New Edition of Robert and Mabel Williams Resource Guide

The story of Robert Williams and Mabel Williams is an important
chapter in the history of African-American people. It is much more
than the history of a black man who fought against segregation
and apartheid in the South. It is the story of a man and a woman
united in struggle, it is the story of a family who fought together,
struggled together and stayed together, united and strong in the
face of racism and oppression. Their story traces their political
and ideological growth from being participants in the civil rights
struggle, and the human rights struggle inside the United States,
to being participants in the world struggle against imperialism
and exploitation. It is a story of human dignity, and courage in
the face of overwhelming odds. Their story is truly a story of
love and of commitment to the struggle of African Peoples and
oppressed peoples around the world.
—Assata Shakur, Black liberation fighter in exile

Robert F. Williams marches in the company of Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Kwame
Ture, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker and other leading voices of Black
liberation. He was one of the most important and controversial leaders of the
freedom movement. Yet his work, words, and profound influence are absent in
most historical accounts. With this CD, the Freedom Archives contributes to a
growing body of recent scholarship, telling the story of Robert Williams through
an exclusive interview with Mabel Williams, his widow, who was with him every
step of the way. The program traces their journey from NAACP leadership and
armed self-defense against the Klan in Monroe, North Carolina through exile and
internationalist solidarity in Cuba, China, Africa, and back to the United States. It
features rare speeches, interviews, and radio broadcasts of Radio Free Dixie, the
short wave radio series Robert and Mabel broadcast from Cuba.

Now available along with the CD
 
http://www.freedomarchives.org/RFW.html

Revolution and Race in Ada Ferrer’s Insurgent Cuba

Reblog www.voxunion.com/revolution-and-race-in-ada-ferrers-insurgent-cuba/

In Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898, Ada Ferrer describes a nationalist revolutionary process in late Nineteenth Century Cuba that created new subject positions for African descended Cubans, enslaved and free, which in turn threatened the symbolic order such that social relations formed under a slave-society regime exercised a counter pressure that frustrated the most liberatory practices of the independence struggle. The threat to the social order in Cuba following the 1868 declaration of the independence struggle resulted in a propaganda offensive from the Spanish colonial government that initially succeeded by invoking the modern colonial symbolic order through the accusation of “race war”. The partnering of independence and emancipation first articulated by Carlos Manuel De Cespedes in 1868 produced a tension between what a Cuban nationality could mean in the face of a freed and armed Black population and a Hispano-Catholic cultural hegemony. The power of the symbolic order emerges always and already asserting itself under any historical condition. Defined as language, the attempt to describe and assign meaning to the experience of “the real,” and enacted through the formal and informal uses of language by institutions and individuals, people perform the symbolic order through custom and habit. We reproduce the symbolic order through law, education, commerce, customary behaviors, and the myriad conscious and unconscious retellings of the “…legends, stories, history, and above all historicity” (Fanon 112) that inhabit our understanding of how the world does and “should” work. The symbolic exerts a policing action on worldview, placing boundaries on what should be imagined. In other words, the symbolic order is the ideological ground upon which the subject figure acts.

The symbolic order under the regime of modern colonialism and slavery has posited the ontological difficulty of “blackness.” Blackness, as a human condition, has been constructed as a sign of both the absence and the negation of civilization. Indeed, the possibility of human blackness has even been brought into question as Western intellectuals have for centuries now seriously debated whether black peoples are members of the human species, or to what degree black people may be humans. Whereas the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century bourgeois revolutions of the Americas and Europe reformed the Western symbolic relationship among social classes, raising the citizen-subject to ontological equality with the traditional nobility, introducing new behaviors and new explanations for those behaviors, black revolutionary struggle, as in Haiti, threatens to overturn the symbolic order more fundamentally, that is, from its foundation. For example, in response to the colonial state invoking “race war” as the proper representation of the independence struggle, Cuban nationalists of the 1880s and 1890s invoked a policy of “racelessness.” The nationalists invented racelessness specifically to erase the blackness of the independence struggle while avoiding an open appeal to whiteness. But racelessness, as Ada Ferrer shows, means different things from different subject positions. An attempt to shift the terrain of the symbolic, “racelessness” remains trapped in the language of race and the practice of white privilege, thus reproducing the ruling ideology.

Another aspect of the symbolic order, gender, also complicates the meaning of independence and national character. In their own representation of the emerging Cuban nation, the Cuban nationalists of the late Nineteenth Century constructed an emphatically masculine image of the nation. Governance remained the domain of men, black and/or white, those who through their struggle and sacrifice made independence possible. The nationalist writers erase the contributions of women, without whom the war for independence could not succeed. They erase the women from their representations of the struggle, thus excluding women from the public sphere of an independent Cuba. On the gender question, the rebel army and nationalist intellectuals reproduced the symbolic order apparently without question, and this was despite the very active cadres of women forming revolutionary clubs, support committees and raising funds for the fight as Nancy Mirabal describes in “No Country but the One We Must Fight For” (62). These tensions produced by challenges to the symbolic order and recourses to the symbolic order coalesce in the court martial of Quintin Bandera, a successful Black general of the rebel army, discussed below.

Struggle transforms. When Carlos Manuel De Cespedes freed his slaves, declared them co-citizens and exhorted them to join him and other Cuban patriots in an armed struggle against the Spanish colonizer, he invited those African men into new subject positions, namely into a new claim to a Black subjectivity in the public sphere. The call to independence and emancipation, the two being constructed as necessary for the realization of each other, and the call for African men to participate in the practice of independence and emancipation, created a sanctioned public space for Black subjectivity within a symbolic order that denies or at best doubts the possibility of a public Black subjectivity. The Black body is already marked as an object, the body par excellence, if not exclusively, that can be enslaved. The constructed pre-condition of the enslaved/enslaveable Black body made the certificate of freedom necessary for free Africans in slave societies, the authority of the master represented through the law embodied in the text of the certificate, here invoked to supersede the symbolic order of custom. Unlike the unsanctioned public subjectivity of the maroon communities, the palenques, De Cespedes’ call to revolution and emancipation constructed Black armed resistance as a creative force in the forging of the nation, rather than the destructive element preventing the emergence of the nation. It was after all, Ferrer reports, the prominent African descent population that allowed Spain to represent Cuba as incapable of nationhood because the nation would be a Black nation, another Haiti, in a sense an anti-nation. I will return to this subject below.

African men expressed their new subject positions through new and open challenges to traditional social relations during the independence war. Ferrer offers the example of Emeterio Palacios, a free black tobacco worker from Santiago who was detained by the Spanish authorities for suspicion of supporting the rebel cause. What is of significant interest in his case has less to do with his actual or perceived support of the rebels, but rather with the manner in which he (allegedly) greeted a white man familiarly in a café. Ferrer reports Palacios as having withheld the honorific title Don from the white man, D. Jose Gilli, and instead calling Gilli ciudadanito [little citizen]: “Palacios thus not only denied him the don to address him as “citizen” and therefore as an equal, but he also opted for the diminutive form of the word, much in the same manner that non-blacks often addressed blacks as negrito” (41). Palacios’s familiarity was taken as a threat to public order of the same high order as any possible rebel activity. Indeed, they are of a piece, the leveling of social relations both through race, class, and the claim to citizenship.

Again, Ferrer offers Antonio Maceo as an illuminating example of the challenge to the symbolic order expressed through traditional social relations. When the Spanish commander Martinez Campos approached Maceo to bring him into the Pact of Zanjon, which inscribed the negotiated surrender of the Cuban rebels after ten years of war, Maceo, having already assumed a position in the symbolic order denied to him on at least two counts as colonial subject and a mulato, that of an honorable man, he also challenged Spain’s claim to being a civilized nation, equating civilization and progress with full emancipation and social equality. As long as Spain was a slave owning empire, which is to say an empire at all, colonialism being a species of slavery, the colonial state could not be characterized as civilized. Maceo turns the colonial symbolic order on its head (66).

Nonetheless, the symbolic order is resilient and adaptable. It frames the ideology of a culture and gives shape to the content of that ideology, reproducing the ideology through the embodied actions of people, including those cultural acts like speech acts or the exercise of politeness or courtesy. Even in the execution of the war, the tension created by the challenge to the symbolic order reveals the difficulty with which those invested in the maintenance of the order attempt to reproduce traditional social relations. Insurgent white officer Ignacio Mora’s specific criticisms about the transfer of power from the white Cuban Ignacio Agramonte to the black Dominican Maximo Gomez betray a cultural-racial-national anxiety. Ferrer reproduces this passage from his war diary:

“If [Gomez] has not destroyed the Camaguey division and converted it into bands, it is because its officer corps, formed by Agramonte, still remember the maxims and rules of their old leader. How jarring it is to see today’s camps! The noise, the gambling [el juego], the shooting of cattle, the tango of the blacks, the wild parties, and the filth of these camps warn us that their leader completed his apprenticeship in Santo Domingo. Everything reveals his poor upbringing and the society from which he comes.” (52)

Mora clearly experienced anxiety over the shifting cultural forms of recreation in the camps. War had been conducted as a “gentlemen’s” endeavor for centuries, reproducing the class structure of civilian society. His comments replicate the myths, stories and legends that cast African cultural forms as inherently immoral and antithetical to “the love of discipline, order, or morality” (52). Even his reference to “bands” may allude to unease with a shift to guerrilla tactics by Gomez. The culture of war came into tension with the shifting subjectivities that the rupture of the independence war allowed to emerge.

Under the modern colonial condition of white supremacy, the black body represents a troubling presence. The symbolic order under white supremacist colonialism demands that blackness, however widely or narrowly represented, to be defined as a problem. Thus, the pressure exerted by the hegemonic symbolic order rendered the notion of an African Cuba, another Haiti, unthinkable except as a nightmare by slave societies and their neo-slavery arrangements following emancipation throughout the Americas in the Nineteenth Century. Colonial Spain could therefore easily employ a propaganda war to exploit the fear of race war and the anxiety produced in the rebel camps by the darkening of the ranks and the officer corps. Mora, cited above, was not among those rebels who surrendered to Spain in 1871, but he agreed with those who surrendered that the “problem” with the rebel army, the reason for its de-moralization, could be found in its increasingly African descended character. Elite men asserted the old class hierarchies and racial hierarchies within the rebel army, and these assertions crashed against the new public faces of African men, Cuban citizens and patriots making claims to equality through shared armed struggle and the embrace of the values of the French Revolution: Liberte’, Egalite’, Fraternite’.

The representation of the independence struggle as a race war effectively demoralized white Cuban support for the war both within the rebel army and among the civilian population. To combat claims of race war by Blacks against whites during the period between La Guerra Chiquita and the final war for independence, 1880 to 1895, the Cuban nationalists on the island and in exile reconstructed the war under the rubric of racelessness. But racelessness is a tricky proposition. It remains within the semantic field of race language. The appeal to racelessness in the hands and from the pens of the most sympathetic of white Cubans could not transcend the “problem” of blackness. Racelessness as a position was necessary because the racist anxieties of the white population needed to be assuaged. In this way, racelessness reinforced a Eurocentric premise: the opinions and attitudes that mattered most were the opinions, fears and attitudes of whites, not blacks. Ferrer explains that the whitening of Cuba through increased Spanish immigration in the period helped the nationalists in this reconstruction of the discourse of the Ten Years’ War. Indeed, throughout Latin America, ruling elites encouraged and facilitated European immigration in order to whiten the overwhelmingly Mestizo/Mulato populations.

Even as the final war in the 1890s drew to a close, and before the United States’ intervention, another sort of whitening occurred with the moving of white Cubans, many late comers to the struggle, into the military administrative positions that would eventually become the local governance, and thus limited or eliminated the possibility of black leadership in the future civilian administration of the nation. Suitability for leadership became associated with “refinement” and “civility” and education, traits preconceived as nearly impossible in the black individual and monopolized by elite families. Consistent with early Spanish colonial policy regarding gentes de razon or “persons of reason,” namely those conversant in the Spanish language, the sign of a rational mind, the turn to refinement as the mark of suitability for leadership again reproduced the lie that on the one hand equates progress, modernity and civilization with European history and culture, and on the other alienates Spain’s (and other European and settler colonialists’) colonial subjects from their own histories and cultures in antagonistic relation to Europe and whiteness. Black majority threatens white existence and thus must remain controlled.

In contrast, in the hands and from the pens of black Cuban nationalists, the appeal to racelessness was an appeal to the democratic and egalitarian principles of the independence struggle. It should have meant the removal of traditional barriers to advancement or access to power. When it did not mean that, but instead denied access to African descended persons or facilitated the advancement of white individuals in order to remove the suggestion of favoritism toward blacks and mulattos, and thus remove charges of race war like those routinely aimed at Maceo, black Cuban intellectuals decried the practice as fundamentally treasonous, betraying the very ideals upon which the struggle was launched by Manuel de Cespedes in 1868, indeed antithetical to slogan of the French Revolution used freely by the Cubans: liberty, equality, fraternity. Ferrer effectively demonstrates this in her comparative analysis of the writings of Juan Gualberto Gomez, a mulatto journalist, and Cuban patriot Jose Marti. Once again betraying the anxiety producing presence of the black body, the black insurgent was a prominent figure for reconstruction. Whereas the white reading audience needed to be reassured of the fidelity and even passivity of the black insurgent, grateful and deferential under arms, black and mulatto writers writing for a black press championed the black insurgents’ dedication to Cuban nationality, gratitude for the independence struggle that led to the end of slavery, but also the reminder of the nation’s debt of gratitude to the black insurgents. Black and white Cuban nationalists both represented race war waged by blacks against whites as unthinkable and the accusation as slanderous.

Finally, Ferrer effectively raises the problematic of gender in the representations of the independence struggle. The Cuban independence writers constructed a singularly masculine image of the nation. The descriptions of men, black and white, struggling as brothers in arms, suffering the hardships of camp life and war, dying in each other’s arms and carrying each other’s wounded bodies placed a claim on the public sphere of the emerging nation. These writers constructed the nation as the creation of modern Cuban men inventing a new kind of brotherhood in the world. This representation is, of course, a fiction. Ferrer mentions the participation of mambisas, Cuban women who fought in battle with the men (174). Susan D. Greenbaum discusses Paulina Pedroso, a black Cuban woman living in Tampa, Florida, during the independence struggle who among other activities organized locally in support of independence (53). Mirabal reports on organizations founded by Cuban and Puerto Rican women in support of the independence struggle when they were barred from joining the male revolutionary clubs formed by the exile communities in North America, organizations like La Hijas de Cuba that challenged the hegemony of all-male groups like Junta Revolucionaria de Cuba y Puerto Rico (62). Nonetheless, the masculinist language of the independence movements constrained access to power for women engaged in the struggle: “They remained, despite their efforts and relative power, outside of the decision-making body of what was quickly becoming the main exile nationalist organization, the PRC [Partido Revolucionario Cubano] (64). This masculinist discourse of nation doubly erased the contributions of African descended Cuban women.

Like the black presence, and with its own body of myths, stories, legends, histories and historicities, the female presence is also troubling in the masculinist symbolic order of patriarchal culture. To return to a point introduced above, Ferrer’s discussion of the court martial of Quintin Bandera focuses on the cultural differences that emerged in the accusations against him, namely his openness about his fraternization with women in the camp, even though what he was accused of was a widespread practice throughout the rebel army, if done under cover of dark, as it were. Among other things, the morality of his camp was impugned because of the presence of his female partner and those of his men in the camp, rather than at a remove as was the custom. A “rustic” man, Bandera’s manner clashed with the expectations of the more “refined” Cuban leadership. Bandera broke with the expectations and the representation of the rebel camp as an exclusively masculine space. The broader, more inclusive and accurate model for the nation could have been taken from Bandera’s example, except that it too deeply upset the symbolic order that had been inscribed regarding the makers of the nation. I even wonder to what degree Bandera and the men and women in his army may have been conducting the practice of war in a maroon manner. That is mere speculation. But I am fascinated by the suggestion.

Ferrer’s use of the war diaries and memoirs of the rebels provide an illuminating view into the ways in which political and social struggle transforms social relations and public subjectivities. The African descended men (and women) who participated in this struggle in the thousands on the one hand seized upon this opportunity to abolish the slave society that held many of them and/or their family members as chattel, and on the other hand to participate in the forging of a new, independent modern nation, one that would owe them loyalty and gratitude for their service. Ferrer’s examination of the independence writers also offers another example the role of a discourse of nationalism and the press in inventing the nation. Nonetheless, the racialized symbolic order of modernity (re)imposed itself upon the Cuban struggle for independence, highlighting the difficulty involved in dismantling systems of hierarchy and oppression, however necessary the work, something to which contemporary Revolutionary Cuba attended early in its process when Fidel claimed African blood flowing freely through Cuban veins as constitutive of Cuban identity (qtd. in Cole 77). Revolutionary Cuba acted upon this heritage through internationalist solidarity with liberation and revolutionary movements and nations in Africa and the Africa Diaspora. Whereas Revolutionary Cuba has also inherited and promoted its own version of racelessness, and despite lingering racists attitudes and assumptions in Cuba, the revolution has at least seriously attempted to reconcile the African character of Cuban history, culture and genealogy with a contemporary Cuban national identity, another form of challenge to the modern symbolic order. Read Ada Ferrer’s Insurgent Cuba. She provides valuable lessons for us as some of us continue to work for a free world, for genuine African liberation.

W. Yusef Doucet is a faculty member of the Santa Monica College English Department.  He co-founded and facilitated the Dyamsay Writers’ Workshop in Santa Monica, CA, the Third Root Writers’ Workshop in Pomona, CA, and a poetry reading series at the Velocity Café in Santa Monica, CA.  Yusef is currently working on a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. His research interests include Fanonian analysis, the policing effect of integrationist/post-racialist ideology and anti-blackness in the modern symbolic order.  Yusef keeps a blog at freeignace.wordpress.com. 

Works Cited
Castro, Fidel. “We Stand with the People of Africa.” Venceremos Brigade Pamphlet. 1976. Quoted in “Afro-American Solidarity with Cuba. Johnetta B. Cole. The Black Scholar: Report from Cuba. Summer 1977.
Greenbaum, Susan D. “Afro-Cubans in Tampa.” The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States. Eds. Miriam Jimenez Roman and Juan Flores. Duke University Press: Durham, 2010. Pp. 51-61.
Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness.” Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. Grove Press: New York, 1967. Pp. 109-140.
Ferrer, Ada. Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1999.
Mirabal, Nancy, Raquel. “No Country but the One We Fight For: The Emergence of an Antillean Nation and Community in New York City, 1860-1901.” Mambo Montage. Eds. Agustin Lao-Montes and Arlene Davila. Columbia University Press: New York, 2001. Pp. 57-72.

Kony 2012: Wrapping Imperialiam in “Activism”

Like other fraudulent NGOs including Avaas.org who’s founder is formally of Fortune 500-funded, George Soros and Zbignew Brzezinski’s International Crisis Group (page 5) as well as the Soros-affiliated MoveOn.org, they exist within one degree of separation from the most depraved corporate-financier interests on earth, promoting identical agendas of invasion, war, occupation, and foreign meddling.

Youth Movement Promotes US Military Presence in Central Africa.

Nile Bowie
NileBowie.blogspot.com
March 8, 2012

Edward Bernays believed that society could not be trusted to make rational and informed decisions on their own, and that guiding public opinion was essential within a democratic society. Bernays founded the Council on Public Relations and his 1928 book, Propaganda cites the methodology used in the application of effective emotional communication. He discovered that such communication is capable of manipulating the unconscious in an effort to produce a desired effect – namely, a capacity to manufacture mass social adherence in support of products, political candidates and social movements. Nearly a century after his heyday, Bernays’ methodology is apparent in almost every form of civic and consumer persuasion. The platform of social media is being used in unprecedented new ways, one such example is a new online documentary about the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an extremist rebel group operating in Central Africa.

The documentary is unprecedented, not for its educational attributes but for its capacity to use visual branding, merchandising and highly potent emotional communication to influence the viewer to support US military operations in resource rich Central Africa under the pretext of capturing the LRA’s commander, Joseph Kony. The Lord’s Resistance Army was originally formed in 1987 in northwestern Uganda by members of the Acholi ethnic group, who were historically exploited as forced laborers by the British colonialists and later relegated by the nation’s dominant ethic groups following independence. Together with the Holy Spirit Movement, the LRA represented the armed wing of a resistance faction aiming to overthrow the government of current Ugandan President and staunch US military ally, Yoweri Museveni.

The LRA was originally formed to combat ethic marginalization, but soon became dominated by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed spiritual messenger of the (Christian) Holy Spirit. Kony utilized his messianic persona to lead a syncretic spiritual movement based on Acholi tribal beliefs’ and extremist Christian dogma. It is claimed that LRA seeks to establish a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments, however its inner ideological mythology is largely unknown. In an effort to mobilize a large scale armed resistance, the LRA routinely recruited child soldiers and forced them to commit heinous acts such as cannibalism and mutilation on others who resisted to join the rebel group during their extensive twenty-five year campaign.

KONY 2012 is directed by Jason Russell and runs just thirty minutes; the video has received over twenty million views on YouTube and Vimeo and it’s national support group on Facebook is said to gain 4,000 members each hour. The highly produced feature is narrated from the perspective of Russell and his attempt to explain the Lord’s Resistance Army to his infant son, Gavin. The video features footage from Russell’s trip to Uganda (prior to 2006, when the LRA was still operating in the region) and introduces the viewer to Jacob, a Ugandan boy who was formally recruited by the LRA as a child soldier. Russell presents various montages of ethically diverse groups of students raising their fists in the air, sporting KONY t-shirts, and scenes of mass celebration in response to President Obama signing the S. 1067: Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009.

The bill was passed without congressional approval, and allows the US to deploy military forces in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan (at the consent of those nations) in pursuit of LRA rebels. The film further advocates the requirement of public support for US military operations in the region through forms of street activism, encouraging viewers to purchase Action Kits ($30.00) and posters ($10.00) featuring images of Joseph Kony. Russell then targets specific celebrities and US policy makers and pressures them to endorse the campaign against Kony. Perhaps most absurdly, Russell suggests that without mass public support from the American public, the US would withdraw its military presence from the region.

This is the first large-scale campaign to mobilize social medialites to aggregate public support for what would otherwise be, controversial pro-intervention US foreign policy. The production relies on highly charged and often unrelated emotional triggers, which ultimately rely on the viewers sense of compassion in tandem with a lack of prior information on the subject to produce a desired result – explicitly, the villainous mythification of Kony and the mainstream acceptance of US presence in Africa through a proposed archipelago of AFRICOM military bases in the region.

The production targets an age group between thirteen and twenty-one, and uses a level of academic vocabulary appropriate for a young adult audience with a limited attention span; the narrator at one point even insists the viewer pay attention. The viewer is encouraged to form an emotional connection to Russell, as we witness unrelated footage of his child’s birth. The viewer is then subsequently associated with Russell’s role as a nurturer to his young son, before shifting to scenes of Russell nurturing the Ugandan child soldier, Jacob. Russell is shown prophetically pledging to stop the LRA to the traumatized and crying young boy. The intimate portrayal of emotion in these scenes work to further incite an reactionary response from the viewer, towards the preordained conclusion suggested in the narrative – a mass mobilization of support for the US military in their efforts to stop Jacob’s source of trauma. Bernays’ would be beside himself.

KONY 2012 is produced like any other sleek marketing campaign – instead of stimulating elements of self-satisfaction like advertisers would do to promote a product, US military intervention is justified to end an atrocious humanitarian catastrophe. The film also plays on an underlying theme of the White Man’s Burden, a notion that persons of European descent inherit a quality of guilt for their ancestors’ inclination for slavery and colonialism, requiring an activist response to finally correct the situation by “saving Africa.” During the Nigerian civil war in 1967, western media successfully used images of starving children for the first time to strengthen public support for military aid to the secessionist Republic of Biafra before rebel forces were defeated. This film attempts to purportedly “change the conversation of our culture,” however it remains a highly sophisticated refurbishment of pro-military interventionist foreign policy propaganda, dependent on dangerous subliminal messaging.

Furthermore, the film was produced by an organization called Invisible Children, Inc., who have been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide necessary information in the Bureau’s standards assessment. Invisible Children, Inc. has failed to disclose a list of sponsors (beyond the donations of American high school students), and has also earned a low rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. In a 2011 financial statement, the organization disclosed that only 31% of all the funds they receive are used for charitable purposes, with the majority allocated toward travel expenses and employee salaries. Invisible Children has also been accused of fraud and voter manipulation in a recent charity contest sponsored by Chase Bank and Facebook. The group’s Co-Founder and President, Laren Poole addressed the International Criminal Court in 2009 alongside Aryeh Neier, President of George Soros’ pro-war Open Society Institute.

Invisible Children has partnered with two other organizations, Resolve and Digitaria, to create the LRA Crisis Tracker, a digital crisis-mapping platform that broadcasts attacks allegedly committed by the LRA. On its list of corporate sponsors, Resolve lists Human Rights Watch and the International Rescue Committee. Digitaria’s website boasts commercial clients such as CBS, FOX, MTV, ESPN, Adidas, NFL, Qualcomm, NBC, National Geographic, Hasbro and Warner Brothers. While KONY 2012 attempts to portray itself as an indigenous activist movement bent on bringing justice to African children, its parent organization is affiliated with the upper echelon of the US corporate media and a network of foundation-funded pro-war civil society groups with a long history of fomenting pro-US regime change under the banner of democratic institution building.

According to Invisible Children’s own LRA Crisis Tracker, not a single case of LRA activity has been reported in Uganda since 2006. The website records ninety eight deaths in the past year, with the vast majority taking place in the northeastern Bangadi region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a tri-border expanse sharing territory with the Central African republic and South Sudan. Since December 2009, the eastern Djemah region of CAR has seen occasional LRA activity; the western Tambura region of South Sudan has experienced even less. The LRA has been in operation for over two decades, and presently remains at an extremely weakened state, with approximately 400 soldiers. Due to the extreme instability in northern DRC after decades of rebel insurgencies and Rwandan/Ugandan military incursions into the nation, it remains highly unlikely that cases of violence in the region can be sufficiently investigated before concluding LRA involvement.

The whereabouts of Joseph Kony are completely unknown; he was last seen in crossing between Sudan and CAR in 2010, according to unverified reports. The US military currently has one hundred military officers training and overseeing the Ugandan military in anti-LRA operations. Due to the complete absence of LRA activity in Uganda, it becomes feasible that the US may be planning further operations in the resource rich DRC. Over six million Congolese nationals have been killed in war since 1996, largely with US complicity. The regimes of Paul Kagame in Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda have both received millions in military aid from the United States. Since the abhorrent failure of the 1993 US intervention in Somalia, the US has relied on the militaries of Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia to carry out US interests in proxy.

Paul Kagame of Rwanda has been given free reign by the US to conduct military operations inside DRC in the on-going ethnic conflict in that region following the 1994 Rwandan genocide. For Ugandan participation in the fight against Somalia’s al Shabaab, Museveni receives $45 million dollars in military aid. The US has contributed enormous sums to these nations and now is beginning to consolidate its presence in the region under Barack Obama and AFRICOM, the United States African Command. The LRA has contributed to less than one hundred unverified deaths in the past twelve months. Considering that the United States completely ignored events in DRC and Rwanda that collectively resulted in nearly seven million deaths, their participation against the ailing Lord’s Resistance Army is completely absurd by comparison.

Through AFRICOM, the United States is seeking a foothold in the incredibly resource rich central African block in a further maneuver to aggregate regional hegemony over China. DRC is one of the world’s largest regions without an effectively functioning government. It contains vast deposits of diamonds, cobalt, copper, uranium, magnesium, and tin while producing over $1 billion in gold each year. It is entirely feasible that the US can considerably increase its presence in DRC under the pretext of capturing Joseph Kony. The US may further mobilize group forces, in addition to the use of predator drones and targeted missile strikes, inevitably killing civilians. In a press conference at the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2008, AFRICOM Commander, General William Ward stated that AFRICOM will further its regional presence by “operating under the principle theatre-goal of combating terrorism”.

During an AFRICOM Conference held at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller openly declared AFRICOM’s guiding principle as protecting “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market”, before citing China’s increasing presence in the region as challenging to American interests.The crimes of the Lord’s Resistance Army have been documented in the past and they are truly despicable actions. Presently, the operations of the LRA have nearly dissolved and their presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is difficult to verify. While the pro-war filmmakers behind KONY 2012 naively call for the US military to assert its place in the conflict, an independent fact finding mission would be far more effective in assessing the seriousness of the LRA threat in the present day.

Editor’s Note: Please also read about verified Western atrocities carried out in Uganda on behalf of the same corporate neo-imperial profiteering dressed up as “feel-good” activism.

Posted by Land De

SETTLER COLONIALISTS AND THEIR “EMPTY LAND” THEORY

Jan van Riebeeck in Tafelbaai

On 16 February 2012, speaking in a purported “New South Africa” Parliament, a former member of the apartheid colonialist National Party, now leading the opposition Freedom Front Plus, claimed that Africans are not the original inhabitants of 40% of Azania, which colonialists called South Africa on 2Oth September 1909.His name is Pieter Mulder. He is a minister of agriculture in the ANC Government led by President Jacob Zuma.

Mulder posits that Africans whom he calls Bantu, never in the past lived in the whole of South Africa. “The Bantu-speaking people moved from the Equator down south while the white people moved from the Cape to meet each other at the Kei River.” He does not disclose that the colonialists came from Europe. Their sole purpose was to take African lands by terrorist militarism. He does mention the Khoi and San people, whom colonialists called Hottentots and Bushmen respectively.

This reflects a despicable colonial attempt to falsify African history and conceal the genocide that colonialists perpetrated on the Khoisan African people. They were not only in the Western Cape but all over Azania as were all various other African people. For instance, King Adam Kok, one of the Khoi Kings still has a town called Kokstad after his name in what is known as Griqualand in the Eastern Cape. The Khoi Africans in the Western Cape under King Koebaha Heijkon maintained trade links with the Xhosa-speaking Africans to the North East of the Cape. The Dutch officials kept records that show that Europeans were amazed that the Khoi Africans traded copper ore with the Xhosa-speaking Africans. The Khoi also traded in goats with the Batswana.

Hendrik Witbooi was a King of the Nama section of the Khoi Africans that lived in parts of both Azania and Namibia. This was before colonialists gave colonial names to these African countries. It was also long before the imperialist Berlin Conference boundaries drawn by European imperialists. In July 1892, Major Curt von Francis of the German army ordered King Witbooi to surrender his African country to the Germans.

The Khoi King replied, “Africa belongs to us, both through the hue of our skin and our way of life. We belong together. And this Africa is entirely our country. The fact that we possess a variety of diverse LANDS and variety of kingships does not mean any secondary division and does not sever our solidarity. The Emperor of Germany has no business in Africa.”

Before Jan van Riebeeck in 1652

The beneficiaries of European colonialism have no business to claim an inch of African soil. Long before Jan van Riebeeck of the Dutch East India Company established a “provision station” in the Southern tip of Africa (Western Cape) the first war of national resistance against European colonial aggression was fought in this part of Azania (South Africa). The colonial aggressors were Portuguese. Their war of colonial aggression was led by Dom Francisco de Almeida. The Khoi people with a section of the Xhosa allies won this war. This was at the Battle of Salt River. It took place in 1510.All the Portuguese colonialists were killed. Probably as a result of this victory, it took 142 years before Europeans dared invade Azania.

It was after the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck through the Azanian Sea (now colonially called “Indian Ocean”) that Africans fought several wars of national resistance against colonialism. One of the first of such wars was fought beneath Table Mountain. This war was led by a Khoi leader called Doman. The colonial wars against the Khoi, as against the rest of Africans throughout Azania were in 1657, 1659 and 1673 to 1677. These three wars against colonialism by Khoi and San proved that the bravery of these sons and daughters of Africa was no match for the military terrorism of imperialist aggressors.

But even then, a Khoi African king in today’s Western Cape asked Jan van Riebeeck, “If we (Africans), were to come to Europe, would we be permitted to act in a similar manner you act here? It would not matter if you stayed at the “provision station”, but you come out here in the interior. You select the best land for yourselves. You never ask us, even once, whether we like it or not or whether it will disadvantage us. You say land is not enough for the pastures of your cattle and sheep as well as ours. Tell me, Jan van Riebeeck and your colonial settlers. Who then, with the greatest degree of justice should give way, the natural owner or the foreign invader?”

“Empty Land” In Azania Is Colonial Insanity

Colonialists are hungry for the riches of Africa and they have desperately tried to make their own wishful thinking the history of Africa ever since they landed in Africa. In 1961 the colonial prime minster of South Africa, Hendrick Verwoerd told an audience in London. “More than 300 years ago, two population groups equally foreign to South Africa converged in rather small numbers on what was practically empty land. Neither group colonised or robbed the other by invasion.”

His Foreign Affairs Minister, Eric Louw had earlier said, “The Bantu began to trek from the North across the Limpopo when Jan van Riebeeck landed at Table Bay in 1652.”

The colonial “empty land” theory has no historical credence. It is conceived in the womb of imperialism. Pieter Mulder suggests that the records of the Boer Trekkers must be consulted to prove his ridiculous point of view. This would be like asking the European Allies in the Second World to consult Nazi history records. The colonisers of Azania have worked for centuries to turn Azania into an “Australia” or “New Zealand.” South Africa is the only British colony in Africa that was called a “dominion.” Britain and its colonial settlers smuggled the African country it had colonised into the League of Nations and into the United Nations as a “sovereign state”, though the coloniser and its settlers could not tell the world on what date South Africa was returned to its rightful owners.

In 1930, reports on excavations at Mapungubwe in the Limpopo area revealed skeletal remains of what was called “ancient Azanians.” (See also Old Africa Rediscovered page 95, The Lost Cities Of Africa pages 155-156 by Basil Davidson; Man In Africa by L.S.B. Leakey; The History Of The World J.M. Roberts pages 457-458; Apartheid: The Story Of A Dispossessed People published by Marram Books London 1984 with a foreword by former Professor of history at Harvard University, C L R James).

A British academic, Shula Marks has pointed out that the carbon dates that have been processed from the Early Iron Age stretching over central, eastern and southern Africa reveal that the first Iron Age African farmers arrived here in the first millenium and not as had been previously assumed, relatively late in the second.” Prof. Marks further stated that “The earliest dates we have for the Iron Age in South Africa go back to 1200 years before the Portuguese rounded the southern tip of the Continent of Africa.” This will be about 286 A.D. When it is considered that there were some Europeans who passed through this country earlier than Portuguese Diaz in 1486, the date is much earlier. Addressing a symposium in 1973 on ancient mining in Azania (South Africa), head of archaeology department of Witwatersrand University stated that “the early Iron Age Africans entered Transvaal between 27 B.C. and 473 A.D.”

Heinous atrocities committed against the Khoi and San Africans is to the degree that they were exterminated. They are a few Khoi in South Africa today, but hardly any San people. The San had to flee to Namibia, Botswana and Angola to survive their colonial extermination from the colonial settlers. Here are a few examples: In 1771 another war broke out between the San people and the Dutch settlers. The San people had begun to retaliate against the setters. The settlers had taken large tracts of their hunting land for farming. As a result of this war, the settler leadership ordered that “every Bushman, Hottentot or Bastaad robber of any sex or age be delivered alive at Robben Island, there to serve the Dutch Company in chains….The Graaf Reinet turned out too late, but Jan van der Walt of the Koude Bokkeveld and Jonker Afrikaner…did yeoman service killing over 600 Bushmen and taking a few alive. As a reward for all this, Van der Walt was given two farms on the Nieuwveld,” writes Erick A Walker in his book A History Of Southern Africa page 118.

It is estimated that the population of the Khoi people when the colonisers arrived in the Western Cape was over a quarter million. Their extermination was not only with colonial guns. Leprosy disease introduced from passing European ships decimated the Khoi people. They had no clue how to treat this foreign disease. They died in great numbers. As Peter Dreyer, author of MARTYRS AND FANATICS…. puts it, “the Khoi were reduced to a landless proletariat – labourers or vagrants on the land of their ancestors.”

The colonial settlers having now subjugated the Khoi Africans and dispossessed them of their land employed them as labourers on their own robbed farmland. They paid them with food, old clothing and alcohol. The liquor is said to have been ‘’hot-ten-tots” a month – hence the new colonial name “Hottentots” for the Khoi people.

Animosity Between The Khoisan And Other Africans Is Colonial Fabrication

Another false theory that colonialists and their historians have propagated is that there was deep hatred between the Khoisan Africans and other Africans in Azania. As indicated earlier in this discussion, King Witbooi, one of the Khoi kings, dismissed this colonial fallacy. Historian Shula Marks has written, “Contrary to much of the mythology which dwells on the inveterate hatred between them…there is much archaeological as well as linguist record of long peaceful interaction between them. The clicks characteristic of the Southern Bantu languages, that are characteristic of the South Eastern Bantu languages, that are unique to this family, also speak of a long and intimate relationship between Khoisan and Bantu-speakers. Oral tradition in many areas recalls the intermarriage even of Bantu-speaking people with Khoisan women. Chief Molhebangwe (sic) of the southernmost Tswana people, the Tlhaping – his mother was a Khoi.”

In fact, a Mofokeng King married a San woman as his senior wife in 145O. Intermarriage between Xhosa-speaking Africans and Khoi Africans was so common that Amagqwashu, Amangqunukhwebe, Amacira and Amasukwini have been described by some historians as half-Xhosa and half-Khoi (Peter Dreyer author of MARTYS AND FANATICS page 81).These people spoke of their women as “Amalawukazi ampundu zibomvu” (The Khoi women who have fair red buttocks).

King Moshoeshoe of the Basotho was among Kings who married San women. Their names were Rosaleng also known as Qea and Motseola known as Seqha.

Loss of Land To Colonialists Is Loss Of Sovereignty, Resources And Nationality

The historical fact is that the colonialists exterminated the Khoisan Africans. Loss of land results in loss of national sovereignty, nationhood and wealth of its people. The national tragedy of losing one’s land was highlighted by Eta when the Khoi African King Adam Kok III died on 30 December 1875. In a moving funeral oration, Eta, the king’s cousin told the Khoi people rather prophetically: “We have laid in the grave a man you all knew and loved. He is the last king of our people. After him there will be no Khoi African in South Africa….Take a look into that grave. You will never look into the face of another king of our people. Do you realise that your nationality is buried there?”

When the Pieter Mulders, the Hendrick Verwoerds, the Eric Louws and their historians talk of “empty land” when colonialists arrived in Azania, they provoke very deep emotions in the hearts of the African people who were dispossessed of their land at gunpoint and are still dispossessed – hence the rampant poverty among them, whether they be Zulu Africans or Khoi Africans.

Prof. James H. Evans of the Faculty of Colgate Rochester Divinity College in America has asked, “Why does the white myth of South Africa differ widely from reality?” He hits the nail on the head when he says, “The answer to this question in part, is that the invaders found it necessary to justify historically, their invasion of a large portion of a black continent. By controlling the history of the region, they could control its inhabitants…the sole aim of which is to keep the Black majority in slavery.”

By Dr. Motsoko Pheko
(The writer is author of several books such as The Hidden Side Of South African Politics and How The Freedom Charter Betrayed The Dispossessed. He is a former Member of the South African Parliament and a former Representative of the victims of apartheid at the United Nations in New York as well as at the UN Commission On Human Rights in Geneva)

2/21 Albany Occupy Prisons Action for ending PP Jalil Muntaqim’s solitary confinement!

NOTE: The Free Mumia Coalition will be driving up to Albany for this Occupy Prisons Action, call our hotline if you want to join us.  212 330-8029

 

Justice For Jali!

 

End Prison Abuse and Solitary Confinement!

 

Attica “Correctional” Facility, January 23, 2012.

 

Jalil Anthony Bottom, a former Black Panther, was sentenced to SIX MONTHS IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT (called SHU or Special Housing Unit) for possession of PHOTOS OF MEMORIAL SERVICES FOR 2 FORMER BLACK PANTHERS.

 

We call on Governor Cuomo, the NYS Legislature, the Attorney General’s Office, and the Department of so-called “Corrections”

 

ISOLATION = TORTURE. END IT!

 

“Long term solitary confinement in excess of 15 days could amount to torture and should be banned.” — Juan E. Mendez, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. New York locks people in isolation at almost twice the national rate.

 

REVERSE JALIL’S DISCRIMINATORY TICKET AND INCREDIBLE 6-MONTH SENTENCE.

 

Six months in solitary confinement for photos of a memorial service exposes the arbitrary and cruel over-use of SHU for targeting, harassment, and abuse.

 

STRIKE DOWN THE “UNAUTHORIZED ORGANIZATIONS” REGULATION, written so vaguely that it invites abuse and harassment based on prisoners political beliefs or staff whims

 

ATTICA = ABUSE. SHUT IT DOWN! “Attica has clearly been unable to cast off its violent past, and has proven, time and time again, to be an unsafe and inhumane place for prisoners… The only possible remedy is to close the facility.” –The Correctional Association of New York

 

JOIN THE PEOPLE’S MIC FOR JALIL & AGAINST CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT in solidarity with occupy4prisoners national occupy day in support of prisoners

 

Tuesday, February 21, 12:00 noon

 Capitol Building, Washington Ave. entrance, Albany

 

Protest Jalil’s sentence (Anthony Bottom #77A4283) and the abuse of solitary confinement: Call your NYS

legislator or Commissioner of Corrections Brian Fisher.

 

The Radical Caucus of Occupy Albany

 

More Photo Images For “Black History Month Then & Now”…. So What Are YOU Gonna Do?

More Photo Images For “Black History Month Then & Now”…. So What Are YOU Gonna Do?

THEN……………..& NOW

   

_______________________________________________________________________________________

THEN………………………..& NOW

           

_________________________________________________________________________________________

THEN………….

 

&   NOW…………

________________________________________________________________________________________

500+ YEARS IS LONG ENOUGH; THIS FUCKING SHIT MUST STOP!

COME & JOIN US ON WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15TH FROM (9AM – 12NOON) 

@ BRONX CRIMINAL COURT AS WE OFFICIALLY LAUNCH AN “ALL- INCLUSIVE & NON-SECTARIAN”  CITY WIDE CAMPAIGN TO STOP POLICE TERROR; DECENTRALIZE THE NYPD; DESTROY THE RACIST PBA/FOP PIG UNIONS & BRING REAL COMMUNITY CONTROL TO PUBLIC SAFETY IN NEW YORK CITY!

SAVE THE DATE!  BRING YOUR LITERATURE!  OCCUPY THE COURT!

–
SIGN THE JERICHO COINTELPRO PETITION!

Free All Political Prisoners!
nycjericho@gmail.com • www.jerichony.org

Green female Revolutionary Guards will “honour the memory of martyr Muammar Gaddafi”

Green female Revolutionary Guards will “honour the memory of martyr Muammar Gaddafi”.

The following english translation below was originally published on the Lizzie Phelan news blogspot: 

Rough translation by I.A Libya

The Female green resistance, “the Alzafa al Akhdar brigade (from the Revolutionary Guards) are ready and prepared to fight in honour of the Martyr Gaddafi who is still alive in our hearts. We are prepared to carry out missions to cleanse the country of the enemy. We have already undertaken certain missions and will continue in our struggle … Greetings to all resistence from east to west, north and south who are struggling until we are all free … We are approaching “

Related articles

• Green female Revolutionary Guards will “honour the memory of martyr Muammar Gaddafi” (redantliberationarmy.wordpress.com)
• #Libya Gaddafi’s Female Guards: Where Are They Now? (dave-lucas.blogspot.com)

Radical Black Reading, 2011

Radical Black Reading, 2011

Posted: 27 Dec 2011 02:01 PM PST

While post-Black vapors have intoxicated contemporary culture, many of our favorite books of 2011 were part of a wave of scholarship that re-evaluated the Black Arts Movement and the Black Power era and took a second look at a long-ago time when “black” was still Black. In Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minnesota), Alondra Nelson provides a smart and timely evocation of the Black Panther Party’s forgotten community health care initiatives. Art historian Kellie Jones’ lavish Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Prestel) was published alongside an exhibition of the same name that was part of Pacific Standard Time, a sprawling multisite project on postwar LA art. Howard Rambsy’s The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry (Michigan) offered an innovative and exciting approach to Black Arts print culture while in Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, poet Evie Shockley (Wesleyan) explored experimentation and form in Black radical verse.

Yet Black Power and Black Arts were not the only examples of black radicalism that came across our desk in 2011. With its stylish and spirited ethnography of everyday life and everyday desire among Afro-Cubans in Havana and Santiago de Cuba, anthropologist Jafari S. Allen’s ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba (Duke) demonstrated how quotidian gestures can embody the most radical practices. Minkah Makalani reconsidered the transnational activism of Black Communists including CLR James, George Padmore, and Cecil Briggs in In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (UNC). Stephen M. Ward compiled the writings of Detroit autoworker and political philosopher James Boggs in Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader (Wayne State). Louis A. Parascandola continued his fantastic work resuscitating the legacy of the enigmatic Guyanese writer Eric Walrond, co-editing, with Carl A. Wade, In Search of Asylum: The Later Writings of Eric Walrond (Florida).

Let’s not forget the independents. 2011 saw a number of wonderful releases from those presses that have fought to forge a public discourse on Black politics and Black culture that is unencumbered by either corporate imperatives or academic distractions. Black Classic Press continued their righteous mission of keeping Black history’s sacred volumes in press by re-issuing Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Pambazuka, who gave us an incredible dossier on the anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death, released Jacques Depelchin’s Reclaiming African History, a slender but powerful volume on the history and political economy of pan-African dispossession. They also published Africa Awakening: The Emerging Revolutions, a compendium edited by Firoze Manji and Sokari Ekine examining the 2011 uprisings from the perspective – finally – of Africa. The legendary Présence Africaine published Moïse Udino’s meditation on the condition of Antilleans in France, Corps noirs, têtes républicaines: le paradoxe antillais. While London’s Peepal Tree Press has made available the Selected Poems of Una Marson, the great West Indian poet, publisher, broadcaster, and pan-Africanist.

Earlier in the year, our Reading Haiti post highlighted some of the notable volumes published on Haiti since the earthquake – but we completely passed over the titles of independent Montreal publishing house Mémoire d’encrier. Certainly among the most exciting publishers in North America, and rapidly emerging as critical platform for writers from the global south, in the past year alone Mémoire d’encrier has published Rapjazz: Journal d’un paria, Frankéttiene’s poetic meander through Port-au-Prince, Dany Laferrière’s earthquake memoir Tout bouge autour de moi, and Refonder Haiti edited by Pierre Buteau, Rodney Saint-Éloi and Lyonel Trouillot. Refonder Haiti brings together more than forty Haitian writers and thinkers addressing the question of reconstruction.*

Two other assessments of post-earthquake Haiti are due out early in 2012: Haiti: the Aftershocks of History (Metropolitan) by historian and Duke University Haiti Lab co-director Laurent DuBois, and the mammoth anthology Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Quake (Stylus/Kumarian), edited by anthropologist Mark Schuller and NACLA editor Pablo Morales. The contributors to Tectonic Shifts address questions of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism, resettlement and forced evictions, and women’s rights and public health – all of which move us far beyond the vapid pronouncements of a post-black condition.

All best for the New Year.

The Public Archive

*Thanks to @bulldozia for drawing our attention to these texts.

Image: “The House of Common Sense, the Home of Proper Propaganda,” Lewis Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore, 125th St. and Seventh Avenue Harlem (1964). Source: Uptown, Saturday Night. Also, this.

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Investigating the Pentagon’s African Holocaust

Spanish High Court Hears Evidence From Journalist Keith Harmon Snow

by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / December 14th, 2011

On November 29th investigative journalist and genocide expert Keith Harmon Snow testified before Spain’s Highest Court (Audencia Nacional) to support the indictments against 40 Rwandan officials for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity during the western-backed invasions of Rwanda and Congo/Zaire by Rwandan president Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF).

In 2005, the relatives of nine Spanish nationals killed in Rwanda and the Congo in 1994, 1996, 1997 and 2000, filed a lawsuit against the government of Rwanda resulting in the issuing of Interpol international arrest warrants for 40 Rwandan officials of Kagame’s régime.

On 6 February 2008, the Spanish Investigative Judge Andreu Merelles issued an indictment charging 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials with serious crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism, perpetrated over a period of 12 years, from 1990 to 2002, against the civilian population, and primarily against members of the Hutu ethnic group.

While the investigations were initially based on complaints from families of nine Spaniards who were killed, harmed or disappeared during the period at issue, the indictment was subsequently expanded to include crimes committed against Rwandan and Congolese victims, based on the universal jurisdiction doctrine. The indictment rules out the prosecution of Paul Kagame, arguing that he may not be prosecuted as long as he holds the position of President of Rwanda.

According to Spanish lawyer Jordi Palou Loverdos:

Spain’s Audencia Nacional was only met by silence when it duly and formally asked the U.N. to hand over the evidence of these crimes perpetrated against people in 1996 and 1997 or the evidence of the pillaging of valuable mineral resources conducted in these same years or earlier. The international media which had access to the UN report have made public the fact that the UN High Commissioner responsible for the report  keeps- separately from the latter- a confidential  data bank containing evidence that implicates individual Rwandan and Ugandan military officials.

In spite of threats and intimidation from agents linked to Western governments and from the United Nations, the Spanish High Court authorities are continuing to hear evidence against the Ugandan and Rwandan proxy forces of the United States in Africa.

Keith Harmon Snow has been researching the real facts of the tragedy known to the world as the Rwandan genocide since 1994, and has, along with many other experts, evidence to prove that the United States, Britain and Israel were responsible for the training, financing and covert military and logistic support of Kagame and Museveni’s forces.

On 6 April 1994, the UPDF/RPA proxy forces assassinated the Rwandan and Burundian presidents (Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira), their military chiefs of staff, and the French pilots of the plane they were flying on, thus provoking and participating in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hutus and Tutsis in one of the most violent civil wars in modern history.

Snow also presented detailed evidence of the war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity committed by Kagame and Museveni’s proxy forces, after they invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996, again backed by the Pentagon, Israel and NATO allies. The Congo/Zaire invasion was commanded by generals Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe, and they involved an officer attached to Kabarebe named Hyppolite Kanambe — alias Joseph Kabila, the strongman in Congo today.

The ongoing Rwandan occupation and plunder of eastern Congo has resulted in the deaths of some ten million people, making this the worst war since the Second World War. The Central African holocaust has been largely ignored by the global mass media corporations who are calling for “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, much as they did to justify invading Libya, by the same countries responsible for supporting mass carnage in Africa.

In spite of orders from Laurent Désire Kabila (Congo’s interim president of 1998-2001), to disengage from the Congo, the RPA and UPDF re-invaded the Congo in 1998, resulting in the Second Congolese War. Although the war is said to have ended in 2001, mass killing of the populations in the mineral rich Kivu provinces of Eastern Congo, under the leadership of these US-backed dictators, has continued to this day.

Contrary to its stated “peacekeeping” mission, the United Nations Observers Mission for the Congo (MONUC) and its follow on dependent, Monusco, has been deployed in the Congo since 2000 and has been involved in sexual violence and contraband activities. MONUC has provided cover for the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundi forces, USAID, the Pentagon’s new Africa Command (AFRICOM), and scores of Western mining corporations who are plundering the Eastern Congo.

Snow gave detailed testimony to the Audencia Nacional of the American, British, Belgian, German, Israeli and Australian mining corporations who have profited from the Pentagon’s holocaust in the Congo.  Banro Corporation, Barrick Gold and many companies run by the Blattner dynasty have profited astronomically from the pillaging of the Congolese people’s resources, as domestic warlords and Western elites enrich themselves while the local people starve.

Snow alleges that these corporations have direct links to the criminal networks run by Paul Kagame, who are plundering the Kivu provinces of the Eastern Congo and massacring the Hutu Rwandan refugees there.

Though the majority of victims have been from the populations of Rwandan Hutus, Rwandan Tutsis and Twa have also been targeted, both in Congo and Rwanda, and many Congolese ethnic groups have been targeted in the Congo. The Kagame regime is determined to eliminate all possible opposition to its rule and to occupy and annex eastern Congo to create a “Republic of the Volcanoes” controlled by Rwanda and populated with satellite US military bases.

Snow told the Spanish court that details collected by the UN Panel of Experts report of 2001 to 2010, detailing the illegal occupation, plunder and war crimes in the Congo, have been watered down by special interest groups linked to Western governments, thus shielding Western corporations and governments from scrutiny by the International Criminal Court and the Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.

Trained in the notorious Fort Levenworth, Kansas (USA) and advised by former British prime minister Tony Blair, Paul Kagame is without question one of the most evil dictators in modern history. The scale and intensity of his atrocities dwarf those of Pinochet, Suharto and Somoza combined.

In spite of expertise gained on the ground throughout Central Africa spanning 20 years, expert testimony to the US House of Representatives in 2001, extensive work as genocide consultant to the United Nations and numerous meticulously documented reports, Keith Harmon Snow’s work continues to be ignored by the corporate media and many outlets who claim to be ‘progressive’ and ‘independent’ .

According to  Snow:

U.S.-based groups fronted by the intelligence and defense establishment and pretending to be ‘grass roots non-government organizations’ — such as the ENOUGH project, Raise Hope for Congo, Resolve, STAND and Save Darfur — have co-opted the grass roots movement and are whitewashing the issues and controlling the media, academic and public spaces to prevent the true grass roots voices for Central Africa from being heard and to prevent the deeper issues from being understood.¹

In preparation for a documentary film to be released next year on the African holocaust, Keith Harmon Snow has just completed a series of interviews with distinguished scholars, investigative journalists and lawyers from France, Spain, Germany, Camaroun and Rwanda. The film, as yet untitled, is expected to be aired in film festivals throughout the world and will also be available online for mass viewing.

Rwanda and the Congo belong to the ninth circle of global capitalism’s Dantesque inferno. It is the circle of betrayal; betrayal of the high ideals of the United Nations to uphold the rule of law and work towards the goal of international peace and stability; betrayal of the trust ordinary citizens of the world have in media corporations to tell them what is really happening in the world, so that leaders and potentates can be held to account.

Uncovering the truth about the role of Western imperialism in the violence that has beset Central Africa since the fall of the USSR to the present day, is of vital importance, as the obscene and racist myth of an African genocide America “failed to prevent” constitutes the mendacious and  insane basis for the Orwellian “responsibility to protect” doctrine.

Western governments and their pro-Kagame lobbies in the mainstream media are quick to smear as ‘genocide deniers’ those who challenge the lies and distortions of the official genocide narrative of the current Rwandan régime by exposing the inconvenient and politically incorrect facts. In the case of Rwanda and the Congo, it should now be abundantly clear who those genocide-deniers are.

Gearóid Ó Colmáin was born in Cork, Ireland, and is currently based in Paris. He is a former bilingual columnist with Metro Eireann. His interests include geopolitcs, globalisation, philosophy and the arts. He is a member of SISA, the Italian-based ecology and education syndicate. Read other articles by Gearóid, or visit Gearóid’s website.

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As Nelson Mandela Turns 93, a Discussion with Anti-Apartheid Freedom Fighter Ronnie Kasrils

As Nelson Mandela Turns 93, a Discussion with Anti-Apartheid Freedom Fighter Ronnie Kasrils.

As South Africa celebrates the 93rd birthday of anti-apartheid leader and former South African president, Nelson Mandela, we speak to one of Mandela’s allies, Ronnie Kasrils, who was on the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress for 20 years. Kasrils also served as minister for intelligence services in post-apartheid South Africa from 2004 to 2008. He has just published a new book, “The Unlikely Secret Agent,” about his late wife Eleanor, a Scottish South African anti-apartheid activist. [includes rush transcript]

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Guest:

Ronnie Kasrils, leading anti-Apartheid activist who was on the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress for 20 years. He also served as Minister for Intelligence Services in post-Apartheid South Africa from 2004

AMY GOODMAN: We turn to South Africa, which today celebrates the 93rd birthday of Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader, the former South African president. He’s expected to spend the day with family in his childhood village in the Eastern Cape. The country’s 12.4 million schoolchildren are planning to sing to him simultaneously this morning. President Barack Obama congratulated Mandela on the eve of his 93rd birthday. He called Mandela, quote, “a beacon for the global community and for all who work for democracy, justice and reconciliation.”

We turn right now to another member of the ANC. I met up with him recently in London. His name is Ronnie Kasrils, leading anti-apartheid underground activist, was on the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress for 20 years, served as minister for intelligence in post-apartheid South Africa from 2004 to 2008. And I started by asking him about his wife, because he has just written a book about Eleanor, a Scottish South African anti-apartheid activist. Ronnie Kasrils’ book is called The Unlikely Secret Agent.

RONNIE KASRILS: She was a wonderful person. She did extraordinary things. She never sought the limelight. When people heard of the things that she had done, her exploits from 1960 after Sharpeville, when I first met her, right through her life, they would be very surprised. She was an elegant, very refined, modest person, and people just didn’t think that she could have done the very dangerous things during that apartheid time, those terrible times, when she was an underground agent for the movement, for the ANC, and also carried out spectacular operations with myself and others, sabotage operations. She was arrested. She was interrogated very brutally. And she managed to turn the tables on the security police by escaping from their clutches.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us exactly what happened. Tell us the time, where she was, what she was doing, and what happened to her.

RONNIE KASRILS: So, the book starts in 1963 in a bookstore in downtown Durban, and the security police come in. She tries to make a run for it, because she knows they’ve come to arrest her. And, of course, they manage to detain her. They take her off to an interrogation center.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s 1963. Mandela was captured then also.

RONNIE KASRILS: It’s the time, very tense time in South Africa. Mandela has been captured. He’s going on trial that year with other leaders, face possibly a death sentence. There had been sabotage actions under his command after the Sharpeville massacre, in which he had participated.

AMY GOODMAN: The Sharpeville massacre being…?

RONNIE KASRILS: Of 1960, 1960.

AMY GOODMAN: Remind people.

RONNIE KASRILS: When 69 unarmed Africans protesting against the past laws that they had to carry were shot down outside Johannesburg. The ANC was banned. People were imprisoned. And it was a very, very difficult and dangerous time in South Africa. So, they arrived to arrest her—

AMY GOODMAN: Eleanor was there?

RONNIE KASRILS: She was in South Africa at this period. And the story opens, in the book, with her being arrested in the bookstore, and that’s in 1963. A lot of what I’ve just said one sees in flashback, as she’s sitting through detention. After being very brutally interrogated day after day, she goes on a hunger strike. And she’s got tremendous amount of secrets that she’s got to keep under her chest, and she’s terrified that she might break and provide the information, which is what the Special Branch are looking for. They initially are wanting her to lead them to me and a wanted person. I’m on the run with others. So that’s the book. It deals with that particular period.

AMY GOODMAN: What were you doing at the time?

RONNIE KASRILS: Well, I was engaged in underground activities for the ANC with others. We had survived the arrests, and we were determined to carry on the struggle.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you get involved with the African National Congress?

RONNIE KASRILS: I got involved after the Sharpeville massacre as a young student, same time as Eleanor. And it was out of shock and revulsion for what had happened at Sharpeville and just the general revulsion against the apartheid system. I sought the ANC out. It was not that easy. They had been banned. But, of course, one had friends and contacts, and I got deeply involved very quickly.

AMY GOODMAN: You were white. You were Jewish.

RONNIE KASRILS: Yes. South African, and born and grew up in South Africa of Jewish background, but I would say a less Jew. I was much more South African in my identity. And in terms of coming to terms with being a white South African, it was about whether I would stand with the black oppressed, and in that sense be truly a South African.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you meet Eleanor?

RONNIE KASRILS: I came down to Durban, where she lived, and happened to stay with friends who were next door her. She had just broken up a marriage, separated from her husband. She was very young, and when I met her, she was a single parent. She had a little girl aged three, who features very strongly in the story, actually.

AMY GOODMAN: Was she active at the time?

RONNIE KASRILS: She was actually a person of conscience like me, but who was connected to Alan Paton’s Liberal Party. And I had joined the more militant, mass-based African National Congress and managed to convince her—it wasn’t difficult—that this was the place where we could really change things.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Eleanor was a member of the ANC, as well?

RONNIE KASRILS: Oh, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: So, go back to the bookstore.

RONNIE KASRILS: So, there she is, trying to keep up appearances in a bookstore, a bookstore which has become very central to the survival of a number of us who are in hiding. And it’s through her and that bookstore that we managed to communicate messages going through her. This is one of the aspects of her role at that particular time. They weren’t aware of that. They wanted to take her in, and they wanted to intimidate her into giving me away, because they knew that they would find me through her, if they could make her talk.

AMY GOODMAN: What prison was she in?

RONNIE KASRILS: Well, she was taken to an interrogation center outside Durban. And she was then kept in Durban’s central prison. They would take her for interrogations at night and day from that prison.

AMY GOODMAN: And what happened to her exactly?

RONNIE KASRILS: She went on hunger strike. And they were actually in a quandary, because they didn’t know how to handle a white woman who was defying them. They were rather petrified that she would die on their hands and subsequently brought a psychiatrist in to assist her. She began to feign a mental breakdown. And the psychiatrist happened to be quite a sympathetic human being, and he stressed to the security police that she would die if she wasn’t transferred to a hospital.

AMY GOODMAN: What did she do to feign a mental breakdown?

RONNIE KASRILS: Well, it wasn’t difficult, because she was on a hunger strike, so she was weak and she was in a bad state. She was being brutalized, brutally treated by then, beaten, hair pulled, thrown to the ground, all sorts of things. And it was easy for her to turn on the tears. In that situation, she made it worse and worse, and they really just couldn’t handle it. So they agreed to take her to a mental home.

AMY GOODMAN: Where did they take her to? What mental institution?

RONNIE KASRILS: They drove her out of Durban to a place called Fort Napier, which had been a British military garrison from the previous century in the Zulu wars. It had been turned into a mental asylum. And they took her to this place. She was feeling elated, because she felt she would be able to escape far more easily from a hospital than from a prison. And this is what she was planning. They came to this very foreboding Victorian garrison with high walls, with gates with sentries. And as they arrived, the Special Branch mocked her, and they said, “You think you’re clever coming to a place like this, but there’s a prison within this place, and this prison is for lunatics, criminally insane, and that’s where you’ll be detained. And in no time, you’ll be wailing for your nice, cozy cell back in the Durban prison.” They went into this place, and a vast setup, a kind of asylum where ordinary mental patients were recovering or being treated. And, you know, they would have families coming and going and so on. They came to what obviously had been the penal center during the British garrison days, a place with metal doors, with barred windows, a real prison. And they came to this place and handed her over to the superintendent of this place for assessment.

AMY GOODMAN: So what happened then?

RONNIE KASRILS: She was absolutely terrified when she went into this place. We’ve all seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This was much more backward. This is Durban, 1963. Of course, there were all these muscular nurses around in starched white uniforms. And this was a center for women who have been confined there in some cases for 20 years, women who have carried out misdeeds like murdering their husbands or boyfriends or burning down a house with their children in, women who have mentally broken down, been sentenced to this place rather than to the normal prisons. And she sees at once that these people are just heavily, heavily medicated. They’re frightening. They’re all wearing grey smocks. There are the headbangers. There are the droolers. There are the people who look like zombies, very stiff-limbed. There’s a woman crying out, “They’ve killed my baby! My baby’s been killed! They murdered my baby!” That night, from her cell, she hears the same woman crying, “They killed my baby! Baby Jesus! They put him up on a cross!” So it’s this kind of situation taking place. They’re very heavily medicated. This was the only way that they’re kept in place.

But she pulls herself together, and she realizes these are victims. These are poor, wretched women who are suffering, and she shouldn’t be afraid of them. And she comes to terms with the place, and she soon interacts. They’re very interested in her. They’re constantly touching her and feeling her hair and so on. She’s in her ordinary civilian clothing; she hasn’t been sentenced. And she comes across a group of women who, like her, are in civilian dress. And she discovers these are women who aren’t mentally disturbed, but they’ve been incarcerated in this place by their families to dry out. They’re alcoholics. And she interacts with them. They’re working-class white women, backward in terms of politics. But Eleanor can get on with them. And she settles down in this place and in no time is assisting the staff in handing out the towels to the patients, in clearing tables, and stuff like this. So she gets to grips with this particular point, this particular place.

She speaks to this one woman, this alcoholic, who is very responsive to her. They play cards. And she says she’s got to get a letter out to a young student who lives in that particular town. Would this woman write to him and ask him to come and visit her, an anonymous woman? And Eleanor dictates a letter to this guy, simply saying, you know, “I’m a lonely woman here. I need to meet people, and I need somebody like you to come and talk to me. I need to talk to someone of your faith. And if you can’t make it, send someone else of your faith.” And Eleanor knew that this particular guy—Rob, by name—would be very curious and would come, particularly because of that phrase. And—

AMY GOODMAN: What was his faith?

RONNIE KASRILS: His faith was he was an ANC member. OK, he was of no faith. He was an atheist, as well. So he walks up there. He doesn’t know Eleanor is there, but of course everyone who would have known her knew that she had been detained. And she writes a couple of letters on very thin cigarette paper. She smoked, like everybody else in those days, like a chimney. And he was in the reception, visitors’ room, meeting with this woman. Nobody else was around. And Eleanor went into this place, tapped him on the shoulder. He nearly collapsed. And she gave him these letters. And those letters were to me and to leaders of the organization, and to this group in Pietermaritzburg, asking for assistance. She said she was going to plan an escape but needed them to help her from the outside.

AMY GOODMAN: So what happened then?

RONNIE KASRILS: She waited for a reply. And the days went by, and it became a week, and more than a week, and she was getting very worried.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you get the message?

RONNIE KASRILS: I did, indeed. And we were planning to assist her, but we were slow about it, so she didn’t hear from us. And one Friday afternoon, a nurse said to her, “Eleanor, why are you looking so glum? You’re usually in high spirits.” She couldn’t tell him why. She was just worried about no response. And the nurse said to her, “You know, you don’t have to be so down in the dumps, because the Special Branch police are coming to fetch you on Monday, so we’ve heard.” She really freaked out.

There was a black nurse, one black woman, who would come and bring the towels and medication to this center for white women patients. And Eleanor found her in the ironing room and asked her to help. She had befriended her previously. And she said to this woman, “I’ve got to get out this weekend.” And this woman said to her, “I can leave the back door of this prison unlocked at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow morning when the shifts change, but only for five minutes. You’ll have to find your way out of the grounds and through the security gate, and you’re going to need to change your appearance, because people know what you look like.” Eleanor said, “Don’t worry about that, just please have that door unlocked.”

So, that night, she prepared her disguise. She had a dress that she had never worn, kept it under the mattress, which meant it was very nicely pressed. She had a scarf for her head. She had managed to get a lipstick from somebody. She managed to get a crayon, a black crayon, from an art class, and she had filched a letterhead from superintendent’s office, and a little bit of money, some coins, playing cards with the alcoholics.

So, the next morning, Eleanor is waiting for the cell to be unlocked. The nurses do the rounds. The patients then go to the bathroom and go to breakfast. She used the lipstick, rouge on her cheeks. She was a very fair woman and very pale—I mean, to the hunger strike and incarceration. So she rosied her features up. She made the eyebrows very dark. And she had the dress on and had this scarf, managed to get down the passageway to this back door without being seen. And the nurse, the black nurse, had left a basket at that door for her, because all the staff, whether in uniform or in civilian dress, carried these baskets. Eleanor came down the passageway, and there was the basket. And she just hoped and felt the door must be open. And she opened it, and indeed it was.

AMY GOODMAN: And that’s how Eleanor Kasrils escaped. Ronnie Kasrils describing the escape of his late wife Eleanor from a mental institution in 1963. She, like Ronnie Kasrils, was a clandestine agent for the ANC, arrested by the secret police in the Durban bookstore where she worked, a year after Nelson Mandela was arrested. Soon after she escaped, she met up with her partner Ronnie Kasrils. They would marry. And for the next 30 years, they would organize inside and outside South Africa.

Ronnie Kasrils has just written a book about his late wife called The Unlikely Secret Agent. Before that, he wrote his own memoir called Armed and Dangerous, which was the sign that the apartheid police put up all over South Africa, looking for Ronnie. He served as chief of intelligence under Thabo Mbeki and deputy defense minister under Nelson Mandela. Yes, the Kasrils were allies of Nelson Mandela. Today has been declared International Mandela Day. It’s Nelson Mandela’s 93rd birthday.

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