16 novembre 2007
I was shot yesterday night
Yesterday Thursday November 15, 20:00 hrs, Eastern Standard
Time, 
on the scene, secure a perimeter, and quickly
find the case of the bullet. My daughter’s mom, who’s heard the gun report,
calls my cellphone: the call doesn’t go through; my phone, having fallen from
my jacket pocket, is scattered on the pavement. Worried, she drives up the
street and finds the neighbor and me reporting to the detectives: she scans me
from head to toe, thinking I might have been hit without realizing it. A
detective tells her: “It’s kids, ma’am, high on some drugs, who wanted to shoot
at someone! Had they been professionals, they’d not have missed… Plus: they’d
have finished him off as he tells me he couldn’t get up having hurt his knees”…
In July 2005, Charles Matembe, my childhood friend, had been shot and killed in
his Mercedes Benz in the neighborhood “Bon Marché” in
I took the picture above today: it's the spot where the hoodlums crossed to shoot at me.
13 novembre 2007
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Siren of African Historical Novel
This past long weekend---it was Veterans' Day weekend in the U.S.---I serendipitously discovered the new siren of African Historical Novel: the Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born in 1977) in her 2006 novel Half of a Yellow Sun that has been reissued in paperback this year (New York: Anchor Books, 2007). 
I'm thrice ashamed by the fact that: 1) At the bookseller, I was wholly attracted by the paratextual guise of the novel's marvelous cover design (in spite of the proverbial warning that you don't buy a book by its cover); 2) As an amateur of fiction---whose taste ranges from Vikram Seth, Zadie Smith, A.S. Byatt, Robertson Davies, Barry Unsworth, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Shauna Singh Baldwin to J.K. Rowling (and the list is not exhaustive)---I've never heard of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, though she has a previous award-winning novel: Purple Hibiscus, which I still have to read; and 3) I hail from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where creative fiction and daily literary practice by the citizenry have all but vanished to be replaced by a kind of a national vicious fictional practice I call "religious-political rumor-mongering" which has the potential of ruining lives through violence at any time in a Congolese urban environment. No wonder then that in DRC, Soukous musicians have usurped the traditional role of "writers" and "intellectuals"---a crazy development where in times of crises the head-of-state would convene those musicians---some of them with frivolous names like "Bill Clinton"---for meetings to find ways out of these crises due to these musicians' alleged role as "educators of the masses"! The problem is that these Soukous musicians don't take their role seriously or don't think they can stand by their political choice and commitment. During the 2006 presidential electoral campaign in Kinshasa, some Soukous musicians---like Mbilia Bell, Tshala Mwana, Emeneya, Kofi Olomide, Papa Wemba, and Werrason---were paid by the incumbent to write propaganda songs for him. And when Jean-Pierre Bemba's supporters went on an anti-incumbent violent rampage on July 26 of last year, they also targeted those musicians---burning to the ground for instance the club Samba Playa, the rehearsal venue of Werrason. The most astonishing defense of musicians I saw on Congolese TV came from Papa Wemba who claimed in an interview that in fact musicians are just akin to "prostitutes" who get paid, like griots, to sing the praises of well-paying politicians! ... No wonder then that in the Congo, the entire popular culture is being "restructured " by Nigerian Igbo films with Igbo words like "igwe" (chief) being given to Jean-Pierre Bemba!...
I need to turn back to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel, lest I get lost in my digression. One would be missing the whole
picture by just describing this novel---Half of a Yellow Sun---as a historical or political novel. It is also a great multi-layered novel of love (also beyond races and religions), of friendship, of filial relations, of sisterhood... It could also be construed as a glimpse into the post-independence Nigerian upper class and intellectual elite... More importantly, it's also the first African novel to stand as a counterpoint to the Cameroonian novelist Ferdinand Oyono's Une vie de boy (1956)---translated in English as Houseboy (1966). For in this novel, in contrast to Oyono's novel in which the houseboy will never turn into a coeval of his masters, Ugwu, the houseboy in Adichie's novel, becomes a coeval family member in the household of his "Master," a fellow Igbo, who sends him back to school and evolves into the writer whose book's outline is interspersed into the novel in a "mise-en-abyme"---a technique A.S. Byatt has pushed to its apex in the new fiction written in English (Possession: A Romance comes here vividly to my mind). The writing of the houseboy takes on such importance that it even crystallizes the experience of the "Master"'s wife, Olanna, who is an intellectual trained in the U.K.: "Ugwu was writing as she spoke, and his writing, the earnest of his interest, suddenly made her story important, made it serve a larger purpose that even she was not sure of, and so she told him all she remembered about the train full of people who had cried and shouted and urinated on themselves" (page 512).
The symbolism of the title of the novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, an expression that recurs in the novel like a refrain of a Congolese soukous song, is unlocked on page 352 of the novel: "About a quarter of her class attended school. She taught them about the Biafran flag. They sat on wooden planks and the weak morning sun streamed into the roofless class as she unfurled Odenigbo's cloth flag and told them what the symbols meant. Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future."
Though the story is told from the perspective of "Biafrans," the novel by no means stands as a piece of propaganda for the Igbos. Biafrans are also cast as bad guys: war profiteering; rapes of their own Igbo women; forced conscription of children (Ugwu would be conscripted and wounded in combat); the Ministry of Information as the Ministry of lies; use of mercenaries (particularly one German mercenary who "throws girls on their backs in the open where the men can see him and does them, all the time holding his bag of money in one hand" (p. 406); even Ojukwu's alleged autocracy, "rape" of some of his collaborators' wives, and flight abroad under the false pretense of negotiating a peace treaty with Gowon. At one point, as the fall of Biafra looms, Harrison, another houseboy, walks up to Ugwu with a blaring radio tuned to "Radio Biafra" and the latter balks:
"Please turn that thing off," Ugwu said. He was watching some little boys playing on the nearby patch of grass. "I want to hear the birds."
"There are no birds singing," Harrison said.
"Turn it off."
"His Excellency [Ojukwu] is about to give a speech."
"Turn it off or carry it away."
"You don't want to hear His Excellency?"
"Mba, no."
Harrison was watching him. "It will be a great speech."
"There is no such thing as greatness," Ugwu said (p. 500).
Adichie's novel, though set against the background of the Nigerian civil was in the late sixties, has a searing relevance today in many of Africa's ethnic conflict-ridden regions: Darfur and the Great Lakes---with their accompanying humanitarian disasters and the Western media horrible ranking of African news: famine that forces people to "watch[..] the goats" "[t]o see what they are eating, and after seeing they are boiling the same leaves and giving their children to drink. It is stopping kwashiorkor" (p. 340); the abuse of refugees: with the Catholic Father Marcel who "fucks most of them [starving girls] before he gives them the crayfish that I slave to get here" (p. 499); the horrific "rule of Western journalism: one hundred dead black people equal one dead white person"; and what we often forget while watching TV footages of Internally Displaced People [IDP's]: "The smell was awful, nose-filling, the smell of a dirty toilet and rancid steamed beans and boiled eggs gone bad" (p. 363).
I didn't rehash the plot of the novel for one simple reason: Adichie's novel is a universe; one has to grab this page-turner and lose oneself into its multi-layered universe and back-an-forth chronotope between the "early sixties" and the "late sixties."
08 novembre 2007
Sexual Terrorism: Bureaucratic Realism vs. Academic Word-mongering Malpractice
Victims of Sexual Terrorism in a hospital ward in eastern Congo/Photo: Hazel Thompson Rwanda exported “sexual terrorism”
to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), mostly in the late 1990s,
when the chase and revenge killings of the perpetrators of the 1994
genocide turned into a full-scale counter-genocide of Hutu refugees
with more than 230,000 victims. Beside outright killings, rapes and
sexual mutilations of Hutu women were systematically carried out as a
form of punishment of their ethnic group’s perpetration of genocide in
Rwanda. And since then, northeastern Congo has become the epicenter of
this scourge where it has festered among roving armed bands, penetrated
the anthropological fabric of the Congolese society, and results today
in the near psychological and physical destruction and extinction of
Congolese women. A socio-historical antecedent that still has to find a
definition and a body of scholarship in social sciences. The most
shocking thing about this is that the ongoing sexual terrorism in the
Congo has caused scant media attention in Africa and in the rest of the
world. What’s more, African and Congolese social scientists claim to be
unable to develop a theoretical tool able to map out, trace, and
explain the horrific phenomenon. As the photographer Hazel Thompson puts it in the legend of one of the horrific photographs she brought back from eastern Congo in early October 2007: “No
one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can
explain exactly why this is happening. “We don’t know why these rapes
are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr.[Denis] Mukwege. “They
are done to destroy women. Really! Would then this be the first human deviant behavior to baffle
scientists in the history of the social sciences? 
But in the course of only a 3-week fieldwork period in eastern Congo in the winter of 2004, a couple of female bureaucrats at USAID who didn’t shy away from tackling head on this phenomenon, gave it the name “sexual terrorism” and developed in the process a basic theoretical toolkit for understanding it---to the shame of social scientists!
What’s sexual terrorism?
The findings of these two women bureaucrats are contained in
a small, little-known 30-page assessment report by USAID’s Office of Transition
Initiative and Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance that was published on 18
March 2004 in PDF format. Beside defining sexual terrorism, tracing its roots,
and offering the first description of its horrific psycho-medical impact on
women’s bodies, the most interesting thing about the conceptual development of
this document is the fact that it the latter was wholly elaborated by a team of
women in the killing and rape fields of the Congo. The document is entitled
“ Sexual Terrorism: Rape as a Weapon of War: in Eastern Democratic Republic of
Congo: An assessment of programmatic responses to sexual violence in North
Kivu, South Kivu, Maniema, and Provinces Orientale (January 9-16,
2004).”
The report was penned by Dr Marion Pratt (Social Science Advisor) and Leah Werchik, J.D. (Human Rights Advisor)---with a team of 5 other women bureaucrats, with a host of Congolese women investigators. What’s also very significant about this report is that, though written by bureaucrats, it is bound one day to become a seminal academic conceptual tool in analyzing the phenomenon.
The report’s definition of “sexual terrorism” is very descriptive:
“Rape and associated
violence against civilians (women, men, girls, and boys) have been widely employed
as weapons in the multiple regional and civil wars that have plagued the
eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo
African academics would certainly gain in realism by reading through this short report. The one attempt to my knowledge by an African (male) scholar to describe the phenomenon is couched in almost unreadable language characteristic of the much-discredited deconstruction fad (though the scholar I’m referring to would vehemently refute my lumping him with postmodern Derridean deconstructionists). The Cameroonian academic and prolific postmodernist theorist Achille Mbembe, whom I am referring to, attempted, as I just said, to grasp this phenomenon of sexual terrorism in parts of his essay entitled “Sovereignty as a Form of Expenditure.” I am not even going to dwell on this notion “expenditure” borrowed from the one-time surrealist French philosopher Georges Bataille. But suffice it to say that when our African (male) scholar tries to capture the phenomenon, he fails miserably as he plods through the conceptual field of the equally discredited old psychoanalytic mold:
“In the face of the
sense---widespread among men---of menacing feminization, rites of proving or
demonstrating one’s virility are multiplying. With the assistance of a context
dominated by wars, the tension between what is threatened with extinction and
what both formerly has been and now is suppressed is exacerbated, and relations
of substitutability between the phallus and the gun are instituted.
On the one hand, and
for a number of child-soldiers who now make up the greater part of the armed
bands, the demonstration of one’s virility is achieved by means of the gun. The
possession of a gun acts, in its turn, as the equivalent of the possession of a
phallus on one’s passage out of the age of virginity. But the mediation of the
gun for the phallus is only imaginary. Putting to death by means of the gun
takes place almost simultaneously with being put to the test through the act of
sex---in this case, generally speaking, by group rape. On the other hand, to
possess a gun is to enjoy a position of almost unrestricted access to sexual
goods; it is, above all, to have access in a very concrete manner to a certain
form of abundance at the heart of which a woman is constituted as a
superfluity, as what one can dispense with without concern as for whether one
will be able to replace it with a similar provision at a later date. Finally,
the sexual act itself manages to become an element, not merely of rape, but of
violence as such. Rape, to the extent that access to the inwardness of woman is
achieved by breaking and entering; violence, to the extent that one uses force
to possess and to dominate someone else’s will as one would in combat. And so
enjoyment through the gun and through the phallus are conjoined, the one ending
in a corporeality that is inert and emptied of all life, death; and the other
by a discharge as violent as it is brief, the orgasmic satisfaction by the
means of which the power of enjoyment is converted into a power of radically
objectifying the Other, whose body one bores into, digs into, excavates, and
empties in the very act of rape.”
Now, this is certainly great wordsmithery at best or, at
worst, utter shamanism in the art of word-mongering. It’s a shame that this
wordy exercise should come from an African scholar reflecting on an urgent
African problem! I just used my “word count” tool on both these quotations: the
definition of sexual terrorism by Dr. Marion Pratt and Leah Werchik consists of
227 words, while Achille Mbembe’s obscure aphorism runs for 375 words that have
absolutely no bearing on the destruction of women currently taking place in the
What’s very sad is that Achille Mbembe’s essay is contained in a collective book edited by Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat entitled “Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World” (Princeton University Press) that appeared in 2005---that is, one full year after Dr. Pratt and Werchik’s report was released and posted on the internet. Which means that a simple Google search could have saved Achille Mbembe from whirling around in the embarrassing conceptual rumba we read above.
To get a sense of the horrors of “sexual terrorism,” we thus need to leave the hallways of academia and go to the cubicles of the American bureaucracy. A change of venue that just shows that Academia is an irrelevance when it comes to solving pressing African problems today.
In the short report meticulously and economically crafted by Dr. Pratt and Werchik, where every single word is worth its weight in gold, the alleged mystery of the mechanism of sexual terrorism unfolds without any syntactic contortions. In just one page of this report, we learn that sexual terrorism has no bounds in terms of its victims’ age who “range in age from four months… to 84 years of age”; in terms of its social consequences as “wave after wave of armed occupation resulted in the disintegration of the moral and social fabric in many localities”; and in terms of its medical, psychosocial, economic, and physiological toll: “Social stigma has left large numbers of rape victims and children born of rape rejected by their families and communities. Many cases of HIV and other infections remain untested and untreated. Fear of going to fields and markets, sites where rapes often take place, has resulted in spiraling malnutrition and economic loss. Widespread criminal impunity and inadequate local and regional governance leave communities without means to reduce the violence.”
The descriptive mode of the report by no means signify that these two USAID bureaucrats have no understanding of the general academic theory on rape---in fact their short report contains a bibliography of 28 references, including books, reports, and scholarly articles. They do indeed rehearse the most recent scholarly typology of the scourge of rape---more specifically Dr. Patricia Rozée’s categories: “punitive rape (used to punish to elicit silence and control); status rape (occurring as a result of acknowledged differences in rank—master/slave, nobleman/commoner; etc); ceremonial rape (undertaken as part of socially sanctioned rituals or ceremonies); exchange rape (when genital contact is used as a bargaining tool or gesture of conciliation or solidarity); theft rape (involuntary abduction of individuals as slaves, prostitutes, concubines, or spoils of war); and survival rape (when young women become involved with older men to secure goods and/or services needed to survive.” To this, Dr. Pratt and Werchik add their own categories: rape, for instance, “used to subjugate [entire] populations as a means of gaining access to valuable or scarce assets.”
In
tracing the origins of the on-going destruction of women in the
What’s
even alarming is that in some areas, rape has also turned into the social norm
for curtailing or punishing women’s “deviant” or “transgressive” behavior: “The
use of sexual violence as a tool of domination and punishment has spread to the
community level as well; the team was told of many individual cases of
“punishment” perpetrated by civilians against one another. In one instance in
And page after page of this report, the
horrific account of the destruction of Congolese women unfolds with the
precision of the cold matter-of-factness of traditional and seasoned
scholarship that stands out as an indictment of the pomposity of Achille Mbembe
or the conceptual helplessness of Congolese social scientists.
One is particularly horrified at the lack of
statistics that could give the extent of this unprecedented destruction of women,
due largely to the scarcity of funding for carrying out such grim tallies: “There
is a natural tendency to want to know how extensive a problem sexual violence
is in order to properly address it. However, the assessment team felt strongly
that scarce funding should not be used at this time to try to determine total
numbers of cases, victims, and survivors. Such studies can be carried out later
if necessary, based on dossiers kept by human rights organizations, hospitals,
NGOs, and other groups.” But three years after this report, the destruction of
Congolese continues unabated in the jungle and townships of the Congo.With these
destroyed women carrying on their bodies for the rest of their lives the
psychological and physical stigmas on what has turned into the land of savage
men: “Rape survivors with fistulas—tears in genital tissue that can cause
uncontrollable leakage of fecal matter or urine—need highly specialized care
that is both time-consuming and expensive. A doctor at Panzi Hospital told the team,“Sometimes the destruction is such that the women have no more
vagina.”
07 novembre 2007
The 1997 U.S.-sanctioned counter-genocide of Hutu refugees in DRC
Three significant developments happened this past week that
would hopefully shed light on the U.S.-sanctioned counter-genocide perpetrated
by the Rwandan government against Hutu refugees in the Democratic Republic of
Congo (DRC) in 1997. The first development was the 5-point memorandum released
by Amnesty International (AI) on November 2, 2007 entitled “Rwanda: Suspects must not be transferred to
Though it could be argued that by also covering parts Mobutu’s malfeasances, the net result might amount to a watering down of the most egregious violations that only happened after the Zairian dictator’s fall. But the UNHCR is only picking up where it had left when it had no other option but to withdraw from the DRC ten years ago, in 1997, due to the lack of cooperation by Laurent Kabila and his then Rwandan allies. What’s more, this time around, the forensic team is free to go through the 40 sites of massacres identified in 1997 and has a whopping $ 2.3m budget which, one hopes, would only be the first installment in this fledging endeavor as there were upward to 200,000 Hutu refugees that were killed by Rwandan troops in a counter-genocide rampage in the Congo jungles for the best part of the first half of 1997. This will prove to be a gargantuan task that can’t be possibly be fully finished in three months either.
What happened in the
DRC in 1997?
One has to keep in mind that by 1996 Laurent Kabila, who
toppled Mobutu, a one-time rebel leader who was once visited in the mountainous
forest of western Congo by the Argentinean-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara in the
mid-1960s, was a refugee hawker in Tanzania when he was recruited to be a
spokesman of the outfit of opportunist exile Congolese politicians Paul Kagame
had set up as figureheads in his design of doing away with the Mobutu regime in
neighboring Congo. In several interviews, the Rwandan President had publicly
acknowledged the fact the operational planning of the “Congolese revolution”
was carried out in
Faced with a country destroyed by 32 years of graft that had
squandered the military might built up for over two decades by American and
European military cooperation during the Cold War, Kagame could have achieved
these objectives without the participation of his Congolese “lackeys,” but he
was aware that the rest of the international community wouldn’t take kindly to
any such brazen takeover of another country. The new Rwandan regime was riding
a huge international surf of sympathy and guilt after the rest of the world had
just stood idly by as one of the most horrific genocides of modern times was
taking place. And the new Rwandan authorities weren’t foolish enough to waste
this sizable amount of capital of goodwill. So Kabila was deemed important in
the scheme being hatched in
Also, the
There was, however, a fourth and far more nefarious objective in Kagame’s mind that one is at a loss to determine whether Kagame’s allies---Kabila and the U.S. that is---were privy to the revenge, indiscriminate, and incremental killings of unarmed Hutu refugees that amounted to a de facto counter-genocide with the minimal estimation of 300,000 dead in the first half of 1997. As James C. McKinley and Howard W. French of The New York Times had it on their November 14, 1997 report entitled “Hidden Horrors: Uncovering the Guilty Footprints Along Zaire’s Long Trail of Death”: “more and more evidence has emerged suggesting that Mr. Kabila and the Rwandans who backed him were also fighting a war of revenge, one deeply intertwined with the ethnic conflicts between Hutu and Tutsi groups that have tormented this region. The Tutsi troops from Rwanda and Congo who made up the core of Mr. Kabila's army had a powerful motive for vengeance, since thousands of Hutu refugees in the camps had taken part in the slaughter of more than half a million Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994.”
And no amount of
forensics in the field would ever ascertain whether the
Modus Operandi of the Counter-genocide: “the best game were the women and children”
At first, the destruction of the Hutu refugees, which
started in early 1997, was carried out in small incremental killings, and then
it gathered its own momentum, culminating in one single mass disappearance of
more than 80,000 children, women, and men. But throughout, the modus operandi
was a simple one: drive off aid workers; seal off refugee camps; fire in the
air, thus driving off refugees into the jungle; then hunt them down there like
game. Their fellow Rwandan pursuers had so much instilled the fear of God in
these Hutu that they walked non-stop; and the fittest among crossed the whole
expense of the Congo within two weeks, with some crossing the River Congo to
Congo-Brazzaville and others reaching as far north as Gabon! (These two
countries were also in violation of international conventions as they forcibly
repatriated these refugees to
William Shawcross, in his book Deliver us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001, pages 247-248) captures the methodology of the counter-genocide of Hutu in the Congo---from the in-the-spur-of-the-moment killing envy to well-planned mass murders, as well as the dubious role played by the U.S. and other governments with the notable exception of France. He writes:
“In April [1997], Mike
McCurry, the White House spokesman, declared that ‘Mobutuism is about to become
a creature of history,’ thus nailing U.S. colors more publicly than ever
before to [Laurent] Kabila’s alliance’s. Emboldened, Kabila and the Rwandan
government both made personal attacks on [Kofi] Annan for his expressions of
concern over the plight of the refugees.
In April the UN
Commission on Human Rights requested an investigation into the allegations of
mass killings and other gross violations of human rights. This followed a
report from the UN special rapporteur on
The commission was set
up, but Kabila made it clear he did not intend to cooperate with it. Mrs.
[Sadako] Ogata, the high commissioner, wrote to Annan to say that representations
‘do not appear to have had any effect. The Alliance
The atrocities
continued. Early one morning in late April about twenty Rwandans and or
alliance troops entered Lwiro hospital north of Bukavu in Zaire. They
seized about fifty children who were there for therapeutic feeding and flung them
brutally into the back of a truck. They also took away about sixty adults,
including members of the children’s families and caregivers.
At Kasere at the end
of April, 80,000 people were waiting for planes. None came. Every night 200 or
so people died. The rebels deliberately drove the aid workers away for a week.
When they were able to return the place was empty. ‘Nobody. All gone,’ said [Kilian]
Kleinschmidt [of UNCHR]. ‘The once full cholera station abandoned. Stretchers,
but nobody on them. Even the smell of death had gone, the smell we had worked
with all those weeks. A feeling of being manipulated as part of a buildup to
something evil.’
The refugees had been
killed or were now being hunted through the forests, ‘and the best game were
the women and children who had no chance to defend their lives.’
[…]
And so it went on all
year long; one reason after another was found to block the team’s access to
alleged massacres sites.
[…]
“Month after month went by, and it became clearer that most governments just did not want to know what had really happened in the jungles of eastern Zaire in the first half of 1997. UNHCR might say that 230,000 Hutu were still unaccounted for, but the U.S had always disputed these numbers.”
But the end of 1997, the situation of the UNHCR had become
so untenable in the Congo that Kofi Annan decided to call it quit while,
according to a report by Howard W. French of The New York Times, “At the United States Embassy in Kinshasa (…)
diplomats were bending over backward to shift the blame for the investigators'
troubles to the United Nations. A senior diplomat in Kinshasa, for example, castigated the team
for its rejection of the Government's insistence that their inquiry be carried
out only in the east.”
Two sites of
interest: Mbandaka (Equateur Province) and Tingi Tingi (near Kisangani, the capital of Oriental Province)
The new forensic teams should pick up where the 1997 team left out: near and at the provincial capital of Mbandaka, which was at the time the freshest sites of mass killings (May 13, 1997) and where there is at least an identified Westerner as eyewitnesses: the Belgian plantation owner Antoine de Klerk, who was arrested at the time by Rwandan soldiers in a lame attempt to have him not talk to the UN forensic team, and who can’t be accused of “Hutu propaganda” by Kigali. In Wendji and Mbandaka, Rwandan troops sealed off the area for four days to carry out indiscriminately killings of at least 2,000 Hutu refugees in front of the local population with one instance of a small child’s skull smashed against a tree because one Congolese villager, who had found him playing dead under his dead parents, wanted to take him home.
There are also Western identifiable eyewitnesses of the Tingi Tingi massacres. According to the same New York Times report by McKinley and French cited earlier : “On March 2, [1997], according to relief officials, Western diplomats and Hutu refugees, Rwandan-backed units of Mr. Kabila's army launched a full-scale assault on the refugee camp at Tingi Tingi, sending the population, which had swollen to well over 150,000, fleeing westward yet again.”
At those sites, eyewitnesses have reported that Rwandan
troops had tried to dispose of the evidence, and in once instance, in Tingi
Tingi, about 200 kilometers southeast of Kisangani, even attempted to cremate
some of the bodies. But with the help of the local communities, investigators
will still be able to find and access sites of mass graves, as the ones
uncovered this year in eastern
One hopes that this new UNHCR investigation will not only reestablish
the historical records of one of the most systematic ethnic cleansings on
African continent but also result in practical follow-ups at the International
Criminal Court with indictments at the rulers of the ethno-fascist dictatorship
in Rwanda (incidentally, the exact mirror of the previous regime in that
country) and their proxies in the DRC for these crimes against humanity---as
well as lay bare to its gruesome skeleton the morally cynical travesty of the
punctual indignations the Rwandan government voice whenever rights
organizations would voice their rightful concerns over these still unpunished
atrocities. As one Western aid worker still active in the African Great Lakes
region this past week told a reporter of the London daily The Guardian in an
article dealing with this renewed UN probe in the Congo: “To this day I have a hard time stomaching the Rwandan genocide
propaganda and those who hold up the current regime as a model for all of
central Africa”
05 novembre 2007
CISSA Workshop in Kigali (Rwanda) : A buzzing beehive
In August 2004, in
Africa.” A theme
that shows that African intelligence services are just as out-of-touch with
reality as their governments. One wonders indeed how in the daily practice of
intelligence-gathering such broad theme could have a pragmatic intelligence application.
Like any other African Union bureaucracies, CISSA boasts an annual roving
presidency. And this year, as if to mock the victims of the
This week, starting this Monday November 5 and during five
days, within this framework of CISSA, a “technical” workshop of representatives
of African intelligence services is being held in
The theme of this workshop in Kigali and the five days that
the various national delegations will spend there are a blatant hijacking of
the meager resources of the African Union and risk transmogrifying CISSA into a
buzzing beehive with little grip on intelligence and security realities.
Kigali : L’Atelier du Comité des Services de Renseignement et de Sécurité Africains (CISSA) : Un gaspillage des ressources
C’est en août
2004 à Abudja, au Nigéria, que fut créée la dernière-née des bureaucraties de l’Union
Africaine---déjà budgétivore pour les pays pauvres du continent---appelée « Comité des Services de Renseignement
et de Sécurité Africains », mieux connu sous son sigle anglais CISSA.
Cette bureaucratie s’illustre par des conférences annuelles ponctuelles durant
lesquelles les délégués vivent aux frais de la princesse pendant une semaine. A
ce jour, cette bureaucratie est à sa 4ème conférence tenue au mois
de juin de cette année à Khartoum, au Soudan, sous le thème ronronnant de :
« Vers une amélioration de la
stabilité, de la paix et de la sécurité en Afrique ». Un titre qui
montre combien les services de sécurité africains sont tout autant décalés par
rapport à la réalité que leurs gouvernements. On se demande en effet comment
dans la pratique quotidienne des activités de renseignement une telle question
pourrait avoir une application pragmatique. Comme toutes les bureaucraties de l’Union
Africaine, le CISSA a une présidence annuelle par rotation. Et cette année,
comme pour se moquer des victimes du Darfour, le chef des services secrets
namibiens a cédé la présidence du CISSA à son homologue soudanais !
Cette semaine, à
partir de ce lundi 5 novembre et pendant cinq jours, dans le cadre du CISSA, un
atelier des représentants des services de sécurité africains se tient à Kigali,
au Rwanda. Assez bizarrement, cet atelier, choisit de ne pas plancher sur des
questions techniques pressantes d’intégration des services de
renseignement---comme celle de l’articulation du CISSA à l’« Initiative Transsaharienne de Contreterrorisme » (TSCTI)
ou celle réclamée par l’Algérie de l’intégration du CISSA au sein de l’organigramme
de l’UA pour le rendre imperméable aux interférences politiques. Or c’est cette
interférence politique qu’on voit à l’œuvre cette semaine à Kigali avec un
atelier dont le thème, encore une fois dénué de tout pragmatisme, est « L’idéologie du génocide »---le
cheval de bataille du gouvernement rwandais qui lui a encore valu il y a quelques
jours les quolibets d’Amnesty
International. Cette fameuse « idéologie
du génocide » est en effet une sorte de croquemitaine passe-partout
que le régime dictatorial rwandais agite ponctuellement lorsqu’il veut réprimer
la société civile rwandaise. Que veut-on en pratique réaliser avec des thèmes pareils ?
Le musèlement de la société civile africaine par les différents services de
renseignement nationaux ? Ou doit-on plutôt considérer cette réunion comme
l’une de ces conférences au cours desquelles le shopping extra-muros est l’activité
la plus mémorable des participants ?
Le thème de cet atelier et les 5 jours qu’y
passeront les différentes délégations nationales sont un véritable détournement
des maigres ressources de l’Union Africaine et risquent fort bien de rendre le
CISSA une ruche pleine de bourdonnements sans aucune emprise sur le réel.
04 novembre 2007
CHAD: SEND BACK HOME TO FRANCE ZOE’S ARK PERSONNEL
According to Mr. Ahmad Daoud Chari, the state prosecutor of
Abeche---the Chadian city where the staff members of the French group “Arche de Zoe”
were arrested with more than one hundred children ready to be flown to
France---the penal code of Chad is just a blank register: there are no
laws written in the books to deal with such crimes. “There are no other penalties in the abduction chapter [of the criminal code] stronger than the one we chose,”
Mr. Chari told reporters of IRIN, the news agency of the UN Office for
the Coordination of the Humanitarian Affairs. He then added: “Our penal code is limited. It doesn't cover [many] infractions. There is a gap.”
In other words, Chad is a nomad rogue lawless state. One then wonders
on what basis the Chadian Chief Prosecutor is seeking 20 years against
the suspects. Worse, in a country where the whims of the head-of-state
have oftentimes force of law (where the court system has no jury of
peers), President IDRISS DEBY, in a rush of hot blood into his brains,
hurled vile abuse at the suspects in front of the world media, accusing
them, without one iota of evidence, of being part of a vast network of
criminals specialized in supplying new flesh to pedophiles and body
parts to rogue organ banks! The spectacle at the Airport of N'Djamena,
the Chadian capital, just showed the world how so-called conspiracies
by opposition leaders are cooked by paranoid African heads of states to
justify the extra-judicial elimination of their political enemies. In
the meantime, Chadians are cheering their president for having thumbed
his nose at the whites all the while forgetting about the ongoing
rebellion and the government's lack of transparency in managing the oil
royalty revenues. The news this morning is that French President
Nicolas Sarkozy is heading to Chad for talks with President Deby to
free at least the 3 French journalists and the Spanish female
crewmembers being also held as accessories. This smacks of utter
diplomatic stupidity. French authorities knew about Zoe's Ark trip
months ago. It's even the French Airforce that helped them all along.
Observers fear that Sarkozy is trying to save the EUFOR troop
deployment along the Chadian-Darfur border in sudden jeopardy because
of this diplomatic debacle and would readily leave Zoe's Ark members to
rot in Chadian insanitary jails... Until Chad stops being a nomad rogue
lawless state and actually starts writing laws, it has no business
holding foreign subjects in its custody. If crime was in progress, send
back home to France Zoe's Ark personnel to face trial...
President IDRISS DEBY, right, hurling abuse at a Spanish suspect
03 novembre 2007
Cyberpatrol: Rwanda’s state-run The New Times’ contradictory responses to International Crisis Group and Amnesty International
Africa is the modern-day
Wild West of “The New Imperialists,” to borrow the apt expression coined by
Greg Mills to describe the Western humanitarian Non-Governmental Organizations
(NGO) and their over-paid staff roaming the continent .
In the conflict-ridden region of the African Great-Lakes,
the most loathed NGOs by governments and their citizens are rights, governance,
and accountability organizations like the New York-based “Human Rights Watch” (HRW)
or the London-based “Amnesty International” (AI) and “Rights and Accountability
in Development” (RAID). In Central Africa, the governments of Angola and
Congo-Brazzaville, for instance, have chosen to treat and prosecute RAID
investigators as “spies” for this organization’s constant criticism of the
misappropriation by Angolan officials of oil revenues and the publication of
the phenomenal credit cards’ expenses of the son of Denis Sassou-Nguesso, Congo-Brazzaville’s
president, who also happens to be a high-ranking official of the governmental
agency overseeing revenues generated by oil royalties.
That’s why the reports, documents, and press releases by
these organizations are taken and even called as “fatwas” by these governments, their state-run media, and their
citizens. At times, when one of these fatwas would seem to favor one country,
its government and media would brandish it in celebratory “gotcha” pontifications.
At other times, when such a fatwa is perceived as negative to a country, the
latter’s government and people would dismiss it and verbally abuse the
organization---if not worse. I, for one, being a Congolese, reeled the other
day against the recent report on Congo’s Kivu provinces by
International Crisis Group which, in my biased understanding, seemed to
establish moral equivalency between the murderous rogue General Nkunda and the democratically-elected
President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph Kabila.
These past few days have seen the release by a number of these
NGOs of a flurry of “fatwas” aimed at
the countries of the African Great Lakes region: Human Rights Watch on the
Congo (and incidentally Rwanda) on October 23; International Crisis Group (ICG)
on the Congo on October 31; and Amnesty International on Rwanda on November 2,
2007.
Two contradictory reactions on the website of The New Times, the Rwanda’s state-run
daily and online news magazine directed each at the last two documents are
published under the same dateline of November 3, 2007, and uncannily
encapsulate both modes of reactions I just described.
The November 2 memo released by Amnesty International caused
quite a donnybrook in Rwanda,
pitting the government against the international rights organization. The memo
is entitled “
This objection by Amnesty International is especially
damning as it tends to confirm the grounds for the unprecedented international
arrest warrant issued in Paris on November 17, 2006 by the now-retired French
anti-terrorist Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière against a sitting head-of-state, in
the person of the Rwandan President Paul Kagame, alongside Rwanda’s army Chief
of staff Colonel James Kabarebe and a host of other high-ranking Rwandan
officials, for the downing of the former Rwandan President Juvénal
Habyarimana’s Falcon 15 jet in which also perished three French crewmembers.
Rwanda reacted swiftly to this arrest warrant, cutting off diplomatic ties with
France on November 20, 2006 as this arrest warrant amounted in fact to questioning
the very constitutional basis on which is founded the regime in place in
Rwanda.Amnesty International memo thus reopened this recent most serious
blow to the moral and legal authority of the Rwandan government. Furthermore,
this memo also pointed to the autocratic nature of the Rwandan government where
any serious political or human rights challenge to it is deemed “genocide ideology” and “divisionism”---a self-serving de facto
censorship of democratic expression of opinions and infringement of the right
of free assembly of Rwanda’s civil society organizations, also decried by the
US State Department Country Report for 2006 as the memo pointedly asserts. Echoing the outrage of the Rwandan government, The New
Times reacted to this memo by throwing back this question of moral
authority at Amnesty International’s own doorsteps in a November 3 scathing editorial
entitled: “Where from did Amnesty buy the
monopoly of morality?” Mirroring the same defensive reactions with which
the media of the neighboring Congo’s media greeted the release the previous
days of the reports by Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group, The New Times’ editorial didn’t mince
words in its assault on Amnesty International: “What right do the employees of Amnesty and the institution itself
believe they have the authority to cast judgment on others they do not know?” What’s more, the editorial then went on to claim that
Amnesty International is in the business of cooking its reports in order to
milk its donors: “Amnesty International
is one of many in an industry that thrives on bad news and pessimism, an
industry notoriously accused of gross inflation of both facts and figures to
retain larger-than-life contracts from foreign donors necessary for their very
survival. It feeds on the souls innocently believing in what
The monopoly on morals
by organisations such as Amnesty International is one of the great crimes never
reported.”
Strangely, under the same dateline of November 3 on the
website of The New Times, an article
by Edwin Musoni is praising the International Crisis Group report on Congo’s crisis in the northern Kivu province in
a “gotcha” game with neighboring
Congo. The article is entitled “Punish FDLR allies, Congo’s Kabila told,”
a title that is an outright misrepresentation of facts as nowhere in the report
does ICG suggest that the FDLR, the umbrella group under which now operate
remnants of the former Rwandan army and the Interahamwe genocidal militias, is
an ally of the Congolese government.
It’s worth repeating here that these militias are entrenched in the mountainous
forests of the Kivu provinces, a region that had been occupied for five long
years by the Rwandan army during its occupation of the Congo.
Moreover, the article suggests that the ICG reports was accusing the Congolese
army and the FDLR militias for carrying out joint military operations to commit
atrocities on Congolese civilians: “FARDC
and FDLR have reportedly committed joint human rights abuses against sections
of Congolese and Rwandan civilians caught on the Congolese soil.” The ICG
report, incidentally disputed by the Congolese government in the very same ways
these fatwas are received in the region, blames instead specifically certain
“rogue” elements within the Congolese army for collaboration with the FDLR. The
ICG report instead enjoins the Congolese government to “Discipline rogue national army (FARDC) and Mai Mai (PARECO and FAPL)
combatants engaged in active collaboration with the FDLR and inciting ethnic
hatred against Tutsi communities.”
And nowhere in Edwin Musoni’s article is
General Nkunda---the foremost rogue among all the rogues in the Kivu provinces
and who is backed by Rwanda---described
as a human rights abuser as other fatwas by these organizations have done.At any rate, as long as conflict and bad governance persist
in the region, these are the two ways in which reports and press releases by
rights organizations will be greeted by governments and their media
mouthpieces.
02 novembre 2007
Representation of Feminity: Dr Faida Mitifu
Three things strike one as odd in the life of Her Excellency
Dr. Faida Mitifu, the Congolese Ambassador in Washington, D.C.: 1) She’s a
woman and the mother of three in the competitive male-dominated arena of
Congo’s diplomacy; 2) She was born in 1959 in the city of Bukavu, in the
eastern Congo, where most of atrocities
against women are currently taking place; and, last and not least: 3) Her
doctoral dissertation in Francophone literature at the University of Georgia,
in Athens, Georgia (USA) is entitled “The
Representation of Feminity in Zairian Novels”---representation of feminity
in Congo's patriarchal diplomatic corps being the very thing she's doing in her
daily life today! Before this life in the limelight, she concurrently taught
African and Caribbean Francophone literature at
Ambassador Faida Mitifu in an unguarded moment at Willard InterContinental
Hotel in Washington, DC/Photo: Alex Engwete
This post first appeared on my blog under the same title on MyTelegraph
The Holy Bible has eaten the soul of my nation from the inside and left it an empty and stinking shell
At Congo’s independence in 1960, Mircea Eliade, the expert
on myths and religion, had this anecdote to comment about the way Congolese
people lived the event, or rather turned it into a cargo cult, in the opening
pages of his book “Myth and Reality”: “In
some villages the inhabitants tore the roofs off their huts to give passage to
the gold coins that their ancestors were to rain down. Everything was allowed
to go to rack and ruin except the roads to the cemetery, by which the ancestors
would make their way to the village. Even the orgiastic excesses had a meaning,
for, according to the myth, from the dawn of the New Age all women would belong
to all men.” He then went on to add: “We
may suppose that “mythical behavior” will disappear as a result of the former
colonies’ acquiring political independence.”
Eliade couldn’t have been more wrong. With political
independence now in its 47th year, a far more nefarious myth has now bugged the
soul of the Congolese nation: The Holy Bible and the vicious fundamentalists
totting it everywhere, even in market places and in packed and stifling “taxis-buses.”
After more than fifteen years of absence from the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC), my homeland, I started going back there on a
regular basis in 2003, and even living in the capital city of Kinshasa for half
of the year since then. This experience was not so much a narrative of
non-return than a cultural turbulence of reentry. For instance, during the
Congolese presidential electoral campaign in July 2006, watching television one
night, I was mystified to watch and hear a pastor who was being interviewed
exclaim: “This is a special country and a
special people: God had prophesied on this land and its people! Politicians
better watch out.” Asking people around me what he meant by that
admonition, they advised with condescension that I read Isaiah 18. And I, for
one, was among those who used to claim: “No
one reads anymore in the Congo."I meant by this aphorism that the practice and performance of literature as
experienced in the West has all but disappeared in the country. But I was
discovering that night that I needed to amend that aphorism as follows: Congo“The one book being read and misread in the is The
Holy Bible.”
Consider this other instance: On another one of my stays in
All this galore could have been great materials for comic relief had it not also parasitized the political arena!
In February 2006, after years of dictatorship and more years
of the bloodiest war in Africa dubbed “
On August 17, 2006, as the country was awaiting the
publication of the results of the first turn of the presidential elections, the
“communications” people of Jean-Pierre Bemba, the most formidable contender to
the incumbent president Joseph Kabila, produced a narrative of the country on
their party-owned television network “Canal Congo TV” (CCTV). They brought on
the set this young “prophet” who “had a dream” on the outcome of the elections.
Strangely, the text of the Congolese prophet was the very text of the dream of
another prophet: Daniel (2:31-45).
“Show me the dream and its interpretation” (6) were the
threatening words Nebuchadnezzar had thrown at the “magicians,” “enchanters,”
and “sorcerers” of Babylon who were put to the ordeal of finding
out not only the king’s disturbing dream but its interpretation as well. The
biblical narrative goes on to say that “the
mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision of the night” by God (19), thus
saving those “wise men” from
destruction by unveiling Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and its interpretation to
Daniel as the narrative of the Babylonian kingdom: the famous messianic “Dream
of the Golden Image.” Duplicating Daniel’s process, the Congolese television
prophet likewise had a nightly vision too, in which God allowed him to crack
open the unfolding mystery of Congo’s
future.
According to the Congolese television prophet, Nebuchadnezzar’s dream as pertaining to the Congolese situation was to be interpreted as a narrative in six installments:
1. The “head of [the] image” in “fine gold” represents the Belgian colonial regime, as gold is associated with a monarch’s crown;
2. The “breast and
arms of silver” represented the administration of
3. Mobutu’s brutal regime was the image’s “belly and thighs of bronze”;
4. The regime of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the assassinated father of the incumbent, was the image’s “legs of iron”;
5. The transitional government led by the incumbent Joseph
Kabila was the image’s “feet partly of
iron and partly of clay”;
6. The regime that was about to unfold in the wake of the
presidential elections will be Jean-Pierre Bemba’s upcoming regime of “stone” (the French word “pierre” (stone) having been extracted
from Bemba’s first name and conflated with the biblical “stone” which, according to verse 34, was set to shatter the image’s
legs: “As you [Nebuchadnezzar] looked, a
stone was cut out by no human hand, and it smote the image on its feet of iron
and clay, and broke them in pieces[.]” The Congolese prophet, however,
doesn’t stop there. Contradicting himself, he then equates the stone, which he
had previously conflated with the person of Bemba, with the Congo, “the
stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth”
(35).
Congolese street and television preachers have a built-in
disclaimer in their prophetic dithyrambs. The television prophet who made these
predictions about a month prior to the runoff elections couched his disclaimer
as follows: if you choose the incumbent despite these dire warnings, everything
he does will be doomed to fail as he is already doomed by the Good Book. The
incumbent did win at long last (with 58%), but to some Congolese who voted for
Jean-Pierre Bemba, who obtained 42% in the runoff elections, the new
democratically-elected president’s administration is doomed by God Almighty as
he might have stolen the elections through black magic or by a devilish
conspiracy with the international community that claimed the elections fair and
square!
Not to be outdone in the religious realm, the incumbent’s camp circulated its own prophecy, which even found its way on the official website of Congo’s President, authored by his official editorialist, Marcel Nzazi Mabidi, who had furbished his pen under Mobutu with his magic realist lyrical praises to the Zairian dictator.
There’s a national “Jesus Christ” in the Congo: Simon Kimbangu (1887-1951); and a “New Jerusalem,” the city of N’Kamba, in the Bas-Congo
Prophet Simon Kimbangu, a catechist, had turned into a
political and religious leader in the early 1920s, a change that made him the
enemy of the colonial state number one. He was swiftly deported into another
province where he died in internal exile under Belgian rule in 1951. Unlike
Daniel, Kimbangu didn’t write prophecies but he’s alleged to have left a
“word-of-mouth” corpus of prophecies that his family and his followers have
used to set up one of the most successful money-making churches in Central Africa, spanning multiple countries, complete
with radio and television stations in Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville, as
well as schools and one university. And still unlike Daniel, Kimbangu is today
a messiah, God’s “Special Envoy” as
the Kimbaguists call him in the full name of their church, the ECSK---“Eglise du Christ au Congo par l’Envoyé
Spécial de Dieu Simon Kimbangu” (the Church of Christ in the Congo by God’s
Special Envoy Simon Kimbangu).
Here’s Kimbangu’s prophecy, as captured by Marcel Nzazi
Mabidi:
"Congo will one
day be independent. For 40 years the country will go through chaos and will
experience daunting difficulties and sufferings of every kind. Then good
fortune will come. The country will first be led by a sheep (Joseph Kasavubu,
the first president). That man will be a native of the province where I was
born.
The country will then
be led by a wild beast (Mobutu) who will come to cast aside the sheep. During
the rule of the wild beast marked by terror, the country will be ransacked.
Money will be lacking in the country. Even banks will be empty.
Then a man will come,
a meteor, a native of the province where I will die (Laurent-Désiré Kabila).
His rule will be very short. His main role will be to chase the wild beast from
power.
Then someone will
come, a young wise man (Joseph Kabila). It’s him that will save this country
and bring to the people true independence.”
To really understand that this country has lost its marbles,
we have to turn back to Isaiah 18, which now passes as the foundational text of
the Congolese “imagined community.”
Even the most seemingly rational Congolese read in Chapter 18 of the Book of Isaiah the prophecy that confirms their narrative as the Lord’s chosen ones, beside the people of modern-day Israel, especially the first verse of this chapter that has the prophet relaying God’s message intimating to a nation “which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia” to
“Go, you swift
messengers,
to a nation, tall and
smooth,
to a people feared
near and far,
a nation mighty and conquering
whose land the rivers
divide.”
A very twisted reading indeed, for if there was in the
African Great Lakes a nation of “tall”
people, it would be the Tutsi Rwandans, the archenemies of the Congolese. When
all this happened, I don’t have a clue. But The
Holy Bible had effectively done its damage…and today most Congolese live
with the expectation that Armageddon---and the ensuing high---might strike
anytime!
This article was first published on "OpedNews" under the same title.