I
recently received a phone call from an Australian man who identified
himself as an investigator for the prosecutor at the International
Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague, Netherlands. The investigator and
his colleague had read my story, “Merchant’s of Death: Exposing Corporate Financed Holocaust in Africa,”
and wanted my cooperation to provide more detailed evidence about the
warlords behind the massacres at Bogoro, Congo, described briefly in my
story.
After some weeks of back and forth discussions and me revisiting
notes and photos to see what I had, I sent them an e-mail at the
definitive moment when they were hoping to receive a brief “dossier”
about the specific case — which they said “had generated a lot of
interest” at the ICC — and I shared my uncertainty about the ethics of
collaborating with an “International Criminal Court” that was only
indicting black Africans. I indicated my concern for the witness
‘Sandrine,’ a young girl discussed in my story who named names of
commanders, dates of executions, and who herself used a machete in an
ethnic massacre and was raped by militiamen. I noted that witnesses
identified for the Rwandan Tribunal (ICTR) had been murdered or
mysteriously disappeared, and noted my awareness of the injustice of
the Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the disconcerting
trajectory of the ICC.
I told them I couldn’t in good conscience help them, it seemed,
until the ICC arrested some of the white-collar war criminals running
loose around the world. It was the right decision, in light of the
recent ICC indictments against another black man, and an Arab at that.
It was a very stupid career move, some one else remarked.
On 4 March 2009 the ICC prosecutors announced that they were at last
issuing the long-threatened but first ever indictments against a
sitting head of state, Omar al-Bashir, the Arab President of Sudan.
Meanwhile, Somali ‘pirates’ off East Africa recently freed a Ukrainian
ship with a Panamanian registration, a Ukrainian crew and flag of
Belize. The freighter carried tanks, rockets and munitions destined for
Darfur, and is owned by an Israeli ‘businessman’ and reputed MOSSAD
operative named Vadim Alperin.
It is difficult to make sense of the war in Darfur — especially when
people see it as a one-sided “genocide” of Arabs against blacks that is
being committed by the Bashir ‘regime’ — but such is the establishment
propaganda. The real story is much more expansive, more complex, and it
revolves around some relatively unknown but shady characters. What
follows is a short and imperfect summary of some of the deeper
geopolitical realities behind the struggle for Sudan.
THE POLITICS OF WAR CRIMES
First note that the ICC can now be viewed as a tool of hegemonic
U.S. foreign policy, where the weapons deployed by the U.S. and its
allies include the accusations of, and indictments for, human rights
violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity. To understand this,
we can ask why no white man has yet been charged with these or other
offenses at the ICC, which now holds five black African “warlords” and
seeks to incarcerate and bring to trial another black man, also an
Arab, Omar Bashir. Why hasn’t George W. Bush been indicted? Or what
about Donald Rumsfeld? Dick Cheney? Henry Kissinger? Ehud Olmert? Tony
Blair? Vadim Alperin? John Bredenkamp?
Following on the heels of the announcement that the ICC handed down
seven war crimes charges against al-Bashir, a story broadcast over all
the Western media system and into every American living room by day’s
end, President al-Bashir ordered the expulsion of ten international
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Darfur under the
pretense of being purely ‘humanitarian’ organizations.
What has not been reported anywhere in the English press is that the
United States of America has just stepped up its ongoing war for
control of Sudan and her resources: petroleum, copper, gold, uranium,
fertile plantation lands for sugar and gum Arabic (essential to Coke,
Pepsi and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream). This war has been playing out
on the ground in Darfur through so-called ‘humanitarian’ NGOs, private
military companies, ‘peacekeeping’ operations and covert military
operations backed by the U.S. and its closest allies.
However, the U.S. war for Sudan has always revolved around
‘humanitarian’ operations — purportedly neutral and presumably
concerned only about protecting innocent human lives — that often
provide cover for clandestine destabilizing activities and
interventions.
Americans need to recognize that the Administration of President
Barack Obama has begun to step up the war for control of Sudan in
keeping with the permanent warfare agenda of both Republicans and
Democrats. The current destabilization of Sudan mirrors the illegal
covert guerrilla war carried out in Rwanda — also launched and supplied
from Uganda — from October 1990 to July 1994. The Rwandan Defense
Forces (then called the Rwandan Patriotic Army) led by Major General
Paul Kagame achieved the U.S. objective of a coup d’etat in Rwanda
through that campaign, and President Kagame has been a key interlocutor
in the covert warfare underway in Darfur, Sudan.
During the Presidency of George W. Bush, the U.S. Government was
involved with the intelligence apparatus of the Government of Sudan
(GoS). At the same time, other U.S. political and corporate factions
were pressing for a declaration of genocide against the GoS. Now, given
the shift of power and the appointment of top Clinton officials
formerly involved in covert operations in Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and
Sudan during the Clinton years, pressure has been applied to heighten
the campaign to destabilize the GoS, portrayed as a ‘terrorist’ Arab
regime, but an entity operating outside the U.S.-controlled banking
system. The former campaign saw overt military action with the U.S.
military missile attacks against the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical factory in
Sudan (1998); this was an international war crime by the Clinton
Administration and it involved officials now in power.
The complex geopolitical struggle to control Sudan manifests through
the flashpoint war for Darfur and it involves such diverse factions as
the Lord’s Resistance Army, backed by Khartoum, which is also connected
to the wars in the Congo and northern Uganda. Chad is involved, Eritrea
and Ethiopia, Germany, the Central African Republic, Libya, France,
Israel, China, Taiwan, South Africa and Rwanda. There are U.S. special
forces on the ground in the frontline states of Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia,
Kenya, and the big questions are: [1] How many of the killings are
being committed by U.S. proxy forces and blamed on al-Bashir and the
GoS? And [2] who funds, arms and trains the rebel insurgents
UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVASTATION
Rebels? Insurgents? The drumbeat of western propaganda portrays the
conflict as a one-sided affair: a “genocidal counter-insurgency by the
GoS” — in the words of Eric Reeves — versus the good Samaritans of the
‘humanitarian’ NGO community . . . and throw in a few (non-descript)
rebels.
“Sudan ordered at least 10 humanitarian groups expelled from Darfur
on Wednesday after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest
warrant for the country’s president,” wrote Associated Press reporter
Ellen M. Lederer. “Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the action
‘represents a serious setback to lifesaving operations in Darfur’ and
urged Sudan to reverse its decision, U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie
Okabe said.”
However, when Ban Ki-moon met with Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame
recently, he never called for Kagame’s arrest, no matter the findings
of two international courts of law that have issued indictments against
top RPA officials. Instead Ban Ki-moon praised Kagame and called for
African countries to hunt down and arrest Hutu people purportedly
involved in the now specious ‘genocide’ in Rwanda in 1994.
The non-governmental aid groups ordered out of Darfur by President
al-Bashir on March 4 were Oxfam, CARE, MSF-Holland, Mercy Corps, Save
the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the International Rescue
Committee, Action Contre la Faim, Solidarites and CHF International.
Of course, the western media is all over the expulsion of any big
‘humanitarian’ moneymaker from Darfur — the moral outrage is so thick
you can almost wipe it. The NGOs and the press that peddles their
images of suffering babes complain that hundreds of thousands of
innocent refugees will now be subjected to massive unassisted suffering
— as opposed to the assisted suffering they previously faced — but
never asks with any serious and honest zeal, why and how the displaced
persons and refugees came to be displaced or homeless to begin with.
Neither do they ask about all the money, intelligence sharing, deal
making, and collaboration with private or governmental military
agencies.
Large ‘humanitarian’ NGOs (and ‘conservation’ NGOs) operate as de facto
multinational corporations revolving around massive private profits and
human suffering. In places like the Democratic Republic of Congo,
Uganda and Darfur these NGOs also provide infrastructure, logistical
and intelligence collaboration that supports U.S. military and
government agendas in the region. Most are aligned with big
foundations, corporate sponsors and USAID — itself a close and
long-time partner for interventions with AFRICOM and the Pentagon.
Refugees and displaced populations are strategic tools of statecraft
and foreign policy, just as ‘humanitarian’ NGOs consistently use food
as a weapon and populations as human shields. The history of the U.S.
covert war in South Sudan is rich with examples of the SPLA and its
‘humanitarian’ partners, especially Christian ‘charities’, committing
such war crimes and crimes against humanity.
CARE International has received funding from Lockheed Martin
Corporation, the world’s largest and most secretive producer of weapons
of mass destruction, and both CARE and Save the Children are tied up
with weapons and extractive industries in other ways. A peek at the
board of directors of Save the Children makes it clear why the U.S.
media is so devoid of truth about Darfur. Similarly, the International
Rescue Committee does not work with refugees, per se, but serves as a
policy and pressure group involved in funneling private profits from
the west back to the west. The IRC has also been cited for involvement
in military operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and it has
deep ties to people like Henry Kissinger.
The AID (read: misery) industry in Sudan was by the mid-1990s the
largest so-called ‘humanitarian’ enterprise on the planet, Operation
Lifeline Sudan (OLS) — a form of managed inequality and a temporary and
mobile economy of white privilege, adventurism and, of course, good
will (sic). The misery industry shifted its focus from South Sudan to
Darfur after a pseudo peace ‘treaty’ was organized to end the decades
old war between the SPLA and GoS; the U.S. and Israel backed the SPLA
from 1990 onward, and continue to do so at present. The result of more
than 12 years of illegal U.S. covert low-intensity warfare in Sudan
resulted in the creation of the independent and sovereign state of
South Sudan in circa 2005 — a state dominated by Jewish and Christian
faith-based interests and western multinational corporations.
Much of the AID infrastructure in Sudan has at one time or another
been used as a weapon through the use of human shields, food deliveries
to refugee populations inseparable from insurgents, and shipments of
weapons by ‘humanitarian’ NGOs. This is both incidental and deliberate
policy. Christian ‘relief’ NGOs played a huge role in supporting the
covert western insurgency in South Sudan. One notable ‘humanitarian’
NGO involved in weapons deliveries was the Norwegian People’s Aid
(known affectionately in the field as the Norwegian People’s Army).
In Darfur, Sudan, the U.S. government agenda is to win control of
natural resources and leverage the Arab government into a corner and,
at last, establish a more ‘friendly’ government that will suit the
corporate interests of the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and
Israel.
Several major think tanks — read: propaganda, lobbying and pressure
— behind the destabilization of Sudan include the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracy, Center for American Progress, Center for Security
Policy, International Rescue Committee and International Crises Group.
Individuals from seemingly diverse positions of the political and
ideological spectrum run these organizations, which are
ultra-nationalist capitalist organizations bent on global
military-economic domination.
The former Clinton officials most heavily focused on the
destabilization of Sudan include: Susan Rice, Madeleine Albright, Roger
Winter, Prudence Bushnell, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Anthony Lake
and John Prendergast. Carr Center for Human Rights co-founder Samantha
Power, now on the Obama National Security Council, has helped to
whitewash clandestine U.S. involvement in Sudan.
John Prendergast has continued to peddle disinformation disguised as
policy and human rights concerns through the International Crisis Group
(ICG), and through its many clone organizations like ENOUGH, ONE and
RAISE HOPE FOR CONGO. Prendergast has been a pivotal agent behind the
hi-jacking of U.S. public concern and action through the disingenuous
(and discredited) SAVE DARFUR movement.
Other notable agents of disinformation on Sudan include Alex de Waal
and Smith College Professor Eric Reeves. It is through these and other
conduits to the corporate U.S. media that the story of ‘genocide’ in
Sudan is cast as an Africa-Arab affair devoid of western interests.
In 1992, human rights researchers Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal
established the London-based NGO African Rights. In August 1995,
African Rights published Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance,
one of many pivotal ‘human rights’ reports that falsely represented
events in Rwanda, set the stage for victor’s justice at the
International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and began the process of
dehumanizing millions of Hutu people and protecting the true
terrorists: Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, the Rwandan Patriotic Army,
and their western backers.
THE MAN FOR A NEW SUDAN
The pivotal intelligence asset working on the ground in Sudan to
destabilize and overthrow the Government of Sudan (GoS) is Roger
Winter, profiled very disingenuously in the seven-page New York Times Magazine feature story of 15 June 2008.
Interestingly, “The Man For A New Sudan” story, an establishment
whitewash of the involvement of the U.S. military-intelligence
establishment in Sudan, was written by Eliza Griswold, a ‘Fellow’ with
the New America Foundation, a left-leaning think tank and pressure
group with a very confused ideological but nationalist-militaristic
position. (The NAF is obviously dependent on U.S. foundation funding,
and it reveals no apparent policy formulations of substance on the
Great Lakes or Horn of Africa, conflicts for which they remain
completely silent).
“When Roger Winter’s single-engine Cessna Caravan touched down near
the Sudanese town of Abyei on Easter morning, a crowd of desperate men
swamped the plane,” Griswold wrote. “Some came running over the rough
red airstrip. Others crammed into a microbus that barreled toward the
65-year-old Winter as he climbed down the plane’s silver ladder. Some
Sudanese call Winter ‘uncle’; others call him ‘commander’.”
Winter’s special post at the State Department was created
specifically for him and his ‘work’ in Sudan. Why do Sudanese people in
South Sudan call Roger Winter ‘commander’?
Roger Winter is the primary conduit for the ongoing covert
destabilization of Sudan. His operations are run primarily out of
Uganda, with the terrorist government of Yoweri Museveni providing
support through the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) alliance with
the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).
The SPLA is the de facto backbone of the Sudan Liberation
Army, one of the main so-called ‘rebel’ factions involved in Darfur;
the SPLA provides military and logistics support to Uganda from the
Pentagon through unknown channels, but most likely involving the nearby
Pentagon client states of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Chad and Eritrea.
The primary Ugandan agents supporting the U.S. war in Darfur have
always been, and remain, Brigadier General James Kazini, a nephew of
Ugandan dictator Museveni and the chief of staff of the Ugandan
People’s Defense Forces (UPDF); General Salim Saleh, half-brother of
Museveni; and President Yoweri Museveni himself.
One of the main protagonists in the Darfur conflict is the current
military regime in Rwanda, whose troops have been involved in Darfur
under the guise of an ‘independent’ and ‘peacekeeping’ operation under
the African Union ‘peacekeeping’ umbrella — back by NATO and private
military companies.
Little known and widely misunderstood is the role of the United
States and its proxies, the UPDF and the RPA, in committing massive
crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide during the Rwandan
conflagration from 1990 to 1994. Prior to the RPA invasion of Rwanda
(from Uganda) in October 1990, the RPA and Rwandan Tutsi Diaspora had
publications like Impuruza published in the United States
between 1984 and 1994 (when the RPA achieved the coup d’etat against
Rwandan President Habyarimana). Tutsi refugees joined Roger Winter, who
was at the time the Director of the United States Committee for
Refugees, to help fund the publication. The editor, Alexander Kimenyi,
is a Rwandan national and a professor at California State University.
Like most RPA publications Impuruza circulated clandestinely in Rwanda amongst Hutu and Tutsi elite and it peddled a genocidal ideology against Hutu people.
The Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora USA, assisted by Roger
Winter, organized the International Conference on the Status of
Banyarwanda [Tutsi] Refugees in Washington, DC in 1988, and this is
where a military solution to the Tutsi problem was chosen. The U.S.
Committee for Refugees reportedly provided accommodation and
transportation.
THE DEVIL CAME IN A HELIOCOPTER
Roger Winter was one of the primary architects of the RPA guerrilla
war, organized from Washington in 1989, that has led to the loss of
more than ten or twelve million lives in the Great Lakes of Africa
since 1990. Winter acted as a spokesman for the RPF and their allies,
and he appeared as a guest on major U.S. television networks such as
PBS and CNN. New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch and Roger Winter made contacts on behalf of the RPA with American media, particularly the Washington Post, New York Times and Time magazine.
Roger Winter moved through Rwanda during the RPA invasion and worked
the front lines of the covert war as a key Pentagon and U.S. State
Department asset in collaboration with the Kagame-RPA operation of
terror. From 1990 to 1994, Winter traveled back and forth from the
RPA-controlled zone to Washington D.C., where he briefed and
coordinated activities and support with U.S. military, intelligence and
government officials.
Roger Winter is intimate with USAID, and is a long-time ally of
Susan Rice, former Assistant Secretary of State on African Affairs
(1997-2001), Special Assistant to President Clinton (1995-1997), and
National Security Council insider (1993-1997). Susan Rice is the Obama
Administration’s Ambassador to the United Nations and staunch enemy of
Omar al-Bashir.
Roger Winter is also a staunch supporter of U.S. Rep. Donald Payne,
one of the leading U.S. Democrats pressing for action to “stop
genocide” in Darfur, Sudan. Payne sponsored the Darfur Genocide
Accountability Act and was arrested in June 2001, along with John
Eibner, director of Christian Solidarity International, for protesting
against the GoS.
Christian Solidarity International has a very subversive
relationship to ‘peace’ and ‘religion’ in Sudan, and they have been one
of the front-runner organizations peddling the accusations of slavery
by the al-Bashir government, in particular, a highly contested and
controversial issue generally inflated and manipulated by
fundamentalist Jewish and Christian NGOs and missionary organizations,
like Christian Solidarity International, Samaritan’s Purse, Servant’s
Heart, and Freedom Quest International, that operate in Sudan.
“Roger Winter was the chief logistic boss for [RPA] Tutsis as early
as mid-1990,” says Ugandan human rights expert Remigius Kintu, “and
until their victory in 1994 they were operating from 1,717
Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. Roger Winter told a [name
deleted] South Sudanese exile at the time [1994]: ‘I have now
stabilized Rwanda and will turn my full attention to Sudan.’ Winter
subsequently closed up shop in Rwanda and based himself in Kampala
working on Sudan. A few years later, Darfur exploded and with Winter’s
manipulations, Rwanda was the first to send troops into that troubled
area. From my sources, the Rwanda Defense Forces [working under the
African Union umbrella] have killed civilians and brought in their
media experts to pile the blame on Sudanese government troops.”
This is exactly what the Kagame and Museveni terror apparatus has
done in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Much of
the terror operations of the UPDF/RPF in Rwanda in the 1990s were
covered up by Human Rights Watch experts Alison Des Forges (d. February
2009) and Timothy Longman, Associate Prof. of Africana Studies and
Political Science at Vassar College.
Similarly, throughout the long war in south Sudan, and now in
Darfur, the atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed factions were/are
downplayed, dismissed or ignored, while those committed by competing
factions are amplified and spotlighted. Also, following the pattern of
UPDF and RPA criminal activities — such as massacres committed under
disguise and/or attributed to the ‘enemy’ — for which there is now a
long history of documentation, and given the lack of any true
independent evaluation, there is no telling who actually committed the
massacres always blamed on the GoS or ‘Janjaweed’ militias.
One Sudanese professional from the south told me recently that it
was not the Government of Sudan but rather the UPDF and SPLA who were
arming the Janjaweed — the so-called Arab militias accused of wanton
killing in an Arab-against-Black genocide. (This Arab-on-black genocide
has been widely discredited.
Professor Timothy Longman and Alison Des Forges co-produced the fat treatise on ‘genocide’ in Rwanda, Leave None to Tell the Story,
published in 1999. Longman and Des Forges produced numerous documents,
based on field investigations in Congo (Zaire), Rwanda and Burundi,
from 1995 to 2008, touted as independent and unbiased human rights
reports but always skewed by hidden interests. Both Longman and Des
Forges had relationships with the U.S. Department of State, National
Security Council and Pentagon, both were regular consultants with
USAID, and they certainly worked with Roger Winter, the Pentagon’s
secret weapon in Sudan.
On 25 September 2008, a Ukrainian freighter was seized by ‘pirates’
off the coast of Somalia and was held until a ransom of $3.2 million
was paid on 5 February 2009. (Somali fishermen disenfranchised by
international dumping of toxic [and possibly nuclear] wastes off
Somalia are labeled ‘pirates’ when they fight for their rights and
freedoms.) The MV Faina is registered in Belize, owned by a company
registered in Panama and piloted by Ukrainians. The MV Faina carried 33
Soviet T-72 battle tanks, grenade-launchers, anti-aircraft guns and
ammunition en route to Mombassa, Kenya, the Pentagon’s primary base on
the east coast of Africa.
The U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet monitored the Ukrainian ship during the
four-month standoff, with the MV Faina pinned down by at least six U.S.
and four European warships. The ship’s owner is Israeli national Vadim
Alperin (alias Vadim Oltrena Alperin), said to be a MOSSAD agent
involved with clandestine activities through offshore front companies
and money laundering. The ship was unloaded in Mombassa on February 12,
and the weapons are destined for Juba, South Sudan.
There are reports that weaponry also included tank munitions heads
sporting deadly depleted uranium and that the final recipients are the
Israeli-backed Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) ‘rebels’ in Darfur.
Sudan has previously accused Israel of supporting ‘rebels’ in the
Darfur war. International arms syndicates and dealers routinely
transfer ‘Soviet-era’ arms for international organized crime, including
covert military operations involving proxy militias and national
governments in Sudan, Uganda, Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and
Rwanda.
Keith
Harmon Snow is an independent human rights investigator and war
correspondent who worked with Survivors Rights International
(2005-2006), Genocide Watch (2005-2006) and the United Nations (2006)
to document and expose genocide and crimes against humanity in Sudan
and Ethiopia. He has worked in 17 countries in Africa, and he recently
worked in Afghanistan. Read other articles by Keith, or visit Keith’s website.
This article was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 9:02am and is filed under “Aid”, Genocide, Human Rights, Imperialism, NGOs, Propaganda, Sudan.
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