billed for the draw was former U.S. Ambassador and Mayor Andrew Young.

First there is the exclusive consulting firm Young founded, Goodworks International, a U.S.-based lobbying firm. Goodworks’ clients include the Governments of Nigeria and Angola, two governments heavily involved in massive human rights abuses connected to extractive industries. Goodworks’ corporate clients with interests in Central Africa include Chevron-Texaco, Guinness, Monsanto, Coca Cola, and—appropriately enough —Barrick Gold.

Guinness is one of the recognizable brand names smartly placed in the recent Hollywood film Blood Diamond. We will explore the Honorable Andrew Young’s ties to the bloodletting in the coming sequel to this series, KONG: Guerrillas in the Mists.

Oracle Corporation is another firm whose name is all over place as a sponsor or partner of the DFGF-I and its work in Central Africa. Oracle was first noted for a donation to DFGF-I programs in 2003 of “$25,000 or more.” Oracle was also cited in DFGF-I and ESSI press releases for direct support of remote sensing programs.

Oracle is an information and communications company deeply intertwined with internet technologies and the Department of Defense. Oracle documents list their top aerospace and defense customers as Boeing, General Dynamics, NASA and Honeywell, while their big petroleum and natural gas customers include the China Petrochemical Development Corporation, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), Shell, Schlumberger and Halliburton. Boeing is partnered with the Government of Rwanda on several key projects; at least one of which is connected to DFGF-I.

The above business links and corporate partnerships place Oracle smack in the middle of the ongoing war for Darfur, Sudan.

Oracle director Jack F. Kemp is the former Republican candidate for Vice-President of the United States (1996), was a member of congress for 18 years, and served in the G.H.W. Bush administration from 1989 to 1993. Kemp also serves as a Director of Hawk Corporation, an aerospace and defense firm that counts the U.S. Department of Defense amongst its many clients. Kemp is a trustee of the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa (ASNSA), a very curious group of primates indeed, and one we will dissect later.

Oracle also brings the Hollywood connection back into focus.

Oracle director Jeffrey S. Berg has been an agent in the entertainment industry for over 35 years. Berg is also the long-time Chairman and CEO of International Creative Management, Inc., a talent agency and promotional firm for the entertainment industry. According to their web site, ICM “orchestrates production and development deals and structures and obtains independent financing for film projects. Additionally, the agency represents domestic and foreign films for sale to distributors and broadcasters in individual overseas territories.

Recent motion pictures the agency has packaged include triple-Oscar® nominee Hotel Rwanda. ICM is the public relations and management agency for Gorilla’s in the Mist actress and DFGF-I supporter Sigourney Weaver.

Conservation International director Barry Diller is also a director of IAC/Interactive Corporation, and of Coca Cola Company, the Washington Post, and FOX Broadcasting. Coca Cola is another of the brand interests advertised on the Manhattan billboards inside the King Kong storyline.

Coca Cola is based in Atlanta, a partner of Zoo Atlanta and a supporter of the DFGF-I.

The satiric movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy, hits pretty close to home for Congolese and Rwandan villagers when one ties together all of these players.

In “The Gods,” an empty Coke bottle drops from the sky near an African hunter and is brought into his camp, but after causing much trouble for the group, the hunter tries to return the bottle to the Gods who must have dropped it. It is a spoof on the bushman of the Kalahari—who are being herded into death camps today for Anglo-American (partnered in Africa with Barrick Gold) and BHP-Billiton diamond mining.

Coke is EVERYWHERE in Africa, even the most remote villages in Rwanda and Congo. Makes you wonder why, and how, given that there are no basic education or health care in the same places.

Coke director James Williams is a former director of Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks, and a director of Georgia Pacific Corporation. Both Georgia Pacific and International paper—huge logging conglomerates—have signed on to the euphemistically named Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP) for Central Africa.

The media connections to these defense, intelligence, oil and mining corporations clearly explain the fact that the western media has not equitably reported—if at all—on a single issue of consequence to the Central Africa region. In fact, reportage is selective, exclusive and universally disingenuous. Media coverage of wildlife, conservation or natural resource issues are generally favorable to the agenda of the BINGOs and DINGOs and their backers, and hostile to the interests of the people, wildlife or landscapes in Africa, who are routinely and casually blamed for their own suffering.

Have the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund or any of their BINGO and DINGO partners issued press releases about extortion, racketeering, crimes against humanity and genocide committed by the agents of the governments of Central Africa and their foreign bakers? Never. For one single but perfect example of this exclusive non-reporting, has anyone reading this story ever seen a news report of any kind about the Bongo dictatorship in Gabon massacring thousands of students at Port Gentil, Gabon? Instead we have the National Geographic peddling the Congo Basin Forest Partnership with photos of surfing hippos and former U.S. General Colin Powell in Gabon.

“If you can show me one conservation or NGO report on Kahuzi Biega and coltan that pinpoints the key players,” wrote wildlife photographer Karl Ammann, who is working with DFGF-I director Gary Striker, “then I will eat this email. Nobody with any stakes in the region ever dares to criticize; that even goes for most of the press. However to do reports without naming the real source of the problem is assisting with window-dressing. I have maintained for a long time that the conservation NGOs are part of the problem rather then the solution.”

It is not only that the BINGOs and DINGOs of the so-called “conservation” community are involved in specious forms of conservation: many of these are blatantly anti-conservation, hostile to true nature preservation and earth defense, working to target local villagers who dare to blockade international logging or mining cartels, and this too is a story we have yet to tell.

But the general public is no longer able to see the trees in the conservation forest. Looking into the monkey hole we find that we have only touched the tip of the funding iceberg: we’re talking about a lucrative world, billions of dollars in annual funding in remote sensing and mapping. The scale and proliferation of these technologies, programs, and organizations working with them are astronomical. Their hidden agendas befuddle even the most curious primates amongst us.

NEXT:
KONG: PART FIVE--The Road to Tayna and the Hanged Man

Nienaber chided her “bodyguard” Robert Poppe: What are the Mai Mai going to do, shoot the Muzungu and eat her?”

She didn’t receive the answer she was expecting. “They are cannibals,” he replied. Great, the myth of the Mai Mai grows. “Do you have proof of this?”

“Oh there is proof all right, up in Ituri. The farmers have proof.”

Writing about this experience, Nienaber said, I never got a clear answer about this “proof,” but alleged cannibalism was definitely NOT on my agenda, so I let it drop. Inside, I was seething. I felt like I had become the enemy of the Congolese people by virtue of my inability to help the desperate people I have seen all day, not realizing at the time that Poppe was now out to get me.”

But, the HANGED MAN had it worse. Like his predecessor, Dian Fossey, THE HANGED MAN was a dedicated activist whose first priority was the protection of the plants and animals that inhabited the park. Sounds a bit like the Mwami’s Tale, except that the Mwami lived to tell his.

NOTES:

1 See the petroleum map in National Geographic, September 2006, and compare with the oil maps in the Sudan/Somalia section of the journalism pages at .
2 Trip Report for International Programs Office, USDA Forest Service, Washington, D.C. ,Final version: December 15, 2004
3 Ibid
4 http://www.fs.fed.us/global/globe/africa/basin.htm#4c
5 Nienaber, Georgianne; Gorilla Dreams: The Legacy of Dian Fossey, iUniverse, 2006
?Weinland, Helen; Life Abroad with Uncle Sam: Foreign Service Days, 1st Books Library
6 From the archives of Farley Mowat, author of Woman in the Mists: The Story of Dian Fossey and the Mountain Gorillas of Africa, Time-Warner, 1988.
7 Gorilla Dreams: The Legacy of Dian Fossey
8 Ibid. Dian Fossey did not get along with her stepfather. His death has left a probate court wrangling over the legal issues involved, spending more of the money that Dian Fossey intended to have used for gorilla conservation.
9 DFGF-I correspondence, Erika Archibald, Ph.D, press officer
10 ESRI Press Release, Winter 2001: < http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/winter0001articles/mtngorilla.html >
11 Glanz, James, “Tracking Gorillas and Rebuilding a Country,” New York Times, Section: F, p.3.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 http://web.amnesty.org/pages/ttt3_training
15 ESRI Press Release, < http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/winter0001articles/mtngorilla.html >.
16 Surveillance of Gorilla Habitat (SOGHA), Space Technologies in support of the World Heritage Convention, Project Plan.
17 See: Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 4/18/1994.
18 “Using Advanced Spatial Technologies for Gorilla Habitat Analysis – DFGF-I,”
http://www.travelersconservationtrust.org/projects/dian_fossey.html
19 Private communication, Dr. Nick Faust, 2006.
20 Private communication, interviewee No. 4 & interviewee No. 2, 2005.
21 Private communication, Nicholas Faust, 24 February 2006.
22 Ibid
23 “Mountain Gorilla Protection: A Geomatics Approach,”
24 “Gorillas Endangered: Technology boosts efforts to save Africa's endangered mountain gorillas,” Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine Online, 2000.
25 Interviewee No. 1.
26 Telephone interview, Gary Strieker, May 2006.
27 < http://rainforests.mongabay.com/baby_gorilla_poaching.htm >;
28 http://southport.jpl.nasa.gov/centralafrica/africa_proposal.html#rationale
29 Gary Strieker, CNN, 17 April 2005.
30 Telephone interview, Gary Strieker, May 2006.
31 Private communication, Karl Ammann, 27 May 2006.
32 Joshua Hammer, Newsweek, April 1994.
33 John Wiley & Sons: < http://www.wiley.com/college/geocases/cases/case7/slide_intro.html >.
34 Private communication, interviewee No. 1, from additional source, 2005.
35 James Glanz, “Tracking Gorillas and Rebuilding a Country,” New York Times, Section: F, p.3.
36 Private communication. Dr. Nicholas Faust, January 2006; James Glanz, “Tracking Gorillas and Rebuilding a Country,” New York Times, Section: F, p.3.
37 Ibid.
38 See: “List of Attendees,” National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC), Research and Development (R&D) Exchange Workshop, March 2003, Atlanta, Georgia: < http://www.ncs.gov/nstac/rd/nstac_03list.html >.
39 See: The Seventh Annual International Crime Mapping Research Conference: < http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/boston2004/agenda.html >
40 Private communication, interviewee No. 1.
41 Ibid.
42 Private communication, interviewee No. 8.
43 Biodiversity Conservation: A Report on USAID’s Biodiversity Programs in Fiscal Year 2002, USAID, 2002.
44 ESRI Press Release, “Jane Goodall Tells Her Story at ESRI’s 25th User Conference,” 2005:
< http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/fall05articles/jane-goodall.html >.
45 See: keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception About those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June 1, 2007.
46 One ICM director, a Mr. Levy, also sits on the board of directors of UNICEF.
47 See keith harmon snow, Hotel Rwanda: Hollywood and the Holocaust in Central Africa, .
48 See keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception About Those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June 1, 2007.

KING KONG 5: The Hanged Man

“Due to the current security problem within the National Park, in spite of the ongoing civil war in Rwanda, it was not possible to continue with other plans to develop, manage and organize the national park. Fighting has been ongoing along the border to Rwanda and within the conservation area. Unfortunately, a park ranger lost his leg…”

Klaus Jurgen Sucker
Mgahinga National Park Uganda, 1991 (1) 
         

 

 

They say Klaus-Jurgen Sucker was beginning to look like the Silverback Gorillas he so tenaciously protected in Mgahinga Gorilla National Park (MGNP). Friends noted that an eerie change took place in his physical form. His hair was turning a premature grey as he struggled to “out-Fossey Dian Fossey”—a term used to describe a conservationist who betters his or her predecessors—and find a way for humans and wildlife to co-exist both inside and outside of Mgahinga National Park.

Mgahinga is a tiny wildlife park in southwestern Uganda and adjoins the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is a contiguous extension of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga National Park and Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park. The 700 critically endangered mountain gorillas roam freely across the international borders of this rugged landscape, and the murdered American naturalist, Dian Fossey, is buried there.

In 1989, Klaus-Jurgen Sucker began working in the middle of a metaphoric fault line that was about to erupt with undreamed of consequences. Simmering like the volcanoes that gave birth to the Great African Rift Valley, the region had been a cauldron of ethnic unrest, tribal animosities, colonial control and multi-national meddling for centuries.

In 1990 the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA)—the military wing of the exiled Rwandan Patriotic Front—launched an invasion of Rwanda from the mountains of southwestern Uganda. Backed by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF), the RPA guerillas waged a low-intensity war that would eventually overthrow the government of Rwanda amidst the “100 days of genocide” in 1994. The United States, Britain, Belgium and other outside military interests have not yet escaped the judgment of history for their parts in the cataclysm of 1994.

When Klaus Sucker arrived in Uganda the country was in shambles. The government of Yoweri Museveni—which has now survived for twenty-two years as a one-party dictatorship——had fought a bloody civil war and won significant control of the country in 1985. The government was controlled by the National Resistance Movement/Army (NRM/A) and backed by Western powers. Uganda needed foreign exchange, and gorilla tourism supported by the Western “aid” enterprise offered an easy and lucrative source of cash. Ugandan wildlife parks like Mgahinga, the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Kibale National Park and the Queen Elizabeth National Park were targeted for “reconstruction” and would soon be given the friendly facelift of public relations and advertising. But the wildlife populations in all of Uganda’s wildlife parks suffered massive declines as animals were slaughtered during the years of civil war.

Two German conservation organizations jointly founded the Mgahinga program, named the Gorilla Game Reserve Conservation Project, which Klaus Sucker managed. One, the Bergorilla & Regenwald Direkthilfe (BRD), a non-profit organized in 1982, still works to support the eastern gorilla population, which includes the severely endangered mountain gorilla made famous by Dian Fossey. The other, Deutcher Tierschutzbund, is a member of the larger European Coalition to End Animal Experiments, an anti-vivisection organization.

Klaus-Jurgen Sucker died under mysterious circumstances. The sacrifices he made to conservation in Uganda were almost forgotten—or buried along with him. While Sucker was a leading agent of change at Mgahinga, the USAID reports from this era never mention Sucker by name; they speak about issues and risks only in terms of “needing to improve park management.” (2) The promotion of Sucker’s life, legacy and work remains in the hands of the Bergorilla & Regenwald Direkthilfe (BRD), his family, friends and loved ones.

“Klaus was a remarkable man; his dedication was something, at times even frightening. It's a great loss that he's gone,” Ulrich Karlowski wrote. (3)

ENVIRONMENTAL MISSIONARIES

On June 20, 1994, Klaus-Jurgen Sucker was found strangled in his house in Kisoro, Uganda. The official German and Ugandan governments’ reports want the world to believe this was a suicide—Sucker was found hanging from a rope.

Klaus-Jurgen Sucker was 37 years old, and an unlikely candidate for self-destruction. His sandwich was found sitting on a plate in his kitchen, half-eaten, and his feet were touching the floor. He was engaged to be married, and looking forward to it. He was the head of the Mgahinga Gorilla National Park Project (MGNP) in Uganda, and while things weren’t as smooth as he might have liked, his journal entries and other communications made it clear he was looking forward to the future. (4)

Field reports from Mgahinga buried in the archives and data banks of USAID and written in the early 1990’s are very similar to conservation communiqués coming out of the Virunga National Park in Congo today. These reports universally frame the blame for “conservation” problems around rogue militias and rampant population explosion, generally castigating the local people for their own suffering, while never addressing the structural violence that insures this suffering and misery. Big “conservation” and “humanitarian” organizations uphold this structural violence, but like the governments and their “AID” machineries, these institutions are rarely challenged.

But Klaus Sucker’s reports from Mgahinga showed one ironic and important difference from those of Congo today. Klaus-Jurgen Sucker was at odds with the USAID-sponsored Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE) —the international BINGO that had its own plans for the park. On the surface, CARE offered Mgahinga a humanitarian operation with a humanitarian agenda focused on emerging concerns for the environment. Behind the scenes, CARE’s true mission was—now as then—another kind of monkey business altogether.

“Sucker’s story is different,” wrote journalist Paul Salopek, in his Pulitzer winning series, Africa’s Wildlife Running out of Room, “because his most powerful opponents weren't the usual rogue’s gallery of xenophobic politicians or greedy wildlife dealers, but competing environmentalists who have launched what is, in effect, a sweeping, last-ditch battle for the soul of wild Africa.”

But journalist Paul Salopek’s reference to “environmentalists” competing in a “last ditch battle for the soul of wild Africa” is a poignant example of the misleading and patronizing discourse that currently holds sway over the minds of white Western readers—the members of a population who, by virtue of our privileged economic and political status, hold the greatest sway over the landscapes of Africa and the disenfranchised people who live there.
 
What is “wild Africa” and how can (mostly) white environmentalists “save” its soul? Sounds like the missionary enterprise that accompanied colonial exploitation and slavery. The hubris of these ideas is only exceeded by their actual implementation. Indeed, Congolese people equate modern “conservation” interests exploiting their local landscapes to the Christian missionaries and their evangelizing hidden agendas.

Today, Western conservation organizations with millions of dollars in annual budgets are falling all over themselves to lay claim to what may be the mountain gorillas’ last stand. Humanitarian organizations do the same in the “humanitarian” business sector. These are industries. The humanitarian or “misery” industry and the environmental “conservation” industries are nothing more than multinational corporate enterprises waving flags and brand names and logos, and the ultimate goal is to secure market share through uniquely defined niche marketing strategies. The Western press serves its function in photographing and thereby advertising the flags, the logos, the white doctors and primatologists in the field—all to drum up donor support from sympathetic hearts. It is a system of competition and exploitation, and nothing less than predatory capitalism.

What is CARE/USAID’s involvement in the “wildlife conservation” sector? Why are the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and Jane Goodall Institute involved in population control in Africa?

THE CLIQUE OF CONSERVATION HYENAS

At the very least, the BINGOs and DINGOs of our story ignore the fate of the humans that share the same habitat with the flagship species and “wild soul” of Africa they set out to “save.” Worse still, these organizations exacerbate the suffering and denigrate the local people, their communities, customs, knowledge, wisdom and sovereignty. The DINGOs build their campaigns on racist discourses and policies that perpetuate slavery, misery and massive loss of life, even as they claim to be working for the betterment of humanity and the global mission to save the earth and its biodiversity.

As recently as March 2006, a meeting took place in Washington DC to examine the BINGO’s tendency to promote “conservation-as-indigenous-dispossession.”

Writing for Indian Country Today, Washington reporter Jerry Reynolds quoted Chemonics International, a Washington based contractor for USAID that figures into the summary criticisms of Klaus-Jurgen Sucker’s work. Writing on its webpage, Chemonics professional’s described their expertise in indigenous issues in terms of parenting children. “Implementing a project with and for the benefit of indigenous peoples is analogous to parenting: there is no reliable ‘how to’ manual and every community, like every child, is unique.'' (5)

After expressions of “distaste” by members of staff for Senator Patrick Leahy and senior USAID staffers, Chemonics removed the offensive language from its website.

According to the mythologies perpetrated by the “conservation clique”—as one Congolese official correctly calls it—it is tribalism and savagery that is to blame for every atrocity committed against wildlife in Central Africa.

“For the ‘clique’ conservation is a flag which they work behind,” one Congolese wildlife professional told us, in an interview conducted in eastern Congo. The source—call him only “Ilungwa”—will not be named herein, as he has already been threatened and fears for his life. He is an expert in conservation in Central Africa, but he has been sidelined and threatened by the clique and their powerful allies.

“If we consider conservation as a flag, it will never be possible to change the values of the clique,” Ilungwa told us. “They are interested in money, retirement, making a good career. The aim of the clique is to survive. When the money comes to Congo they make sure the money is well—shared amongst the clique. When someone—Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund for example—gets CARPE funding they will organize a posh V.I.P. dinner at a posh hotel. They will invite the Governor and military leaders and heads of other projects. They tell them they have a big project, lots of money for the next few years. They make promises—hospitals, schools, road improvements—in the name of conservation. They are like hyenas: ‘we have a kill, if we need to split up and work alone we will, but let’s try to work together and share the kill.’ And the kill is the big money, and the clique has its own rules and its own accountings. But there is no accountability, and that is why Congolese people are dying and wildlife is disappearing.”

The discourses of the exploiting organizations—conservation and humanitarian—vary according to the reader or listener being targeted by the suave propaganda. The language and syntax of fundraising campaigns exploit deeply held beliefs to “do good,” and sustain and cycle the cash flow of contracts, grants, private donations and other funding. For black people in rural Africa—both educated and uneducated—other tactics and strategies are employed, with a completely different syntax and language. But the effects are the same on all sides of the divide: millions of people in Africa suffer, and they are blamed for their own suffering, and denigrated for living at all.

“The strategies and methods used by the clique are used beyond Africa, beyond borders, beyond what you can touch,” Ilungwa, the clique insider, explained. “At the end of the system, the end result is to get the money, and the money circulates and circulates. The discourses from the clique are very different from what they do. And the clique is very powerful: if you challenge the funding and spending and corruption—they will destroy you.”

Did the conservation clique in Central Africa destroy Klaus-Jurgen Sucker?

FACING DOWN KALASHNIKOVS

Klaus-Jurgen Sucker was no fool. He certainly realized that the life of a high profile gorilla conservationist had inherent risks. Dian Fossey had been murdered in 1985, a few years in time and a short distance in kilometers away, on the other side of the mountain at her Karisoke research station. Like Fossey, Sucker was unpopular with poachers, smugglers and others who had vested interests in the park. Sucker, too, was threatened by armed militia and ordered to surrender his research. His response was to invite the invaders to shoot him with their fierce Kalashnikovs. They declined, and instead they left Sucker’s fate to others.

In 1989, Klaus Sucker’s initial partners in the venture to restore the dilapidated Mgahinga National Park were Thomas Butynski and Samson Werikhe. Butynski would go on to be a senior conservation biologist with Zoo Atlanta, which has a special relationship with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I). Recall that Clare Richardson, current CEO of DFGF-I, was once a fundraiser for Zoo Atlanta, and that Zoo Atlanta’s partners are corporate entities hostile to true conservation objectives. (See Kong: Part Four: The Map.) Butynski also went on to become director of Conservation International’s Eastern African Biodiversity Hotspots Program and vice-chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Primate Specialist’s Group, Africa Section. He is very much an insider in the conservation clique that rules over Central Africa.

Curiously, documents received through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS)—in Kong: Part Four: the Map we outlined USFWS involvement in Central Africa—have blacked out the dates that Thomas Butynski was in Uganda working with Klaus Sucker; other details are also redacted.

In one document Butynski wrote: “I am a primatologist who has been involved with primate field research and conservation since (REDACTED) mostly in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Equatorial Guinea….” (6)

FOUR AND TWENTY BLACKBIRDS

Samson Werikhe, the third partner who began working with Klaus Sucker and Thomas Butynski at Mgahinga in 1989, made the news in colorful fashion in January 2003, when the Ugandan news outlet New Vision reported that Werikhe fled to the United States amid allegations of corruption and embezzlement in the USAID-funded Wildlife Clubs of Uganda (WCU). New Vision reported that the entire twelve member staff of WCU resigned after the scandal broke.

“Werikhe took over the (WCU) clubs three years ago from Violet Kajubiri, who had built a strong secretariat which benefited from donor funds, including USAID,” reporter Gerald Tenywa wrote from Kampala for New Vision.

“We had an impending audit before Werikhe left the country,” Mr. Douglas Lugumya, the chairperson of the governing council, said. (7)

Samson Werikhe is now in the United States, and he is not keeping a low profile. Werikhe’s biography for 2005 places him as a “conservation intern” at the U.S. Air Force’s Beale Air Force Base. The biographical reference appeared in an article Werikhe wrote for The Magpie, a conservation bulletin published in the Sacramento, CA area. (8)

“All in all, (the) life of a wildlife biologist in Africa is sometimes difficult to predict because he is faced with unique problems…funding and issues of wildlife vs. man,” Werikhe wrote. This was an unbelievable understatement, considering his past in Uganda, and one wonders if the fate of Klaus Sucker ever crosses his mind.

Bearing in mind the proliferation of maps in this KONG epic, and the other many defense and intelligence interests, it is noteworthy that our Ugandan wildlife official-on-the lam took refuge at Beale Air Force Base. According to readily available information posted on its website and elsewhere, “Beale AFB is a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft base, located in the Sacramento Valley, and home to the only stateside reconnaissance wing of the USAF. Beale AFB recently flew the SR-71 Blackbird and still flies the nation's fleet of U2 spy planes. Beale is also one of four U.S. locations for the Phased Array Warning System, a unique radar system housed in a large pyramidal building. Also called PAVE-PAWS, the system tracks airborne and space-borne objects over the Pacific Ocean (a Cape Cod PAVE-PAWS looks out over the Atlantic). The base covers 23,000 acres and employs around 4,000 people.”

Beale A.F.B. is deeply connected to aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin, one of the partners of Zoo Atlanta and a financial sponsor of CARE International, and the maker of the SR-71 Blackbird.

Samson Werikhe’s comments in The Magpie about wildlife versus man, and his association as a “conservation intern” at Beale, begs the question as to exactly how many Blackbirds are baked into this gorilla conservation pie.

Werikhe is also closely tied to the United Nations World Heritage Program, one of the many questionable institutions that have been intensely lobbying for “gorilla protection” in the beleaguered Virunga National Park in DRC, and yet another massive enterprise that does not show an equitable concern for the innocent Congolese people caught in a decade of war and corporate plunder.

“UNEP-WCMC has been identifying and compiling information on the protected areas of the world to produce comprehensive global dataset and maps,” according to its website. (9)

More global datasets and wildlife conservation mapping? Maps, maps, the Empire and its predilection for maps…

Samson Werikhe is also on record as co-authoring a joint presentation to UNEP-WCMC, in September 1997, on behalf of the Governments of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This presentation was held in South Africa and it discussed the impact of war on protected areas in these three countries —in terms of wildlife and environment—and presented a case study of the Virunga Volcano region. (10)

The presentation and report offer the standard propaganda about war and high population densities—another example of powerful external institutions delimiting Central Africa’s problems in terms of the proliferation of its populations. These indigenous populations have little or no say in the unfolding drama of the CARPE landscapes of the Mwami’s Tale (of our series) and other massive programs premised on the access to, and control of, the very land they live on.

The potential for addressing population “pressures” jointly with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was noted, and it was suggested that a dialogue should be established between UNHCR, IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) and other relevant parties.

In a departure from the usual cartographical angst about overpopulation, the well-respected Annette Lanjouw of the International Gorilla Conservation Project (IGCP), based in Nairobi, Kenya, attended the same conference and suggested possibilities for the establishment of a peace park in the Virunga Volcano region. Lanjouw noted the need for a strategy that addresses both human needs and conservation of species. The constraints in establishing such a park were outlined, including the security situation and the extremely limited resources for the establishment and management of such areas. (11)

PROJECT ELGON FLIES HIGH

Samson Werikhe was also a principal player in the enigmatic 1996 “Project Elgon,” sponsored by the University of Aberdeen, U.K. Available and somewhat sketchy descriptions of the project indicate it was designed to “assess human activities…by examining the sustainability of current land use practices, and attitudes towards sustainable land use practices, as well as assessing the use of and attitudes towards family planning,” in Mount Elgon National Park, Uganda. (12)

High-resolution satellite maps of Mt. Elgon, taken by the NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) mentioned earlier in this series, are available on the web in “cleaned up” versions. Readers can look for themselves at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/2004/2004061717144.html

The buzzwords for the Mt. Elgon Project were all there: “sustainability,” “land use,” “community development,” and “family planning”— the euphemism for population control —“family planning.”

Project Elgon began in 1996, when a few hundred thousand Rwandan refugees returned from eastern Congo to Rwanda across the border at Gisenyi, a small town across from Goma, on the shores of Lake Kivu. At least 800,000 refugees were in the refugee camps in Goma alone. (This does not take into account the numbers in Uganda or Tanzania.) The camps were shelled by the Rwandan government in September of 1996 in violation of international humanitarian law, and with complete support of the Pentagon, and the Rwandan military attacks were amongst the opening forays in the Pentagon-backed war to overthrow the government of Joseph Mobutu and reorganize the power structure in Congo/Zaire. (13)

Hundreds of thousands of refugees—mostly women and children—also fled west into Congo’s forest and were hunted down and slaughtered by the RPF and UPDF forces; some were reportedly located with the aid of remote sensing satellite technologies and the awareness and even support of U.S. government officials. (14) Sources in Congo are adamant that U.S. government and United Nations (World Food Program) officials tolerated and even aided the massacres, which were generally blamed on the Congolese “liberation” forces and the now assassinated Laurent Desire Kabila that ostensibly led them. (15)

At the same time, the Pentagon had launched major covert operations from Uganda, including Special Forces operations in western Uganda. The Pentagon set up high-tech outposts—communications, command, control and intelligence—in the Ruwenzori Mountains on the Uganda/Zaire border and on Idjwe Island in Lake Kivu on the Rwandan/Zaire border. The Ugandan air base at Entebbe served as the U.S. military’s premier base for weapons shipments into Central Africa: C-130 transport airplanes reportedly landed around the clock for months during the 1996-1997 invasion.

U.S. Special Ops also set up a covert military operation at the Makerere University Biological Field Station in Kibale National Park, a remote research compound shared with foreign wildlife conservation interests, some thirty minutes by four-wheel drive from Fort Portal, Uganda, near Bwindi and Mgahinga national parks. The Uganda Wildlife Authority and the Uganda National Council of Science and Technology managed the research station; the latter has been heavily funded by USAID.

An undated Memorandum of Agreement lists Thomas Butynski, the former partner of Klaus-Jurgen Sucker, and Eastern Africa Biodiversity Hotspots director for Conservation International, as one of thirty-three signatory individuals committed to supporting the objectives of the Kibale field station. (16) Permissions to conduct the research came from Museveni himself—the Ugandan Office of the President—and other Uganda agencies. (17)

Notably, in one research publication focused on work at Kibale, the authors described the detrimental impact caused by the massive infusion of USAID funds in the years just previous to the U.S. military training at the station. “In the early 1990s the field station received some large foreign aid grants, primarily from USAID. The amounts were more than 1500% of any annual budget previously required by the project. They induced conflict over spending, very wasteful allocations to structures and items never used, and created resentment among Ugandan participants.” (18)

“We saw these Special Ops coming and going,” said one wildlife conservation professional working on a research project based at the time inside the shared compound in Kibale. As usual, the source refuses to be identified out of fear of retaliation and the ruination of his career. (19)

“Everyone knew it was the U.S. military but nobody asked questions. They were obviously authorized by the Ugandan Government to be there because they were training Ugandan soldiers to fight in Congo.” The source reports that the project was funded by the Wildlife Conservation Society, National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the National Council for Science and Technology, Makerere University, Harvard, University of Florida and the University of California at Irvine.”

“This was a very remote station in the jungle. We saw the U.S. military at hotels in (nearby) Fort Portal, and we saw them in the jungle. In was quiet in the beginning (1996) but during the invasion of Zaire/Congo, military planes heading to Congo were flying low over us all the time. All these colleges and universities from the U.S. use the research station and it’s huge, and the military were there when we were there, when the shit was hitting the fan in Zaire (Congo), in 1996 and 1997.”

The timing of the massive infusion of USAID funds for “conservation” at Kibale raises questions about whether these funds were intended to construct new facilities soon to be used by the U.S. military for covert training and covert operations based out of a remote forest. We also wonder how many of Uganda’s National Parks and “conservation” research facilities serve as similar covert operation bases.

But back in 1992 the shit was hitting the fan elsewhere—the battle being waged was for the control of tiny Rwanda. In one of his last communications, Klaus-Jurgen Sucker would remark on the U.S. military interest targeting Rwanda from Mgahinga, which straddled the border of northwestern Rwanda.

The maps and the mapping agencies, the money, the wildlife, the scientists, the humanitarians and family planners, and the crooks on the run all converged on little Mgahinga Gorilla Park—and Klaus-Jurgen Sucker faced them all alone. After Sucker’s death in 1994, the Mgahinga cast of characters—taken straight from the Kong screenplay—were kept busy mapping and, as we have shown, they all met again on Mount Elgon, in eastern Uganda, in 1996.

Sucker’s big mistake was that he opposed big “conservation” and big “humanitarian” interests. Like Dian Fossey, his hopes for a functioning park which provided a haven for wildlife was perhaps a myopic vision. He had no idea what or whom he was really challenging.

There are other critical associations between BINGOs and DINGOs of today, the world of Klaus Sucker, and powerful U.S. interests, and these go far beyond “conservation” interests involved in equatorial Africa. But the story of Klaus-Jurgen Sucker illuminates the dangers inherent in opposing agendas cloaked in the oxymoron of “conservation”. It seems that Sucker, like Dian Fossey, paid the ultimate price for his dedication to conservation for its own sake.

ANTI-CONSERVATION AGENDAS

To understand the deeper relevance of the Klaus-Jurgen Sucker’s story in today’s conservation arena it is necessary to take a little detour back to the future. Some twelve years down the road from the death of Sucker we can gain some insight into the “conservation” priorities and ethics of the people Sucker was then dealing with.

In June of 2006 Sucker’s former partner, Thomas Butynski, came under criticism for a letter of support, which he wrote on Conservation International letterhead, of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Permit Application (PRT-837068) that would allow the Yerkes National Primate Center in the United State to engage in the “lethal taking” of Mangabeys (monkeys), over a 5-year period.

An additional letter of support for the Yerkes application came from Dr. Terry Maple, a Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I) director and former CEO of Zoo Atlanta—and also Butynski’s former employer after the Sucker episode. Dr. Terry Maple now runs the Palm Beach Zoo. In his own words, he supported the killing of captive Mangabeys “with enthusiasm,” and noted that his experiences in Africa dated to 1978. (20)

In fact, Dr. Maple also noted his DFGF-I association, although his letter was not on DFGFI’s letterhead, but on the letterhead of Georgia Tech University.

Recall that Dr. Faust, The Mad Scientist of  Kong: The Map, was associate director of the Georgia Tech Center for GIS and one of the principal DFGF-I research scientists for GIS projects. Dr. Faust was one of the key architects of the GIS terrain surveys with the Rwandan government, DFGF-I, and the National University of Rwanda (NUR)—the surveys where datasets were turned over to the Rwandan military. Conservation International’s (CI) letter on behalf of the Yerkes’ application was surprising to some animal rights’ groups.

According to the International Primate Protection League, “CI has over $192 million dollars in assets and could well afford to fund the Ivory Coast project from its own treasury. It should not be endorsing a project with a component that involves killing of captive Mangabeys in the United States.” (21) In essence, the deal was to trade a field research project on the Ivory Coast for monkey lives in the Yerkes laboratory in the U.S.

“Yerkes stated that it would pay $30,000 per year to a Mangabeys study project in the Tai Forest, Ivory Coast, West Africa, run by Scott McGraw of Ohio State University. In return Yerkes asked to conduct AIDS-related research on its Mangabey colony and even to kill “superannuated (old) animals,” as well as monkeys who are “genetically over-represented” (meaning having too many relatives).” (22)

In April 2006, The Georgia Consortium for Health and Agro Security submitted a proposal to locate the National Bio and Agro Defense Facility (NBAF) in Georgia. The proposal noted the “world class bioengineering programs at the Georgia Institute of Technology,” and that the NBAF program “reflects a growing appreciation of the need to study…related bioterror pathogens through the lens of animal, as well as human medicine.” It also mentioned “unique resources such as the Yerkes Primate facility.” (23)

Due to intense lobbying by animal rights’ groups, the Yerkes application was rejected. The involvement of the DFGF-I and CI interests in the Yerkes case makes clear the powerful interests these organizations are prone to serve, including interests involved in biological warfare and animal experimentation.

OUT-FOSSEYING FOSSEY

Friends and family say Klaus Sucker had a life-long dream to work with the endangered mountain gorillas and other threatened wildlife in the Great Lakes region of Africa. When he started in 1989, the Mgahinga Forest reserve was devastated and almost devoid of wildlife, much like the Parc des Volcans of Rwanda was when Dian Fossey began her tenure there in 1967—and much like the embattled Virunga National Park and others in the Democratic Republic of Congo today.

Poaching, smuggling, pit-sawing (24), cattle grazing and various forms of “illegal” encroachment were common. Mountain gorillas and other rare animals like golden and blue monkeys, elephants, golden cats, bushbucks, duikers, tree-hyraxes, and giant forest hogs had retreated to the high regions of the Muhavura, Sabinyo and Gahinga volcanoes. (25) Then, like today, there was a constant conflict between humans’ struggle to survive and the threat to wildlife.

Sucker faced the same ethical conflicts that perplexed Dian Fossey. The park thrived under his leadership, but he also resisted the rights of the local people to hunt and gather within the park. Fossey initially had the same mindset, but by the time of her murder in 1985 she had realized that humans and wildlife must find ways to coexist.

In a heartbreaking midnight conversation with the murdered gorillas, “Digit” and “Uncle Bert”, Fossey agonized over whether or not the publicity she generated for the gorillas would lead to their demise.

“It was black as coal and I could only dimly see the (gorilla grave) markers. I stood beside Digit a long time still not knowing what to do, but Digit knew, and Uncle Bert and all the others.” (26)

The latest gorilla deaths then seen at Karisoke were due to human worm infestations introduced by tourists and researchers, not from the native population, and Fossey blamed herself for introducing the habituation process whereby gorillas accepted human presence. The Mountain Gorilla project had instructed that necropsy results of recent gorilla deaths not be shared with Fossey, ostensibly due to the fallout which would descend upon the fledgling tourism industry in Rwanda.

Accounts vary as to the relationship Sucker had with local villagers. Like Fossey, the most vehement criticism Sucker faced came from big conservation organizations that wanted access, tourism, and the dollars that went with it.

While alive, Klaus Sucker was viciously disparaged by CARE for allegedly violating the rights of indigenous people, especially the Batwa Pygmies, who relied upon the park for hunting and gathering. However, it seems the BINGOs may have been seeking to get rid of Sucker at all costs, and so were prepared to use any argument that served their interest. Indeed, immediately after Sucker’s death, the tune of the conservation organizations changed as they pointed their satellites at the villagers “encroaching” on the gorilla habitat, and then produced their fancy remote-sensing maps to prove it.

In his article exposing the double standards and vested interests of the BINGOs and DINGOs like Conservation International, writer Mark Dowie opens with a discussion of how the Batwa of Uganda were blamed for eating silverbacks—an accusation the Batwa deny—while forcibly being expelled from their communal forests. Dowie goes on to explore the role of the BINGOs and DINGOs of conservation as “culture-wrecking” institutions.

“It's no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture,” Mark Dowie wrote in his story Conservation Refugees. (27) “But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Even the more culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention,”

Notably, Jane Goodall is on the Advisory Board of the Orion Society, the group that published Dowie’s article in Orion Magazine.

The Batwa people of Uganda have been severely marginalized, their human rights universally violated. Even the USAID affiliated reports that complained about Sucker flagged the urgent humanitarian crises faced by the Batwa pygmies. Little has changed in their favor.

In his year 2000 Pulitzer series, Chicago Tribune journalist Paul Salopek quoted Jaap Schoorl, “a Dutch environmental consultant who worked in Uganda when the German (Sucker) was still booting villagers” out of Mgahinga National Park. “But we have to face the reality that Africa's wild places are shrinking islands surrounded by a growing sea of people. Unless we do something drastic, we're lost,” Salopek quoted Schoorl to say.

But Paul Salopek misidentified Jaap Schoorl, just as he failed to explore the deeper interests presented as “conservation” organizations in his articles.

Ulrich Karlowski is the brother of Klaus Jurgen Sucker’s fiancé, and one of the people who independently tried to investigate Sucker’s death. According to Karlowski’s testimony in the Gorilla Journal, Jaap Schoorl was on payroll with CARE as a “technical advisor” for CARE’s Development through Conservation (DTC) program. Schoorl was advising on “park management and law enforcement” in the neighboring Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, another reserve targeted to be a gorilla Mecca for tourists. Salopek already used two CARE/DTC consultants as “experts” to support his article, and perhaps that’s why Schoorl was identified merely as a Dutch environmental consultant: two is a couple, and three was one too many CARE blackbirds for Salopek’s “conservation” pie.

Schoorl’s job description can be independently verified in the CARE project summary reports, prepared by the private U.S. consulting firm Chemonics International. (28)

In November 1994—Sucker died in June—Schoorl showed writers for the Gorilla Journal a map of the national park with multiple-use zones and areas of increased poaching; they overlapped nearly completely. (29) The evidence clearly showed that the “multiple-use” programs implemented by the CARE/DTC program were detrimentally affecting wildlife and deterring conservation.

Jaap Schoorl’s cartographic career advanced rapidly, and by 1998 he was the Director of Operations for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)-Cameroon, giving the opening address at a “Conference Report on Capacity Building in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for World Wide Fund for Nature.” (30)

The Kribi conference feted the ArcView 3.01, desktop GIS software from Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI), Redlands, California, USA. Of course, ESRI is the secretive intelligence and defense mapping agency allied with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Conservation International in the Kong: Part Four: the Map segment of our series.

Klaus Sucker had been every bit as tenacious as Dian Fossey, and he established regular patrols, stalked and harassed the poachers, pit saw operators and smugglers. Like Fossey, Sucker confiscated cattle that grazed in the protected areas, but stopped short of spray-painting them as she had. The rangers, like Fossey’s, were well taken care of, and Sucker made sure they had shelter. He organized conservation education programs for the people living on the borders of the protected area. The conservation project that was initially named the Gorilla Game Reserve Conservation Project (GGRCP) was thriving and very successful, according to existing reports from the time.

There is also evidence that local public opinion was on Sucker’s side. In July of 1994, the Ugandan New Vision published a letter that accused the CARE-DTC project leaders “for a long time (being) on the neck of this man. His death reportedly by hanging himself in a window leaves a trail of suspicion.” (31)

Sucker was also commended for doing more on the ground than “CARE-DTC can ever think of doing.” After Sucker’s death, the surrounding area and Bwindi became “infested with poachers, gold miners, and pit-sawyers” due to the “instability” created by CARE. Mining had now entered the picture.

Friends readily list Klaus Sucker’s many achievements. He confiscated and destroyed 7000 animal traps and snares, stopped destruction of the forest, ended smuggling and illegal grazing of cattle, recolonized plant species, established environmentally-friendly gorilla tourism (although Fossey thought there was no such thing), and created 1500 jobs that were “well paid by local standards.” (32) His friends and supporters have set up a website to document his achievements (www.klaus-juergen-sucker.de), but are reluctant to speak with researchers, due to the terrible aftermath of the story. Our last in-depth contact with Ulrich Karlowski, Sucker’s then soon to be brother–in-law, was in 2005. He recently has indicated that there is not much more he can add to what he has already offered—but perhaps we can.

According to accounts written in the Gorilla Journal, Ugandan authorities soon realized that they were sitting on what was probably the “most successful conservation project in all of Africa.” As a consequence, the Mgahinga forest was designated a national park and Klaus Sucker was appointed chief warden. He had out-Fossied Dian Fossey and successfully turned an unprotected area into one of the “best functioning national parks in Africa.” Of course, Fossey’s experiences and research had paved the way for this success. Eventually, the Mgahinga Gorilla National Park had the highest density of rangers per square mile than all of Uganda’s national parks. However, there are no interviews or reports from the villagers who were also a part of this (his-) story.

According to Sucker, by June of 1992, the protected area was enlarged and some 1305 farmers, who had been “illegally” using the recently annexed “Zone 2” of the park, gave up their animal husbandry practices and left the area. Supposedly, this was done on a voluntary basis after all concerned had a democratic vote and some 273 affected families received financial compensation.

Sucker’s report, published in the August 1993 Gorilla Conservation News, documented a “compensation for the former encroachers” which was “underway with USAID and CARE in Kampala (Uganda).”

Again there was a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) of the same sort that was peddled to the Mwamis in the Tayna Reserve of Part Three of our Kong series: The Mwami’s Tale.

“The encroached Zone 2 of MGNP was voluntarily left by the illega1 settlers and land-users following a time-table, which was agreed up on in the memorandum of understanding. Between June and December 1992 this process went on in a peaceful and orderly manner. Violence was avoided from the beginning under the control of the Ugandan National Park (UNP) and the project. People shifting their homesteads from the National Park were supported by UNP with poles and bamboo taken from Zone 2. People were allowed to harvest their remaining crops until certain dates agreed in the memorandum of understanding. Cattle grazing and the grazing of domestic animals were stopped by the catt1e grazers according to the dates agreed,” Sucker reported.

This resettlement project became a model for similar projects in other national parks. It looked as if it might be really possible to enlarge the habitat of the mountain gorilla. For the first time in history, there could be, and there was, a reversal in habitat loss through cooperation and promises made and kept.

The animals thrived. The number of observed gorillas in the Mgahinga forest increased from 25 to 45 and they stayed for longer periods and more often. One group of gorillas spent an entire year in the forest, the first time such an event had been observed in more than 40 years. Buffalos and elephants returned and were seen in areas that had been abandoned by their species.

There is no doubt that the Mgahinga project, with Sucker running it, was a success for wildlife. This is not the case in the Democratic Republic of Congo today, despite the massive influx of “conservation” dollars into the region. As we pointed out previously, the northern white rhino of Congo’s Garamba National Park is all but finished, but the news has yet to be revealed for fear of upsetting donors and raising untidy questions. Wildlife and environmental protection has failed miserably in the DRC, for all the CARPE landscapes, National Reserves and National Parks. Judging by the constant flow of press releases and gruesome photos of severed gorilla heads from conservation organizations bemoaning the loss of gorilla after gorilla, and the steady accumulation of gorilla orphans, nowhere is this failure more evident than in the DRC’s Virunga National Park.           

 

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.

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

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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 .